Dear President Obama,

We urge you to withdraw the nomination of Islam Siddiqui as Chief Agriculture Negotiator and to reconsider your support of Roger Beachy as director of the new National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Siddiqui is CropLife’s current vice president of science and regulatory affairs, and until last month, Beachy was the head of Monsanto’s de facto nonprofit research arm. As two textbook cases of the “revolving door” between industry and the agencies meant to keep watch, Siddiqui and Beachy’s industry ties demonstrate that both men are too beholden to corporate agriculture to serve the public interest.

Appointing Siddiqui to this critical post within the U.S. Trade Representative’s office sends a clear signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. plans to continue down the worn and failed path of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture by pushing pesticides, inappropriate biotechnologies and unfair trade arrangements on nations that do not want and can least afford them. Siddiqui’s professional record is revealing on several points:

• Siddiqui was a paid lobbyist for 3 years for Croplife America, which represents the chemical pesticide and ag biotechnology interests. Members include Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.
• CropLife America’s regional partner had notoriously “shuddered” at Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden for failing to use chemical pesticides and launched a letter petition drive, urging the First Lady to consider using insecticides and herbicides in her garden.
• CropLife America has consistently lobbied the U.S government to weaken and thwart international treaties governing the use and export of toxic chemicals such as PCBs, DDT and dioxins.
• Siddiqui’s past service at the USDA included overseeing the initial development of national organic food standards that would have allowed GMOs and toxic sludge to be labeled “organic”— until over 230,000 consumers forced their revision.

As the global food crisis deepens and we head into the Doha round of trade talks at the WTO, the U.S. needs a lead negotiator who understands that the current configuration of trade agreements works neither for farmers nor for the world’s hungry. All eyes are on the U.S. to demonstrate international leadership in this arena by withdrawing support for an industrial model of agriculture that imperils both people and the planet, by undermining food security and worsening climate change.

In his capacity as director of NIFA, Roger Beachy will be in charge of the nation’s agricultural research agenda and purse strings for the next six years. Given Beachy’s previous career running the Danforth Plant Science Center, a nonprofit closely linked to and funded by Monsanto, we believe that billions more in government funding will be funneled into genetic engineering and chemical pesticide research. Meanwhile the real solutions to our growing agricultural problems, provided by sustainable and organic agriculture research, will suffer from a lack of federal funding and attention.

Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, agricultural biotechnology—of the kind aggressively promoted and marketed by CropLife— has failed to deliver on any of its promises of higher yields for U.S. farmers, “enhanced nutrition” or drought-resistance for developing country farmers. What Monsanto’s research agenda has yielded is skyrocketing herbicide use, resistant “super-weeds”, rising debt for farmers, polluted waterways, threats to the health of farmworkers and rural communities, and unparalleled corporate consolidation in the agrochemical and seed industries. The top 10 agribusinesses control 89% of the agrochemicals market, 66% of the modern biotech market and 67% of the global seed market.

With farmers here and abroad struggling to respond to water scarcity and increasingly volatile growing conditions, we need a resilient and restorative model of agriculture that adapts to and mitigates these effects of climate change. In the most comprehensive analysis of global agriculture to date, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), states unequivocally that “business as usual is not an option.” We need a model of agriculture that regenerates soil health, sequesters carbon, feeds communities, and puts profits back in the hands of farmers and rural communities. Industrial agriculture—and Roger Beachy, Islam Siddiqui and CropLife in particular—favor none of these solutions.

While we appreciate your Administration’s recent gestures in support of local food systems, we fear these initiatives will not fulfill their potential unless the monopolistic power and political influence of the agricultural input industry is directly confronted. We therefore respectfully ask you to withdraw your appointments of Siddiqui and Beachy, and replace them with candidates who have a sustainable vision for U.S. agriculture and trade.

As parents, farmers, advocates, scientists and people who eat food, we remember your promise on the campaign trail: “We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. It’s the Department of Agriculture. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.” We, the undersigned, are writing to hold you to that promise.

What’s worse? Seeing animal and environmental advocates drawn into this dangerous game. Activists try to improve husbandry practices or promote supposedly sustainable animal farms because it’s an easier sell than the go-vegan-or-else approach; but many experienced and thoroughly practical gardeners consider dabbling in animal agribusiness reforms misguided.

In 1944, when just over two billion people occupied the planet and before the era of mass-scale industrial farming, Donald Watson and a few like-minded people founded The Vegan Society based on the opinion that the truly idyllic and sustainable animal farm didn’t exist in the early 1900s, and never will. Watson was a vegan-organic gardener — steering clear of animal manure, bonemeal and blood, and instead using compost for fertility. Why aren’t more animal and environmental advocates following this example?

In the 1970s, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (followed by Animal Factories, authored with Jim Mason in 1980) described large animal processing plants as horrifying places; but Singer has steadfastly maintained that breeding and killing can co-exist with the idea of treating animals fairly. In other words, Singer appears to believe that the animal factory, not animal farming per se, constitutes the ethical problem. Singer is often credited with propelling the animal-rights movement; but by framing advocacy as a challenge to factory farming, Singer interrupted vegan activism.

Today, major grocery chains are asking producers to be less like assembly lines and more like old times — then cashing in. Whole Foods Market claims “to assist and inspire ranchers and meat producers around the world to achieve a higher standard of animal welfare excellence while maintaining economic viability.” Peter Singer, together with an alarming number of animal-protection groups, endorsed Whole Foods’ Animal Compassion Foundation, which turned out to be quite lucrative in North America — and beyond. “Sausages made from humanely treated animals,” the Guardian Observer announced in early 2006, summing up the hype surrounding Whole Foods Market’s British debut.

Pig Business, aired on British television just this summer, is a much-heralded documentary by Tracy Worcester, who has worked on behalf of Friends of the Earth. Brimming with disturbing images (some of which were excised for the television audience), the film decries pig crates, rough handling, and cheap meat. Worcester points out that foreign pigflesh — from the US-based multinational Smithfield, for example — would fail British expectations of handling and housing standards. The film’s promoters laud small farms and local butchers. Agreeing is Zac Goldsmith, former editor of Ecologist magazine and now Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park, London: “I think small farming in a localised economy is the answer.” Goldsmith cites Pig Business as helping to “address the unfairness of the system allowing local farmers to be out competed [sic] by cheap imports of much lower standard.”

“I think we all fundamentally like pigs, don’t we?” asks Tracy Worcester, who is married to Henry Somerset, Marquess of Worcester — heir of the Duke of Beaufort and a farmer. But is this factory-crit trend its own form of denial? Worcester will eat bacon, the Telegraph assures its readers — as long as it’s from “really, really happy pigs.”

Those pigs aren’t happy, dear readers; they’re dead. Meanwhile, all this idyllic farming of the affluent people, by the affluent people, for the affluent people pushes free-living animals out of once-thriving biocommunities to make room for the supposedly thrilled pigs. Moreover, animal agribusiness is notorious for its heavy use of fuel to transport crops and animals from place to place.

To get around that, our affluent role models give us the “locavore” trend — exhorting us to buy dairy, eggs, and animal flesh as well as vegetables from area farmers or hobby farms, and to eat roasts and quiches at restaurants with local sources. But even Forbes has run an opinion piece questioning these ideas, citing a study by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture that connects transport to just 11% of food’s carbon footprint. “No matter how you slice it,” the comment observes, “it takes more energy to bring meat, as opposed to plants, to the table. It takes 6 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken and 10 to 16 pounds to make a pound of beef.”

The conclusion? “If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer’s market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.”

The word “vegan” would have been more straightforward, because egg companies use space and feed and are significant polluters; dairy cows, who live longer than beef cattle and are overfed to stay as productive as possible, are associated with high methane emissions and feed demand. If you really want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegan.

And support vegan-organic growers. They’re offering a new path for the human journey. They’re cultivating respect, shielding and celebrating the freedom that’s still possible for animals who live in local ecologies. They are genuine liberators, freeing the land from grazing and fodder production, taking no more water than necessary, avoiding pollution, and returning part of the harvest to other beings and to the land. They know much of global grain harvest is fed to domesticated animals, and that feed crops are invasive — planted where rainforests once flourished. They know financially well-off regions siphon vast quantities of grain unnecessarily from others, and that animal husbandry puts enormous pressure on the world’s water. They point to a way out of these problems.

Activists who prefer to pursue humane animal agribusiness say we must do something for animals suffering in factory farms right now. Some think vegan education is just too slow, or that a vegan humanity isn’t possible anyway. They sound like realists, so they’re pretty effective at making vegans sound marginal. But are they right?

Copernicus must have felt marginal in a society that generally assumed our planet was the central fixture in the cosmos. Relatively quickly in the course of history, humanity’s perspective was radically changed; likewise, the vegan movement offers a fresh perspective, and it’s poised to make human the supremacist view obsolete. Environmentalists have discovered how incorrect that old view is. Earthworms, bees and other supposedly insignificant beings are now understood as enormously influential in the biocommunity. Meanwhile, the vegan philosophy has posited that we cannot give animals some kind of moral rank; all are entitled to live on their own terms, bees and earthworms included.

We all have the wonderful potential to accept this philosophy today. Trying to get there in increments — say, by switching to “cage-free” eggs or supporting free-range concepts — means forgetting that Earth’s space is finite, that animals are displaced by commercial landscapes, that the spread of pasture-based farming uproots free-living beings and snuffs out their lives.

When the idea of human supremacy — and its corollary, the treatment of the world as our warehouse — is understood as a destructive myth, it will be replaced by a new paradigm. By learning to cook vegan dishes or to cultivate vegan-organic gardens, many people are preparing for that shift today. The social change could become apparent relatively quickly, and that’s good. By most predictions, we have little time to spare.

A closer look at the article revealed it wasn’t a Norm Coleman ploy to get folks in Minnesota to quit eating burgers and fries, nor a menu for the genetically obscene monster in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, but an announcement by Germany’s Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner that Germany is banning the cultivation of MON 810, a genetically modified (GM) corn produced by US biotech giant Monsanto.

The GM Monster

It appears that MON 810 is also believed to be the “Frankenstein” of GM crops by at least five other European countries — France, Austria, Hungary, Greece and Luxembourg — all of whom have banned its use. MON 810 was approved by the European Union in 1998, and was the only GM crop approved for cultivation in Germany. Aigner said she had legitimate reasons to believe that the genetically modified Monsanto seed “presents a danger to the environment.” The plant produces a toxin that not only destroys the larvae of the corn borer moth, but other, beneficial, insects as well.

Andreas Thierfelder, spokesman for Monsanto Germany, responded that Monsanto would decide “as quickly as possible” whether to take legal proceedings. She said the “matter was very urgent as the planting season was about to start.” Just how urgent was evident days later when Monsanto filed a lawsuit against the German government, claiming that its ban on MON 810 is arbitrary and contravenes EU rules. Although Monsanto sued France in an effort to overturn its ban on genetically modified corn, and lost that battle in March when France’s highest court ruled that the corn “may” harm the environment and wildlife, the German government is justifiably edgy, as it must prove conclusively to the German court that MON 810 damages the environment.

But the feeder GM corn is just one tiny blip on the Frankenfood radar. And, it’s not just Europeans who should worry. As Jim Hightower, former two-time Texas agriculture commissioner warned way back in June 2004:

For some time, the likes of Monsanto have had their white-smocked engineers tinkering merrily and dangerously with the very DNA of food, genetically modifying the natural composition of things like potatoes so they contain a pesticide in every one of their cells, or altering rice so it contains a diarrhea drug in every bite. This is no mere lab experiment, for unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans, Monsanto and a handful of other global biotech giants have quietly spread the seeds of these genetically altered Frankenfoods to so many farms over the past decade that about a third of the foods on U.S. supermarket shelves now contain organisms with tampered DNA — everything from baby food and milk to products made with soybean and corn. Thanks to well-placed campaign donations and powerhouse lobbying, this infiltration of our food supply has been done with practically no consumer awareness, since both Bill Clinton’s and George W’s administrations have let these foodstuffs be sold in America without so much as a label on them to tell us that we’re buying something that our families might prefer to avoid.

Kinda ruins the appetite, doesn’t it? Not just the fact that Monsanto has infiltrated the bulk of our food chain, but that it clearly believes it has the right to do so with or without our knowledge. It has fought oversight, regulation, labeling and scientific research for years. The arrogance with which multinational biotech corporations such as Monsanto are disrupting and modifying life’s natural genetic order — from seeds to food to animals to humans to the environment — is creepy. The Almighty must surely be watching in slack-jawed amazement.

The Profit Plan

These giants are “chemical” corporations, and one of their goals is to create seeds that will withstand more (and more and more) of their herbicides. Monsanto, which gave us the deadly Agent Orange and the toxic weed killer Roundup, is not alone in its quest to manipulate, or to control the world’s order. Germany’s chemical giant Bayer, well known for its popular and effective Bayer aspirin, and for Aleve and Alka-Seltzer, was the first to introduce heroin as well as mustard gas, and produces a series of neonicotinoids — insecticides that attack the central nervous systems of insects, such as bees. Other mega-corporations dealing in both pharmaceuticals and pesticides, to name a few, are Merck, DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Syngenta — but Monsanto has been around for more than a century, produces 90-percent of genetically modified seed — and has many friends in high places. Many high places.

Last year, Vanity Fair’s Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele teamed up to present a well-researched background article, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” wherein they listed some, but not all, of these friends:

Monsanto has long been wired into Washington. Michael R. Taylor was a staff attorney and executive assistant to the F.D.A. commissioner before joining a law firm in Washington in 1981, where he worked to secure F.D.A. approval of Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone before returning to the F.D.A. as deputy commissioner in 1991. Dr. Michael A. Friedman, formerly the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for operations, joined Monsanto in 1999 as a senior vice president. Linda J. Fisher was an assistant administrator at the E.P.A. when she left the agency in 1993. She became a vice president of Monsanto, from 1995 to 2000, only to return to the E.P.A. as deputy administrator the next year. William D. Ruckelshaus, former E.P.A. administrator, and Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, each served on Monsanto’s board after leaving government. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto’s corporate-law department in the 1970s. He wrote the Supreme Court opinion in a crucial G.M.-seed patent-rights case in 2001 that benefited Monsanto and all G.M.-seed companies. Donald Rumsfeld never served on the board or held any office at Monsanto, but Monsanto must occupy a soft spot in the heart of the former defense secretary. Rumsfeld was chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical maker G. D. Searle & Co. when Monsanto acquired Searle in 1985, after Searle had experienced difficulty in finding a buyer. Rumsfeld’s stock and options in Searle were valued at $12 million at the time of the sale.

Bartlett and Steele go into some detail about the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its patent rights, not only against GM or GE (genetically engineered) farmers, but organic farmers as well. They write:

Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers — anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records.

Once you opt to buy Monsanto seeds, you are no longer a farmer, you’re a “grower” — a serf — and you must sign a Technology/Stewardship Agreement wherein you agree, among many other restrictions, to use Monsanto seed for planting only a single commercial crop…not to sell or give seeds to any other person for planting . . . to pay annual technology fees (in addition to the price of the seed) due Monsanto . . . to turn over your records and receipts anytime Monsanto asks for them. In short, you sign your life — and your livelihood — over when you become a “grower.” And, if you’re ever taken to court (and it’s likely you could be), and you lose (and it’s likely you will) — you will find you agreed to pay Monsanto and its attorney fees and all related court costs.

The End Game

This goes way beyond garnering profits for agriculture conglomerates such as Monsanto. It is about disrupting the natural order of life — whether plant or animal. And, for those orchestrating this havoc, it is about control. As Henry Kissinger once said matter-of-factly, “If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.” Kissinger has long been obsessed with two things — depopulating the world and establishing a New World Order.

What better way to control the food than to ban seed saving — what better weapon is there to use against starving populations than food? The answer is laid out in detail in F. William Engdahl’s November 2007 critical book about genetic manipulation, Seeds of Destruction. Engdahl is no conspiracy theorist. He is a leading researcher as well as an economist and an associate and regular contributor for the Center for Research on Globalization.

In his extensive three-part review of Seeds, investigative journalist Stephen Lendman reveals “the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and why that prospect is chilling.”

Lendman reminds us that Kissinger has been both at the forefront and behind the scenes since the 1960s when, as Engdahl wrote, “the Rockefellers were at the power center of the US establishment (and) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (was) their hand-picked protégé.” Kissinger was there as Nixon’s Secretary of State in 1973 when the food crisis hit and, as Engdahl said, he decided US agricultural policy was “too important to be left in the hands of the Agricultural Department so he took control of it himself.” Even back then, Kissinger’s goal was to go global and seize control of the agricultural food market. Kissinger’s “food diplomacy” was to use food to “reward friends and punish enemies.”

Lendman writes, “Food is power. When used to cull the population, it’s a weapon of mass destruction.” He says “One way or another, the Rockefeller Foundation aims to reduce population through human reproduction by spreading GMO seeds.” And the “world’s number one” in patenting seeds is Monsanto. He explains:

Like it or not, they’re advancing their agenda, and a 2004 Rockefeller Foundation report shows it. GM crop production achieved nine consecutive double digit year increases since 1996. More than eight million farmers in 17 countries now plant them, over 90% in developing nations. Far and away, the US is the world’s leader “with aggressive Government promotion, absence of labeling, and the domination of US farm production.” Here, “genetically engineered crops (have) essentially taken over the American food chain.” In 2004, over 85% of soybeans were genetically modified, 45% of corn, and since animal feed is mainly from these crops “the entire meat production of the nation (and exports) has been fed on genetically modified animal feed.” What animals eat, so do humans.

According to Engdahl, agribusiness giants, aided by the Rockefeller Foundation, the US government and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are progressing relentlessly toward the second pillar of Kissinger’s end game — controlling food to control (and expunge) populations of lesser nations. In December 2007, Engdahl sounded the alarm about yet another seed venture (adventure?), “Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic,” a steel-reinforced concrete seed bank built deep inside a mountain on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. This “program” is funded by the Rockefellers, by such seed giants as Syngenta and Monsanto — and by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who knows a bit about monopoly.

The Way Out

Engdahl says that, since 2007, Monsanto and the US Government together hold the patent for a commercial seed called “Terminator,” designed to commit suicide after just one harvest, and farmers will be forced to return to Monsanto or other seed giants to purchase new seeds each year for crops needed to feed their populations. He said if they’re allowed to continue their reckless pursuit of power, in a decade or so, the small farmer will be but a memory and the majority of the world’s food producers would be little more than feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed corporations. “Those who say ‘it can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events,” he wrote. “The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.”

The good news is that Europe is fighting back against being forced to plant genetically manipulated seeds for plants and food. Countries like Austria and Denmark, France — and now Germany — are standing up, and standing together, to ban biotech products. As is always the case, when those who lust for power and control concoct their grand schemes, they fail to factor in the human response. Lendman says public opinion throughout Europe is strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients. He writes:

Several EU countries, including France, Germany, Austria and Denmark, even ban some EU-approved biotech products to further cloud the outlook. Polls show why, with European public opinion strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients, with hostility levels in France as high as 89% and 79% wanting governments to ban them. This shows European consumers are far ahead of Americans and much better protected (so far) by their overall exclusion as well as having labeling requirements for those allowed to be sold. That provision is crucial as it empowers consumers to use or avoid eating these foods. If enough people abstain, food outlets won’t carry them.

It’s not that Americans don’t care that the Rockefeller-Gates-Monsanto plan to solve world hunger is but a ghastly scheme to cull the population of its nonproductive bottom-feeders. Thanks to conspiratorial US media, most of us are either blissfully unaware or are unable to make a sound because, as Hightower said, our “Congress and the White House (and the media) have Monsanto checks stuffed in their ears.”

The way out is to become informed — and just say no to having unlabeled, untested products crammed down our throats. If we do nothing, we will reap what we sow. We will, as Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of evolutionist Charles Darwin, wrote in his 1952 book The Next Million Years, be condemned to the status of workers in a beehive.

We must stand up and support Europe’s attempt to organize a ban on genetically modified crops and food. It is the way — the only way — out of this mess. Lendman, who maintains “the stakes are much too high — human health and safety must never be compromised for profit,” suggests that we read Engdahl’s book, which is a “wake-up call” for all of us.

I suggest we start by reading Lendman’s review of that book, which is a much louder wake-up call.

Anyone who denies that is either lying or somehow unaware of the huge mass of compelling scientific evidence.

Many publications regularly publish articles summarizing the scientific evidence and outlining the devastation that we face if action isn’t taken quickly. I highly recommend Green Left Weekly as a continuing source. I’m not going to repeat what you’ve undoubtedly read there.

But I do want to draw your attention to an important recent development. Last month, more than 2500 climate scientists met in Copenhagen to discuss the state of scientific knowledge on this subject. And the one message that came through loud and clear was this: it’s much worse than we thought.

What were called “worst case scenarios” two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually understated the problem. The final statement issued by the Copenhagen conference declared: “The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.”

Nicholas Stern, author of the landmark 2006 study, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change now says, “We underestimated the risks. We underestimated the damage associated with the temperature increases, and we underestimated the probability of temperature increases.”

Seventeen years of failure: with one exception

Later this year, the world’s governments will meet, again in Copenhagen, to try to reach a new post-Kyoto climate treaty. Will they meet the challenge of climate change that is much worse than expected?

The politicians’ record does not inspire hope.

Seventeen years ago, in June 1992, 172 governments, including 108 heads of state, met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

That meeting produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first international agreement that aimed “to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a low enough level to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” In particular, the industrialized countries promised to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels.

Like the Kyoto Accord that followed it, that agreement was a failure. The world’s top politicians demonstrated their gross hypocrisy and their indifference to the future of humanity and nature by giving fine speeches and making promises — and then continuing with business as usual.

But there was one exception. In Rio one head of state spoke out strongly, and called for immediate emergency action — and then returned home to support the implementation of practical policies for sustainable, low-emission development.

That head of state was Fidel Castro.

Fidel began his brief remarks to the plenary session of the 1992 Earth Summit with a blunt description of the crisis: “An important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: mankind. We have become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.”

He placed the blame for the crisis squarely on the imperialist countries, and he finished with a warning that emergency action was needed: “Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”

After the 1992 Earth Summit, only the Cubans acted on their promises and commitments.

In 1992 Cuba amended its constitution to recognize the importance of “sustainable economic and social development to make human life more rational and to ensure the survival, well-being and security of present and future generations.” The amended constitution obligates the provincial and municipal assemblies of People’s Power to implement and enforce environmental protections. And it says that “it is the duty of citizens to contribute to the protection of the waters, atmosphere, the conservation of the soil, flora, fauna and nature’s entire rich potential.”

The Cubans have adopted low-fertilizer agriculture, and encouraged urban farming to reduce the distances food has to travel. They have replaced all of their incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents, and distributed energy efficient rice cookers. They have stepped up reforestation, nearly doubling the island’s forested area, to 25% in 2006.

As a result of these and many other projects, in 2006 the World Wildlife Federation concluded that Cuba is the only country in the world that meets the criteria for sustainable development.

By contrast, the countries responsible for the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions followed one of two paths. Some gave lip service to cleaning up their acts, but in practice did little or nothing. Others denied that action was needed and so did little or nothing.

As a result we are now very close to the tomorrow that Fidel spoke of, the tomorrow when it is too late.

Why Cuba?

The World Wildlife Federation deserves credit for its honesty in reporting Cuba’s achievements. But the WWF failed to address the next logical question. Why was Cuba the exception? Why could a tiny island republic in the Caribbean do what no other country could do?

And the next question after that is, why have the richest countries in the world not cut their emissions, not developed sustainable economies? Why, despite their enormous physical and scientific resources, has their performance actually gotten worse?

The first question, why Cuba could do it, was answered not long ago by Armando Choy, a leader of the Cuban revolution who has recently headed the drive to clean up Havana Bay. His explanation was very clear and compelling:

“This is possible because our system is socialist in character and commitment, and because the revolution’s top leadership acts in the interests of the majority of humanity inhabiting planet earth – not on behalf of narrow individual interests, or even simply Cuba’s national interests.”

General Choy’s comments reminded me of a passage in Capital, a paragraph that all by itself refutes the claim that is sometimes made, that Marxism has nothing in common with ecology. Karl Marx wrote:

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

I’ve never known any socialist organization to make this point explicitly, but Marx’s words imply that one of the key objectives of socialism must be to build a society in which human beings work consciously to be Good Ancestors.

And that is what the Cubans are doing in practice.

The idea that we must act in the present to build a better world for the future, has been a theme of the Cuban revolutionary movement since Fidel’s great 1953 speech, “History Will Absolve Me.” That commitment to future generations is central to what has justly been called the greening of the Cuban revolution.

The Cubans are committed, not just in words but in practice, to being Good Ancestors, not only to future Cubans, but to future generations around the globe.

Why not capitalism?

But what about the other side of the question? Why do we not see a similar commitment in the ruling classes of Australia, or Canada, or the United States?

If you ask any of them individually, our rulers would undoubtedly say that they want their children and grandchildren to live in a stable and sustainable world. So why do their actions contradict their words? Why do they seem determined, in practice, to leave their children and grandchildren a world of poisoned air and water, a world of floods and droughts and escalating climate disasters? Why have they repeatedly sabotaged international efforts to adopt even half-hearted measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions?

When they do consider or implement responses to the climate crisis, why do they always support solutions that do not work, that cannot possibly work?

Karl Marx had a wonderful phrase for the bosses and their agents — the big shareholders and executives and top managers and the politicians they own — a phrase that explains why they invariably act against the present and future interests of humanity. These people, he said, are “personifications of capital.” Regardless of how they behave at home, or with their children, their social role is that of capital in human form.

They don’t act to stop climate change because the changes needed by the people of this world are directly contrary to the needs of capital.

Capital has no conscience. Capital can’t be anyone’s ancestor because capital has no children. Capital has only one imperative: it has to grow.

The only reason for using money to buy stock, launch a corporation, build a factory or drill an oil well is to get more money back than you invested. That doesn’t always happen, of course — some investments fail to produce profits, and, as we are seeing today, periodically the entire system goes into freefall, wiping out jobs and livelihoods and destroying capital. But that doesn’t contradict the fact that the potential for profit, to make capital grow, is a defining feature of capitalism. Without it, the system would rapidly collapse.

As Joel Kovel says, “Capitalism can no more survive limits on growth than a person can live without breathing.”

A system of growth and waste

Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much is sold every day, every week, every year. It doesn’t matter that the sales include vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, or that many commodities cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil as sewers for the disposal of industrial waste.

It all contributes to profits, and thus to the growth of capital — and that’s what counts.

In Capital, Marx wrote that from a capitalist’s perspective, raw materials such as metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. are “furnished by Nature gratis.” The wealth of nature doesn’t have to be paid for or replaced when it is used — it is there for the taking. If the capitalists had to pay the real cost of that replacing or restoring that wealth, their profits would fall drastically.

That’s true not only of raw materials, but also of what are sometimes called “environmental services” — the water and air that have been absorbing capitalism’s waste products for centuries. They have been treated as free sewers and free garbage dumps, “furnished by Nature gratis.”

That’s what the pioneering environmental economist William Kapp meant nearly sixty years ago, when he wrote, “Capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”

Kapp wrote that capitalism’s claims of efficiency and productivity are: “nothing more than an institutionalized cover under which it is possible for private enterprise to shift part of the costs to the shoulders of others and to practice a form of large-scale spoliation which transcends everything the early socialists had in mind when they spoke of the exploitation of man by man.”

In short, pollution is not an accident, and it is not a “market failure.” It is the way the system works.

How large is the problem? In 1998 the World Resources Institute conducted a major international study of the resource inputs used by corporations in major industrial countries — water, raw materials, fuel, and so on. Then they determined what happened to those inputs. They found that “One half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year.”

Similar numbers are reported by others. As you know, about a billion people live in hunger. And yet, as the head of the United Nations Environmental Program said recently, “Over half of the food produced today is either lost, wasted or discarded as a result of inefficiency in the human-managed food chain.”

“Inefficiency” in this case means that it is no profit to be made by preventing food waste — so waste continues. In addition to exacerbating world hunger, capitalism’s gross inefficiency poisons the land and water with food that is harvested but not used.

Capitalism’s destructive DNA

Capitalism combines an irresistible drive to grow, with an irresistible drive to create waste and pollution. If nothing stops it, capitalism will expand both those processes infinitely.

But the earth is not infinite. The atmosphere and oceans and the forests are very large, but ultimately they are finite, limited resources — and capitalism is now pressing against those limits. The 2006 WWF Living Planet Report concludes, “The Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand — people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.”

My only disagreement with that statement is that it places the blame on “people” as an abstract category. In fact the devastation is caused by the global capitalist system, and by the tiny class of exploiters that profits from capitalism’s continued growth. The great majority of people are victims, not perpetrators.

In particular, capitalist pollution has passed the physical limit of the ability of nature to absorb carbon dioxide and other gases while keeping the earth’s temperature steady. As a result, the world is warmer today than it has been for 100,000 years, and the temperature continues to rise.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions are not unusual or exceptional. Pouring crap into the environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and it isn’t going to stop so long as capitalism survives. That’s why “solutions” like carbon trading have failed so badly and will continue to fail: waste and pollution and ecological destruction are built into the system’s DNA.

No matter how carefully the scheme is developed, no matter how many loopholes are identified and plugged, and no matter how sincere the implementers and administrators may be, capitalism’s fundamental nature will always prevail.

We’ve seen that happen with Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism, under which polluters in rich countries can avoid cutting their own emissions if they invest in equivalent emission-reducing projects in the Third World. A Stanford University study shows that two-thirds or more of the CDM emission reduction credits have not produced any reductions in pollution.

The entire system is based on what one observer says are “enough lies to make a sub-prime mortgage pusher blush.”

CDM continues not because it is reducing emissions, but because there are profits to be made buying and selling credits. CDM is an attempt to trick the market into doing good in spite of itself, but capitalism’s drive for profits wins every time.

Ian Angus was a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century conference , in Sydney Australia, April 10-12, 2009. The event, which drew 440 participants from more than 15 countries, was organized by Democratic Socialist Perspective, Resistance and Green Left Weekly. The above is Ian’s talk to the plenary session on “Confronting the climate change crisis: an ecosocialist perspective.” He has lightly edited the text for publication.

Monsanto established “Monsanto Fund” in 1964 as the charitable arm of the company. It states that “our philanthropic goal has been to bridge the gap between people’s needs and their available resources. We want to help people realize their dreams, and hopefully inspire them to enroll others in their vision.”

Monsanto has also Monsanto Fund Matching Gifts Program. This program “gives permanent Monsanto employees and active members of the Monsanto Board of Directors an opportunity to join Monsanto Fund’s support of not-for-profit institutions.” Monsanto makes it candid that the request for support of an NGO is honored “if the recipient organization adheres to the guidelines of the Matching Gifts Program.” “Eligible organizations include, but are not limited to: Colleges and universities, private and public elementary and secondary schools, organizations that serve youth, museums, libraries, health and human service agencies, environmental, community and cultural organizations.” World Vision is one of the recipients of the “matching gifts”.

Monsanto’s philanthropic activities are meant to not only improve its image, but also provide key relationships. It understands better than anyone that relationships, partnerships and network are the key for success of the company.

On November 1, 2006, in his 2006 IBM lecture at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, on “Sabina Xhosa and the New Shoes: Introducing Technologies into Developing Countries”, Hugh Grant, Chairman, President, and CEO of Monsanto, focused on agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa. He took Malawi as a model. Agriculture is the primary industry in Malawi. According to him, “seventy-two percent of the people’s caloric intake depends on maize, or corn.”¹ Maize or corn is the staple food in most Sub-Sahara African countries.

Monsanto was seeking a foothold in the Sub-Sahara Africa. Grant said:

We haven’t broken through in Africa in any of the Sub-Sahara African countries. So what do we need? We need one African country to say yes. One African country to start field trials. We need to start the field trials and start testing this in African soil, and at Monsanto we’re ready to work with an array of partners to make happen.¹

The opportune time for Monsanto arrived with the arrival of severe drought in Malawi in 2004. Any predator looks for a vulnerable prey. Malawi, after the drought, was just the kind of prey predator companies like Monsanto look for. According to Grant, Monsanto held “a discussion with relief organizations, non-government organizations, the Malawi government, and some of the relief agencies, particularly an agency called World Vision. We got together and said this is going to keep on happening unless we take a different approach. And that’s what we did.”¹ On December 20, 2005 Monsanto announced its intention to donate 700 metric tons of “quality hybrid maize seeds” to farmers in Malawi. This “high quality seed” was “donated” to the farmers through “some of the NGOs and government and relief agencies working on delivery and distribution systems.”¹

U.S. Ambassador to Malawi Alan Eastham praised Monsanto for its donation. He said, “The donation of hybrid seed to local farmers will potentially have a significant impact on the quality of next year’s harvest and represents the best tradition of socially responsible giving by the U.S. private sector.”² A representative of World Vision Malawi, one of seven members of the NGO consortium, said, “This donation is addressing both the short-term and the long-term needs of the people in Malawi, and fits very well with our programs in this country.”² The nexus between the US government and Monsanto is evident by not only the statement of the US Ambassador to Malawi, but also a highly positive report given by Charles Corey, Washington File Staff Writer. The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State (Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov).³

Therefore, Monsanto’s “donation” of seeds to Malawi farmers through its partners like the World Vision was to get a foothold in the Sub-Sahara Africa. What are its interests?

Monsanto pledges “Growth for a Better World”: “We want to make the world a better place for future generations.” Increased yields are the core of this agenda. To achieve this Monsanto provides “the products and systems” to farmers. Its main product is Roundup herbicide. Monsanto also produces GM seeds. The GM crop is resistant to the herbicide, Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops. These are known as Roundup Ready Crops. The genes contained in the GM seeds are patented.

Patenting means that farmers who buy GM seeds enter into a licensing agreement with Monsanto for the use of that particular gene. They are forbidden from saving seeds for the next season. They must buy new seed from the company each season. This denies farmers’ right to save seed. The implications of this are huge for poor farmers. Saved seed is the one resource that the poor farmers depend upon to carry them through the year. Denial of this right will greatly impact them economically. For they have to pay more each season to buy new seed. Although Monsanto purports to help farmers “improve their lives” through the supply of GM seed, the reality is that it places unbearable economic burden on the poor farmers. Teresa Anderson says, “Social and economic risks from GM crops are equally weighty. They will increase dependence on outside technologies, marginalize farmers from R&D, and consequently exacerbate the social and economic difficulties….”⁴

The implications of patenting of the gene in the GM seed go further than forbidding seed saving. If a GM crop cross-pollinates with a neighboring crop through the movement of wind, insects, birds, or accidental seed mixing, the neighboring harvest would be likely to carry the patented gene also. Monsanto could then claim that the neighboring farm has infringed their patent. The farmer, who was unintentionally contaminated by somebody else’s GM crop, would be breaking the law if he saved his seed and planted it. Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers or anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. Ever since commercial introduction of its GM seeds, in 1996, Monsanto has launched thousands of investigations and filed lawsuits against hundreds of farmers and seed dealers.

All this boils down to the dreadful result, that is, Monsanto controlling much of the world’s food supply. Control of food supply leads to control of people.

Genesis of Monsanto

Hugh Grant says, “As an agricultural and technology company committed to human rights, we have a unique opportunity to protect and advance human rights. We have a responsibility to consider not only how our business can benefit consumers, farmers, and food processors, but how it can protect the human rights of both Monsanto’s employees and our business partners’ employees.” However, this statement needs to be verified with the “gene” of Monsanto.

Monsanto was founded in 1901 by John Francis Queeny as a saccharin producing company. Giving his wife’s maiden name Monsanto to the company, he called it the Monsanto Chemical Works. His steady customer was a new company in Georgia named Coca-Cola.

Later Monsanto extended its list of products to vanillin, caffeine, drugs used as sedatives and laxatives, plastics, resins, rubber goods, fuel additives, artificial caffeine, industrial fluids, vinyl siding, dishwasher detergent, anti-freeze, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. From 1929 to 1971, Monsanto produced PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) as industrial coolants and insulating fluids for transformers and other electrical equipment.

In the 1960s, Monsanto manufactured Agent Orange, a poisonous chemical toxin. Agent Orange is the code name for a powerful herbicide and defoliant. This is “a chemical that strips trees and plants of their leaves and is sometimes used in warfare to deny cover to enemy forces.” The US military used this toxin in Vietnam War. It sprayed an estimated 21,136,000 gallons of Agent Orange across South Vietnam to defoliate jungles.⁵ This chemical has been reported to cause serious skin diseases as well as a vast variety of cancers in the lungs, larynx, and prostate. Children in the areas where Agent Orange was used have been affected and have multiple health problems including cleft palate, mental retardation, hernias, and extra fingers and toes. According to Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects.⁶

In February 2004, the Vietnamese Association of Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA) filed a class action law suit against Monsanto in a New York court. On March 10, 2005, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who defended the U.S. veterans affected by Agent Orange, dismissed the suit, ruling that there was no legal basis for the plaintiffs’ claims.

During the 1970s, Monsanto shifted more resources into biotechnology. In the 1980s it decided to become one of the key players in the worldwide agricultural biotechnology market. In 1981 the company created a molecular-biology group for research in plant genetics. The next year, Monsanto became the first to genetically modify a plant cell. Over the next few years, it developed genetically modified seeds of cotton, soybeans, corn and canola.

In the late 1990s after restructuring the company, Monsanto was rebranded as a “life sciences” company. A new company Solutia was named for the chemical and fibers operations. Then after additional reorganization in 2002 Monsanto officially declared itself an “agricultural company”, dedicated to making the world “a better place for future generations”.

Reality Check

GTM (Gaming The Market) gives a short list of grievances against Monsanto⁵ :

1. 1917 US government suit against Monsanto over the safety of saccharin;
2. 1965-1972 UK landfill illegal toxic waste dumping;
3. Agent Orange chemical warfare;
4. 1979 dioxin chemical spill Kemner v. Monsanto longest civil jury trial in U.S. history;
5. Responsible for 56 contaminated Superfund sites;
6. Anniston, Alabama mercury and PCB-laden waste discharged into local creeks over 40 years;
7. Terminator seeds that lead to world food shortages, poverty, and death;
8. Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone Posilac (rBST) (rBGH);
9. Using coercive tactics to monopolize world markets;
10. Pursuing 500 cases annually against customers for “seed fraud”;
11. Andhra Pradesh Government vs. Monsanto on India seed price fixing;
12. US Department of Justice and US Securities and Exchange Commission criminal and civil charges for international bribing;
13. False advertising for “biodegradable” Roundup weed killer;
14. India child labor abuse in the manufacture of cotton-seeds;
15. Farmers suicides in India;⁷
16. Corporate tax evasion at Sauget, Illinois facility;
17. Campaign against dairies which do not inject bovine growth hormone from advertising.

On March 11, 2008 a documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German Cultural TV channel) by French journalist and film maker Marie-Monique Robin, entitled The World According to Monsanto (Le Monde selon Monsanto). Over a period of three years Robin has collected material for her documentary, through numerous interviews with people of different backgrounds. She traveled widely, from Latin America, to Asia, through Europe and the United States, to personally interview farmers and people in influential positions. This documentary dealt a severe blow to the credibility of Monsanto.

The destructive effects of genetically engineered crops are worldwide, but the extensive damage done in India has been widely documented by Vandana Shiva, a physicist and environmentalist. She is an activist and author of many books concerning the nefarious consequences of GM farming as opposed to the wisdom of traditional family and biological farming. Commenting on the consequences on farms and human life in India due to the use of hybrid seeds, she said,

Recently I was visiting Bhatinda in Punjab because of an epidemic of farmers’ suicides. Punjab used to be the most prosperous agricultural region in India. Today every farmer is in debt and despair. Vast stretches of land have become waterlogged desert. And, as an old farmer pointed out, even the trees have stopped bearing fruit because heavy use of pesticides has killed the pollinators — the bees and butterflies…And Punjab is not alone in experiencing this ecological and social disaster. Last year I was in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, where farmers have also been committing suicide. Farmers who traditionally grew pulses and millets and paddy have been lured by seed companies to buy hybrid cotton seeds referred to as “white gold”, which were supposed to make them millionaires. Instead they became paupers.

In India and China it has been proved that the promises of Monsanto that BT cotton (genetically engineered cotton) would produce a far higher yield and prove less costly in terms of herbicide and fertilizer required has been proved devious.

Monsanto (and its partners like World Vision) is not held back by any considerations of ethics. Monsanto does its business exclusively with the intent of increasing its own profit at the cost of farmers worldwide. If left to its own devices it will most certainly destroy not only the livelihood of millions of farmers, but also their very life.

Conclusion

Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds have transformed the company and are radically altering global agriculture. The company has produced GM seeds for soybeans, corn, canola and cotton. More products have been developed or are in the pipeline, including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. The company is also seeking to extend its reach into milk production by marketing an artificial growth hormone for cows that increases their output.

On April 25, 2009 Monsanto announced in India a special fellowship program for research on rice and wheat plant breeding. Under the program, the company will allocate $10 million to encourage young Ph.D. scholars to pursue their research in rice and wheat breeding. Edward Runge, Director of Monsanto’s Beachell-Borlaug International Scholars Program, told that the company was looking at attracting students from India and China, two of the fastest growing economies and the largest populated countries. Also rice and wheat are staple food in these countries.

1. Hugh Grant, “Sabina Xhosa and the New Shoes: Introducing Technologies into Developing Countries,” 2006 IBM Lecture at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, on November 1, 2006.
2. Charles W. Corey, “U.S. Company Donates Maize Seed to Farmers in Malawi: Monsanto’s Contribution Expected to Feed More Than 1 Million People.”
3. In order to understand the nexus among the US government, Corporations and NGOs one may read about US Global Leadership Campaign (USGLC). USGLC is an influential network of over 400 organizations and thousands of individuals. Corporations and NGOs such as Monsanto, Lockheed Martin, Mercy Corps, CARE, World Vision, Caterpiller, AIPAC, Motorola “joined together in a coalition with a common message and a common mission.”
4. Teresa Anderson, “Patented GM Crops: Making Seed Saving Illegal?”
5. “Monsanto: Profiting without Conscience.”
6. Watch the documentary on the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
7. “Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India and More,” www.democracynow.org, 13.12.2006.

   According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data record, there have been 166,304 farmers’ suicides in a decade since 1997 in India. Of these, 78,737 occurred in five years between 1997 and 2001. The next five years – from 2002 to 2006 – proved worse, seeing 87,567 take their lives. This means that on an average, there has been one farmer’s suicide every 30 minutes since 2002. www.hindu.com, 31.1.2008.

Linn Cohen-Cole, the libertarian grandmother at the forefront of the anti-HR 875 campaign called me “dangerous” for fostering complacency by encouraging readers to grow their own food instead of send e-mails and faxes…that no one reads.

The Cornucopia Institute and the Organic Consumers Association has already assured organic advocates that HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act, is only “trying to improve the safety of food products derived from large industrial processing facilities and does not intend to trample organic farmers, backyard gardeners or consumers of fresh local foods.”

Following the April 3 Cornucopia press release, “Family Farmers Fear Being Run over by Food Safety Juggernaut,” organic food activists received a mass e-mail exposing the role of Linn Cole in spreading disinformation about HR 875:

Subject: RETRACTION: URGENT! Monsanto Bill to Ban Organic Food:

“Monsanto, or one of their proxy groups, is actually feeding libertarian groups disinformation on this bill.

The bill doesn’t ban organic. When you make that misinformed, but well-intentioned call to your Congressman, you are doing exactly what Monsanto wants—coming across as an ill-informed and hysterical extremist. Monsanto is making a last-ditch effort in this PR war, but they have already really lost it.”

Monsanto lost it because 43 million Americans, including First Lady Michelle Obama, have risked going to jail for growing their own food!

This will help you understand what really happened:

   1. Monsanto is one of the most powerful multi-national corporations in the world. The Global One-World Government New World Order conspiracy, of which Monsanto is a part, is aimed at controlling millions via the food they eat. “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people,” said Henry Kissinger in 1970.

   2. Monsanto uses overt and covert strategies to accomplish their goals. Monsanto is behind both sides of the battle over HR 875. They don’t leave important matters like these to chance.

   3. Monsanto’s tentacles reach into every aspect of our society: government, private industry, the military, law enforcement and, of course, agriculture. Large, small, organic and non-organic farmers—and don’t forget libertarian grass roots activists—are all influenced directly and indirectly by Monsanto. The company that rose to power in the 20th century as a leading chemical giant now focuses on agriculture. In Monsanto’s world, there is no room for the family farmer. The company’s well-known corporate bullying tactics have made this clear. Just ask Percy Schmeiser, the brave Canola farmer who dared to take on Monsanto.

   4. HR 875’s vague wording was intentional.

   5. Family Farmers (organic and non-organic) are under attack, but not by Congresswoman DeLauro, the author of HR 875 whose husband was a political consultant to Monsanto 10 years ago.

   6. The timing of HR 875 coincides with the slow food, Locavore, and urban gardening movements in the United States and, for that matter, any slow food movement anywhere in the world.

   7. The E-coli and salmonella outbreaks related to spinach, tomatoes and peanuts are the work of Monsanto’s agents: Things don’t happen; they’re made to happen.

   8. Healthy Family Farm owner Sharon Palmer was arrested for selling raw goat milk, and the Ohio food co-op raided Gestapo-style was obviously instigated by Monsanto agents in a move designed to intimidate urban gardeners.

It doesn’t matter if libertarian grandmother Linn Cohen-Cole, or Paul, a farmer from Wisconsin, were accidental dupes or knowing agents of Monsanto’s disinformation campaign. It only matters that the disinformation campaign was discovered before it wounded the health freedom movement.

Spreading misinformation, misleading or outright false information is not the way to defeat “food safety” legislation, because when you make that misinformed but well-intentioned call to your Congressman, you are doing exactly what Monsanto wants—coming across as an ill-informed and hysterical extremist.

The very clear and present danger is that our “unelected representatives” will be forced to sit down and actually read HR 875. But when they do, they won’t find a ban on heirloom seeds, farmers markets or backyard gardening, because it isn’t there. Does anyone think Monsanto would actually put in writing that we are going to arrest Michelle Obama for planting a garden?

If they did, our representatives wouldn’t need a flood of frantic messages hollering that HR 875 is the bill that will “kill all farms and eat your babies.” No, believe it or not, our representatives eat and go to farmers markets just like we do.

So who is behind this disinformation campaign?

The Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF) originated the Linn Cole articles.

The Organic Consumers Association and other legitimate heath advocates have been questioning the NSF for several years, and the criticism is universally the same: Why does the NSF keep turning out factually inaccurate, hysterically grim articles such as Linn Cole’s?

The answers start with the NSF founders, husband-wife team Albert Stubblebine and Rima Laibow. Now, when I accuse these people of being disinformation professionals, let me explain. I’m not saying they’re doing sloppy research, and I’m not saying they’re being overzealous. What I am saying is that they are working, for pay, to spread false information and to make their organization look like a legitimate activist group.

My conclusion is Stubblebine and Laibow are using the Natural Solutions Foundation—and Linn Cole—to undermine the health freedom community by spreading disinformation about HR 875.

Stubblebine is a retired U.S. Army major general who designed AEGIS, “a major Homeland Security private initiative.” Given this background and his ties to the U.S. intelligence community, eyebrows were raised in the health freedom community in early 2005 when, along with Laibow, Stubblebine launched the NSF website and began to promote his wife as an expert on Codex Alimentarius, the commission working to adopt strict new guidelines for vitamin and mineral supplements.

Dr. Rath, founder of the 4.dr-rath-foundation, a legitimate health advocacy group, and the author of A Modern Major General Exposed? writes: “It quickly became apparent to experienced health freedom observers that Stubblebine either hadn’t done his homework properly, or that he and Laibow were intentionally spreading inaccurate and misleading material about Codex and other related dietary supplement issues via their website and press releases.

Moreover, despite repeated concerns being expressed by more experienced health freedom observers, Stubblebine and Laibow continued to disseminate this material, and pointedly ignored requests to remove it from their website.”

In my “Scared to CodeX Death” article, I refer to Dr. Rima Laibow when I write: “And although the effects of Codex are devastating and will result in humans dying from starvation and preventable diseases from under-nutrition, any claims that WHO or FAO have released epidemiological projections are untrue.”

Dr. Rima Laibow, to the consternation of those fighting Codex, is the source of the untrue claims about the “epidemiological projections” in her YouTube video “Codex Alimentarious & Nutricide.”

The NSF pair want to discredit HR 875, because when the cleverly worded HR 875 finally goes to committee, Monsanto will unleash a massive PR campaign aimed at, guess who? Linn Cohen-Cole and the other lefties who, according to Monsanto, are spreading false and misleading information about an innocent food safety bill.

Later, the headlines such as “HR 875 doesn’t criminalize small agriculture” will warn the population about health freedom activists who, by spreading misinformation, are threatening our food safety and free speech. Then, HR 875 and the real threat, HR 859, are passed without fanfare.

End of story.

And when the son of HR 875 is born, the one that really makes it illegal to grow your own food and have a garden, activists will gear up for another war, but it will be too late.

The battle cry from Monsanto will be heard loud and clear:

“Remember HR 875! Don’t listen to these reactionaries. They will do anything to cast Monsanto as the Agent Orange-eyed monster. Vote here.”

And the epitaph will be written: “The Grandmother Who Cried Wolf”

So if you want to fight Monsanto, take up your hoes and join the 43 million urban gardeners.

You see, what Monsanto is really afraid of is that we are starting to cooperate with each other and grow our own food. It’s called the Power of Community.

So bad that when Maine Department of Agriculture officials raided the factory farm on April 1, four Department workers themselves succumbed to the ammonia filled barns and had to be treated by doctors for burned lungs, missing work.

(No wonder Quality says its barns have “automatic feed and water systems” and “eggs are never touched by human hands.”)

So bad that OSHA is now investigating. (Where were they before?)

So bad that Philadelphia, PA-based Eggland’s Best dropped the farm’s largest franchisee Watertown, ME-based egg giant Radlo Foods which in turn dropped Quality Egg as of May 15 and pledged to go cage free.

Quality Egg, the former DeCoster Egg Farm, though the DeCoster family is still actively involved, has a thirty year history of animal, worker and environmental abuses.

In 1977 farm neighbors filed a $5 million lawsuit because their homes were infested with manure propagating insects.

In 1980, the Labor department charged the farm with employing five 11-year-olds and a 9-year-old.

In 1988 it let 100,000 chickens burn to death in a fire.

In 1996 it was presented with a fine for $3.6 million by the federal government for worker abuses. (Legal assistance lawyer Cesar Britos was overcome by barn ammonia too.)

And in 2001 a cruelty complaint was filed about dead hens intermingled with live ones during transport which the Department of Agriculture has not made public because it needs to be “reviewed and redacted.” (hello?)

But thanks to video from an undercover investigator for Mercy For Animals (MFA), agriculture and law enforcement officials raided Quality Egg for eight hours on April 1–with a search warrant and in the company of State Police troopers.

Like all battery cage operations, the 1,700-acre Quality Egg facility confines millions of hens in tiny cages in which they can’t walk, fully spread their wings or engage in other basic biological behaviors for over a year until they are rewarded with slaughter.

Quality’s seven 700-foot long barns with caged hens stacked on top of each other over manure pits produce 21 million eggs for such household names as Wal-Mart and grocery stores Stop & Shop, Shaw’s and Hannaford’s.

Video from the MFA investigator shows live hens left to hang by their feet over conveyer belts, left to suffocate in garbage cans and left to drown in manure pits which employees kicked them into.

Hens “lucky” enough to remain in their cages hover between life and death, their lungs infected and eyes plastered shut with keratoconjunctivitis lesions from living their whole lives in the ammonia fumes that sickened investigators in a few minutes.

“A hen’s head and wing were trapped under the cage’s front wall. One of her legs was stretched out and would not move or bend. She had a gash on her right side, leaving the skin split open and mostly yellow inside. A gash on her left side was red from fresh blood with a layer of dust partially covering the wound,” writes the investigator in his diary.

“Another live hen, also trapped under her cage’s front wall, had the side of her face on a moving egg belt. I saw that the side of her face, including her eye, was encrusted in what appeared to be egg yolk and dust.”

After the raid which was covered by the Associated Press, state and local officials, Quality’s customer/distributors and the grocery stores involved all professed ignorance of the conditions. Right.

Quality Egg Compliance Manager Bob Leclerc noted that Quality adheres to United Egg Producer guidelines — which permit battery cages — and said that none of the incidents were brought to “the attention of management before.”

Maybe he hadn’t yet watched the Mercy For Animals video which shows the investigator pointing out abuse — repeatedly — to other workers and supervisors including to Jay DeCoster, the son of Jack DeCoster. (An employee who was told there were live hens in trash cans he was emptying says, “It don’t matter.”)

A week after the raid — and before expected animal cruelty charges — Leclerc cleaned up the six feet deep manure piles and dying hens at Quality Egg and let the press in.

But it was a little late says Mercy For Animals executive director Nathan Runkle.

The egg industry tries to pretend it’s a few “bad employees” when it’s exposed says Runkle. But in reality the abuse videotaped depicts “standard handling and killing practices used on egg farms across the country. It is systemic, widespread and endemic to caged egg operations.”

We’ve constructed a system that treats everything and everyone on the planet as a person or as a piece of property. Water and seeds, trees and beaches: all for sale. Conscious animals too are classified as property, available for use by “persons” (including businesses). Only those legal persons have rights — socially created shields which oblige us to respect other people’s interests.

Which brings us back to animal-rights activists. People who are serious about nonhuman rights wish to discontinue the system that makes human interests the top priority and then controls all other beings for our uses and conveniences.

The animal-rights idea has been around a long time. Henry Salt, author of Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), asserted that the human habit of raising other animals in order to consume them is to inflict unnecessary harm on sentient beings. Salt, as well as Anna Kingsford (who graduated from medical school in Paris in 1880, unique in doing so without having experimented on a single animal), influenced Gandhi to decide it’s a moral duty “not to live upon fellow-animals.” And in 1944, the word “vegan” was coined to express the idea of conscientious objection to war against our fellows. The vegan peace declaration is a commitment to avoid the products of animal use, such as dairy items, flesh, eggs, and honey. By preferring melon slices or a plate of stuffed grape leaves, vegans erode the custom of animal breeding — a custom that, at the same time, uses habitat needed by animals who could live free.

In its broadest sense, veganism is the cultivation of a society that renounces domination and systematic killing. This is the core of animal-rights theory: the forthright claim that all conscious beings, human or not, should be allowed to live on their own terms, not the terms set down by those who seek to control and exploit others.

Plea From Planet Earth

Imagine the day the extraterrestrials pay us a visit. Being more capable and advanced than ourselves (get a load of that spaceship), but not having any way of hearing or understanding our words or cries, they debate whether to consume us, experiment on us, or wrap us up and carry us home as playthings. Our options end. They decide to enlist us in fulfilling their interests in food, research and entertainment. We’re frightened and appalled, even by the ones who only insist on doing it for our own good (stewardship, we Earthlings have called that). We like to decide what’s good for ourselves.

“Please, let us alone,” we beg. “Don’t split up our families to introduce us into your more advanced culture; don’t talk about how well you should care for us before using us up. Don’t try to mimic our natural habitat so we can live and reproduce when you display us. Don’t do it even if you know we’ll blow ourselves up or go extinct under the melting ice caps. Just go in peace.”

Could we ourselves heed that plea? Most people will call it impossible, saying we must be realistic; they’ll say patterns of domination and subjugation, and hierarchical ideas about species, are too ingrained in human thinking to be undone. Whether they are right or not, most people thereby perpetuate the power structures humanity has constructed. The first step to achieving change is conceiving it, and that’s what the vegan proposal has done. At its best, our movement inspires society to accept risk, to respect other beings even if that means accepting some level of danger, to ensure that we leave animals capable of living and moving freely in spaces to which they’ve naturally adapted, and to refuse to alienate them from those habitats.

Plain fairness challenges us to intervene in the cycle of breeding animals, and to stop sending domesticated cats, tropical birds, school-raised ducklings and other displaced animals into the world to fend for themselves in biocommunities that are ill-equipped to sustain or cope with them. To leave birds in their own forests rather than remove them and cage them as decorative or talkative pets, to let chimpanzees live in their natural territories rather expect them to have babies in zoos and language labs, to let bats and wolves and jaguars migrate without impediments, to respect turkeys’ natural lives rather than consider their slaughtered bodies essential to our holiday buffets; to leave fish in their waters, swimming free. The dignity of freedom, along with life itself, is at the core of what rights are meant to defend.

That doesn’t mean we ignore the dependent and domesticated — abandoned rabbits or feral cats or dogs in need of homes. Animal-rights theory challenges the cycle of making animals vulnerable and then coming to their rescue; yet it is not a pass to ignore the welfare of dependent animals who are already born. We are all members of humanity, the class we’ve constructed in order to bestow on ourselves the right to control all the others. Where we’ve endangered our fellow-animals and made them dependent, we have a collective responsibility to care for them today. So a caregiving ethic properly applies to cats, dogs, and other purpose-bred animals, while animal rights means preventing the cycle of control in the first place, preventing the destruction of communities of deer and coyotes, elk and wolves, wildcats, whales, bats and bees. This is why the strongest case for animal rights must be engaged with environmental advocacy.

In turn, animal-rights theory presents environmentalists with their strongest case. After all, a society that seriously considers animals’ claims to their habitat would refuse to let Mobil, Shell, and BP — or the Nature Conservancy, which has profited from drilling for natural gas in the habitat of highly endangered speckled grouse — ignore the interests of animals. Animal rights would change humanity’s way of doing business.

Tom Regan’s Case for Animal Rights (1983) urged: “With regard to wild animals, the general policy recommended by the rights view is: let them be!” These three little words go right to the core of the theory, and they free the spirit of activism. Regan’s three little words also highlight the need for a positively framed right for free-living beings to exist. If the rights proponent focuses simply on “abolition” — that is, on removing animals from the property category — there’s a danger of missing the positive need for free animals to procreate and experience their lives. We could stop bringing other animals into being for our purposes but ignore the loss of communities who enter the world for their own; and animal rights is a hollow idea if animals don’t survive to benefit from the concept. This means we’ll need to control our own numbers and learn to respect the environment not just for our health or aesthetic satisfaction, but because it’s home to other living beings.

Evolution of Animal-Rights Activism

One of my co-workers in the movement, Peter Wallerstein of Friends of Animals’ Marine Animal Rescue group, is an expert at assisting coast-dwelling animals who get caught in anglers’ gear. The idea is to free animals from dangers humans have caused (consistent with this mission, Wallerstein won’t eat fish), and quickly return them to their normal lives. To rescue is to exert control over a seal or a pelican, so Wallerstein believes interventions should be temporary: just long enough to enable the animals to return safely to their sea or skies, where they might flourish on their terms. In most cases, for Marine Animal Rescue, the interactions are brief — although some sea animals are found so debilitated they need long-term care; and unusual algal blooms, thought to be connected with warming oceans, cause domoic acid poisonings, which are often fatal to sea lions and seabirds.

Some others — spider monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons, parrots, and various animals kept in human settings and then discarded, such as the ones who now live at our San Antonio sanctuary — need a caregiving ethic, and they need it for life. Primarily Primates offers its animals private space, and publicly challenges humanity’s feeling of entitlement to use other animals. And that, in turn, means confronting any business which breeds domesticated animals into existence, displacing habitat where free-living animals once thrived. So the evolution of our work now includes collaboration between the rescue and rehabilitation community and animal-rights theorists. We point out that advocates can and do care for the animals caught in our current system yet at the same time organize a new cultural reality, so that whole communities of animals won’t be driven from their lands and waters, selectively bred to meet our specifications, or in some way pressed into positions of needing refuge.

We know we’re asking questions that challenge many, many generations of our cultural patterns. In light of the tremendous responsibility we’ve accepted, what kind of rights should we seek?

Seen in its strongest and best light, the animal-rights proposal does not present a list of demands, but cultivates an attitude of respect. A willingness to live gently on the land and walk respectfully along the ocean without seeing either as a store of resources for us. A desire to allow natural plants to flourish for bees, to grow our crops with an appreciation for the animals who move beneath and over them. We need to learn, as much as possible, to let other animals be.

To respect the lives of seals means respecting the lives of fish and other animals in their waters. Respecting the lives of primates would necessarily mean respecting tree frogs in the forests that need us to put down our logging machinery. What other members of Earth’s biocommunity need from us is a robust movement to defend what natural places remain.

Once we agree in principle what animal rights should be and then implement it, cultivating a society that can outgrow its drive to kill and conquer, we then decide the best approach in specific situations. Some difficult questions will involve conflicts we might have caused or aggravated between living communities, given our outsized population and the ways we have already changed the face of the planet. The key will be mindfulness, so as to steadfastly avoid reinstating the primacy of humans over the other animal communities.

Because it defends the vital interests of our fellow-animals in viable habitats, the vegan declaration of peace presents the most serious challenge to those who deforest the land, commodify life, and pollute the earth, water, and atmosphere. As such, it’s not only a key to our becoming full moral actors on the ecological stage, but also needed for keeping that stage from falling apart. We cannot afford to surrender to the loss of whole biocommunities and the meltdown of major ice sheets; if we don’t change soon, our options will run out. Never has it been more important for vegan advocates to know just what we’re asking for, and be heard.

“We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what’s in the bank,” said Jackson, president of The Land Institute. “If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won’t much matter.”

Jackson doesn’t minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a “50-year farm bill,” which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op/ed earlier this month.

Central to such a bill would be soil. A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination, said Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as an environmental studies professor at California State University-Sacramento.

Jackson believes that a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it. While Jackson and his fellow researchers at The Land Institute continue their work on Natural Systems Agriculture, he also ponders how to turn the possibilities into policy. He spoke with me from his office in Salina, Kansas.

Robert Jensen: This is a short-term culture, and federal policies typically are aimed at short-term results. Why call for a farm bill that looks so far ahead, especially in tough economic times?

Wes Jackson: For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.

We need to reverse that destructive process, which means recognizing the need for fundamental changes in the way agriculture is practiced. That requires thinking beyond the next quarterly earnings report of the agribusiness corporations and beyond this fiscal year of the feds. We need farm bills — laid out in five-year segments, with a view to the next 50 years — that can be mileposts for moving agriculture from an extractive to a renewable economy.

RJ: What are some of the key aspects of a long-term solution?

WJ: Support for soil conversation and protecting water resources have to be central. There needs to be funding for research on a different model for agriculture. And we have to avoid wasting any more resources on biofuels made from annual crops, especially corn, which is certain to exacerbate soil erosion, chemical contamination, and a larger dead zone in the gulf.

RJ: But it is true that most people, including those in the new administration, are focused on short-term problems in the financial and industrial economy. Is there any chance people — especially people in an overwhelmingly urban nation — will pay attention right now?

WJ: Remember, if our agriculture is not sustainable then our food supply is not sustainable, and food is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs. Either we pay attention or we pay a huge price, not so far down the road. When we face the fact that civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland, it’s clear that we don’t really have a choice. Beyond that, changing the way agriculture is practiced would incorporate partial solutions to major problems that people do care about: climate change, over-consumption of energy, water problems. Yes, a 50-year bill is sensible right now.

RJ: What would such a 50-year plan look like? What are the key features?

WJ: We start by acknowledging the necessity of moving from an extractive, unsustainable economy to one that is renewable and sustainable, and the first place to look is to the production of the most basic commodity — food. Once we face that necessity, we move to examining the possibilities for achieving this, recognizing that we have to act now while we still have slack, some room to move. Here’s a sobering thought: If we don’t achieve this sustainability first in agriculture, it’s highly unlikely we will in any other sector of the economy and society. That’s what makes this so imperative.

RJ: OK, start with the necessity. How is agriculture, as it is practiced today, an extractive enterprise that is unsustainable?

WJ: All organisms are carbon-based and in a constant search for energy-rich carbon. About 10,000 years ago humans moved from gathering/hunting to agriculture, tapping into the first major pool of energy-rich carbon — the soil. It was agriculture that allowed us effectively to mine, as well as waste, the soil’s carbon and other soil-bound nutrients. Humans went on to exploit the carbon of the forests, coal, oil, and natural gas. But through all that, we’ve continued to practice agriculture that led to soil erosion beyond natural replacement levels. That’s the basic problem of agriculture.

Added to the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has given us pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. We have less soil, and it is more degraded. We’ve masked that for years through the use of petrochemicals — pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. But that “solution” is no solution, and is in fact part of the problem. There are no technological substitutes for healthy soil and no miraculous technological fixes for the problem of agriculture. We need to move past the industrial model and adopt an ecological model.

RJ: This concern about chemicals has led to increased support for organic agriculture. Is that the solution?

WJ: Organic agriculture is a start but by itself is insufficient. Eliminating the chemicals is only half the problem — we still have to deal with soil erosion. Remember that we humans had organic agriculture until very recently, when we got industrial agriculture, and we still lost soil all along the way, for the last 10,000 years. There is good reason to believe we started the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about then (with the carbon compound of the soil being oxidized). It has only become a crisis in our time due to the scale increase of people and material and energy throughput.

RJ: OK, so organic alone isn’t the answer. Isn’t that where no-till or minimum-till farming comes in?

WJ: Those methods help deal with erosion, but as practiced today they require unacceptable levels of chemical inputs and end up eliminating biodiversity. Once again, it doesn’t offer a way out of the extractive economy and the problem of contamination.

RJ: So, where does that leave us?

WJ: Let’s go back to basics: The core of this idea is the marriage of agriculture and ecology. As Wendell says, we need to take nature as the measure. We need to look to nature for models of how to manage ecosystems in a sustainable fashion. At The Land Institute, we think that leads to perennial polycultures. Instead of annual crops grown in monocultures on an industrial model, we are looking at perennials in mixtures, which we think can solve a number of problems regarding erosion and contamination.

RJ: Before I ask about the details, a basic question: Is that feasible, given the 6.5 billion people on the planet? Can such strategies focused on perennials produce enough food?

WJ: First, let’s recognize that without fossil fuels, the industrial-agriculture strategies we have now could not feed even the current population, and population growth makes these changes more important than ever. As populations grow, there’s increasing pressure to put more and more marginal land into production, which increases the rate of degradation. A new model is essential.

At The Land we’ve been working on perenializing the major crops and domesticating a few promising wild species. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can not only better protect the soil but also help reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use, and toxic pollution. Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient.

RJ: Let’s assume that Natural Systems Agriculture and similar projects hold the promise you suggest. Those practices will have to be implemented in the real world, which is structured by the larger extractive economy in capitalism, at a time of crisis — some would say, even, a time of collapse. What has to happen to make that possible?

WJ: You’re right that it’s not just about plants and science, it’s also about people and society. We think that protecting the soil is not only an ecological imperative but an opportunity for positive economic and cultural change as well. The proposals we’re discussing would increase employment opportunities in agriculture — sustainable farming will require more “eyes per acre,” and replacing fossil-fuel energy with human energy and ecological knowledge makes good economic sense. With the reduced need for the hoe or plow, and land management relying more on fire and grazing, we draw on the naturalist instinct in nearly all of us, rather than presenting farm work as nothing but the “sweat of the brow” amid “thistles and thorns.” This will be necessary to counter the longstanding denigration of the countryside and rural communities, which has been a feature of our so-called cosmopolitan culture.

We’re seeing that on a small scale now with more young farmers staying on the land, with creative new endeavors in community-supported agriculture. People recognize that life is more than working in a small cubicle and consuming in a big-box store. People are hungry for good food, and they’re also hungry for a good life. People are ready to explore what it would mean to come home, not to a romanticized vision of the past but to a sustainable future.

RJ: How would a farm bill that you and Wendell might write differ from what we see today?

WJ: The farm bills we’ve had largely address exports, commodity problems, subsidies and food programs. They all involve here-and-now concerns. A 50-year farm bill represents a vision that stresses the need to protect soil from erosion, cut the wastefulness of water, cut fossil-fuel dependence, eliminate toxins in soil and water, manage carefully the nitrogen of the soil, reduce dead zones, restore an agrarian way of life, and preserve farmland from development. The best way to accomplish most of these goals is to gradually increase the number of acres with perennial vegetation, first of all through rotations and an increase in the number of grass-fed dairies sprinkled about the countryside and secondly, through progress toward perennializing the major crops. A good bill could help farmers accomplish those things.

RJ: It’s also likely that many people reading this will dismiss you as idealistic, as unrealistic. How would you answer that?

WJ: These are the same people who believe it’s realistic to continue practices they know to be unsustainable. The basic choice is simple: Do we want to work at coming up with a system that can produce healthful food and healthy communities, one that is economically and ecologically viable? Or do we want to continue to contaminate our soil and water, as we watch that soil continue to be eroded by that water? That contamination and erosion are both material reality and metaphor for our cultural and economic condition.

Look, I’m a scientist from the countryside, which means I have spent my life dealing with reality in research and on the farm. These are necessary and possible goals. Without the necessity it may be considered grandiose. Without the possibility it could be regarded as grandiose. The test for grandiosity, in my view, fails. As a nation, we are blessed with some of the world’s best soils. Increasingly city people want healthier and safer food. And we’re at a political moment when everybody and his dog is talking about the need for change. So, let’s get to it.

It’s absurd enough the Bureau claims a five-figure population of free-roaming horses and burros is too big — while ranchers, covetous of any blade of grass or drop of water these horses find, graze more than five million cows, buffalo, sheep and goats on public lands.¹

It’s shameful enough that the Bureau takes the horses and burros — animals the agency is responsible for protecting — away from the land to which they were born, and severs these animals’ own relationships. That it privatizes these horses and burros — more than 216,000 of them over the years — selling them at auctions and sale yards, or “adopting” them off — taking $125 per head, under current law, as the minimum adoption fee.

It’s disgraceful enough that the government even threatens to kill them.²

It’s nauseating enough that the government enables people to break free-living mustangs and turn them into lifestyle accessories through schemes such as the “Extreme Mustang Makeover” — a circus-like spectacle complete with hoops of fire, which is trumpeted by Mustang car maker Ford as though it were some kind of noble environmental activity.

And now, in one of the bitterest twists of all, these so-called American icons will not only be made to march at the forthcoming inaugural parade, but also used to guard the US borders. Instead of moving uncontrolled, these horses will be trained and enlisted to stop humans from moving uncontrolled.

I received a message from the National Public Outreach Specialist at the Bureau’s Wild Horse and Burro Program earlier this month telling me I ought to think it’s all awesome. Here’s the entire message:

—–Original Message—–
From: Bureau of Land Management Wildhorse and Burro [mailto:whb-news@Bureau of Land Management.gov]
Sent: December 17, 2008 2:45 PM
To: leehall@friendsofanimals.org
Subject: BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT Wild Horse and Burro Program

Hello Lee Hall, J.D.,
I just wanted to share with everyone an article that is really awesome. Our Mustangs are going to be \”strutting their stuff\” at the inaugural parade in January. Some of you may know that the U.S. Border Patrol, both North and South, are using Mustangs as their choice of the best \”breed\” for the type of work; endurance, sure-footedness, sense of danger, etc. There is an article on the national wild horse and burro website regarding the parade. Please visit [tiny url]

I am not sure if you URL will work in this form of an e-mail, so, if not, please go to www.wildhorseandburro.Bureau of Land Management.gov. Then go to Newsletter and News (right navigation bar), click on Success Stories and you will find the article. It is the last one shown.

YEAH, for our Nation\’s Living Legends!

Thank you,
Janet Neal
National Public Outreach Specialist
Janet_Neal@Bureau of Land Management.gov

(775) 861-6614
——————–
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please visit [tiny url]

These hapless horses are now involuntarily participating in the border militarization which has destroyed so many communities of free-living animals even as it has killed so many human beings. When migrants at the southern border die in the summer, it’s after first falling unconscious or succumbing to seizures and finally heart failure. The fluids from their defeated organs seep out onto the earth. In winter, they die on dunes and in canyons, shivering uncontrollably, losing their ability to grip, and then to think, to move at all; their pulses slow, their pupils dilate, their skin turns bluish and their breathing fails. Still, people come. They come when the need to feed their families overwhelms their fear of detention or death. Wild horses surely wouldn’t keep them away.

At the same time, border construction has disrupted the lives of the few remaining Sonoran pronghorn antelopes — beings who never got hung up on the dividing line between nations until a big fence was built on it. Road-building for patrols near the Tijuana Estuary disturbs coastal sage scrub birds. The habitat of mountain lions and black bears, Mexican spotted owls, and the elusive, solitary jaguars revered by ancient Aztecs and Mayans, is being irreparably torn and fragmented. Stadium lights and security equipment upsets nocturnal animals and those with natural radar. As Julia Whitty explains, the 700-mile border wall is, from an ecological perspective, severing the spine of the Americas “at the lumbar, paralyzing the lower continent.”³

The ecological balance of a hemisphere apparently does not strike much of our officialdom as awesome — or even noticeable. It would be nice to think change is going to come. But Barack Obama was one of the supporters of the law that, when signed by Bush in 2006, authorized the grotesque barrier. Wall proponents want the thing completed by the close of June 2009.

We ourselves may well be headed for extinction, because so many living beings with whom our physical lives are intertwined are disappearing from nature. If the trend, which walls and fences exacerbate, continues at the current rate, more than half of all plant and animal species will be gone by 2100. The unremitting spate of extinctions — even more than escalated climate change — is the most certain threat to human life on Earth.⁴ Notably, of those species recorded as recently extinct, more lived in the United States than anywhere else, followed by the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda and Mauritius.

Wild Inspiration

“The wild mustang has been an inspiration for Ford Motor Company for decades.” So says a corporate press release. The wild mustang, described through a singular noun: an inspiration, a living legend, an icon of the West, a concept for car designers instead of a community of individual horses and burros with distinct characters, cohabitants of the land who know each others’ struggles. Human laws and customs treat other animals as a pool of potentially useful natural resources, scientific specimens, pets, food or entertainment. Unfettered ones are mist-like and unreal, fetishes or symbols of the past, mascots or marketing concepts. We’ve systematically obstructed our ability to perceive them as beings with their own interests and experiences.

Ford taps into the public notion that adoption into private ownership is a saving grace for horses struggling to survive. That rationale misses some critical points. First, a benefit is not conferred on these animals when we pull their territory out from under them and auction them off or otherwise put them into private hands.

About 200 years ago, three million wild horses roamed most of the North American continent, in evident harmony with the rest of the biocommunity.⁵ At the beginning of the 20th century, 2 million mustangs roamed free.⁶ Now, including those stored in government pens, there are merely a few tens of thousands. Alarmingly, and despite the limited numbers of genetically viable herds, the Bureau of Land Management and the Humane Society of the United States have collaborated in subjecting these animals to invasive experiments with the contraceptive porcine zona pellucida. The Bureau of Land Management claims that reducing and repressing the free-roaming equine population is necessary to maintain a natural and ecological balance between these animals and watersheds, vegetation, and ranches. The claim is result-oriented. Cattle ranches have no part in the natural and ecological balance.

The mission of the Bureau of Land Management is, in part, “to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”⁷ But ranchers, for whose convenience the horses and burros are snatched from their habitat, are devastating public lands, usurping precious water and oxygen-giving trees. The United States — home to about 5% of the world’s population — generates approximately 24% of the world’s extra greenhouse gases.⁸ A major cause is animal agribusiness, responsible for large amounts of methane, a gas that packs more than 20 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, and for 65% of human-related nitrous oxide, a gas with nearly 300 times CO2’s potency. And this business expands our population’s footprint by clearing forests solely to grow feed for animals bred to be killed.

And it’s all unnecessary. Thus, boycotting ranchers’ products and exerting pressure on the government to stop subsidies to animal agribusiness are genuine ways to help horses and burros. Depriving them of their freedom is not.

On Their Own Terms

The West is overpopulated, but not by horses. Where the land is not overtaken by concrete, only a few strongholds of dense forest and some ice peaks are free from the effects of animal agribusiness, which gradually destroys waterways, shelters and food for birds and other animals. But there are precedents for reversing the damage. Twenty years ago, land around the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona, where the Bureau of Land Management had long granted grazing permits, had become a barren wasteland. On 1 January 1988, the Bureau instituted a moratorium on nearly all cattle grazing. Congress subsequently designated the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area a nature preserve of 58,000 acres. The river deepened, and fish reappeared. Native grasses and bushes thrive once more.⁹

The treatment of North American horses to date is, in contrast, anything but a success. More than a million wild horses once roamed Canada, but in the 1960s, after decades of continual shooting and slaughtering, only four small herds existed.¹⁰ By 1974, the Alberta herd had been reduced to about 1,000 — too small to maintain its genetic health. The other three herds, all in British Columbia, are now gone.¹¹

In 1971, Richard Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act into US law. Responding to a public outcry over roundups, the law directed the Bureau of Land Management to protect the animals. Nevertheless, roundups were codified in the law. Lawmakers simply failed to consider these animals on their own terms. They described the equids as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” — rhetoric befitting a made-for-television western of that time, when most people thought nature could be treated as though it existed for human purposes alone, and global warming was yet unheard of. The Act’s mission needs updating to match current human knowledge and an evolving environmental ethic.

Moreover, free-roaming horses and burros have their own interests. They should be entitled to genuine protection. No exemptions or permits should exist to sell or remove a wild free-roaming horse or burro from the public lands. Free-roaming equids should be just that: free from roundup, capture, sterilization, and deliberate harassment — and any obligation to defend politics and borders they have nothing to do with.

1. See Bureau of Land Management Public Lands Statistics, “Summary of the Authorized Use of Grazing District Lands” (FY 2004).
2. On 23 October 2008, Sally Spencer, Director of Marketing for Wild Horses and Burros, told Friends of Animals 30,000 horses are being stored in corrals, and their futures would be decided at an advisory meeting on 17 November 2008; options proposed included stepping up adoptions, selling the animals without limitation, killing them, or requesting more money for management purposes.
3. Julia Whitty, “Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth’s Vanishing Biodiversity,” Mother Jones, 25 Apr. 2007.
4. See ibid.
5. Robert Alison, “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” Toronto Star, 15 Oct. 2005.
6. Deanne Stillman, “Wild Horses Aren’t Free,” Los Angeles Times, 2 Jun. 2008.
7. As stated on the Bureau of Land Management website, in the public release “BLM’s ‘Seeds of Success’ Program Aimed at Improving Health and Productivity of Public Lands” (24 Aug. 2007): “The Bureau’s multiple-use mission is to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”
8. See generally U.S. Dept. of Energy, Energy Information Administration, “Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2003,” Report #: DOE/EIA-0573 (2003) (released 13 Dec. 2004), at page 2 (“US Emissions in a Global Perspective”), following the Executive Summary.
9. David Kreuper et al., US Geological Service’s Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Center, “Response of Vegetation and Breeding Birds to the Removal of Cattle on the San Pedro River, Arizona” (2003).
10. See “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” note 5 (citing information from the Canadian Wild Horse Preservation Society).
11. See “Last Roundup Feared for Canada’s Wild Horses,” note 5. Additionally, some 300 free-roaming horses exist in relative privacy on Sable Island, off Nova Scotia. Before they were legally protected, they were subject to roundups and use as “pit ponies” in coal mines and for other purposes. The free-roaming population of about 150 horses on the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague off the eastern US coast are accessible by road to tourists, and horses from this population are rounded up yearly and auctioned off for fundraising purposes by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company.

The deal South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics is negotiating with the Madagascar Government looks rapacious…The Madagascan case looks neo-colonial…The Madagascan people stand to lose half of their arable land.
– Financial Times Editorial, November 20, 2008

Cambodia is in talks with several Asian and Middle Eastern governments to receive as much as $3 billions US dollars in agricultural investments in return for millions of hectares of land concessions…
– Financial Times, November 21, 2008

We are starving in the midst of bountiful harvests and booming exports!
– Unemployed Rural Landless Workers, Para State, Brazil (2003)

Introduction

Colonial style empire-building is making a huge comeback, and most of the colonialists are late-comers, elbowing their way past the established European and US predators.

Backed by their governments and bankrolled with huge trade and investment profits and budget surpluses, the newly emerging neo-colonial economic powers (ENEP) are seizing control of vast tracts of fertile lands from poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, through the intermediation of local corrupt, free-market regimes. Millions of acres of land have been granted – in most cases free of charge – to the ENEP who, at most, promise to invest millions in infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of their plundered agricultural products to their own home markets and to pay the ongoing wage of less than $1 dollar a day to the destitute local peasants. Projects and agreements between the ENEP and pliant neo-colonial regimes are in the works to expand imperial land takeovers to cover additional tens of millions of hectares of farmland in the very near future. The great land sell-off/transfer takes place at a time and in places where landless peasants are growing in number, small farmers are being forcibly displaced by the neo-colonial state and bankrupted through debt and lack of affordable credit. Millions of organized landless peasants and rural workers struggling for cultivatable land are criminalized, repressed, assassinated or jailed and their families are driven into disease-ridden urban slums. The historic context, economic actors and methods of agro-business empire-building bears similarities and differences with the old-style empire building of the past centuries.

Old and New Style Agro-Imperial Exploitation

During the previous five centuries of imperial domination the exploitation and export of agricultural products and minerals played a central role in the enrichment of the Euro-North American empires. Up to the 19th century, large-scale plantations and latifundios, organized around staple crops, relied on forced labor – slaves, indentured servants, semi-serfs, tenant farmers, migrant seasonal workers and a host of other forms of labor (including prisoners) to accumulate wealth and profits for colonial settlers, home country investors and the imperial state treasuries.

The agricultural empires were secured through conquest of indigenous peoples, importation of slaves and indentured workers, the forcible seizure and dispossession of communal lands and the rule through colonial officials. In many cases, the colonial rulers incorporated local elites (‘nobles’, monarchs, tribal chiefs and favored minorities) as administrators and recruited the impoverished, dispossesed natives to serve as colonial soldiers led by white Euro-American officers.

Colonial-style agro-imperialism came under attack by mass-based national liberation movements throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, culminating in the establishment of independent national regimes throughout Africa, Asia (except Palestine) and Latin America. From the very beginning of their reign, the newly independent states pursued diverse policies toward colonial-era land ownership and exploitation. A few of the radical, socialist and nationalist regimes eventually expropriated, either partially or entirely, foreign landowners, as was the case in China, Cuba, Indochina, Zimbabwe, Guyana, Angola, India and others. Many of these ‘expropriations’ led to land transfers to the new emerging post-colonial bourgeoisie, leaving the mass of the rural labor force without land or confined to communal land. In most cases the transition from colonial to post-colonial regimes was underwritten by a political pact ensuring the continuation of colonial patterns of land ownership, cultivation, marketing and labor relations (described as a ‘neo-colonial agro-export system). With few exceptions most independent governments failed to change their dependence on export crops, diversify export markets, develop food self-sufficiency or finance the settlement of rural poor onto fertile uncultivated public lands.

Where land distribution did take place, the regimes failed to invest sufficiently in the new forms of rural organization (family farms, co-ops or communal ‘ejidos’) or imposed centrally controlled large-scale state enterprises, which were inefficiently run, failed to provide adequate incentives for the direct producers, and were exploited to finance urban-industrial development. As a result, many state farms and cooperatives were eventually dismantled. In most countries, great masses of the rural poor continued to be landless and subject to the demands of local tax collectors, military recruiters and usurious money lenders and were evicted by land speculators, real estate developers and national and local officials.

Neo-Liberalism and the Rise of New Agro-Imperialism

Emblematic of the new style agro-imperialism is the South Korean takeover of half (1.3 million hectares) of Madagascar’s total arable land under a 70-90 year lease in which the Daewoo Logistics Corporation of South Korea expects to pay nothing for a contract to cultivate maize and palm oil for export.¹ In Cambodia, several emerging agro-imperial Asian and Middle Eastern countries are ‘negotiating’ (with hefty bribes and offers of lucrative local ‘partnerships’ to local politicians) the takeover of millions of hectares of fertile land.² The scope and depth of the new emerging agro-imperial expansion into the impoverished countryside of Asian, African and Latin American countries far surpasses that of the earlier colonial empire before the 20th century. A detailed account of the new agro-imperialist countries and their neo-colonial colonies has recently been compiled on the website of GRAIN.

The driving forces of contemporary agro-imperialist conquest and land grabbing can be divided into three blocs:

   1. The new rich Arab oil regimes, mostly among the Gulf States (in part, through their ‘sovereign wealth funds).
   2. The newly emerging imperial countries of Asia (China, India, South Korea and Japan) and Israel
   3. The earlier imperial countries (US and Europe), the World Bank, Wall Street investment banks and other assorted imperial speculator-financial companies.

Each of these agro-imperial blocs is organized around one to three ‘leading’ countries: Among the Gulf imperial states, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; in Asia – China, Korea and Japan are the main land grabbers. Among the US-European-World Bank land predators there are a wide range of agro-imperialist monopoly firms buying up land ranging from Goldman Sachs, Blackstone in the US to Louis Dreyfuss in the Netherlands and Deutsche Bank in Germany. Upward of several hundred million acres of arable land have been or are in the process of being appropriated by the world’s biggest capitalist landowners in what is one of the greatest concentration of private landownership in the history of empire building.

The process of agro-imperial empire building operates largely through political and financial mechanisms, preceded, in some cases, by military coups, imperial interventions and destabilization campaigns to establish pliable neo-colonial ‘partners’ or, more accurately, collaborators, disposed to cooperate in this huge imperial land grab. Once in place, the Afro-Asian-Latin American neo-colonial regimes impose a neo-liberal agenda which includes the break-up of communal-held lands, the promotion of agro-export strategies, the repression of any local land reform movements among subsistence farmers and landless rural workers demanding the redistribution of fallow public and private lands. The neo-colonial regimes’ free market policies eliminate or lower tariff barriers on heavily subsidized food imports from the US and Europe. These policies bankrupt local market farmers and peasants increasing the amount of available land to ‘lease’ or sell-off to the new agro-imperial countries and multinationals. The military and police play a key role in evicting impoverished, indebted and starving farmers and preventing squatters from occupying and producing food on fertile land for local consumption.

Once the neo-colonial collaborator regimes are in place and their ‘free market’ agendas are implemented, the stage is set for the entry and takeover of vast tracts of cultivable land by the agro-imperial countries and investors.

Israel is the major exception to this pattern of agro-imperial conquest, as it relies on the massive sustained use of force against an entire nation to dispossess Palestinian farmers and seize territory via armed colonial settlers – in the style of earlier Euro-American colonial imperialism.³

The sellout usually follows one of two paths or a combination of both: Newly emerging imperial countries take the lead or are solicited by the neo-colonial regime to invest in ‘agricultural development’. One-sided ‘negotiations’ follow in which substantial sums of cash flow from the imperial treasury into the overseas bank accounts of their neo-colonial ‘partners’. The agreements and the terms of the contracts are unequal: The food and agricultural commodities are almost totally exported back to the home markets of the agro-imperial country, even as the ‘host country’s’ population starves and is dependent on emergency shipments of food from imperial ‘humanitarian’ agencies. ‘Development’, including promise of large-scale investment, is largely directed at building roads, transport, ports and storage facilities to be used exclusively to facilitate the transfer of agricultural produce overseas by the large-scale agro-imperial firms. Most of the land is taken rent-free or subject to ‘nominal’ fees, which go into the pockets of the political elite or are recycled into the urban real estate market and luxury imports for the local wealthy elite. Except for the collaborationist relatives or cronies of the neo-colonial rulers, almost all of the high paid directors, senior executives and technical staff come from the imperial countries in the tradition of the colonial past. An army of low salary, educated, ‘third country nationals’ generally enter as middle level technical and administrative employees – completely subverting any possibility of vital technology or skills transfer to the local population. The major and much touted ‘benefit’ to the neo-colonial country is the employment of local manual farm workers, who are rarely paid above the going rate of $1 to 2 US dollars a day and are harshly repressed and denied any independent trade union representation.

In contrast, the agro-imperial companies and regimes reap enormous profits, secure supplies of food at subsidized prices, exercise political influence or hegemonic control over collaborator elites and establish economic ‘beachheads’ to expand their investments and facilitate foreign takeover of the local financial, trade and processing sectors.

Target Countries

While there is a great deal of competition and overlap among the agro-imperial countries in plundering the target countries, the tendency is for the Arab petroleum imperial regimes to focus on penetrating neo-colonies in South and Southeast Asia. The Asian ‘Economic Tiger’ countries concentrate on Africa and Latin America. While the US-Europe Multinationals exploit the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as well as Latin America and Africa.

Bahrain has grabbed land in Pakistan, the Philippines and Sudan to supply itself with rice. China, probably the most dynamic agro-imperial country today, has invested in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia to ensure low cost soybean supplies (especially from Brazil), rice production in Cuba (5,000 hectares), Burma, Cameroon (10,000 hectares), Laos (100,000 hectares), Mozambique (with 10,000 Chinese farm-worker settlers), the Philippines (1.24 million hectares) and Uganda.

The Gulf States are projecting a $1 billion dollar fund to finance land grabs in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Japan has purchased 100,000 hectares of Brazilian farmland for soybean and maize. Its corporations own 12 million hectares in Southeast Asia and South America. Kuwait has grabbed land in Burma, Cambodia, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Laos, Sudan and Uganda. Qatar has taken over rice fields in Cambodia and Pakistan and wheat, maize and oil seed croplands in Sudan as well as land in Vietnam for cereals, fruit, vegetables and raising cattle. Saudi Arabia has been ‘offered’ 500,000 hectares of rice fields in Indonesia and hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile land in Ethiopia and Sudan.

The World Bank (WB) has played a major role in promoting agro-imperial land grabs, allocating $1.4 billion dollars to finance agro-business takeovers of ‘underutilized lands’. The WB conditions its loans to neo-colonies, like the Ukraine, on their opening up lands to be exploited by foreign investors.⁴ Taking advantage of neo-liberal ‘center-left’ regimes in Argentina and Brazil, agro-imperial investors from the US and Europe have bought millions of acres of fertile farmlands and pastures to supply their imperial homelands, while millions of landless peasants and unemployed workers are left to watch the trains laden with beef, wheat and soy beans head for the foreign MNC-controlled port facilities and on to the imperial home markets in Europe, Asia and the US.

At least two emerging imperial countries, Brazil and China, are subject to imperial land grabs by more ‘advanced’ imperial countries and have become ‘agents’ of agricultural colonization. Japanese, European and North American multinationals exploit Brazil even as Brazilian colonial settlers and agro-industrialists have taken over wide swathes of borderlands in Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia. A similar pattern occurs in China where valuable farmlands are exploited by Japanese and overseas Chinese capitalists at the same time that China is seizing fertile land in poorer countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Present and Future Consequences of Agro-Imperialism

The re-colonization by emerging imperialist states of huge tracts of fertile farmland of the poorest countries and regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America is resulting in a deepening class polarization between, on the one hand, wealthy rentier Arab oil states, Asian billionaires, affluent state-funded Jewish settlers and Western speculators and, on the other hand, hundreds of millions of starving, landless, dispossessed peasants in Sudan, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Palestine, Burma, China, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Paraguay and elsewhere.

Agro-imperialism is still in its early stages – taking possession of huge tracts of land, expropriating peasants and exploiting the landless rural workers as day laborers. The next phase which is currently unfolding is to take control over the transport systems, infrastructure and credit systems, which accompany the growth of agro-export crops. Monopolizing infrastructure, credit and the profits from seeds, fertilizers, processing industries, tolls and interest payments on loans further concentrates de facto imperial control over the colonial economy and extends political influence over local politicians, rulers and collaborators within the bureaucracies.

The neo-colonized class structure, especially in largely agricultural economies are evolving into a four tier class system in which the foreign capitalists and their entourage are at the pinnacle of elite status representing less than 1% of the population. In the second tier, representing 10% of the population are the local political elite and their cronies and relatives as well as well placed bureaucrats and military officers, who enrich themselves, through partnerships (‘joint ventures’) with the neo-colonials and via bribes and land grabs. The local middle class represents almost 20% and is in constant danger of falling into poverty in the face of the world economic crises. The dispossessed peasants, rural workers, rural refugees, urban squatters and indebted subsistence peasants and farmers make up the fourth tier of the class structure with close to 70% of the population.

Within the emerging neo-colonial agro-export model, the ‘middle class’ is shrinking and changing in composition. The number of family farmers producing for the domestic market is declining in the face of state-supported foreign-owned farms producing for their own ‘home markets’. As a result market vendors and small retailers in the local markets are falling behind, squeezed out by the large foreign-owned supermarkets. The loss of employment for domestic producers of farm goods and services and the elimination of a host of ‘commercial’ intermediaries between town and country is sharpening the class polarization between top and bottom tiers of the class structure. The new colonial middle class is reconfigured to include a small stratum of lawyers, professionals, publicists and low-level functionaries of the foreign firms and public and private security forces. The auxiliary role of the ‘new middle class’ in servicing the axis of colonial economic and political power will make them less nation-oriented and more colonial in their allegiances and political outlook, more ‘free market’ consumerist in their life style and more prone to approve of repressive (including fascistic) domestic solutions to rural and urban unrest and popular struggles for justice.

At the present moment, the biggest constraint on the advance of agro-imperialism is the economic collapse of world capitalism, which is undermining the ‘export of capital’. The sudden collapse of commodity prices is making it less profitable to invest in overseas farmland. The drying up of credit is undermining the financing of grandiose overseas land grabs. The 70% decline in oil revenues is limiting the Middle East Sovereign Funds and other investment vehicles of Gulf oil foreign reserves. On the other hand, the collapse of agricultural prices is bankrupting African, Asian and Latin American elite agro-producers, forcing down land prices and presenting opportunities for imperial agro-investors to buy up even more fertile land at rock-bottom prices.

The current world capitalist recession is adding millions of unemployed rural workers to the hundreds of millions of peasants dispossessed during the expansion period of the agricultural commodity boom during the first half of the current decade. Labor costs and land are cheap, at the same time that effective consumer demand is falling. Agro-imperialists can employ all the Third World rural labor they want at $1 dollar a day or less, but how can they market their products and realize returns that cover the costs of loans, bribes, transport, marketing, elite salaries, perks, CEO bonuses and investor dividends when demand is in decline?

Some agro-imperialists may take advantage of the recession to buy cheaply now and look forward to long-term profits when the multi-trillion dollar state-funded recovery takes effect. Others may cut back on their land grabs or more likely hold vast expanses of valuable land out of production until the ‘market’ improves – while dispossessed peasants starve on the margins of fallow fields.

The new agro-imperials are banking on the new imperialist states committing resources (money and troops) to bolster the neo-colonial gendarmes in repressing the inevitable uprisings of the billions of dispossessed, hungry and marginalized people in Sudan, Ethiopia, Burma, Cambodia, Brazil, Paraguay, the Philippines, China and elsewhere. Time is running out for the easy deals, transfers of ownership and long-term leases consummated by local neo-colonial collaborators and overseas colonial investors and states. Currently imperial wars and domestic economic recessions in the old and emerging imperial countries are systematically draining their economies and testing the willingness of their populations to sacrifice for new style colonial empire building. Without international military and economic backing, the thin stratum of local neo-colonial rulers can hardly withstand sustained, mass uprisings of the destitute peasantry allied with the downwardly mobile lower middle class and growing legions of unemployed university-educated young people.

The promise of a new era of agro-imperial empire building and a new wave of emerging imperial states may be short-lived. In its place we may see a new wave of rural-based national liberation movements and ferocious competition between new and old imperial states fighting over increasingly scarce financial and economic resources. While downwardly mobile workers and employees in the Western imperial centers gyrate between one and another imperial party (Democrat/Republican, Conservative/Labor) they will play no role for the foreseeable future. When and if they break loose…they may turn toward a demagogic nationalist right or toward a currently invisible (at least in the US and Europe) ‘patriotic nationalist’ socialist left. In either case, current imperial pillage and the subsequent mass rebellion will start elsewhere with or without a change in the US or Europe.

1. Financial Times, November 20, 2008 page 3.
2. Financial Times, November 21, 2008 page 7.
3. Stephen Lendman, “Another Israeli West Bank Land Grab Scheme”, Counterpunch. October 10, 2008; Guardian.co.uk, October 10, 2008.
4. See GRAIN.org

Carocote is a mountain range area previously owned by the same Vollmer family. This 390 hectare area lay fallow in 2003 when one of the first land occupations took place. Forty-six families came from nearby towns of Sabaneta and Tasajera to claim the soil. And once again, Chavez intervened to accomplish the mission.

There is no level area here except a space bulldozed out for the 26 new houses finished a year ago. Only 25 families remain; the others left because of no housing facilities and lack of income. Five of those families which left, however, built their own ramshackle houses at the very top of this mountain range and grow their own crops. I was told that they do better than the cooperative. The National Institute of Land (INT), which oversees Mission Zamora, still considers them part of the mission and assists them with credits and equipment, showing quite a bit of flexibility for a “dictatorial” government, as the right-wing opposition and Yankees refer to it.

Nancy, one of the five elected cooperative leaders, took me to the empty house used for visitors. The houses here are just like those at Quebrada Seca. As I was arranging my bunk bed, I found stacks of information pamphlets promoting the constitutional reform referendum voted on last December. It would have qualitatively improved the rights, benefits and power of the poor and working class, but it failed to pass by one percent of the vote. The greatest disappointment was the failure of three million voters, who had voted for Chavez as president, to go to the polls. They were a large part of the 44% abstention. Chavez forces engaged in internal analysis and self-criticism. One of the main reasons for its failure was the lack of organizing for it — too few doors knocked on. And here before me was evidence: many hundreds undelivered, unused pamphlets.

Two Cuban advisors lived next door to the visitor’s house. With typical Cuban hospitality, Rudys immediately invited me into his house and asked if I had had lunch. He fed me leftovers from his Cuban prepared lunch of black beans, rice, yucca and a bit of meat. Rudys was eager to speak with me as he had seen the “contra golpe” TV interview and knew I had lived in Cuba.

Rudys had taken a three-year agriculture education in his home province of Pinar del Rio, north of La Habana. He’d been at Carocote 16 months and would be here for two years. The advisors get a vacation in Cuba at mid-term. Rudys was glad to be helping Cuba’s good neighbor Venezuela. He was also concerned about the great degree of thievery and insecurity that people experience. This must contribute to the fact that few Venezuelans invite people inside their houses. Despite the close cooperation these families experience here everyone locked their doors. I was told they did not have internal thievery but people from the town sometimes come looking for something to steal. Just the week before, someone had set fire to dry grass on a hillside, which burned some trees, but the residents were able to put it out before it attacked their young crops.

I hooked up with Nancy and part of her team, one of six. Two members were not present. The coop’s president, Nancy’s husband, was in Cuba for a two-week training course. On the way to their plot of carrots, a 20-minute walk, we passed seven long nurseries. They were well built steel structures. Nancy explained that they would be used for tomatoes and other vegetables but were just short of being completed.

“We should have had them functioning by now, but one big problem is that our motor pump was stolen.”

The carrot patch was near the end of the cultivatable area. Like the other crops, all the rows are dug on hillsides, making sowing, cultivating and harvesting quite difficult and even painstaking. The terrain here does not allow for tractors. Most of the weeds had to be pulled up by hand, if one wanted to take up the roots. But the others used hoes to cut them above the roots. There were far more weeds than carrot plants. In the two and one-half hours we worked—instead of the designated four—I cleaned four rows, revealing very few carrots. In some places plants were two even three meters apart. Most of this crop had already been lost to weeds. I had done this work when I lived in Cuba and know that it is not a welcome task but this was below par.

I asked Nancy why there were so many weeds and why the team didn’t have seeds with them to sow where carrot plants had been choked. She was embarrassed by my questions, admitting that she should have thought of bringing seeds. “Next time.”

Ricardo, the other Cuban advisor, later told me: “The most important thing for farmers is consciousness, not the back. If they cultivated more often, it would be easier to work the hoe and there would be more plants.”

In the evening, I had a long conversation with another neighbor, Luis, who gave me an overall view of their history.

“In the beginning, most of us still worked for wages nearby. Some of us built make-shift living quarters while we were here preparing the earth. Just clearing the earth and irrigating by hand took us three years, and there was the dispute about ownership too. It wasn’t until 2006 that we began to be full-time farmers. And INT gave us a 200BF monthly stipend to make ends meet. That was terminated this year in the hope—and with gentle pressure—that we will produce enough to pay ourselves.

“Although about 50 hectares are cultivable, we only have 10 or 11 in seed. We will soon have 15 hectares planted. The majority of our crops are vegetables, some potatoes, a few herbs, and a couple hectares in plantain and cambur”—the Venezuelan banana.

“Unfortunately, we have not yet begun ecological farming methods, but we hope to.”

“Each crop takes between three and six months from seed to maturity, so we are harvesting and selling several times a year. Our teams are economically independent from one another and sell on the local markets, especially to Mercal.

“We decide what we will grow but INT helps us with earth analysis, and the mission’s principle is based on producing necessary products at low costs and prices. We undercut the speculating supermarkets and the big plantation owners who hoard products.”

Luis’s wife, Juanita, is one of the adults who do not work the land but work in the home and take major responsibility for the children. Had the December 2007 referendum passed, she like all housewives would have received a government wage for that work.

“Our lives have improved so much,” Juanita said softly with a smile as she joined us.

“Chavez has accomplished so many good things. I am so proud to be Venezuelan now. But there are people who accuse our president of being responsible for all that is not good, for all that goes wrong. Some say he robs. What a lie that is. The truth is that the opposition is the thief; the rich are thieves. And everybody knows that all previous presidents were thieves, so some people just assume that Chavez is as well.”

Guacharaca, a turkey-like wild bird living n mountains and high land cooperatives. Farmers hunt them for their rich meat.

Early next morning, after a hearty breakfast at home, I went to find a team to work with. None were about. Everyone was at home. I took a stroll over the hillside passed a plot of young plants and down to the stream that crossed the mountain. I climbed up its bank under tall trees. The gentle rolling sound was suddenly overcome by a chattering flock of guacharaca. These turkey-sized birds cackle similarly as well yet fly more like predators. Locals hunt them for their red meat. Once they settled, another sound crashed into my ears from upstream. I followed its call to the foot of a waterfall cascading ten meters into an inviting pool. Stripped in a flash, I dived into the blue paradise. After a refreshing swim, I crawled upon a large warm rock. Bathing in the sun, one of the world’s greatest waterfalls sparkled behind my closed eyes. Venezuela harbors Angel Falls, or Kerepakupai merú. At 979 meters, it is the planet’s highest free-falling waterfall.

After a leisurely early swim and sun-bath, I returned to the residential compound and found Enrique sitting contemplatively on his porch.

Enrique is, at 57 years of age, a new farmer. A former petroleum worker, he had worked his way up to production chief for a large oil company. Workers tripled production during his time as chief but they received none of the extra profits. Enrique took the issue up.

“You know what the owners’ bosses did? They fired me. It didn’t matter to them that I was an excellent foreman for them. What mattered is that I crossed the line to speak up on behalf of their productive workers. In their eyes, this was treason. It was then that I became a determined follower of Hugo Chavez.”

Enrique was an initiator of the cooperative. He looks upon his present life optimistically. He views the future as one in which the poor and the conscious working class of the Third World take the offensive against a decaying capitalism.

“It will not be far away when an explosive crisis will bring much of the working class within the rich lands on the side of their historic brothers and sisters around the world.

“Today, I live for our fellowship, our common life. I now earn about 5,000BF a year instead of 36,000 but I am a happy man. My children bloom with free education and health care, and we all live tranquilly.”

But Enrique is not naïve or fundamentalist.

“We still live as egoists in this land. We still are affected by the capitalist disease, greed. Our consciousness still lacks power.”

Enrique wanted to talk about Barak Obama.

“Obama could be the alternative man for capitalism-imperialism for three to four years. He won’t do much for the poor and workers. He’d be a good trading man for big capitalism. He can talk better with Third World rich leaders, blacks, Arabs, Latin Americans. But he’d disappoint many of his hopeful, idealistic followers. Maybe this would bring about a greater awareness of the real nature of capitalism-imperialism, no matter the spokesman’s color or gender, and maybe a radicalization would take off.”

I left this homegrown polilogue and headed home. I passed a group of boys playing soccer. During a pause, I asked them how they felt living here. All of them expressed contentment. No worries; plenty to eat; transport to a school where they thrived. Good Cuban doctors in town.

My third day at Carocote was a rest day, Sunday, so I would return to La Victoria. But first, I wanted to talk with the oldest cooperativist. At 68, Pedro is a happy man with eight children and eight grandchildren—or is it six, mused the gray-haired black man.

“My memory fails me. But I remember how it was living here as a child. I was born in this same area. There was nothing. None of the governments before Chavez did anything for the poor, and we were the vast majority. We lived in tin-covered straw sheds with no water or electricity. We couldn’t go to school. Nobody knew how to read or write. We grew corn. Coño how things have changed since Chavez! Look at this house I have. My wife’s in town where we also have a room. She’s sick and can’t get about. She gets what care can be given, and it’s the Cuban doctors who are caring for her.

“Now we have land and houses. I plant cambur y ocumo. I hope Chavez continues leading and goes the way of Fidel. The bad ones, those who have the money, don’t want him. The President is with the people.”

Yeah, Pedro told it like it is! The man with the big heart, a man who came from their roots, the brave one standing up against Goliath—this is a leader!

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

The upper classes complain that the Chavez government has limited the number of vehicle imports, although in the two previous years 600,000 private cars were imported. The government seeks to diminish importation and increase national production in all areas. It already produces many of its military vehicles and tractors, and it has just begun to produce its own cars for private sales in a joint venture with Iran. The “People’s Car” will sell for a modest $7,000—new imported cars sell for four times that at a minimum. The first 20,000 cars are planned to role off the assembly line in 2009. Furthermore, the millions of Venezuelan drivers are privileged to have what must be the world’s cheapest fuel. While a liter of bottled water costs the equivalent of $1.40, the now nationalized gasoline costs about $.04 cents (100 centavos in national currency) a liter, or $.15 cents a gallon, which is 35 to 45 times less the price of gasoline in the warring-for-oil United States.

Early one morning in February, Diego borrowed his girl friend’s car and drove me to a low mountain range where Quebrada Seca’s farm cooperative is located. He told me some of its history, and I had done some research.

I had read Central Bank figures, which show that the government had increased financing of agricultural production by 738% between 2004 and 2007. About five million of the nation’s 30 million hectares of cultivable land have been expropriated and turned over to about 200,000 people, most of them not farmers. In many cases, the very land titles have been contested. Some lands had simply been seized decades or hundreds of years ago by those with great local power and weaponry.

The Chavez government inherited a “one-crop” economy based on oil, mostly owned by US and British companies. In 1935, 60% of the work force was rural, mostly in agriculture. By 2000, only 12% of the population was rural. In 1998, only 6% of GNP came from agricultural production, the lowest rate in all of Latin America. And three-quarters of the land was held by five percent of landowners. Under Chavez food production has doubled but demand has also grown, even more than national supply. So it has been necessary to increase foodstuff imports, which come mainly from the new regional economic alliances, Mercosur and the Venezuela-Cuba ALBA initiative and now four more member nations.

The fact that the government has several times increased wages and pensions dramatically is a major cause for the increase in demand and consumption. On worker’s day, May 1, 2008, Chavez announced that the minimum monthly wage and minimum pension is to be the equivalent of $560, placing Venezuelans minimum incomes 2.6 times higher than the entire continent average.

Diego told me that, three years ago, about 150 people occupied this mountainous area of 1000 hectares owned by a wealthy German family. The Vollmers had long ago immigrated to Venezuela and became the largest agro-landowners in Aragua state. Like many wealthy plantation owners much of their land lay fallow. Who owns land and how it is used is fundamental to whether a society is based on capitalist market enterprise or socialist fellowship. And large private property owners have been the core power for hundreds of years before Chavez. His new national assembly passed a law allowing the government to expropriate idle land and redistribute it to landless peasants and other poor people. In October 2005, a comprehensive land reform was implemented with the name Mission Zamora. This occurred following President Chavez his first public speech advocating a socialist system. He did so at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

“Everyday I become more convinced…that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can’t be transcended from within capitalism itself, but through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. But I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed from Washington,” he said.

“It is impossible within the framework of the capitalist system to solve the grave problems of poverty of the majority of the world’s population. We must transcend capitalism. But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion as the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path…a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything. That’s the debate we must promote around the world…”

Diego introduced me to the cooperative’s secretary and one of the two Cuban advisors. With his recommendation, and my CV from eight years working in Cuba, I was warmly welcomed and permitted to go about the farm and speak with whom I wished. Diego drove back and I went on my own. At the entrance to the farm land stood a large billboard sign. It read (English translation):

“Quebrada Seca. Free Town. Agriculturally Productive People. Socialist Future.”

After two kilometers cross mainly brush land, I came across a coop team. Three women and one man were cultivating a plot. Juleen spoke for them.

“This year we’ve started a new work structure, hoping this will allow a surplus. Last year I was cultivating peppers and we lost the crop. We didn’t earn anything. The only way we’ve survived is due to a small annual stipend from the Ministry of Agriculture—which it stopped this year—plus credit for seed and farm tools. But now we plough the land with our bare nails, because our three tractors are broken down and we don’t have money for repairs. So, you ask, how do we eat?” chuckled chubby Juleen.

“We get help from our families who live and work in cities. And here we all help each other, we share what we have. Most families are headed by a man and a woman and one of them usually works outside on the weekends, at least one day a week. My husband and I alternate. He works at manual labor and I wash and iron clothes in Quebrada Seca. We each earn 30BF a day. We have no money for anything other than essentials, never for vacations, because then we work for cash in the town.”

It was nearly time for lunch so we starting the long walk up a steep hill toward the housing complex. Working hours are from 07:00 to 11:00, followed by a three-hour lunch break, and then back to work from 14:00 to 18:00. On the way up, the four new farmers spoke about their three-year history. When Mission Zamora started almost all the plantation owners protested expropriations. They went to court, which would tie up the question of land ownership for years.

In the last three years, Chavez has often intervened to convince landowners to release fallow lands, sometimes offering compromises so that peasants and relocated city folk could get started. That was the case here. The government offered assistance on long-term credit with low or no interest rates to start farming. This included new housing for those who stay on. The houses are about 80m², made of concrete and some wood, with tile roofs and floors. It usually takes up to a year to construct the houses in each cooperative and costs between 80,000 and 120,000BF to build. The first five years of residence is free. Once they reach the end of that time, a decision will be made about how much each cooperative family will pay. The objective is that full ownership is turned over to the families after 20 years.

“That’s the best thing about being here, our houses” garrulous Juleen said, beaming. “You’ll see.”

The new farmers explained that production relations have changed three times in so many years. First everyone worked as one collective but it was difficult to motivate all to work equally hard. Most had never tilled soil. The second year, they broke into ten teams of four to six each. Still it didn’t work. Now each team is independent and is responsible for its own economy. There are only 57 residents left, 25 farmers work in five teams. Seven of them have taken farming courses. In theory, thirty percent of the total cooperative’s income should go back into the coop to pay off state credits. Seventy percent is shared internally. However, since real production has been so low almost no payment on credits has been forthcoming. The government does not press them.

“We have technical assemblies each week. There’s one this afternoon. Here we plan and learn together. We used to haggle about who works well or not but there was no way to determine this objectively. Then we decided individual income on the basis of just showing up for work. That didn’t work either. Now each team has equal status, responsibility and income from proceeds. But, in reality, there is no income to divide. Yeah, we’ve sold what little we’ve produced to local markets, to Mercal, but it doesn’t make ends meet,” I’m told.

Mercal is a mission, which seeks to increase the country’s food sovereignty, providing access to quality produce, especially grains, dairy and meat at subsidized prices, averaging about 40% of the chaotic supply-demand system’s prices. From its initiation, in 2002, the items sold in local Mercals, usually located in private homes, has increased from just 15 elements to 400. The Ministry of Agriculture’s figures early this year indicate that 12 million people shop at Mercal’s 15,677 locations, meeting about 67% of the nation’s needs. The woman owner of the house where I stayed is coordinator of the local Mercal.

Twenty-seven new houses sit just under the peak of this mountain. They look like the 50 recently built in the local town and 10,000 more across the nation—a figure that lags behind the goal of building homes for everyone by 2021, which means more than one million. This project—Mission Hábitat—is part of the incentive for new farmers, and they are pleasant structures.

While Juleen and a neighbor woman prepare lunch for their families and me, I wonder about the fresh-smelling environment. The kitchen, which opens to a patio, has what is essential: refrigerator, gas stove, sink with drinkable water from nearby wells, cabinets and drawers. This house has two bedrooms and six beds. There’s an extra room. Two tiled bathrooms serve this family of six with shower and flush toilet. The living room has seating place for the entire family—sofa and two stuffed chairs—and there is a dinning room. The ceiling is high, about five meters, and wood-paneled. There are many windows and good ventilation. Everything is clean and shinny. Each house has a small yard area. Some grow a few vegetables and herbs. In the center of the complex is a playground with swings, slide and teeter-totter.

Juleen’s husband comes in. He is a bit shy but answers a couple of questions. The kitchen hardware came with the house; the furniture they bought on credit and some were gifts. They also have a radio. As yet there is no television signal or telephones.

After a great lunch of fruit, two vegetables, beans, pasta and chicken, we walk down to the main building where assemblies occur. On the way, Juleen complains that the children must walk to and from school an hour a day.

“Some cooperatives have mini-buses to transport children to school and adults to shop at markets, but we don’t. The future: I don’t know. We don’t work as much or as hard as we should. We have internal problems. We have a five-member executive committee elected every six months. They receive no money for this service and are workers too. Sounds good in theory but our first president stole money. We fired him but he still hasn’t been tried. Our new president spends little time here. He mostly confines himself to his own production of 500 chickens for eggs and meat. We buy much of his produce.”

Twenty farmers came to the assembly and a few children. An advisor from the ministry came to speak about the “green revolution”, combating plagues organically. A Cuban advisor spoke of Cuba’s success in this. They explained how they could get funguses and combative insects from government laboratories to replace costly insecticide sprays. Over time, production would increase in quality and quantity.

People listened attentively and asked questions. Suddenly the meeting was interrupted by a dog fight and subsequent laughter. The assembly ended with an account of what land was planted in what. Only about a fourth of the 100 cultivatable hectares were under seed.

I walked back to town for the bus, a bit down by what I had seen and heard. Making a “green revolution” with city folk is not a quick process, but it had started.

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Since it came to power in 2003, the Lula government has been embroiled in a conflict between six large-scale rice growers and 19,000 indigenous people over 4.2 million acres of Amazon grassland, forest and river called Raposa Serra do Sol, in the northernmost state of Roraíma, on the border with Venezuela and Guiana. Today, the land dispute threatens to provoke a civil war in the region.

Raposa Serra do Sol was demarcated as a single, continuous indigenous reserve by the administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1998, and signed into law by President Lula in 2005. Since then, the rice growers, who arrived in the region in the early 1990s, have been required by law to leave their large, landed estates, and offered financial compensation to do so. Yet they have refused. Instead, due to pressure from the rice growers and other agribusiness interests, the Brazilian Supreme Court is currently deciding whether legislation for demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol may be changed to make it discontinuous, thereby allowing the rice growers to remain on the reserve in “islands”.

The landmark case, supposedly to be decided by the end of this year, will set the stage for the future of indigenous land rights in Brazil. It has drawn the attention of high-level politicians, military officers, international human rights organizations and even the Pope, pitting the interests of economic expansion against those calling for protection of human rights and the environment.

Leading the struggle to change the demarcation is Paulo Cesar Quartiero, the largest rice farmer in Roraíma, former mayor of the town of Pacaraima (part of which lies in Raposa Serra do Sol), and president of the Association of Rice Producers of Roraíma (ARPR), a powerful group of rice growers integrated into national agribusiness markets. Quartiero is a “ruralista”: a member of an influential network of politicians at the municipal, state and federal levels that represents the interests of large landowners and national and international agribusiness.

In March, when dozens of indigenous people began to non-violently agitate for full demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol, the federal government ordered federal police to remove Quartiero and the other rice farmers, who thwarted the operation by blowing up bridges into the reserve. In May, when several indians non-violently occupied land controlled by Quartiero, he organized a militia to attack them with firearms and explosives, wounding ten people. The federal police later found 149 bombs on Quartiero’s farm that they suspect were produced with the help of military personnel. Quartiero was briefly jailed, then released after posting $250 bail.

While in prison, Quartiero was charged about $16 million by the federal environmental agency (IBAMA) for destruction of permanently protected land, impeding regeneration of grasslands, using state land without authorization, and undertaking agricultural activities in violation of his farming license. He has appealed the charges. In August, Quartiero made it onto a “Dirty List” compiled by IBAMA of 38 mayoral candidates running for election who were caught practicing some illegal activity in the Amazon.

During the national elections on October 5th, Quartiero voted in a missionary school for indigenous children on Raposa Serra do Sol called Surumu. On September 2nd, the federal prosecutor had indicted Quartiero for organizing a group of armed men to invade Surumu in 2004, destroy school property, threaten students and functionaries of the school, and kidnap three priests working there-whom he allegedly imprisoned for two days.

Though Quartiero lost his bid for re-election, it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will require him to leave Raposa Serra do Sol. If it does, will he accept? Further, will Quartiero be convicted and sentenced for his alleged crimes? The Amazon region is notorious for impunity and violence.

“Quartiero continues free and harassing the Indians. Last week, he destroyed signs for the demarcation of the indigenous land, and desks and tables at the school,” reported Marcy Picanço of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a national Catholic organization that works with indigenous people in Raposa Serra do Sol, in an email to CENSA in late September.

Some in the military have threatened to rebel against the government in support of Quartiero and the other rice farmers. In August, the Associated Press reported that during a meeting at the Military Club of Rio de Janeiro, Gen. Augusto Heleno Pereira, who commands the Amazon region for the Brazilian Army, attacked the federal government’s indigenous policy as “lamentable” and “chaotic”, and even suggested that if were ordered to do so, the army would refuse to remove the rice farmers from Raposa Serra do Sol.

“The Brazilian army does not serve the government but rather the Brazilian state,” Gen. Pereira said. While he was reprimanded by the Minister of Defense, Quartiero called him a patriot, and the state assembly of Roraíma voted unanimously to give him the title of Citizen Emeritus.

Many politicians and non-indigenous residents of Roraíma support Quartiero and the rice farmers’ fierce determination to stay on the land. “A great part of the area of our state is committed to indigenous land, and if this goes through, 47% of our state will then be demarcated for the Indians, and this endangers our economic development,” Jose de Anchieta Junior, Governor of Roraíma, told Al Jazeera.

Quartiero and the other rice farmers are integrated into Brazil’s highly-capitalized agricultural sector, replete with expensive machinery, agrochemicals and, possibly, transgenic seeds. According to ARPR, on average, the rice farmers in Raposa Serra do Sol have expanded by 20% per year since their arrival. According to CIMI, the farmers’ rice is harvested and transported by truck over 400 miles to the Amazon port of Manaus. From Manaus, the rice is sold and distributed to national (and possibly international) markets. The Minister for Agriculture confirms that 70% of rice produced in Roraíma is produced in Raposa Serra do Sol.

Yet, according to data from the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IGBE), Roraíma’s contribution to the country’s total agricultural production is tiny: the state produces just 1.3% of Brazil’s rice, and its contribution to all cereals, legumes and oilseeds is only .1% (in fact, the entire north, which represents 45% of Brazil’s national territory and is almost entirely Amazon rainforest, produces just 2.6%).

There are about 750,000 indigenous people in Brazil, of whom 70% live in the Amazon. The families of the five tribes in Raposa Serra do Sol are mostly peasants–campesinos–cultivating beans, corn and manioc for family consumption and local markets, hunting in the forest, and fishing in rivers.

According to Picanço, a continuous reserve is important because land and territory ensure the essential elements for the survival of the indigenous people in Raposa Serra do Sol, and the “physical and cultural reproduction of future generations. All indigenous land demarcations in Brazil are continuous. This is laid out in the Constitution of 1988, and does not allow for the demarcation of reserves as ‘islands’, which signifies separating a people from its own being and condoning it to death.”

Others against changing the demarcation for Raposa Serra do Sol say that it will set a dangerous precedent for the other indigenous territories still in the process of demarcation. “If the Supreme Court alters the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol, then the ruralistas will pressure to change other indigenous demarcations, in order to amplify land area for planting and mining,” said congressman Adão Pretto, a member of the PT from the state of Rio Grande do Sol, in a recent interview with CENSA.

“Since 2007, the ruralistas have been pressuring to alter the federal demarcation decrees. There are various legislative decrees-some of which have already been approved-to repeal mandates that create new reserves,” reports Pretto.

Amongst those who support changing the legislation for Raposa Serra do Sol is Abelardo Lupion, a congressman who–like Quartiero–is in the right-wing, reactionary Democratic party. Lupion is presently under federal investigation for alleged corruption through ties to U.S.-based Monsanto Corporation. In March, Lupion presented a proposal to suspend the demarcation of an indigenous reserve in the state of Santa Catarina.

Various reserve demarcations have been suspended. On September 16th, after a meeting with the state’s governor that was attended by hundreds of large soybean farmers, FUNAI suspended demarcation of a reserve in Mato Grosso do Sul state. On September 24th, the Supreme Court suspended a ruling on the demarcation of an indigenous reserve in Bahia state.

In 2004, the New York Times reported that many indigenous in Raposa Serra do Sol felt betrayed by Lula: “They recall that Mr. da Silva visited here more than a decade ago, expressed support for their plight, and promised that if he ever got into power, he would grant their demand.”

Lula did not sign the legislation for the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol until two years after he became president. The Times suggested that Lula’s delay was the result of backroom politicking by the PT to consolidate its power. Soon after Lula was elected, Flamarion Portela, then governor of Roraíma, switched political parties and joined the PT. In return, the PT may have cut a deal with the rice farmers.

In fact, the Supreme Court’s present deliberation over Raposa Serra do Sol was initiated by Roraíma Senator Augusto Botelho, a member of the PT. Botelho proposed the action when he was in the Democratic Workers Party, and became a member of the PT in 2002. According to Picanço, “Botelho should leave the PT, or the PT should ask him to revoke the action or leave the party. Unfortunately, he continues in the PT, contradicting its national policy.”

“The PT in the North suffers a lot of pressure from the ruralistas,” acknowledges congressman Pretto. “In the specific case of Roraíma, there is immense pressure from those living on ‘the islands’ that would be extinguished with the demarcation of a [continuous] reserve. However, the PT’s official position is for the demarcation as it is. This position was debated in the executive branch.”

Many others in the PT support the struggle for indigenous land rights. Brazilian Minister of Justice Tarso Genro has repeatedly expressed support for a continuous demarcation in Raposa Serra do Sol. In a 2007 landmark decision, Genro upheld the demarcation of 27,000 acres of land for several indigenous communities in the state of Espírito Santo, thereby requiring Aracruz Celulose S.A.–a multinational corporation that is the largest producer of paper pulp cellulose in the world–to relinquish a large swath of its eucalyptus monocultures.

“The problem is that the Judicial branch is more reactionary than the government,” says José Maria Tardin, a Brazilian member of the international food sovereignty movement La Vía Campesina, whose members in Brazil have repeatedly expressed solidarity with the indigenous people in Raposa Serra do Sol.

The Supreme Court was supposed to make a final decision on Raposa Serra do Sol on August 27th. Judge Carlos Ayres de Britto was the first to vote in favor of a continuous reserve. Later that day, Judge Carlos Alberto Menezes Direito requested more time to make a decision, delaying a final vote. One week later, Quartiero and the other rice farmers in Raposa Serra do Sol harvested 150,000 tons of rice, worth about $67 million.

“Some say that it will be 7 to 4 in favor of changing the demarcation legislation, though nothing is certain,” says Pretto. “With Britto’s vote, now the pressure from the ruralistas on the other judges will be much greater.”

If the Supreme Court upholds the legislation for a continuous reserve in Raposa Serra do Sol, and the federal government can compel the rice farmers to leave the territory, the case will serve to advance human rights for indigenous Brazilians, curb impunity and reign in the power of agribusiness. Further, it will help stop industrial agriculture from pillaging what is arguably the planet’s most important ecological asset to climate stability: the Amazon rainforest.

Brazil ranks among the top ten largest emitters of greenhouse gases emissions (GHG), and the primary cause of GHGs from the country is deforestation. In August, IGBE reported that the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased by 70% in 2007, spurring a loss of 2.4% of the forest. As prices for food and agrofuels skyrocket, farmers in the Amazon are enticed to clear more forest for planting crops, pushing the agricultural frontier further north into the rainforest.

Support for indigenous land rights could help to counter the rate of deforestation in the Amazon. Including the 123 reserves yet to be demarcated, Brazil has 611 reservations on about 13% of Brazilian land, and 70% of indigenous lands (of which Raposa Serra do Sol comprises almost 4%) are in the Amazon region. Eleanora de Paulo Dias, a spokeswoman at FUNAI, recently told CENSA from her office in Brasília, “The connection between indigenous land rights and climate protection is fundamental. Indigenous lands are better protected than conservation reserves.”

Alternatively, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the rice farmers and Quartiero continues to enjoy impunity, it is not only the indigenous people in Raposa Serra do Sol who will suffer the consequences; everyone will.

Tables and straw bales appeared in the heart of the city’s Civic Center around a victory garden on about a quarter of an acre that had replaced a lawn. It was surrounded by a huge marketplace, which was like an old-fashioned farmers’ market that gets food directly from the farm to the fork, bypassing corporate super-markets.

A couple of miles away by the Bay at Ft. Mason — inside an old military hangar stretching over the length of a couple of football field — people strolled down a long aisle to taste fresh seafood, chocolate, wine, olives, ice cream, Indian bread and other delightful options. They could also attend free film showings and rock concerts at the former military base transformed into a cultural center.

Meanwhile, inside large auditoriums and smaller meeting rooms people discussed the growing global food crisis, how to respond to it, and imagined possible futures for farming. The final panel included the following key voices in the growing world-wide sustainable agriculture movement: Italian Carlo Petri, the founder of Slow Food in l986, physicist Vandana Shiva from India, Kentucky poet and author Wendell Berry, UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse Restaurant, and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schloesser.

Petri emerged as a storytelling organizer, Shiva as a radical scientist, Berry as an elder statesman, Pollan as a teacher with a broad theoretical frame, Waters as an inspiring chef, and Schloesser as a reporter from the field.

“Good, Clean, and Fair”

“Good, clean, and fair” are Slow Food Nation’s (SFN) goals, described in a panel as the “Triple Bottom Line.” Good means food that has a welcoming taste and fair means that the farmworkers and others are treated well. Clean is more difficult to describe, so a panel “Exploring the Meaning of Clean” was offered.

SFN was fortunate to be covered by more than a couple hundred daily newspapers and other corporate media. However, this coverage by the fast press gave little or not attention to the substance beneath the pleasurable, attractive surface. This article focuses more on the critique of our food system that many of SFN’s Food for Thought speakers articulated.

“We’re not the leaders,” the elder Berry asserted. “We’re the catalysts. More and more people are talking to each other and doing things for each other. This is the cooperation principle.” Berry focused on the importance of being thrifty, growing a local economy, and being a good neighbor.

“We’ve made terrible mistakes in this country in terms of exploitation,” Berry admitted, echoing one of SFN’s main themes of social justice. “We continue to do so with the migrant population of Mexico.”

“The themes here are the themes of the next century,” Petri declared, painting a larger picture in Italian, which was translated into English. “If they are not, there will not be a future. Sooner or later these issues will arrive on the tables of all politicians.”

“Lets get rid of the heavy coat of being consumers, which destroys our lives,” Petri continued. “It allows all the injustices we have been hearing about. Enough of being consumers. Try to consume less every day. Lets all start wasting less. Lets free ourselves from this consumptive disease.” Frequently waving his arms, the bearded, grandfatherly Petri often brought humor and laughs to serious matters with compelling stories.

“Food Matters”

“Food matters,” Pollan asserted. “It is about politics and our health. The food issue has gotten on the national agenda because of the world food crisis. Food prices are high and the era of cheap food is over. Yet politicians have not been talking about food; they need to deal with it. It involves all the issues — energy, the price of oil, climate change, and health.”

Pollan continued, “We have been eating oil for 30 years now. We don’t have the oil any more. Agriculture is the original solar energy. We can eat without oil. We need to return to a diet of contemporary sunlight.”

“Markets are being stolen from farmers,” the activist physicist Shiva asserted, indicting industrial agriculture corporations. “The Gates Foundation is doing everything wrong in India. It continues the obsolete paradigm of getting pesticides into Africa and elsewhere. I think that the Gates Foundation is criminal. Monsanto and Cargill are killing people. We need to enforce anti-trust laws against them.” Shiva described the large number of farmers in India who are committing suicide because they are being displaced and loosing meaning in life.

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas echoed Shiva’s concerns, “What the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation are proposing is a new Green Revolution. The data is in about its (negative) consequences.”

“The U.S. shapes global appetites and is destroying our laws in India. GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) are being placed on fast forward. Your local solutions need global consciousness.”

“You cannot underestimate the powers of those who will resist change,” Schloesser commented. “We need to create and broaden a real movement. We need a Slow Food Nation in Des Moines, Iowa. Our policies and companies cause harm to thousands who have not had a seat at the table.”

In an earlier panel that he moderated with workers and their advocates, Schloesser noted, “The sustainable agriculture movement has been successful in the last ten years.” He pointed to the growth of farmers’ markets, organic food, animal rights, and “a renewed appreciation for the taste of food.”

“But something has been missing,” Schloesser contended, “human rights. The people who harvest, process and prepare the food” have not been given their fair share. Schloesser and other panelists described the slavery involved in the tomato industry in Florida and the particular difficulties of meatpackers. Farmworkers and restaurant workers are among the poorest paid in the U.S.

International activists such as Petri and Shiva and their U.S. colleagues help pull down the veil placed by the corporate fast media in this country. It conceals much of the deadly action of our food system (which one government official described as “acceptable risks”) that systematically exploits workers in the U.S and world-wide, drains natural resources from around the globe, and exports our deadly chemicals and practices that thwart traditional agriculture.

As such notables discussed food inside to sold out crowds sitting in comfortable chairs, a soap box was set up outside in the Victory Garden where farmers and others educated the tourists and casual observers who came there just by chance or deliberately and sat down on straw bales. The marketplace surrounding the garden on about a quarter of an acre often had long lines at booths where farmers from around California offered their diverse foods. One felt like they were in an old-fashioned village where people were enjoying themselves with slow conversations, bumping into each other in a crowded plaza.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom strolled by the garden and explained, “Both Alice Waters and I got down and helped plant the garden. We plan to leave it up at least through Thanksgiving and the end of November. Then we will decide what to do.” Waters added, “I’ve been wanting a garden on the White House lawn for a long time.”

At the soapbox orchardist Peter Jacobson of Yountville, California, spoke about “Learning from Chefs.” He advocated and described the growing trend of chefs developing relationships with local farmers. Both farmers and chefs are under a lot of pressure — usually at different times of the day. Farmers often begin their work before sun-up and chefs often continue past sundown.

50 Million More Farmers Needed

“We need 50 million more farmers if we are going to be able to farm sustainably” in the U.S. Jacobson asserted, echoing a theme raised at SFN and by Wendell Berry in his l977 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, published by Sierra Club Books.

SFN offered a specific panel on “Edible Education,” which focused on schools for children. The long weekend itself also became an educational process. People learned about food and agriculture by what they heard and saw, as well as by what they tasted. Musicians reminded participants that agriculture and the food that it produces is a basis of culture.

RSK Arts and Drumming played traditional Nigerian drums and told stories, including one about a native doctor who used food as medicine. They sang a ”A Farmer’s Song” and Rasaki Aladokun explained, “We mean real farmer’s labor, not mechanized.” The drums sent out a heart beat rhythm throughout the victory garden that could surely be heard in downtown offices and which inspired little blonde girls to dance among the vegetables. The drums themselves were made of plants and animal skins, which provide us nourishment in other ways as well.

“We all eat everyday,” master chef Waters noted. “There are consequences to the choices we make with respect to our health, environment, and culture. Edible education is to help children understand those consequences.”

African American Van Jones of Green for All in Oakland was one of the most applauded panelists at SFN. “The clean energy wave is what I focus on — replacing pollution-based energy,” Jones said. “We have a crisis in our public school system. The schools fail to teach kids about how to get jobs and how to eat. We need to change how we fuel our buildings, as well as our bodies. The green economy that we are building can pull everyone together. We need to put the hungry kids without resources at the center. We need a movement to go from diesel to soul.”

“The interests of big business is a big part of why agriculture is failing. We need to put the interests of big business to the side,” the chair of SFN’s board, Katrina Heron, noted. “Big likes to talk to big,” noted SFN Executive Director Anya Fernald. This makes it difficult for small family farmers to be selected to provide food to the massive school lunch programs.

The Climate Change and Food panel was opened by moderator and author Mark Hertsgaard as follows: “We are gathered here today three years and a day after Hurricane Katrina. Today Hurricane Gustav is roaring through the Caribbean and headed toward New Orleans. It reminds us of the enormous power weather events have on food. How do we feed the world as we look out over the next 25 to 50 years?” The deadly specter of famine was raised.

Hertsgaard continued, “The rising temperatures will have ominous impacts on our food production. Yields of corn and other staples are projected to decline 10-20 percent in the Mid-West.” He added that projections in Africa are up to a 50% decline in the next 20 years. He said that there are now 800 million people in water-stressed parts of the world, which is projected to rise to some three billion people in 25 years.

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, noted that, “fossil fuel-based civilization is unsustainable. The uncertainty of climate change is what is problematic. The farm bill locks the U.S. into five years of unparalleled disaster. There is a profound denial about food in American politics. Politicians do not get it.”

“The thunderstorms that hit the Mid-West last year are creating soil erosion in Iowa and elsewhere,” the Land Institute’s Wes Jackson noted. “For future generations this could be more significant that Katrina. We have to get back to the stuff that we are made of, which is soil.”

“What scares me about this historical moment is that some of the big bio-technology and agribusiness corporations are presenting themselves as solutions to the problems,” revealed author Anna Lappe of the Small Planet Institute. “But biotechnology neither increases yields or diversity nor does it democratize the food system.” She later added, “Organic agriculture can match or pass the yield of chemical, industrial agriculture. Industrial-style agriculture depletes resources in ways that are not accounted for.”

Echoing what her mother Frances Moore Lappe wrote about in Diet for a Small Planet, her daughter asserted that “the problem today on the planet with respect to hunger is not a question of scarcity. We have enough food to feed us all. It is a crisis of democracy, as my mother wrote thirty years ago.”

The Food for Thought speakers’ series took a systems approach. It related food and agriculture to issues such as climate change, social justice, re-localizing food, and the policy and planning needed to replace our current food system with a more sustainable one. Food security, energy security, and climate security were approached as intimately linked.

“Food is a universal right, not a privilege,” declared Josh Verteil, the new president of Slow Food USA. He will coordinate the some 200 Slow Food chapters in the United States, which has around 16,000 members among the more than 80,000 members in the international organization.

Six hundred leaders in the food industry were invited to come to a Changemakers Day at the beginning of SFN to discuss key issues. At these sessions one could hear lively conversations between different groups of people, including farmers and government regulators.

Local, National, and International Implications

SFN’s agenda was local, national, and international. On the local level the intention was to turn people toward what they can eat from local farmers, especially at a time when gasoline prices are rising, which contributes to a rise in food prices. The average travel distance from field to fork in the U.S. is 1500 miles.

On the national level, the draft of a Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture of slightly over 500 distilled words was released. Six months in the writing, the intention is to gather some 300,000 endorsers and take the document to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2009 to influence the next farm bill.

The author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Daniel Imhoff, was the originating author and primary editor of the Declaration. Among its editors and framers were Pollan, Berry, Waters, Former Deputy Secretary of the USDA Richard Rominger, and Michael Dimock, who is the president of Roots of Change, one of SFN’s co-sponsors. The Declaration is now posted on www.fooddeclaration.org and seeks comments and endorsers before a final version appears.

“The driving force behind the Declaration,” explained Imhoff while at a Taste Pavilion at Ft. Mason, “was to describe what healthy food is. We want to make the link between health and food.” Imhoff seeks to involve the medical community more in drafting the U.S.’s next farm bill and making the connection between food and health clearer.

The active presence of the Italian Petri and the scientist Shiva helped place SFN within an international context. SFN was modeled after the Terra Madre and Salon de Gusto gatherings that happen regularly in Italy. SFN had a European flavor, especially as people walked down the promenade at Ft. Mason, as if they were on Las Ramblas in Barcelona, or similar strolls in European cities.

Slow Food Nation (SFN) was unlike the dozens of agricultural and food-related gatherings this reporter has attended for over a decade, such as the informative annual Eco-Farm and Bioneer conferences. Those tend to have a couple of thousand committed activists who pay and meet inside. Many of them were also at SFN, but they were joined by thousands of others, some of whom were merely curious, found themselves attracted, and dropped in to free events. Most of those attending SFN did so outside on sunny days in what is usually foggy San Francisco at this time of year. Sold-out SFN tours left for farms to the north and south, including to the Russian River in this reporter’s home county.

Walking through the victory garden were many parents with infants in their arms and strollers. It was a truly family event with people of all ages. The lines at the booths at the marketplace were often long where people could buy the kinds of food and lunches that the gathering advocated. Members of the Youth Food Movement delegation seemed to even out-number the gray-hairs at the Edible Education panel. Some of them planned to stay around for a gigantic Eat-In scheduled for Labor Day in a large San Francisco park.

SFN was a major networking event with so many people interested in food coming together. “Stop the Spray: Support Healthy Food Systems” flyers were passed out on the sidewalk to protest the Light Brown Apple Moth eradication program currently happening in parts of California. A flyer promoting the showing at a local theatre of the film The World According to Monsanto was distributed. It will be screened by Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the book Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating.

During the weekend both corporate leaders and anti-corporate activists were together in discussions. SFN’s most controversial partner is Whole Foods Market, which is criticized for its union-busting activities and running small local grocery stores and small farmers out of business. In contrast, among SFN’s media partners was the progressive Mother Jones magazine.

“Whole Foods does not live up to Slow Food’s standards of good, clean, and fair,” asserted Sebastopol Farmer’s Market manager Paula Downing. “I went to a panel where a Mexican worker reported that they had negotiated a one cent a pound raise for their tomato picking in Florida with corporations like Taco Bell and Wal-Mart. Yet Whole Foods has not agreed to that raise. The difference is $45 for a ten-hour day, rather than $40. Rather than partner with Whole Foods, Slow Found should confine itself to stores that do comply with its standards, like Berkeley Bowl and Olivers in Sonoma County.”

“The role of Slow Food Nation,” according to one of its organizers, Michael Dimock, president of Roots of Change, “was to convene people and be a convergence.” A test of its effectiveness will be what happens in coming months as endorsers of the Declaration are solicited and then when it is presented to Congress.

Some SFN organizers are already considering hosting another such gathering, either next year or the following year.

Inflation is here big time.

– Charles Holliday CEO, Du Pont. June 24, 2008

The sustained rise in the price of oil and commodities has hammered industries… and deepened fears of global inflationary spiral — which has already provoked riots across Asia — as producers pass on higher costs to manufacturers and consumers.”

– Financial Times, June 25, 2008, page 1

Introduction

Inflation and all of its repercussions for wage and salaried workers, fixed income middle classes, as well as manufacturers and transport industries is splashed all over the financial pages of the major newspapers throughout the world. Inflation is the great solvent that dissolves paternalistic ties between employers and workers, landowners and peasants, clientele-patronage regimes and the urban poor and sets in motion violent protests against private property and previously popularly elected regimes. Historical religious, clan, party, ethnic, tribal, caste and other differences are temporarily suspended, as Hindus and Moslems in India, Communists and Christians in the Philippines, peasants and workers in China, industrial workers and public employees in Egypt, blacks and mulattos in Haiti…join together in sustained mass protests against inflation which profoundly and visibly erodes their living standards from week to week, in some cases from one day to another.

But the left, the Anglo-American left? Where and what do our most prominent public intellectuals, including those with booking agents charging five-digit lecture fees, have to say about this world-wide revolt? Nary a word is found in left, center-left magazines, web sites and blogs. During their lucrative lectures, they thunder against the immoralities of war and climate change. They hurl imprecations against rulers and exploiters and their immoralities, and the bellicose interests they represent (with special exemption of the ubiquitous Zionist Power configuration). Yet there is hardly a mention of the purveyors of the global cancer which is literally eating away the bread of everyday life of billions of people. They talk of a ‘peace movement’, (which has disappeared); of one or another dissident electoral candidate; and reminisce over youth revolts 50 years ago. But like the intellectuals who sipped their wine while the revolting masses headed for the Bastille, they are at best irrelevant, unblinking spectators to the greatest turmoil of the new millennium.

The targeted capitalists and their regimes and the downwardly mobile middle classes and the masses facing destitution are much more aware of the centrality of inflation to their profits, living standards and everyday life and the threats of popular upheavals. The Anglo-American left, in all of its variants, is destined once again to irrelevance in the face of world-historic challenges and opportunities. This contrasts with the intense preoccupation of the capitalist class with inflation. It is the central topic of weekly meeting of central bankers the world over. Empty resolutions are approved at the monthly conferences convoked by international financial institutions. Almost daily there are pronouncements by finance and economic ministers. Yet the complacent indifference of our intellectuals is striking.

To awaken from intellectual stupor and political irrelevance in the face of the mass revolt against inflation, it is necessary for the Anglo-American left to come to grips with the scope, depth and significance of accelerating inflation in our times. Inflation is pre-eminently a political phenomenon in every sense of the word: it is a product of public policies which deeply affect markets, supply and demand, consumers, producers and speculators. Inflation is the detonator of mass political action and offers historic opportunities for broad-based ‘regime transformation’ and even revolutions in a way similar to the way the destructive imperial wars have in the past. Like wars, inflation devastates vast sectors of society, puts them all in common deteriorating positions and projects their worst nightmare — a regression into the abyss of mass destitution.

The Centrality of Inflation

The most threatening challenge to contemporary imperial regimes and their client nations is out of control inflation and a raging rise in food prices. Writers on the Left who write of the end of empire and focus on the financial crises (in the US), or the energy crises (in Europe), or the grievance of mass peasant protests over corruption in China, have overlooked the one grievance which cuts across all regimes of the world (with greater or lesser intensity but everywhere growing more powerful) namely inflation, especially in vital necessities such as food and fuel costs.

For Marxists, their narrow focus is on the class struggle at the workplace and related issues of unemployment and deteriorating work conditions as the detonator of mass unrest and organized anti-capitalist action. For environmentalists, the point of mobilization is climate change, peak oil, environment degradation and the resultant deterioration of human existence. For anti-imperialists and related anti-war activists, it is the US, EU and Israeli wars in the Middle East which represent the great moral challenges of our times and the greatest danger to world peace.

While these progressive analyses and prognoses are righteous in intent and worthy causes to support, they overlook the fact that they are not the points of greatest conflict between imperial and client regime and the great majority of humanity today. The greatest concern and the issue, which has consistently mobilized hundreds of millions over the past year, is inflation, rising food and fuel prices, declining living standards, hunger and the everyday experience (and reality) that conditions are deteriorating with no end in sight. The point of greatest contention today is not the workplace (or point of production) but in the ‘market’, the place of consumption, where money earned from production purchases less and less of the necessities of life.

Inflation: Detonator of the First Sustained World Revolt

In Asia, particularly Pakistan, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Philippines, Nepal, Mongolia and China, hundreds of millions of workers, peasants, artisans and low-paid self employed workers, as well as house-wives and pensioners have engaged in sustained mass protests as they experience a decline in the quality and quantity of food purchases as prices skyrocket. In Africa, hunger stalks the land and major food riots have occurred from Egypt through Sub-Saharan Africa to South Africa. In the Caribbean, Central and South America, food riots have led to the overthrow of regimes, mass protests, road blockages from Argentina, Bolivia, through Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti.

Recognizing the revolutionary potential of ‘hunger politics’ induced by inflation, even right-wing, as well as center-left regimes have attempted to limit unrest through (1) food subsidies, (2) raising interest rates and cutting public expenditures to slow down the economy and lessen inflation (Brazil), (3) lowering food exports in order to supply local consumers (Vietnam, India, Indonesia), (4) enacting special laws against hoarders and speculators (Philippines) and (5) repressing mass protest (Haiti, Egypt). None of these short-term, local ameliorative measures have worked: Controls of exports have not lessened imported inflation and wholesalers/retailers have not complied with price controls and engaged in hoarding and black market activity. While agricultural production has increased, the growth of non-food products (ethanol for bio-gas) has grown even faster. The ineffectiveness of these ‘reforms’ reflects the failure of agricultural policies over the past half-century, which have focused on financing large-scale specialty export agricultural crops and urban-service-industrial complexes, while neglecting basic food production by family farmers for local consumption. Countries, as diverse as Cuba, Egypt, China and the Philippines, have divested from agriculture to service (tourism in Cuba), recreational facilities for the wealthy (golf courses), agro-exports (Brazil), real estate (China), technology centers and commercial shopping malls (Philippines and India). In the process they have displaced food producing small farmers, depriving them of credits, price incentives and infrastructure – not to mention confiscating rich agricultural lands from indebted farmers for conversion to golf courses, exclusive subdivisions and shopping malls.

The result is the convergence of ongoing protests by dispossessed peasants and farmers, suffering from lack of access to land, irrigation and agricultural credits, and masses of poor urban consumers suffering from inflation of food prices. What is at fault is not merely the prices but the social relations of production. State priorities and the configuration of class power, which control the state and decree economic strategies, reorganized the economy at the expense of local low-cost and available food production. None of the ameliorative measures taken by contemporary regimes have even approached the structural roots of the inflation crisis and the rising cost of food.

Inflation and Structural Vulnerability

Inflation has had such a devastating effect today — even more than in the past — because of several profound shifts in the occupational and social organization of the economy. Worldwide class-based trade unions have declined in numbers and capacity to safeguard the interests of urban and rural wage labor. With this decline has come the abolition of wage indexes, sliding scales of wages, which allow workers wages to keep up with the rise of prices. Secondly, the vast growth of informal and service sector workers are not organized to raise wages in response to increases in food prices. The growth of pensioners with fixed income has increased their vulnerability to inflationary prices, leading to sharp declines in purchasing power. The growth of contract labor, precarious labor contracts has undermined all possibilities of negotiating labor contracts which allow wage and salary workers to keep up with inflation.

Thirdly, the dominant ideology, promoted by all capitalist economists and accepted by many trade union officials, claims that wage increases, and wage indexing induces inflationary pressure. This leads to collusion between ‘labor and capital’ in creating a ‘lag’ between rising prices and wage adjustments, resulting in declining living standards. Fourthly, this pernicious and erroneous doctrine deflects attention from the real causes of inflation — declining capitalist investment in the productive economy, the vast increase of capital flowing in the paper economy, the huge increases in profits and the grotesque salaries, bonuses and payoffs to senior executives, totally unrelated to ‘performance’. As a result there is a decrease in the production and circulation of goods of mass consumption. The growth of a vast parasitical ‘service sector’ with money pursuing fewer actually available goods has led to higher prices. Most of the affluent classes (the upper 20%) can afford the higher prices, in part because they can pass on the added costs to the mass of working class and urban and rural poor. In other words, in the contemporary economy, inflation benefits the wealthy because they pay their workers in deflated currency, while they can take advantage of inflation to further jack up prices and then income. In other words the upper classes have fortified their economic positions to take account of inflation through their power over prices, income and other compensations in a way that wage workers and people on fixed income and other vulnerable sectors cannot. Bankers protect their loans via adjustable interest rates. Monopoly resource owners jack up prices to retain profits. Wholesalers mark up prices to compensate for higher commodity prices. Large-scale retailers squeeze final consumers — the great majority at the bottom of the production and distribution chain.

Inflation: The Targets of Revolt

The revolts of the mass of vulnerable consumers are directed at retailers, wholesalers and the government, which are held responsible for the higher prices. Governments are charged with deregulating the economy, subsidizing the profiteers, promoting profiteering, complicity with monopolies, imposing wages and salary constraints without commensurate control over prices and basic necessities. Where some subsidies or price controls are decreed they are not consistently implemented or enforced. Worse still, widespread evasion, hoarding and black-marketeering is rife because of official complicity and corruption. According to regime bureaucrats, it is ‘easier’ to control wages than prices — hence the uneven and unjust enforcement. Moreover, capitalist producers frequently dis-invest or withhold products especially necessities from the market as an effective weapon against price controls, forcing scarcity and inducing popular discontent with the incumbent regime. Reformist policies and regimes then are forced to choose between ‘lifting controls’ to increase profits and prices or maintaining controls and facing the wrath of masses confronting empty shelves. Few if any contemporary regimes are willing to make credible threats to intervene in economic sectors or even enterprises, withholding goods or investments. Even less likely are regimes willing to actually mobilize workers, farmers and consumers to take over strategic economic sectors vital to popular consumption.

Anti-Inflationary Revolts and Extra-Parliamentary Politics

Given the total dominance of unhindered and unregulated ‘free market’ ideology among all the leading political parties and within the executive, legislative and administrative branches of government, there are no institutional political vehicles through which the consumers can act to arrest their declining living standards, their decreasing capacity to meet basic needs and in many regions avoid growing malnutrition and hunger. Because of the all-pervasive and powerful stranglehold of free market capitalism among all national and international decision makers, all the meetings convoked by international organizations to deal with the ‘food crisis’ (narrowly defined as ‘hunger’ induced by scarcity and exorbitant food prices) have repeatedly failed to come up with practical and workable solutions. At best, they simply pledge funds for temporary food aid, subsidies and proposals for technical or market assistance. No meeting challenges the power of corporate agriculture to raise prices, allocate investments to more profitable fuel use rather than food; no crisis managers suggest massive shifts of credits from agro-exporters to family farmers; no effort is made to end price gouging by wholesalers or retailers. In other words, the crisis managers are of the same class as the beneficiaries of high prices and scarce food producers — and therefore they operate within the same market rules, which perpetuate higher profits and declining living standards.

Given the failures of official policies and the lack of any institutional solutions of redress, the only outlet for downwardly mobile masses is extra-parliamentary opposition; the sacking of trains, stores and wholesale warehouses; the overthrow or voting out of office of incumbent regimes; the blocking of transport and seizure of government buildings; mass marches and demonstrations facing legislative and executive houses. Incumbent regimes everywhere fear mass repudiation in upcoming elections, even as their ‘populist’ opponents provide no systematic alternative. As yet, the mass consumer protests, even as they draw heavily upon the families of workers, have yet to enlist the organized working class at its point of production. Only on rare occasions have organized workers engaged in ‘general strikes’ against price increases of basic foodstuffs. The process of linking producter and consumer sectors is however not far on the horizon as local joint actions are occurring and calling into question the reliance on unrestricted markets. Bourgeois journalists, some financial editorial writers and a few government advisers are aware of the growing danger of inflation, rising food prices and the profit/wage gap to the capitalist system and are calling for anti-inflationary policies and public regulation. Faced with the deepening financial crisis resulting from the speculative crash and the necessity of large-scale, long-term state intervention and bail-outs, sectors of the capitalist class are also calling for greater state supervision and tighter controls over covert (off the books) institutional swindles.

Popular perception of massive state bailouts of banks and proposals for new regulations to save the financial system has reinforced the idea that the state can equally (or with greater justice) interfere to regulate food and fuel prices and to prop up declining living standards.

Inflation and the Transition from Protest to Popular Uprisings

Inflation and high levels of engagement of the state in saving capitalism has raised mass discontent from a local protest against local price gougers and profiteers to a national political protest against a class-biased state, which ignores deteriorating living standards and concerns itself only with the very rich.

Previously apolitical or even conservative workers, peasants and households who experienced incremental and cumulative gains in living standards through long hours and multiple household workers are now seeing their livelihood decline. Their earnings are devalued, their capacity to satisfy basic needs deteriorating. The sensation of ‘going backwards’ or losing control over their everyday lives and of downward mobility is fueling mass collective anger. The treadmill of added work without rewards, respect or recognition is reinforced daily by the added costs to everyday goods. Inflation destabilizes all calculations, not only for the future, but also of everyday life: What to buy or not buy. What to pay or what to pay off. Uncertainly about what is affordable today and unaffordable tomorrow. Uncertainty spreads from the poorest to the ‘stable workers’, from the ‘fixed income’ pensioners to the ‘secure public employees’. Inflation’s global spread undermines living standards in Europe and the Americas, Asia and Africa, and with it, discontent erodes party loyalties and confidence in electoral and/or regime legitimacy. Historically nothing undermines public confidence in the currency, the banks, politicians and the existing market ideology as much as daily creeping inflation. The greatest fear of all is the sense that a lifetime of effort will result in the ‘loss of everything’ — home, transport, health, and education — as prices rise faster than income. At some point, rampant inflation leads to absolute regression and with that a rupture with all previous loyalties and commitments.

Conclusion

Inflation, as it accelerates, in the past and today, is the great solvent of incremental everyday habits and politics: Today it undermines incumbent politicians; tomorrow it can call into question regimes and social orders.

In the past, inflationary disorders and desperation brought forth rightist demagogues who specialize in imposing order and stability. It ill behooves the left to once again ignore the destructive effects of inflation, the demands for order and stability and mass consumer discontent. Inflationary fears are as much entrenched as class and property issues. Combating inflation, especially basic price increases is central to any prospect for a social transformation, which claims to benefit the wage and salaried workers, urban or rural dwellers, the poor, minorities, consumers and producers.

The secret of storytelling amongst the poor is the conviction that stories are told so that they may be listened to elsewhere, where somebody, or perhaps a legion of people, know better than the storyteller or the story’s protagonists, what life means. The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story however mild has to be fearless and the powerful today live nervously.

A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day’s luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to bad or good luck) so that the last have become first.

Story-time (the time within a story) is not linear. The living and the dead meet as listeners and judges within this time, and the greater the number of listeners felt to be there, the more intimate the story becomes to each listener. Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.

– From John Berger’s That have not been asked: ten dispatches about endurance in the face of walls

It’s not always a matter of justice; there are simply too many of us who know not to expect justice from this system that profits at the expense of all life: Sometimes it’s not a matter of justice, but as John Berger says above, it’s a matter of “luck.” Good luck or bad. Good Karma and bad, who’s in synch with the flow of change and the Times, and who stands foolishly against the tide. It’s like that this time. It’s a matter of luck, of grace, of Karma, of what is necessary as the times change. This time, we are determined: the last shall be first, life will come before profit, the poor before the wealthy, the natural will supercede the artificial. This time, if we have something to say about it — and we do, all of us — the Conquest is over.

No one could have predicted it, and frankly, no one did. There were those of us who had nothing to go on but this: we listened to the land, and the land spoke to us. We listened; we listened to what might be possible but seemed impossible; We refused to surrender dreaming; we refused to forget what had been born, the ancient, magical connection of land and a newly arising culture that touched so many of us here in LA: a connection that touched a nerve so deep in us that its resonance spread in a web of connection — and yes, we will say it — hope — across the world. Mayan Indians in a Zapatista community prayed for the land and for the life unfolding there. Native elders came and shared the lessons of their peoples. Red tailed hawks visited the trees.

The place is this one: The South Central Farm. More than any struggle in the history of this city, the forbidden ones, those with no face, no history, no role in the formal or informal myths that comprise the “image” that is Los Angeles, simple farmers and gardeners – campesinos, the indigenous and their descendants — broke through all barriers, uniting people from every racial and cultural group, and every strata and class in a deeply felt unity that spoke to the world entire. They never backed down, although, to all appearances, they went down along with the fences, trees and plants that were bulldozed when the land was seized by an army of Los Angeles Sheriffs. Even then one of the first bulldozers was stopped cold by the resistors who had liberated and occupied the land during a drawn out siege. Imagine. A bulldozer. Stopped. Cold. By a zucchini!

A zucchini sent down its exhaust pipe. No one could have made it up. No one would have believed it.

Just like no one might have imagined that the Farm could be reborn. Given the stranglehold of the myth of private property that has weighed on the land like an invading and occupying army for two years now, since the Farm was seized by the state on behalf of its alleged “owner” — developer Ralph Horowitz – it has seemed impossible that the stranglehold might be broken.

But, as luck would have it, there is a zucchini at hand. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck. Sometimes luck, and just a little imagination applied just so. Sometimes Karma catches up with the bad guys. Just so. That’s how it is this time. And so, there is hope where it seemed all hope had been slain or carried, deeply wounded, from the field.

Here’s the deal. Ralph Horowitz and his partner in crime, City Councilwoman Jan Perry, played it cool. They waited two years for things to cool off after their brutal take down of the Farm. They thought it was all forgotten. They didn’t raise a stir or a peep. Horowitz worked quietly, overseeing the design of a new, giant warehouse distribution center on the land the City Council had all – but given him, selling it at a loss of millions of taxpayer dollars. The man had a deal, and he knew it. So, he laid low, waited for the turmoil and the questions to blow over, for the Farm’s organization to unravel and dissipate, and laid his plans. He wanted something. He was going to prove to the world who he was and what he was. He was going to obliterate the last vestige of what had been the world’s largest urban garden, and replace it with a warehouse shaped like a giant “h.”

“h” for Horowitz, obvious as the “S” on Superman’s chest. He’d show us. He’d show us all.

Perhaps, as one writer suggested, the giant “h” really stands for “hubris.” Be that as it may, Horowitz is no rank amateur. It takes a pro to corner the City into giving you a free gift of $11 million dollars worth of land. It takes a pro to spin the tale into one about “the victimized capitalist” whose “property rights” have been violated. It takes a lot of pure nerve to take a gift of $11 Million dollars, then accuse those who worked the land you’ve been given of “expecting something for nothing.” He did it with a straight face. The man is a pro. And he’s got the title to the land, after all. Never discount a man like that.

The thing is, a long time ago, Horowitz did own the land, if such a thing can be called legitimate by any standard. But, the City of Los Angeles exercised eminent domain, stripping Horowitz of the title so it could build a trash incinerator — the Lancer project, it was called — there in the heart of South Central. But, the neighborhood, in one of the first major mobilizations around environmental justice for peoples of color, forced the city to capitulate on its plan. There’d be no incinerator. And Horowitz, showing the long range determination for which he’s known, made a bid to have the land returned his way. It didn’t happen.

To make a long story short, after the LA rebellion of ‘92, the City sold the land to the semi-independent Port of Los Angeles in 1994 for $13M, and the Harbor let the food bank across the street from the site use it for a community garden. It blossomed into the largest urban farm in the world — the South Central Farm — feeding over 350 families and many in the neighborhood. Then, eleven years after it was first purchased for the Lancer Project incinerator, in backroom dealings that have yet to be explained, the City sold the land back to Horowitz for just $400,000 more than the price they originally paid him for it years before — very roughly speaking the City charged Horowitz about a third of the land’s market value — and considerably less than the price the Harbor had paid for it. Given spiraling land prices, it was a de facto gift of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to Horowitz — a fact that can not have escaped anyone, least of all Horowitz, who would soon attempt to market the 14 acre plot for over $16 million, all the while complaining about the “free ride” he was giving the Farmers.

For two years, the Farmers took time from their jobs and their farming to make twice-weekly trips to City Council meetings to implore the City to return the land to them, but by 2006 Horowitz had lined up the support of the Ninth District’s councilmember, Jan Perry, who iconic US representative Maxine Waters would soon characterize as Horowitz’s business “partner.” The Council wasn’t listening. Often, some of its members literally turned their backs as the Farmers spoke, an open insult.

As an eminent eviction approached, the Farmers occupied the land, supporters encamped there, with 24 hour patrols, tree sitters, blockades. indigenous ceremonies, rock, hip hop and Son Jarocho concerts, and press conferences with an array of celebrities from Hollywood, the music industry, and the realm of people-powered politics. Support poured in not only from Los Angeles or the US Left, but from around the world. Even the L.A. Times called the Farm “Magic.” They were right. It was a kind of Earth magic blossoming, to the amazement of millions, in what is arguably the most alienated city in the most alienated country in the world. But, the Times editors pretended to lament, property rights trump “magic” — no matter how captivating. And so it seemed. The whole thing has been bulldozed, the encampment smashed. What remains, to the naked “rational” eye, is a giant field of dried stubble.

And all this time, Horowitz has been waiting. And, he’s been dealing. Like we said, the man is a pro. His next slight of hand was almost as stunning as his last. This time, he got the City planning Department to waive an Environmental Impact Report normally required for major developments under California law.

Now, it’s quite a feat to get people responsible for even a modicum of environmental oversight to ignore reality so blatantly – to pretend that a warehouse distribution center that will pull over 2,500 diesel truck trips a day into a small residential area will have no appreciable negative environmental impacts. The feat is doubly stunning when you consider that there is not an environmental regulator walking who is unaware that diesel emissions, and, especially, what’s called diesel particulate matter, causes cancer, asthma and other severe respiratory problems, and that children, the ill, and the elderly are particularly vulnerable to it. It might seem like rocket science to some, but you can find the truth in your first online search under “diesel emissions.” It’s terribly common knowledge. But, whatever the string, Horowitz, or perhaps his buddy Jan Perry, found it – and pulled it. And even though the site is near a middle school, Horowitz got his waiver. Not only were no significant conditions imposed on his project – but the City planners claimed the risks were so negligible that Horowitz didn’t even need to file an Environmental Impact Report – the potential problems didn’t even warrant an investigation, so to speak. The California State Legislature might disagree. It recently passed a bill, SB 974, sponsored by Sen. Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach that will generate $400 million a year, specifically to reduce diesel emissions associated with California ports in areas like the Alameda Corridor, (where the Farm land is located) in order to protect children from harm.

But, it looked like Horowitz was batting a thousand. Laughing on his way to the bank, like they say.

The Farmers had little notice, and almost no chance to act. Well, they had one chance, which is right next to no chance. That chance came on July 2nd. Tezozomoc, who, along with Rufina Juarez, the Farmers had elected to lead them, swore to himself that he would be at the one scheduled public hearing on the waiver of the Environmental impact report all by himself if need be.

As luck would have it, though, in three short weeks, Farm activists scoured the neighborhood, generated 140 original, mostly hand-written letters opposing the waiver from nearby residents, got hundreds of petition signatures from across the city, lined up support from major environmental groups – one group with a million members or more — the NRDC — filed their own report: a 21 page analysis objecting to the waiver, and the Farmers brought over 100 people out to the hearing to insist on protection for the lives and health of area residents. They ultimately overflowed the hearing chambers while the media flocked to the Farmer’s press conference and rally on the City Hall lawn. The demonstrators chanted, Azteca danzantes danced, musicians strummed vihuelas, and car horns gleefully pierced the din of downtown traffic — all on a weekday morning during the work week.

The Deputy Advisory Board of L.A.’s Planning Department relented even before the first resident spoke, announcing that the Board would reconsider the waiver of the Environmental Impact Report. The matter had already been cinched, just by the volume of letters the Department had received, even before the hearing opened. The period for filing comments by the public was extended for three more weeks.

Like luck. Like magic. Like the Lakota and Cheyenne — the ones who made it Custer’s last stand where Custer ran out of luck.

It began to look like Horowitz’s luck was running out, too.

CAUGHT RED- HANDED

No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you: it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.

The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the White man whether the Indian did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force.

– Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

Someone thought — wrongly — that the ploy to waive an Environmental Impact Report for the Horowitz warehouse distribution center would slip right under the radar. Reports from inside Jan Perry’s staff indicate that Perry and Horowitz had assumed the South Central Farmers had evaporated as a political force to be reckoned with in L.A., and that they were shocked and angered on the 2nd of July to discover the Farmers and area residents in the streets — and once again in their faces — demanding justice. But the vitality, cohesion and determination of the Farmers and their support network wasn’t the only thing Perry missed; she also missed the last meeting of board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD – the air pollution agency mainly responsible for regulating and licensing stationary sources of air pollution for most of L.A., San Bernadino, Orange and Riverside Counties.) And, it seems, she never saw a devastating new critique of the Horowitz project coming from within her own domain as a SCAQMD board member. While she wasn’t looking, it seems someone made a move to cut Jan Perry’s political throat — at least as far as her infamous alliance with Ralph Horowitz goes.

On the same day the Farmers filled the chambers of the advisory board of the Department of City Planning to overflowing, the staff of the SCAQMD filed a report that not only served as a brutal calling to accounts on the waiver of an Environmental Impact Report for Horowitz, but that recommended in the strongest possible terms that any project that produces the kind of harms that the warehouse distribution center portends for the area be expressly “prohibited” by the City Planning Department.

The report faults the Planning Dept. on numerous counts, from elements as simple as using a skewed map of the area, to its failure to adequately assess the environmental impacts of the construction process and its failure to accurately assess the actual diesel emissions the warehouse will concentrate in the area (especially of cancer-causing diesel particulate matter) or to make meaningful recommendations for mitigating these dangers. Even beneath the bureaucratic language of the report, it is hard to miss the almost palpable sense of disgust, even outrage, that underlies the message.

The report insists that the Planning Dept. re-examine its recommendations on a number of fronts, and strongly suggests stringent guidelines for mitigating potential environmental and health impacts of the project while noting for example that certain mitigations the Department takes almost for granted could result only from the use of equipment that, in one case, does not even yet exist. The SCAQMD insists that if City Planning is going to claim such mitigations as a given, that it also show how it is going to access such non-existent equipment to ensure them.

And, while City Planning has suggested that any environmental or health impacts would be so minimal as to not even require an Environmental Impact Report, the SCAQMD insists that, were the Department to approve such a project over the SCAQMD’s objections, that necessary mitigations might include, for example, the construction of new freeway off-ramps that lead directly to or near the Horowitz facility (at the cost, no doubt, of millions of taxpayer’s dollars, millions beyond the millions Horowitz has already pocketed.)

Dust in the Wind

Ralph Horowitz has tried to destroy every root of every plant that was the South Central Farm. Like a killer driving a knife into his target over and over, he’s plowed the land over and over in an attempt to dismember the last remnants of an identity he seems to want to erase from the face of the Earth. He’s planned to erase what was, and replace it with his giant warehouse — which is to be designed in the shape of a giant “h”. The soil remains rich with the organic remains that have been plowed under time and again, although, with the destruction of the many of the root networks that permeated it, much the soil has become silty, loose and windblown, shifting to fill and slightly flatten the crevices between the mounds of the plowed furrows, and lifting with the winds to leave fine layers of dust on the windows of houses and of cars parked nearby. The planned construction would kick up immense amounts of dust into the air, as 57,00 cubic yards of soil are excavated and exported by truck from the 14 acre site.

Air Quality regulators call such airborne particulate matter “fugitive dust,” and they’re calling out City planners for calculating the amount of such dust based on an assessment that only five of the site’s 14 acres will be involved in the excavation. Beyond that, they note, planners focused only on the excavation of the soil itself, and failed to make clear whether their calculations included the impacts of trucks hauling out the tons of soil. They insist that the “fugitive dust analysis” be revised, that the City guarantee that the excavation will be limited to five acres, and that construction emissions do not exceed the phony claims made by City planners.

Further, the City planners claimed that all of the equipment used during construction will be fitted with a special diesel oxidation catalyst to lower the impacts of diesel emissions by 40% in the area during construction. The SCAQMD, however, notes that such specialized equipment is only available for a total of 3 engine types, and that it is all-but unavailable for off-road construction equipment.

In effect the SCAQMD challenges the City planners to prove that such equipment will be available and used on the Horowitz construction, or to demonstrate exactly by what method the City plans to ensure the 40% reductions they are claiming will be achieved. They are flatly calling the City planner’s bluff.

Alongside seven other recommendations on the construction phase of the warehouse complex alone, the Air Quality people also insist that watering or other non-toxic means be used to reduce the “fugitive dust” — a method proven to reduce airborne particulate matter by some 60%. According to sources with industry experience, however, watering 3 times per day, as recommended by the Air Quality staff, would likely turn the slowly expanding mini-dust bowl that was the South Central Farm into a bowl of heavy mud and water, greatly increasing the difficulty of excavating the underground parking facility Horowitz wants to serve the giant “h” shaped warehouse. Ralph Horowitz has a new problem he can’t just plow under, this time.

The Free Ride is Over

City planners can’t dart under the radar on this one, either. The SCAQMD is demanding written responses on all of the issues it raises, as per the law (public resources code, section21092.5), and they want these responses in writing before a final Environmental Impact Report is issued. The problem for City planners is obvious. They hadn’t planned to require an environmental report from Horowitz at all. That’s what the so-called “neg dec” they issued was all about in the first place — another free ride for Jan Perry’s favorite developer. Like children darting under turnstiles, they somehow weren’t counting on conductors checking for tickets.

But as the report progresses, it looks even worse for Horowitz and the giant “h”. It seems they not only lack tickets, but they may not be able to cover the fare, even if they were to admit that the free ride is over.

To excuse (or cover-up) their complicity in the harms of the Horowitz plan, City planners apparently tried other slight of hand maneuvers to evade detection of the reality behind the waiver they offered the developer. The Air Quality District called them out for one scam, in particular. The City planners estimated diesel emissions for the Horowitz project using a supposedly “similar” facility and its emissions as a measure for the probable impacts on South Central residents in this case.

But the warehouse used in the comparison served “substantially fewer” trucks than the 2, 581 trips a day reported for the Horowitz facility, thus, the District notes that diesel emissions (and, consequently, cancer risks) were “substantially underestimated” by City planners. The District calls on the City to “correct or explain this apparent discrepancy.” The report also accuses City planners of underestimating the amount of time trucks will stand, engines idling at the facility, by as much as one third. Air quality regulators insist on a mitigation plan that prohibits trucks from idling for more than the ten minutes City planners claim is realistic, and they demand the City show an enforcement mechanism that will make such a prohibition credible.

But it doesn’t stop there. The SCAQMD lists an additional 16 measures that would be warranted to mitigate the impact of diesel exhaust and particulate matter — including the multi-million dollar construction of one or more additional freeway exits that would bypass the community or limit the amount of time any given truck is on the surface roads in the immediate area.

The bottom line, however, is this. The SCAQMD recommends that the City “specifically prohibit” land uses at the site that would, in an area already full of warehouses, “further expose” nearby schools, health facilities, the aged and the ill to “additional cancer risks from diesel particulate matter.”

In other words, the SCAQMD is telling the City “Shut this project down.” “Prohibit its construction and operation.” The struggle for environmental justice is full of situations like this one, and lawsuits are a constant and predictable part of the terrain. The air quality regulators cannot be unaware that any effort on the part of the City to ignore or bypass these recommendations opens the door to a strongly based lawsuit to force the City to comply.

Force the City to comply… With the law… No more free rides… Conductors… Sometimes your luck just runs out. Sometimes you stand too long, too strong, against the wrong tide, and do so with the wrong ethics. Sometimes, one might notice, for things to go right in the end, you have to be right: for things to be sustained, one might notice, they have to be sustainable, they have to be grounded in the real. Sometimes, as Leslie Marmon Silko notes, history catches up with you. It’s inevitable. Relentless, she says. Every house of cards, like every empire, falls when the wrong wind blows. Sometimes, all it takes is a quick puff of air from the lips; or a zucchini dropped just so in the exhaust pipe of a bulldozer clanking over the land the way that tanks clank over people’s lives. The way a sophisticated developer in the second largest city in the Empire falls before the onslaught of a few Indian campesinos from Mexico and their backers with a few cell phones, a copier, and almost no money at all. Like magic. Like karma, Like luck. Like someone, somewhere, “located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill” is listening.

The way we’ve been listening to the land…

Like that.

And it’s a good thing. With all the changes coming, we’re gonna need that land. We’re gonna need that food, those skills, these Farmers. All of us. Together.

If you’re paying attention, it’s obvious.

Someone’s listening.

Right now.

We’re certain of it.