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We Should Aspire to be Peasants

August 11, 2022

We Should Aspire to be Peasants

Painting by Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern – Public Domain

Rising food prices — as the USDA has forecast for 2022 — may seem like a good thing for farmers.

After all, who wouldn’t like to see some more cash? Farmers, like everyone else, have been through a lot lately. Years of stagnant or falling farm income in many ways paralleled the stagnant wages of so many Americans. The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through our supply chain, crashing farm prices and disrupting markets.

But the story is not so simple.

Inputs – that’s where the problem lies. Whether it’s fertilizer, seed, machinery or fuel, farmers are having to pay more to grow our nation’s food. The war in Ukraine has led to fuel and fertilizer shortages, another component of the soaring input costs.

Clearly, corporations are also price gouging. With every aspect of agriculture being highly consolidated, it’s easy for companies to do as they wish, as just four firms control over 60% of our seed, another four determine what happens with 75% of fertilizer in the U.S., and still four others set the terms for over 75% of grain sales. Meanwhile, some corporations, instead of allowing farmers to repair their own machinery, require them to seek out pricey company-authorized technicians when things break down.

Corporate agribusiness controls the food system, racking up profits while farmers and consumers dance to their tune.

So, what’s the answer, who should we look to in times like these?

Peasants, that’s who. Peasants actually produce food for their families and communities, not commodities for the global economy.

Most American farmers probably think it laughable to see peasant farming as a model. American farmers are told that they feed the world, while peasants work small acreages and think in terms of food diversity and food sovereignty, not mono-cultures and global markets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Agricultural Elephant in the Room

February 1, 2021

Agricultural Elephant in the Room

Abandoned dairy barn, Willamette Valley, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I find it strange Americans and, especially, scientists and politicians talk to little, if at all, about agriculture. And yet agriculture gives us food and, surreptitiously, threatens the future.

Vast number of Americans live in large cities like New York, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta, San Francisco and Lost Angeles. These cities have great museums and, possibly, universities, but are agricultural deserts.

City merchants, grocers and government institutions buy most of the food they need for their large population from farmers or agribusiness, which grow food as far away from cities as they can.

The reason for the separation of the city from the country was the original sin of America: the savaging of the Native Americans and the outright theft of their land.

There was a second grabbing of land, what the British called enclosure. This time, during the twentieth century, large farmers and agribusiness put out of business small family farmers. This substantial amount of stolen land made agribusiness and large farmers kings in the countryside.

These agrarian monarchs remade rural America into toxic cornucopia gardens and feudal mills of animal feeding and slaughter, disease factories of pandemics.

Urban food deserts

This political economy employs millions of the most exploited Americans in our midst. This explains, to some degree, the illiteracy and apathy of urban people for what sustains life: food and drinking water.

Urban people don’t know how to grow food. As long as they have the money to go to the “super market,” they will continue to be divorced from life, to the point that, in fact, some have already reached, believing that bread and milk come from the refrigerator.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pesticides in the Dock: Ecological Apocalypse But Business as Usual

September 26, 2019

Pesticides in the Dock: Ecological Apocalypse But Business as Usual

Photograph Source: United States Department of Agriculture – Public Domain

In a new paper published in King’s Law Journal –  ‘The Chemical Anthropocene: Glyphosate as a Case Study of Pesticide Exposures’ – the authors Alessandra Arcuri and Yogi Hale Hendlin state:

“As the science against glyphosate safety mounts and lawsuits threaten its chemical manufacture’s profits, the next generation of GMO crops are being keyed to the pesticide dicamba, sold commercially as XtendiMax® – and poised to be the next glyphosate. Regulatory agencies have historically been quick to approve products but slow to reconsider regulations after the decades of accumulated harms become apparent.”

They add that the entrenched asymmetries between public and ecological health and fast-to-market new chemicals is exacerbated by the seeming lack of institutionalised precautionary policies.

According to environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason, these ‘entrenched asymmetries’ result from the corporate capture of key policy-making bodies and their subversion by agri-food oligopolies.

In her new report, ‘Why Does Bayer Crop Science Control Chemicals in Brexit Britain’, she states that Bayer is having secret meetings with the British government to determine which agrochemicals are to be used after Brexit once Britain is ‘free’ of EU restrictions and becomes as deregulated as the US.

Such collusion comes as little surprise to Mason who says the government’s ‘strategy for UK life sciences’ is already dependent on funding from pharmaceutical corporations and the pesticides industry:

“Syngenta’s parent company is AstraZeneca. In 2010, Syngenta and AstraZeneca were represented on the UK Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Foods, Consumer Products and the Environment. The founder of Syngenta, Michael Pragnell CBE, was the Chairman of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) from 2011-2017. CRUK started by giving money (£450 million/year) to the Government’s Strategy for UK Life Sciences and AstraZeneca provided 22 compounds to academic research to develop medicines. AstraZeneca manufactures six different anti-cancer drugs mainly aimed at breast and prostate cancer.”

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Brave New Food: GEs and Clones are Heading to the Dinner Table

December 16, 2015

Brave New Food: GEs and Clones are Heading to the Dinner Table

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Consumers, safety activists, Big Food, biotech companies and many of the US’s importing and exporting partners have been closely watching to see if the FDA would approve the genetically engineered AquAdvantage Salmon, which it did last month. Of course unlabeled GE crops are eaten by millions and GE animals have been created to make human drugs largely under the public radar. Still the AquAdvantage Salmon is the first approved GE animal destined for the US dinner table.

The AquAdvantage Salmon is not the only GE food animal in the works. Scientists at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where Dolly the cloned sheep was created, have spent years creating chickens that can be used as “biofactories” to make eggs with interferon and other disease-fighting substances.

“Once you’ve made the transgenic birds, then it’s very easy,” enthused scientist Helen Sang, PhD. “You can breed up hundreds of birds from one cockerel [young male]—because they can be bred with hundreds of hens and you can collect an egg a day and have hundreds of chicks in no time.

Other researchers are working on animals engineered to contain omega-3. Scientists at Harvard Medical School, the University of Missouri and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have concocted “white piglets with muscle tissue larded with omega-3 fatty acids,” say published reports. All they had to do was modify a round-worm enzyme that converts omega-6 to omega-3, inject the gene into mouse embryos to create mice that make their own omega-3, and transfer the genetic material into pigs–and voila!

“People can continue to eat their junk food,” said Harvard’s Alexander Leaf, MD about the brave new pigs. “You won’t have to change your diet, but you will be getting what you need.” Aren’t animals great?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Neoliberal Ebola: the Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak

July 29, 2015

Neoliberal Ebola: the Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak

The notion of a neoliberal Ebola is so beyond the pale as to send leading lights in ecology and health into apoplectic fits.

Here’s one of bestseller David Quammen’s five tweets denouncing my hypothesis that neoliberalism drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa. I’m an “addled guy” whose “loopy [blog] post” and “confused nonsense” Quammen hopes “doesn’t mislead credulous people.”

Scientific American’s Steve Mirksy joked that he feared “the supply-side salmonella”. He would walk that back when I pointed out the largeliterature documenting the ways and means by which the economics of the egg sector is driving salmonella’s evolution.

The facts of the Ebola outbreak similarly turn Quammen’s objection on its head.

The virus appears to have been spilling over for years in West Africa. Epidemiologist Joseph Fair’s group found antibodies to multiple species of Ebola, including the very Zaire strain that set off the outbreak, in patients in Sierra Leone as far back as five years ago. Phylogenetic analyses meanwhile show the Zaire strain Bayesian-dated in West Africa as far back as a decade.

An NIAID team showed the outbreak strain as possessing no molecular anomaly, with nucleotide substitution rates typical of Ebola outbreaks across Africa.

That result begs an explanation for Ebola’s ecotypic shift from intermittent forest killer to a protopandemic infection infecting 27,000 and killing over 11,000 across the region, leaving bodies in the streets of capital cities Monrovia and Conakry.

 

Explaining the Rise of Ebola

The answer, little explored in the scientific literature or the media, appears in the broader context in which Ebola emerged in West Africa.

The truth of the whole, in this case connecting disease dynamics, land use and global economics, routinely suffers at the expense of the principle of expediency. Such contextualization often represents athreat to many of the underlying premises of power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

GMOs and the Neoliberal Apologists

June 16, 2015

GMOs and the Neoliberal Apologists

Ignoring Reality, Subverting Morality
Monsanto is often called one of the most ‘evil’ companies on the planet. It has a history of knowingly contaminating the environment and food with various poisons, cover ups and criminality (see this, outlining the company’s appalling history). In recent times, there has been much focus on its promotion and patenting of GMOs, the deleterious impacts of its glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup and how GMOs pose a threat to human and animal health, ecology and the environment (see this, for example).

Campaigners and activists have described how global agribusiness players like Monsanto are threatening food security and food democracy. Monsanto and others have been able to capture or unduly influence government regulatory/policy agendas, important trade deals and global trade policies via the WTO. Monsanto is a major player and wields enormous political influence and receives significant political support.

Little wonder then that we now have campaigns specifically targeting Monsanto. While it is laudable and correct to highlight the actions of Monsanto and indeed its partners like The Gates Foundation, we should not be side tracked from developing a wider analysis to understand the underlying forces that drive companies like Monsanto.

A recent piece by Christina Sarich shows that any shares held by Gates or the individuals at the top of the Monsanto corporate structure like CEO High Grant or CTO Robb Fraley are dwarfed by those held by institutional shareholders, such as Vanguard, Capital Research and State Street.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto Bites Back

May 25, 2015

Monsanto Bites Back

Monsanto, the U.S. agribusiness giant that controls a quarter of the entire global seed market, could soon be even bigger and more powerful than it already is, following renewed speculation over its interest in Swiss agrichemicals firm Syngenta. The logic behind the deal is clear: Monsanto ranks as the world’s largest purveyor of seeds while Swiss-based Syngenta is the world’s largest pesticide and fertilizer company.

A Monsanto-Syngenta tie-up would “deliver substantial synergies that create value for shareholders of both companies”, said Monsanto president and COO, Brett Begemann, adding that cash from these side deals would make an acquisition easier to finance. It would also be the largest-ever acquisition of a European company by a U.S. rival.

The target, Syngenta, seems somewhat less enthusiastic. It is the second time in as many weeks that Monsanto has tabled an unsolicited offer for its Swiss competitor. The first time, on May 8, Syngenta politely but firmly rebuffed Monsanto, saying that the offered price of $45 billion undervalued the company. In response to the latest offer Syngenta said a sell-off of its seeds business would not be enough to allay regulators’ concerns about the tie-up.

The 2 C’s: Consolidation and Concentration

If the deal is consummated, the two companies combined would form a singular agribusiness behemoth that controls a third of both the globe’s seed and pesticides markets, as Mother Jones reports:

 

To make the deal fly with US antitrust regulators, Syngenta would likely have to sell off its substantial corn and soybean seed business, as well its relatively small glyphosate holdings, in order to avoid direct overlap with Monsanto’s existing market share, the financial website Seeking Alpha reports.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Food democracy South and North: from food sovereignty to transition initiatives

March 18, 2015

Food democracy South and North: from food sovereignty to transition initiatives

When the idea of food sovereignty emerged twenty years ago, from the mobilisation of campesinos in Costa Rica and from the protest marches of small farmers in the Indian state of Karnataka, it had one important lesson to teach us: policies in the areas of food and agriculture should not be taken hostage to the exigencies of international trade. This idea was central to the establishment in 1993 of the Via Campesina, which was soon to grow into the largest transnational social movement in existence, now spanning 164 local and national organizations in more than 70 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and representing an estimated 200 million farmers.

As an antidote to the globalization of food markets, food sovereignty was very much a product of its times. The Uruguay round of trade negotiations launched in 1986 was nearing its conclusion, and at the request of major developing countries, agriculture had been placed at the centre of the table of the big bargain to be struck: food, it was becoming clear, was set to become the next frontier of the great mill of commodification, and farmers from the world over were asked to compete against one another — and let the least competitive disappear.

Food sovereignty was, first and foremost, a story of solidarity against adversity, of cooperation against competition. The trade negotiators wanted their farmers to compete: instead, rallying behind the new slogan, they decided to unite. A strange ballet of words occurred: those talking about trade « liberalization » were condemning farmers to new forms of pressure and coercion from the global marketplace and from the large agrifood companies that dominate it, while those speaking of food « sovereignty » meant in fact the opposite of food wars — they meant alliances across national borders.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

GRAIN — Right to land and seed

December 15, 2014

GRAIN — Right to land and seed.

“Food sovereignty” is the main political demand of the landless and peasant movement in Bangladesh in times of climate change and intensifying land conflicts. The concept of food sovereignty is based on the right to grow their own food, with own seeds and in an ecologically sustainable way of farming. The peasant movement fights for a revolutionary land reform and self-determined food production, in order to improve and guarantee the local and national food supply. One strategy to strengthen the demand for food sovereignty is the occupation of land by groups of small farmers. According to the law, landless farmers have a right to land which often isn’t enforced due to corruption and unequal power relations.

The capitalization of the agricultural sector is a threat for the local markets and self-sustained food production. Since the so called “green revolution” in the 1960s, there is a growing influence of international seed- and chemical-companies on the agricultural market in Bangladesh. The dependency on fertilizers, pesticides and modified seeds along with the infrastructural adjustments made by the state of Bangladesh and the World Bank have significantly changed the living conditions of small farmers. Higher production costs as well as lower productivity and fertility of the soil is the reason why many peasants end up in dept.

Around three fourths of those engaged in the farming sector are landless workers. Many would have the right to receive land through the “Kash land”-legislation. But corruption of local politicians and administration are immediate and structural obstacles that prevent landless workers from obtaining land-titles of state-owned or unused land.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will GM Crops Feed the World?

October 26, 2014

Will GM Crops Feed the World?.

The Claim: We need GM crops to feed the world


Full Report (550kb PDF)

Supporters of genetically engineered (also called genetically modified or GM) crops claim that we need this technology to feed a growing global population. However, the promise to “feed the world” with GM crops overlooks the real causes of hunger, and disregards the many harmful impacts of using GM technology.

The Real Problem

The claim that we need GM crops to feed the world ignores the real, root problem: Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality.

  • The truth is that we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people, which is the number our population is predicted to reach by 2050. A third of food produced around the world is wasted every year.
  • People are generally hungry not because of insufficient food production, but because they do not have money to buy food, access to land to grow food, or because of poor food distribution systems and a lack of reliable water and farming infrastructure. GM crops do not help solve these causes of hunger.

We don’t need GM crops to feed the world

1. The GM crops on the market today are not designed to address hunger

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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