Advertising Age is reporting that, due to its fear of a backlash arising from “parental concerns that [its] advertising and packaging was preying on fears of the H1N1 virus,” Kellogg Company, the billion-dollar-a-year profit engine that peddles Cocoa Krispies and other junk food, is removing preposterous “anti-oxidant” claims from Cocoa Krispies boxes.

Here is Kellogg’s official announcement:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal.

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers.

We will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition, and we are committed to communicating the importance of nutrition to our consumers.

Let’s run that through our handy-dandy, unpatented Consumer Trap Marketing-to-English Translator, shall we?

The results:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals. Meanwhile, we won’t tell you here that by “Rice Krispies,” we also mean “Cocoa Krispies.” Including that fact would disclose that we are basically selling candy here.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents‘ indicating their desire for vulnerability to deceptive claims about more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal lives.

While science* shows suggests that these antioxidants may help support the immune system, given the public attention on that we know our vitamin-sprayed sugar crunch doesn’t have a prayer of preventing H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. After all, it would cost us money to remove them now. We will, however, continue to provide spray on the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers continues to provide us with an excuse for passing our product off as [wink, wink, make air quotes] “part of a nutritious breakfast.”

We will continue to respond to ignore both the desire for improved nutrition and the nutritional and economic inferiority of our mega-processed and packaged product to plain old whole-grain bread, and we are committed to communicating the importance suppressing knowledge of nutrition and home economics to among our consumers targets.

Fuck you, and goodnight.

* When science is even conceivably on our side, it is absolute truth. Climate change? Dangers of excessive sugar intake? Needs more research.

Command economy is basically a slave enterprise where supply and price are regulated by the government rather than market forces.

The only thing I will agree with about the “law of supply and demand” is that supply at a downward-manipulated price, can create demand.

Downward manipulation is an uneconomic aberration first discovered in the precious metals market by the noted silver analyst, Ted Butler.

We are conditioned to believe free enterprise supply and demand would lead to inflated prices so the greedy corporations can make more money, but Ted Butler’s research in the silver market concludes the opposite.

The beneficiaries of this type of manipulation are the consumers because corporations can sell their products affordably and still make a profit.

Butler’s investigation has identified JP Morgan Chase, one of the founding members of the Federal Reserve, as the prime suspect, in the “ongoing intentional, not accidental” great crime of keeping the price of commodities low so the middle class can afford the American dream, a nightmare for the planet.¹

I’ll get right to the point: McDonalds in the 1950s made a profit by selling a product for less than the competition, but a not-so-invisible hand produced cheap calories in great abundance so Ray “Crock” could sell a cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — and still make a profit.²

You don’t eat the hamburger at McDonalds because it’s a dollar: It’s a dollar to get you to eat it.

How did we get a food system that produced what should be a $35 hamburger downwardly manipulated to $1?³

“Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist in the Food & Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).⁴

In other words, the Scoundrels behind the Federal Reserve, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kuhn, Loeb and JP Morgan Chase, underwrite cheap grain and the factory-farming system for meat, so you can get a hamburger for a dollar.

Our current food system—characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table—is not the product of any free market but rather the result of a specific set of governmental and monetary policies (from those Scoundrels at the Fed) and the free gift of fossil fuels from the world’s richest man in history and another founding member of the Federal Reserve, John D. Rockefeller.

He didn’t just give dimes away, he gave away his oil so you could get inexpensive fuel and food.

If you fly over Iowa from October to April you will notice the land is completely bare— black—because you are seeing an agricultural landscape created by cheap oil from John D.

Cheap energy enabled the creation of monocultures and vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer but at the same time, subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals.

Since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could.

So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating a hamburger or chicken McNuggets for a dollar.

Taking the animals off farms made no economic, environmental or ecological sense: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant—factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution.

As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution—animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete—and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

After World War II, the US government pursued a monetary policy, at the direction of the Fed, subsidizing commodity crops by paying farmers (money created out of thin air) by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government (Scoundrel) check helped make up the difference.

As this artificially manipulated cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in that burger until the price reached a dollar.⁵

ADM Gets Caught Putting Money In The Cookie Jar

The Informant! is a movie about the lysine price-fixing scandals that Archer Daniels Midland found themselves in the center of back in the 90s.

ADM was caught fixing the price lysine, an amino acid and very attractive animal feed additive used to make chickens fat, dumb, and happy, back up, after it was manipulated too far down for anyone to make a profit.

Price-fixing is a crime no matter how many people ADM feeds.⁶

From cradle to grave we are brainwashed to believe everything is about profit.

So, in the film, when Mark Whitacre tells the FBI that ADM cheated millions from the consumer by colluding to fix prices, we forget that Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food (down from 18% in 1966). When we eat inexpensive burgers and fries, it’s thanks to ADM downward-manipulating the price of lysine.⁷

Our not-so-free market economy based on consumer products, that is, products we are downward manipulated to want, not need, was never FREE or sustainable. Consumers consume…the resources of the planet.

The huddled masses should be thanking those scoundrels at the Federal Reserve for 60 years of downward manipulating the price of commodities: It resulted in unprecedented prosperity, but don’t forget to blame them because the American dream was an environmental nightmare for the planet.⁸

1. ”The Real Story,” Theodore Butler; “Silver But No Silver Lining,” Atlantic Free Press, Robert Singer.
2. ”Farmer in Chief, Michael Pollan,” October 9, 2008, Erwan Frotin, The New York Times
3. Economist Douglas McDonald estimates that if water subsidies were withdrawn from California livestock producers, the income of the state’s other businesses and workers would rise over $10 billion annually (1987 figures).

   Other economists have exposed the cost of water subsidies to the meat industry that are hidden in the state’s rising prices for water rights, and thus, housing. Fields and Hur calculate the overall price of subsidizing the California meat industry’s water to be $24 billion (1987 figures). The Food Revolution by John Robbins, President of the EarthSave Foundation.

4. Time Magazine, “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food,” Bryan Walsh Aug. 21, 2009.
5. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. “Farmer in Chief, Michael Pollan,” October 9, 2008, Erwan Frotin, The New York Times.
   Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors.
6. Each day, the 28,000 people of Archer Daniels Midland Company transform crops such as corn, oilseeds, wheat and cocoa into food ingredients, animal feeds, and agriculturally derived fuels and chemicals.
   The editors of World Watch state that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future—deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.”
   Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.”
7. Archer Daniels Midland has been sued for colluding to fix prices in the citric acid and high fructose corn syrup markets among others, but their most noteworthy violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the part ADM played in fixing the price of lysine, an amino acid used in animal feed. Lysine is especially good at making chickens fat, dumb, and happy, which makes it a very attractive feed additive. Unlike any other price-fixing conspiracy before or since, ADM’s involvement in forming and participating in a cartel was meticulously recorded by a mole inside the organization while the crime was being committed, offering an incredible insight into the nuts and bolts of an international corporate conspiracy.
8. ”A Sure Thing?,” Ted Butler Commentary; “Silver But No Silver Lining,” Atlantic Free Press, Robert Singer.

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.

Almost 70 years later, with the advent and adoption of GM crops succeeding the mislabelled ‘Green Revolution’, these words have returned to haunt us. “Today, as a consequence of technologies introduced by the green revolution, India loses six billion tons of topsoil every year. Ten million hectares of India’s irrigated land is now waterlogged and saline. Pesticide poisoning has caused epidemics of cancers. Water tables are falling by twenty feet every year. The soil fertility and water resources that had been carefully managed for generations in the Punjab were wasted in a few short years of industrial abuses. If India’s masses have avoided starvation, they have endured chronic and debilitating hunger and poverty”.¹ India exports food, but 200 million of mainly rural, women and children go to bed hungry (Global Hunger Index). The ongoing commercialisation of agriculture in India continues, with the US extracting many pounds of flesh through trade agreements like the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture and US AID and USDA investments in agricultural universities to bring Indian agriculture under the full sway of genetically modified crops controlled by Monsanto the 90% market leader. Monsanto is also on the Board of this ‘Initiative’ representing US interests, along with other agri giants.

Global hunger already at an unprecedented level is growing. Those who are the most hungry are the farmers who produce our food. The causes are mainly man-made attributable squarely to the free trade policies championed by the WTO, and manoeuvred through the chicanery of these processes to the detriment of the developing nations and backed by the IMF and the World Bank. The FAO contributes to this through its ambivalent stance, refusing to provide the kind of clarity that would encourage real solutions to the crises. Developing Countries have been forced to open up their markets to western agri-business giants and face a price war on cotton for example in India, because of huge US subsidies provided to American farmers exporting mainly GM cotton to India. We have the astonishing spectacle of poor Indian farmers not being able to compete with US farmers and they are committing suicide. It is called ‘competitive advantage’, which essentially means the Indian government is not able to protect our markets under the WTO policies, doesn’t feel obliged to provide the right level of support prices and/or just can’t compete with the magnitude of US government handouts to their farmers. Indian farmers are also GM cotton farmers facing higher input costs and of course, without the competitive advantage of their American counterparts. They also seem to have lost or have been deprived of the “more sophisticated agricultural wisdom that has served Indian farmers for centuries.”¹ (emphasis mine)

Corporations now own 98 per cent of patents in agriculture, own seed monopolies, and are extending their control of genetic stock (plant and livestock).² Unless this trend is reversed, whole communities and countries will lose control over the production of their food and national food security. Fortunately, strongly echoing Sir Albert Howard, we have a new ‘avatar’ of him in the collective effort of 400 scientists, to champion our cause of how to produce enough to food to feed the world over the next 50 years.

The IAASTD

The UN International Assessment of Agricultural Science & Technology for Development sees no role for GM crops or Modern Biotechnology, in a road map for agriculture for the next 50 years. Authored by 400 and scientists and signed by 60 countries, including India, it took four years to complete. In its published conclusions in 2008, it states that there is no evidence that GM crops increase yield. Some biotech companies were so disgruntled by the report’s lack of support that they pulled out of the entire process. The IAASTD makes it clear that the road map for agriculture for the next 50 years must be through localised solutions, combining scientific research with traditional knowledge in partnership with farmers and consumers. The report calls for a systematic redirection of investment, funding, research and policy focus toward these alternative technologies and the needs of small-farmers. Therefore, the IAASTD has clearly shown the international response to the WAY FORWARD which is sustainable agriculture that is biodiversity-based.

In his widely referenced report, ‘Organic Agriculture is the Future’, Doug Gurian Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists shows that organic farming systems round the world are often as productive as current industrial agriculture not only in developed countries, but more so in the developing world; that green and animal manures employed in organic agriculture can produce “enough fixed nitrogen to support high crop yields.”

These highly productive methods are needed to produce enough food without converting uncultivated land—such as forests that are important for biodiversity and slowing climate change—into crop fields. They build deep, rich soils that hold water, sequester carbon, and resist erosion. And they don’t poison the air, drinking water, and fisheries with excess fertilizers and toxic pesticides. Some have dismissed the promise of these methods. Among these are State Department Science Advisor Nina Federoff, who in recent interviews characterized organic agriculture as some kind of retreat to a quaint past. She and others characterize organic farming and similar systems as inherently unproductive, sometimes suggesting that such methods are capable of supporting only about half the current world’s population.

Federoff’s view is at odds with the latest science, and represents a status quo kind of thinking. Today’s dominant industrial U.S. agriculture relies on huge monocultures of a few major crops like corn and soybeans, and requires large inputs of fossil-fuel based synthetic chemicals to control pests and fertilize the crops. Such an agriculture churns out a lot of commodity crops (most of which are turned into meat and processed foods) while also contributing greatly to air and water pollution. Industrial agriculture is a major contributor of heat-trapping emissions and a major cause of so-called dead zones such as that in the Gulf of Mexico. And industrial agriculture is ultimately its own worst enemy, as it causes massive degradation of the very soil that is vital to farming itself. This kind of agriculture is unsustainable.

The MYTH of High Yields

GM Crops will neither feed India nor the world. After 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialisation, genetic engineering has not demonstrated sustainable benefits to farmers. 99% of GM crops, which have been commercialised, are either engineered (a) to contain the Bt gene, or (b) are herbicide tolerant (HT) GM crops as in Roundup Ready soybean. Neither of these is engineered for intrinsic yield gain. This is the plain science. The US Department’s Agriculture’s Review of 10 years of GM crop cultivation in the States, which has the longest history of GM crops, has concluded:

Currently available GM crops do not increase the yield potential… In fact, yield may even decrease if the varieties used to carry the herbicide tolerant or insect-resistant genes are not the highest yielding cultivars… Perhaps the biggest issue raised by these results is how to explain the rapid adoption of GE crops when farm financial impacts appear to be mixed or even negative.

‘Failure to Yield’ released by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) considers the technology’s potential to increase food production over the next few decades.

The intrinsic yields of corn and soybeans did rise during the twentieth century, but not as a result of GE traits. Rather, they were due to successes in traditional breeding… Cutting through the rhetoric, overall pesticide use (herbicides, insecticides and fungicides) has not been reduced through GE… recent U.S. data suggest that herbicide use in GE crops is now significantly higher than it was prior to their introduction. Weeds that have developed resistance to the herbicide used with GE crops now infest several million acres, forcing greater herbicide use. Insect-resistant GE crops have reduced overall insecticide use somewhat, but on balance GE crops have not reduced our dependence on pesticides… It makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in developing countries… these include modern, conventional plant breeding methods, sustainable and organic farming and other sophisticated farming practices that do not require farmers to pay significant upfront costs… (emphasis mine)

Agriculture that is Biodiversity-based: The Irrelevance of GE Crops

These reports bring us full circle to the evidence provided by Howard 70 years ago, as well as to the agricultural science and wisdom of Indian farming practices, which find their counterpoint in the wisdom of farmers in all traditional cultures and which scientists like Gurian-Sherman and of the IAASTD describe as “sophisticated.”

Our health and nutrition are tied in with seed quality, variety and abundance. In over 10,000 years of agriculture, farmers have selected seed, exchanged seed, preserved biodiversity and delivered safe crops. It is noteworthy and a tribute to their acumen that over the past many centuries, not a single plant has been added to the list of major domesticated crops. On the other hand, with GM crops we cannot make an “outcome prediction of the type that can be made when crossing two strains such as wheat that have been safely eaten for two thousand years.”³ In the span of 12 short years of GM crops, we are faced with major problems of safety and testing and billions of dollars are being spent in damage control and clean-up operations. GM is also drawing a disproportionate quantum of investment in research despite its weak performance to date. Instead, these billions of dollars of public money should be invested in now proven, modern alternative agricultural technologies.

* The urgent question that must be asked is how much more of our scarce research dollars will be diverted to this controversial and unproven technology?

The health and ecological risks of GM crops are well documented in the scientific literature. Now, the research on their contribution to CC (Climate Change) is gathering momentum. The new report published by GRAIN⁴ on the 7th Oct ’09, shows that agriculture has a pivotal role in sequestering carbon, and that it is small farmers that hold the key to ‘cooling the world’. The evidence highlights the fact that the global industrial food system is the most important “single factor behind global warming, responsible for almost half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions” and that its role in the climate crisis has been seriously underestimated. Soils contain enormous amounts of organic matter and therefore, carbon. Calculations in the report show that the organic matter that has been lost over the past decades can be gradually rebuilt, if policy is oriented to agriculture in the hands of small farmers and their ability through alternative farming practices to restoring soil fertility. “In 50 years the soils could capture about 450 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is more than two thirds of the current excess in the atmosphere”, a huge contribution to resolving CC. “The evidence is irrefutable. If we can change the way we farm and the way we produce and distribute food, then we have a powerful solution for combating the climate crisis. There are no technical hurdles to achieving these results, it is only a matter of political will.”⁵

On the other hand, with GM crops we face a dangerous pincer attack that we must demolish if we are to survive and thrive: (a) on the one hand, the massive disinformation that GM crops will feed the world including India through mythical high yields and without harm, is reminiscent of the 30 years of disinformation that surrounded Climate Change. The IPCC Report (with Pachauri as Chairman) though almost too late, was nevertheless required to change those perceptions and get consensus across borders on urgent climate mitigation solutions. Fortunately for the world, the International solutions for agriculture proposed by the IAASTD Report and the evidence for the potential contribution of agriculture in the carbon sequestering solutions of organic farming and the role of small farmers, are TIMELY. We must heed these; and (b) on the other hand, a comprehensive deregulation of the kind that led to the melt down of global financial markets. The clear evidence is that the US has similarly shown the way to a dangerous and unscientific deregulation of GM crops first in the US and that role-model is being pushed in India and other developing countries.

The FAO must take note of the sanity of these road maps for urgent change, and the great irrelevance of GM crops, which are seriously and it must be said, dangerously hindering that vital focus and redirection of resources that are required in agriculture. If the FAO will lead this process for change, then it must encourage and broker that change without ambivalence, and support national and sovereign governments in India and the developing world in these solutions, no matter what pressures a ‘misguided’ US policy may impose on all parties.

On the ‘hope’ that the IAASTD generates:

   While here I stand, not only with the sense
   Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
   That in this moment there is life and food
   For future years.

– William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

1. Alexis Lathem Community College of Vermont, “Assessing the Legacy of Barlaug…”
2. Jesse Lerner-Kinglake of War on Want: Global Food Fight.
3. David Schubert (Salk Institute) and William Freese, “Safety Testing and Regulation of Genetically Engineered Foods,” Biotechnol Genet Eng Rev, 2004, 21:299-324.
4. GRAIN: “Small Farmers Can Cool the World“
5. Henk Hobbelink: coordinator of GRAIN

Last week, the Times blasted California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for downgrading a scheduled Pollan lecture because it received pressure from David E. Wood, a university donor who happens to be chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co.

“Agribusiness gets plenty of opportunities to preach its point of view at agriculture schools such as Cal Poly, where the likes of Monsanto and Cargill fund research,” the Times wrote, calling the 800-acre Harris Ranch, near Coalinga, whose “smell assaults passersby long before the panorama of thousands of cattle packed atop layers of their own manure,”–”Cowschwitz.” Ouch.

And agribusiness has the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal with.

The land grant, ag-based university, in the middle of dairyland, clearly doesn’t remember its roots. It gave Pollan’s In Defense of Food, another anti-agbiz screed according to industry, free to all incoming freshmen as part of its common book read program where everyone reads the same book, Go Big Read, in August.

“I have not seen the students this excited about something in years,” Irwin Goodman, horticulture professor and vice dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences told the Associated Press as the James Beard Award-winning book was discussed in French and political science classes and included in an exhibit on the history of food.

Protesting farmers who came to hear Pollan speak at the university’s 17,000-seat Kohl Center in September wearing matching green T-shirts which said “In Defense of Farming: Eat Food. Be Healthy. Thank Farmers.” were clearly outnumbered. So were bumper stickers reading No Food; No Farms and Don’t Criticize Farmers With Your Mouth Full in the parking lot.

Students get all their facts from writers like Pollan, the farmers, who were bussed in by Madison-based feed company Vita Plus, told the Capital Times. They have never visited a farm for first-hand knowledge of food production and don’t know what they’re talking about.

But efforts to open farms to the public are not always successful.

This month United Egg Producers’ “Opening the Barn Doors” media tour at Morning Fresh Farms in northern Colorado, for example, only confirmed the size of today’s egg farm that make humane conditions impossible (36 barns; 23,000 birds each, 23 million dozen eggs a year) and raised further questions about environmental blight by showing the press wearing white HazMat suits to enter the barns. (See: You want us to eat WHAT?)

Last month the American Egg Board rolled out a kid-focused “The Good Egg” campaign which includes sponsorship of Sesame Street, a Cookie Monster product placement and a feel good virtual tour to soften public opinion about egg farms. But nowhere does the campaign address the daily grinding up of newborn males even as they hatch at the hatcheries which supply egg farms to provide the industry with only females–a practice that United Egg Producers confirms is routine. Does the Cookie Monster know about that?

Nor can all that crowding and all those chemicals be good for you, Pollan has written and many studies suggest.

But agribusiness is also combating last year’s American Institute for Cancer Research and World Cancer Research Fund study that found the link between processed meats and colon cancer so strong, the organizations advised consumers to change their eating habits.

Trent Loos, an outspoken columnist with the agbiz weekly, Feedstuffs, says nitrosamines, found in processed or cured meat and widely believed carcinogenic, may actually be good for you, preventing and treating “cardiovascular and other diseases associated with nitric oxide insufficiency in the diet.”

“Nitric oxide is an important signaling molecule in the human body to regulate numerous physiological functions including blood flow to tissues and organs,” write Loos of research conducted by Dr. Nathan Bryan at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Texas, Houston. “The regular intake of nitrite-containing food appears to ensure that blood and tissue levels of nitrite and nitric oxide pools in the body are maintained at adequate levels.”

Some of the ag press has even picked up the theory–but don’t expect a Pollan book called In Defense of Nitrites anytime soon.

My spouse grew up dirt poor on the East coast of Canada. With ten mouths to feed, household economics meant both tuna and lobster in everything. Both were cheap and plentiful, with easy access to communities that had lived off the sea for centuries. Each year the family would load into small, aluminum boats laden to the gunnels, and cruise the rivers for fiddleheads; tightly wound new shoots of the fern plant, and a local delicacy served fried with butter and garlic. These they would sell and barter for the tuna and lobster (amongst other things) that fed the family. Families of similar station owned the tuna boats and lobster trap-lines, and there was a primitive harmony to the economics, one that had sustained their ancestors for generations. That’s the way it was in 1974.

I grew up in the industrial heartland of Canada, with steel mills and toxic waste pouring into the lake, pleasantly hidden beyond “hissing summer lawns” and well cared for hedges. My memories of tuna are quite different. Ours came from a tin can, casually tossed into my mother’s overflowing shopping carts as a lunch supplement or terrifying tuna casserole (bless her heart, my mother couldn’t cook). Two cans maybe, four if it was on sale. My sister and I demanded tuna — Star-Kist tuna, “the chicken of the sea”, made palatable no doubt by that irascible cartoon mascot, Charlie. We knew Charlie from TV of course. My spouse on the other hand missed it not having a TV, and so our motivations for tuna were civilizations apart. They got to eat, and we got to participate in the emerging industrial corporatism that had swallowed up tuna — and everything else on the earth.

Know your tuna. There are several species of tuna, all in various states of depletion. The “Bluefin Tuna” is, by some estimates, a scant two years from complete extinction. Not surprisingly, it is the most popular tuna species amongst its only real predator, humans. The Giant Blue Fin can exceed ten feet in length, and weigh in excess of 310 pounds. Some live to 30 years or more. Or used to at least. They can cruise at depths of up to 1500 feet and cover 4,800 miles in under 4 months. They can reach 40mph. Yet, the Bluefin Tuna has still melted like snow on hot summer asphalt before the wholesale corporate industrialization of tuna fishing.

There are three main ways to kill a tuna. One is the small scale, ancient method of harpooning the things one at a time from an open boat, still used today wherever tuna and fishing are found. Industrialization solved this sustainable quaintness of steady speed and simple efficiency however, by employing boats that move across the ocean with the horsepower to pull drag lines up to 80 miles long behind them, each line dangling baited hooks by the hundreds up to depths of 500 feet or more. Purse Seine fishing is all that and more. Giant nets a mile in circumference and 600 feet deep are deployed around great schools of fish, and drawn up from the bottom, trapping hundreds of flailing dolphins, sharks, turtles — and of course tuna — at the surface. There the tuna are slaughtered on a true, industrial scale, and hauled aboard company boats by hook and gaffe. The unfortunate sea borne collateral damage sinks to the bottom as so much surplus chum.

Horrible. But hey, ya gotta kill ‘em if ya want to eat ‘em, right?

The shoreline communities who could catch their meals on a daily basis, and eat them fresh before they spoiled consumed tuna — as well as other water borne foods — at sustainable levels for centuries. This was in the era before the refrigerated container or beverage-dispensing refrigerator, as it remains in many places today. However, amongst the many benefits of industrial technology, there lay the Trojan horse that opened up the earth’s oceans to every man, woman, child, and household pet on the planet. Mechanized fishing fleets and robotic assembly line production, distribution, and retail of the humble tuna had brought great, fresh chunks or tin cans of the stuff to every remote station of the earth. At that point, it was just simple math as a billion or more munching cats and humans a day relentlessly gnawed away at the ever-dwindling fish stock.

For the Bluefin Tuna, the math has run down to single digits.

Scientific and regulatory bodies all agree that the Bluefin Tuna stock cannot sustain a catch greater than 15,000 tonnes (think 15,000 compact cars) in the Mediterranean, home of the greatest tuna runs on the planet. Last year the quota was set at 29,000 tonnes. European member nations, some of them a day’s long drive from any water at all, overfished the limit by 25,000 tonnes. This year, Turkey alone will fish 25,000 tonnes, thumbing its nose at both regulatory agencies and the future. These Nations will also fish during spawning season in June, out of both capitalist ignorance and the fact that large fish are simply impossible to find, the younger, smaller ones now the most plentiful Tuna demographic in the sea. Estimates are that even the breeding stock will be gone by 2012, which means gone forever. There are now only three years to forever.

While over 70 countries fish tuna, Japan and the United States account for two thirds of the consumption. The largest fleet is Japanese, and the largest company in that fleet is Mitsubishi – think compact cars, coincidentally. Last year Mitsubishi alone fished 60,000 tonnes of tuna. 20,000 of those tonnes were not immediately taken to market, but frozen and warehoused against the day that tuna disappears, which should be sometime in the third or fourth quarter of fiscal 2012. Did I mention a single large tuna will fetch $100,000 at market? Mitsubishi, the giant Japanese mega corporation, is deliberately fishing the species to death in an attempt to drive up prices and unload its investment.

The story of the Bluefin Tuna is the story of everything. It is a unified theory of the human universe. Its laser straight tale contains within it an entire understanding of the state of civilization, all the pillars that hold up the shiny, creaky edifice that is us.

In the beginning, there was capital. Excess stuff. Things you didn’t need as much as things other folks had. A bag of grain for a jar of salt. A bale of fiddleheads for a few pounds of tuna. A professional class developed (as they always do), and traders became intermediaries bartering goods and services for others, earning a primitive existence from the economies of scale that yielded even more stuff left over, which in turn was “invested’ in even more stuff, earning a “return” to the trader of even more stuff again. And in this way was born an insidious virus with an insidious name, hidden for eons in the thick dull pages of Lipsey and Stiener, the holy grail, the secret code to the universe… Return on Investment. Alternatively, as it is colloquially known, ROI.

Beg, borrow or steal excess stuff (literally, that’s what the term was coined for), and invest it for return or profit. It’s a hell of a gig. You consume nothing but your own, otherwise useless time, and get stuff out of thin air, like magic. We call that stuff wealth now. Too many problems hauling salt up and down hill and dale caused the creation of promises to pay; to many problems collecting on promises to pay caused the creation of script. We call script money now. Further problems collecting script caused the creation of governments, laws, and communities.

Of course, the power of ROI became irresistible, and the sight of well-dressed folks apparently doing nothing for their salt, while you busted your hump in the salt mines didn’t help matters much either. Class structures developed, all variations on the theme of have excess stuff, and have not excess stuff. The haves needed protection from the have not’s — and each other — the government needed the wealth these wizards were creating to pay armies to protect themselves in turn. A lasting marriage of convenience was formed welding the ruling class to the wealthy class, and with it a consolidating of laws and rights progressively honouring the achievement of Return on Investment.

The next step was the sudden realization that several wealthy traders, mine owners, and government types who pooled their capital would, through the magic of arithmetic, yield even greater amounts of wealth. The magic of human greed created fraud, theft, and lawyers. Here in the western world, it was that feisty group of capitalists, lawmakers, and lawyers who invented the corporation, a legal fortress created to pool great lumps of capital for the express purpose of maximizing its investors Return on Investment.

It is a simple alchemy. Find something somebody wants and make it worth their while for you to get it for them. Find a lot of stuff a lot of people want, and you are a capitalist member of the ruling class in any civilization. The people want salt to preserve their foods and add to tuna casseroles, but are to otherwise involved in scraping a mean harvest from the earth? Go and figure out a way to dig enough of the stuff out of the earth to sensibly trade for whatever the other guy produces. Risk death, starvation, or worse in exchange for opportunity to work the magic of ROI. Roll the dice and come up sevens enough times, you transit the barriers of class at the speed of compound interest. Crap out, and you vaporize into that invisible demographic, the statistically irrelevant cohort unknown as those that failed.

The winners write history, and law.

The ancient trade of Fish Monger is a simple case in point. Fish, and other bounty of the sea, lakes, and streams, is an essential foodstuff powerful with calories and proteins. Fish, along with loaves, were the classic staples of the burgeoning human food chain. An early problem was however, that fishing was capital intensive. You needed a boat, a net, and a sea stocked with fish. Trading these things with folks without them for the grains and meats your sea didn’t provide gave rise to the fish trader, who transferred the produce from one geography to the other. Better diets all around gave rise to larger populations, each one of whom represented additional demand for fish and loaves each way. Traders made out like bandits, as did all members of the process of producing and investing for return — including bandits.

In Japan, the large capital costs involved in feeding an Island nation naturally developed into conglomerated groups of fishermen to do the fishing, mongers to handle the transactions, bankers to raise the money, private “security” to protect the investment, and on top of it all, a CEO who became a de facto member of the national ruling class. These family owned businesses set the rules that allowed themselves to develop unfettered, becoming the fabric of culture and society itself by the time of the Meji Restoration of the 19th century, as “Zaibatsu”.

With the defeat of Japan at the end of the second world war, these Zaibatsu’s were easily transferred into law and put to work rebuilding Japan on the American model. Mitsubishi (remember them?) became stupid wealthy as one of the big four, ancient “Keiretsu” organizations controlling, among other things, the business of feeding the people fish. The Industrial Revolution visited Japan as it did Europe, and the Mitsubishi Keiretsu harnessed the emerging technology better than most, that technology aiding and abetting the chemistry of ROI just as it would everywhere else. More people, more demand, more supply. World markets were opened, and Japanese fish began to emerge in places a thousand miles from any ocean.

Where demand did not exist, the suckerfish of the great capitalist whale created some. We call that marketing now. Kids demanded “Chicken of the Sea”; thirty something’s in Peoria began to eat Sushi on Saturday nights. Pets consumed trailer loads of their less fortunate, wondrously free friends of the ocean — an incredible feat of return on investment.

Great scads of wealth were created, wealth that was reinvested in other, better, faster ways to maximize return on investment. The occasional gold bidet was purchased, as were billion-dollar fishing fleets; an investment specifically intended to return the maximum, its holy charter not just protected, but also limitless by law. Be it an American hedge fund churning out insane algorithms for digital cash, or Japanese Keiretsu machine harvesting the oceans, all are protected by law, and sanctioned by various forms of corporate charter to brook no opposition in the single-minded pursuit of return on investment.

A simple exchange of goods, the magic of grade school arithmetic, and the pure, innate curiosity and inventiveness of man (we call that greed today), all combined to bring us the funky western civilization we love and enjoy. The creation of wealth and capital so long ago has allowed a handful of powerful, professional “interests” to organically develop around the world. Protected by laws they themselves write, and the willing acquiescence of a population that depends on the efficient functioning of the system for its plasma TV’s, the modern free market capitalist enriches his nation as he enriches himself, spreading wealth by ever reinvesting, ever creating and filling demand. If he isn’t the de facto ruling class or government, he (there are the occasional “she’s”) is the power behind it. It is not economics as much as it is religion and as such, nobody but heretics is going to screw with that.

Extracting stuff from the earth, then creating a system that magically creates wealth by leveraging it a million times over, sanctioning the whole thing in law, and then demanding by natural right limitless return… does beg a series of humble questions. If the infinite and exponential creation of wealth depends entirely on the very limited resources of the earth, is there a point where the two lines on some graph may sometime cross? A point where unlimited demand meets exponentially diminishing supply? What happens then? What would it look like? How would we, simple earthlings, know when it was coming or if it had arrived?

Which brings us back to the Bluefin Tuna, completely fished out by 2012, and not a damn thing to be done about it. I thought about that recently when shopping at the local mega grocery outlet. Tuna was on sale, two cans for 99 cents. The daughter threw a few cans into the cart. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly “gotta have tuna”.

God had spoken for the Bluefin Tuna.

This essay could go from here in many directions; for example, to the chips and energy drinks that so many, especially the young, abuse themselves with or to the preparations that are used to create eating addictions, but this is about a personal concern suddenly turned timeless and potentially devastating.

Someone dear to me has had continuing depressive symptoms (and I have dabbled in the depression waters for my knowing life). He has tried diet related ameliorators: reducing pesticide in take; getting adequate and balanced amounts of essential amino acids, vitamins and micronutrients; generally recognizing the critical role of intake.

My discussions with him had begun to move more and more often in the pharmacological direction, a “solution” we agreed that was like using a mallet to repair a fine Swiss chronograph. But we had never seriously discussed gluten.

Of course, gluten and celiac disease had come up, but it somehow didn’t seem directly relevant to symptoms of neurotransmitters. However, as I bumped into more and more references to gluten digestion issues, I decided to just stop eating gluten as a self-test before I offered this as a serious option for my son.

I have for many years kept track of my calorie budget and general diet (see first sentence!). When I stopped eating foods containing gluten I replaced (or more than replaced) the calories with other foods (e.g., avocado for bread in some circumstances). And yet, in the first 10 days I lost 7 pounds. Now those who know basic metabolism realize that 7 pounds of fat represents over 25,000 calories and at 2000 calories a day, even if I ate nothing, I would only use up about 6 pounds of fat; ergo, the weight loss was from water, more precisely, edema; and even more precisely, the edema of an inflammatory response to gluten was the most likely reason.

I was amazed. As time passed my energy level increased. Walking up steep hills, especially carrying weight, had become more and more taxing for me over the years; I had given this to my age. But, even 3 weeks into the diet change I noticed a reliable difference. And then I began to notice a change in mood. I would call it an improvement certainly, though more correctly it was a smoothing out.

About a month into gluten-free my car decided to malfunction many miles away from what passes here for civilization; this after I had been walking for some time in the high desert hills. My only choices were to stay overnight or to walk out in the deep dusk and dark. I walked out carrying my camera gear – 2½ hours before a road and a car kindly saved me. But I was fine and fully prepared to walk the next 8 miles to home. This would not have been my condition the month before. My interest was fully piqued.

Gluten: “Wheat gluten was traditionally classified into gliadin and glutenin based upon solubility in aqueous alcohol. Gliadins were thought to be responsible for precipitating coeliac disease; glutenins were thought probably to be nontoxic. More recent classification, according to primary amino acid structure, reveals not only great heterogeneity but also similarities between different gliadin and glutenin proteins. Peptides derived from both groups are immunostimulatory in coeliac disease and it is highly probable that glutenin proteins are therefore toxic. Attempts to breed wheat with satisfactory baking properties tolerated by coeliac patients will be very difficult.” (P. D. Howdle, St James’s University Hospital, Leeds, UK.)

This is a stark statement.

Gluten is a water insoluble protein complex found in the family of the grasses; it seems that its properties are useful in protecting seeds in dry conditions. Thus, unlike many of the plant-made chemicals that are toxic in foods as a form of protection from predation, gluten’s consequences come from the unfamiliarity of the protein to the human digestive system, at least, the unfamiliarity of the Caucasian digestive system.¹ In the most extreme form, celiac disease (US spelling), symptoms are dramatic, though often misdiagnosed. But what interested me were the less intense consequences.

Humans have been eating grass-based foods as a major and continuous part of their diet for only about 8 to 10 thousand years. And even then it is only in very local regions that grains have been primary for that long. Most of the world has only been grain-fed for less than a third of that time. Our digestive system and the enzymes that are its tools have been evolving to a reasonably consistent diet for millions of years. Prior to grains, the great change for our Genus was the addition of meat and animal fat in increasing amounts over the last 2½ to 2 million years. The jump to grains has been dramatic and rapid – far too rapid to allow for digestive processes to adapt fully (or even at all) to new proteins.

The consequence is that gluten can only be partially digested. This is especially true for those with celiac disease. It is now understood that their bodies treat certain of the peptide pieces (break-down products of the partial digestion of a protein) as they would viruses and react by killing their own intestinal lining cells. Some of these peptides get into the blood stream and are attacked at other places in the body resulting in auto-immune disease symptoms.

But what if no one, no human digestive system, can fully cope with gluten? The numbers are interesting: about 1 in 200 Caucasians are said to have celiac symptoms. It has also been suggested that only about one in 50 cases are correctly diagnosed. As I think through the numbers that would mean that about 1 in 4 are actually having some symptoms of gluten digestion insufficiency. And then add in my experience. I have had, in any one moment, no set of symptoms that would point to a ‘condition’ worthy of attention, but looking over my years a number of accepted, and therefore, unexplained concerns fit neatly into a gluten response model. I have been vital all my life, mountain climbing, pulling 3 day study sessions in college, seeming strong and effective. Yet, as I aged into the accepted declines, I discover that most likely I have been running my whole life with a sea anchor deployed.

What would happen to the human condition if the world went off gluten? What if almost everyone is being diminished to some degree by an inflammatory response to a food that they cannot fully digest because the food is too new in our dietary repertoire?

My sons are taking this seriously with what seem, to this point, to be good results, but what about the others that we know about, the 50 undiagnosed (crazy word for being poisoned by your food) for every one who is? And if we find that the consequences are more wide reaching, can we eliminate gluten from our food supply (reducing is not an option, it is all or none in most cases)?

It is obvious that the “gluten interests” would fight this even being considered, would fight accurate information getting to the public. And since gluten carrying grains are now half or more of the world’s food supply and since world agriculture is devoted to these grains, it would also be effectively impossible, even if the world were to accept that gluten was a serious health issue. For the moment then, I will remain on a gluten free diet and suggest to others that they give it a try.

1. No blatant racism here: the research has been done on mostly those of European descent and such subtleties of physiology should not be thoughtlessly generalized. Similar frequencies are suspected in other populations.

The historical and political background of the right to food concerns the development of the notion of access to adequate food as a right. Lack of access to food can be due to two reasons: scarcity of food, or problem of access to available food. The issue of world hunger has been characterized as shortage of food. Guaranteeing the right to food has, therefore, been linked to food production to overcome shortage.

However, hunger and malnutrition persist even if food is abundant. For many years the website of the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. has described India’s agriculture and rural development as “a saga of success”. It boasts, “From a nation dependent on food imports to feed its population, India today is not only self-sufficient in grain production, but also has a substantial reserve.”¹ It is true that the country now produces enough food to feed its entire population. Despite agricultural successes, India still has a huge number of malnourished people, more than any other country.

The greater cause for hunger and malnutrition, therefore, is the problem of access to adequate food. Poor and marginalized segments of the population lack purchasing power to buy minimum amount of food they need to prevent hunger. Food insecurity exists even if there is food in abundance. Trading more food will not help the poor and the marginalized, if they are excluded from production and have no means to buy the food which arrives on the markets. Producing more food will not assist them in purchasing food, if their incomes remain too low. The problem is one of accessibility of food for the poor and the marginalized. So a focus solely on increasing the supply of food could lead to policy choices that make hunger worse.² Policy makers should address the problem of access to adequate food and make changes in income distribution and trade policies that are needed to ensure that the human right to adequate food is realized in practice.

Access to adequate food is fundamental for the right to adequate food. Accessed food must be adequate in terms of quality, quantity and cultural acceptability. Access to adequate food has been defined in terms of intake of nutrients, calories and proteins. Malnutrition need not be lack of quantity of food intake, but could also be due to lack of quality food. Both are often the results of poverty and discrimination.

Right to adequate food sets obligations on the state. It also helps empower those vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition to hold government accountable. Poor and marginalized are not mere passive beneficiaries of government programs or private charities, but participate in the democratic process of policy formation and implementation.

State Obligation to Right to Adequate Food

Given the crucial importance of access to adequate food in a world of plenty where massive hunger persists, it is not surprising that the right to adequate food has received attention in the community of states. More appropriately, it is a reminder to the states of their commitment to ensure that the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger and the right to adequate food is safeguarded.

For sixty years, the legal, political and cultural concept of the human right to food has been evolving as a set of universal norms for the United Nations community, its member states, and civil society. Paragraph 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) declares: “…everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of himself [sic] and his family, including food…” Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adds: “State parties to the present Covenant recognize the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger…” and agree “to take steps to the maximum of available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized, including “adequate food.” Some two hundred additional UN instruments and declarations address the right to adequate food and nutrition within civil-political, economic-social-cultural, development, indigenous, women’s, and children’s rights constructions.

Under Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “the right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.”³ The core content of the right to adequate food implies the availability of food in a quantity and quality sufficient to satisfy the dietary needs of individuals, free from adverse substances, and acceptable within a given culture. The right to adequate food is “indivisibly linked to the inherent dignity of the human person and is indispensable for the fulfillment of other human rights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights. It is also inseparable from social justice, requiring the adoption of appropriate economic, environmental and social policies, at both the national and international levels, oriented to the eradication of poverty and the fulfillment of all human rights for all.”³

The right to adequate food imposes threefold obligation on States: to respect, protect and fulfill the human right to adequate food. The State is obliged to refrain from taking any measures that result in preventing existing access to adequate food (respect); to ensure that private actors or individuals do not deprive individuals of their access to adequate food (protect); and pro-actively engage in activities intended to strengthen people’s access to and utilization of resources and means to ensure their livelihood, including food security (fulfill as facilitate). Finally, whenever an individual or group is unable, for reasons beyond their control, to enjoy the right to adequate food by the means at their disposal, States have the obligation to fulfill (as provide) that right directly. This obligation also applies for persons who are victims of natural or other disasters.³

States have committed themselves to implement policies aimed at eradicating poverty and hunger, and improving physical and economic access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate and safe food.⁴ In 1996 in their Rome Declaration on World Food Security, world leaders and their representatives stated: “We consider it intolerable that more than 800 million people throughout the world, and particularly in developing countries, do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. This situation is unacceptable.”⁴

Reality of Poverty and Malnutrition

In spite of growing recognition and solemn commitments made by world leaders, the stark reality is that there are more hungry people today. The number of hungry people has increased from approximately 840 million in 1996 to 967 million in 2008.⁴ More than 2 billion people worldwide suffer from “hidden hunger”, or micronutrient malnutrition. Majority of the hungry are in rural areas, as around 70% of the world’s poor people live in rural areas and are dependent on agriculture for their income, food supply and livelihoods. According to a UN-Hunger Task Force report, three out of five small farmers suffer from hunger.⁵

Action Aid International has identified the following groups as the most affected by hunger and malnutrition: agricultural laborers, landless, poor farmers, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, informal sector workers, unemployed people, street children, the homeless, people living in areas of conflict or at risk from conflict,⁶ refugees, migrant workers, settlers and the internally displaced. Within these groups, women, children, especially girls, disabled people, the elderly and female-headed households are the most vulnerable.⁷ 125 million people die each year from malnutrition related causes. Children and adults are left mentally and physically stunted, deformed or blind, condemning them to a marginal existence. Hunger repeats itself through the generations, as undernourished mothers give birth to children who will never fully develop.⁸

In India it is evident that, although the 1990s saw a period of sustained economic growth as the country moved towards a more market-oriented economy, this economic growth did not benefit all Indians equally. Middle and upper classes in urban areas have benefited under “India Shining”, but the poor have suffered a decline in living standards and rising food insecurity. Poverty⁹ and malnutrition, especially among women, children, and people who belong to scheduled castes and tribes, remain very high. About 2 million children die every year as a result of serious malnutrition and preventable diseases. Nearly half suffer from moderate or severe malnutrition. This is one of the highest levels of child malnutrition in the world. Nearly a third of children (30%) are born underweight, which means that their mothers are themselves underweight and undernourished.¹⁰

Hunger and malnourishment is predominant in rural areas of India. 70% of Indians still live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods (65%). Very low agricultural wages (minimum wages are not always enforced), landlessness, lack of work during the agricultural lean season, and the impacts of trade liberalization have contributed to food insecurity.

Right to Adequate Food and Agricultural Trade

As noted above, the majority of hungry and malnourished live in rural areas and are dependent on agriculture for their income, food supply and livelihoods. They are food producers, such as landless laborers or small farm holders. Among the factors that contribute to this paradox of hungry farmers is the agricultural trading system, according to Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

The dominant trend in market-oriented globalization is “to expand the global reach for investments and to broaden market for profit.”¹¹ Investments in agriculture, food processing and marketing are on the rise. International trade in food has increased due to reduced trade barriers. Relentless pressure for unrestricted international trade and investment has not only constrained the policy space of governments, but also resulted in national and local governments and economies ceding some sovereignty over their markets.

Today, agricultural trade is far from being free or fair. Many developed countries continue to protect agriculture as a question of national security and food security, while persuading developing countries into unilaterally liberalizing their agricultural sectors, often under the programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In his address to the Future Farmers of America in Washington on July 27, 2001George W. Bush, then President, stated, “It’s important for our nation to build – to grow foodstuffs, to feed our people. Can you imagine a country that was unable to grow enough food to feed the people? It would be a nation subject to international pressure. It would be a nation at risk. And so when we’re talking about American agriculture, we’re really talking about a national security issue.”¹² In the same speech, Bush argued against “the trade barriers, the protectionist tendencies around the world that prevent our products from getting into markets.”¹²

Despite preaching the “benefits” of “free” trade in agriculture, US, EU, Japan and other industrialized countries continue to skew their farm subsidies so heavily in favor of their biggest agricultural producers. From 1995 to 2006 USDA provided $177 billion in subsidy to its farmers. Top 10% of the agricultural producers received 74% of the total amount. During this period US government provided nearly one billion dollar subsidy to just three American rice growers. Rice is staple food for nearly 3.7 billion Asians. Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz described the United States Farm Bill as “the perfect illustration of the Bush administration’s hypocrisy on trade liberalization.”

In 2004 EU paid its biggest 2,460 farmers on average $667,000 each, or $1.7 billion in total. In Germany, 14% of the biggest farm producers got 65% of all payments; in France, 29% of the biggest farm producers got 72% of all payments; in UK, 31% of the biggest farm producers got 84% of all payments; and in Italy, 1.6% of the biggest farm producers got 34% of all payments.¹³ These figures make a mockery of claims that the US Farm Bill and EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are geared toward small farmers and rural development. This huge subsidy allows food cartel to sell rice, wheat and other staple foods at very low price to dominate global food market. This displaces local production of basic foodstuffs and farming livelihoods in developing countries. “These subsidies continue to promote over-production and dumping, hurting poor farmers in developing countries,” said Luis Morago, Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair spokesperson. He further said, “Europe’s common agricultural policy and the US Farm Bill continue to ignore small farmers at home and cripple poorer farmers abroad.”¹³

While developed countries pay huge subsidies to their biggest food producers to dominate the production of staple foods like rice, corn/maize and wheat, and milk, developing countries are left at a severe disadvantage, as they cannot afford to subsidize their agriculture, but must reduce tariffs and open up to unfair competition from subsidized products of the developed countries. Measures to help smallholders such as farm subsidies and cheap credit policies has been opposed by international financial institutions and has fallen out of favor at the national level of many developing countries because it does not serve the interests of those who influence the government. In most developing countries small farm holders do not have the strength to either compete in or resist the pressures of market globalization.

Right to Adequate Food and Agribusiness Companies

The agricultural trade liberalization has benefited big farms and agribusiness companies of the developed countries. It benefited 1% of farms larger than 100 hectares, while harming 85% of farms with less than 2 hectares.² The globalization of agriculture has been accompanied by concentration of market power into the hands of a limited number of large-scale trade and retail agribusiness companies. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) notes,

One of the more striking features of industry changes…has been the convergence of ownership between agrochemical and seed/genomic firms. This strategy has worked well to sell proprietary bundled lines of chemicals, genetic technologies and seeds, which can be attractive to farmers as a purchased management tool. However, such bundles can increase reliance on expensive inputs, increase farmers’ costs, and reduce flexibility of on-farm management strategies for pests and weeds, as well as implementation of novel consumer-driven production systems.¹⁴

Transnational corporations have monopolized the food chain, from the production, trade, processing, to the marketing and retailing of food. Globally, the seed industry is increasingly driven by US and Europe based transnational agribusiness companies. Just 10 companies, which include Aventis, Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta, control one-third of the $23 billion commercial seed market and 80 per cent of the $28 billion global pesticide market. Monsanto alone controls 91 per cent of the global market for genetically modified seed. Another 10 companies, including Cargill, control 57 per cent of the total sales of the world’s leading 30 retailers.¹⁵

With the trade deal between India and the United States, known as the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), the Indian markets and agricultural policies are increasingly coming under the influence of transnational companies such as Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland Company, a US grain purchaser and trader and is, with Cargill, one of the companies that maintains “oligopolistic control of the American food-manufacturing and food-processing markets”, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.¹⁶ These three companies are members on the KIA Board, which implements the KIA. The Board has decided to focus initially on four core areas: agricultural education, food processing and marketing, biotechnology and water management.¹⁷ “The KIA is part of the US comprehensive strategy on revitalizing the bilateral relationship in agriculture with India,” said Susan Owens, director of the FAS Research and Scientific Exchanges Division. Owen stated: “We want to broaden the scope of the AKI (or KIA) beyond just research…We want to use the AKI (or KIA) to increase agricultural production in India….”¹⁸

Monsanto owns the patent on Bt cotton. In 2005 approximately 1.26 million hectares, and in 2006 nearly 3.28 million hectares of land in India was under Bt cotton cultivation. Farmers who buy GM seeds enter into a licensing agreement with Monsanto for the use of that particular gene and the company prescribed fertilizer. 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. Monsanto is now charging 1850 Indian rupees per 450 gram pack of Bt cotton seeds as compared to 38 Indian rupees charged in China for the same quantity. In India, the price for non-Bt cotton variety is at 450 to 500 Indian rupees. India has recently allowed field trials of GM varieties of rice, brinjal and groundnut.

In many regions of the world, transnational corporations now have unprecedented control over food, and there is no coherent system of accountability to ensure that they do not abuse this power. Global food companies have become too powerful and are undermining the right to adequate food in developing countries.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)

Introduction of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) has become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage and accumulation in the production and trade of agricultural goods. This has resulted in the increasing concentration of control over seeds and other resources in a few transnational companies. The IPR owners, usually transnational companies, can prevent others from producing or selling the seeds or plant varieties over which they own the rights. They can set prices or royalties on the seeds, and terms and conditions for use of the seeds and inputs. This not only denies the right of farmers to save seeds for the next season, but also forces them to depend on transnational companies for seeds and inputs. With raising prices of seeds and inputs, coupled with prevention of saving seeds, small scale farmers become vulnerable whether there is bumper crop, or failure or low yield. In times of bumper crop, they get lower price for their produce, and in times of failure or low yield they incur loss. But the farming costs keep rising.

Because of their sheer size and assurance of huge financial returns due to IPRs, transnational companies are increasingly engaged in agro-biotechnology research. As the goal of companies is profit, their research and production efforts tend to focus on only a few crops, thus weakening biodiversity and sustainability caused by expanding monoculture in food production. The consequences are terrible on “minor crops”, which are commercially not profitable for the companies.

With the trends towards strengthening IPR systems worldwide (and in India), there is an increasing ability of agribusiness companies privatizing genetic resources and agricultural knowledge. The tendency will be to focus on research on lucrative developing country markets, rather than developing country needs. Therefore, IPRs are not designed to respond to socio-economic concerns such as food security of developing countries, or to protect the livelihoods of landless and small scale farmers, but to promote the greed of agribusiness companies at the expense of landless and small scale famers in these countries. Thus, IPRs can impede progress towards sustainability, food security and distributive justice.

Right to Adequate Food — the Guiding Framework for Policies and Action

The present liberalized agricultural trade system excludes millions of landless and small scale farmers, and undermines the ability of developing countries to protect their farmers. What is very clear is that in the long run hundreds of millions will die from hunger, while the markets expand.

Therefore, an approach to international trade based on human rights, particularly the right to adequate food, shifts the focus not only to the impacts of trade and its policies on the most vulnerable and food insecure, but also to enhance the welfare of the vulnerable people. The right to adequate food can only be fully realized by States within a multilateral trading system which enables them to pursue policies aimed at realizing the right to adequate food. Trading system should not only refrain from imposing obligations which directly infringe upon the right to adequate food, but also ensure that all States have the policy space they require to take measures which contribute to the progressive realization of the right to adequate food under their jurisdiction.¹⁹) State, as part of its obligation to protect people’s resource base for food, should take appropriate steps to ensure that activities of the private business companies are in conformity with the right to adequate food.

The report of The International Assessment of Agricultural Science, Knowledge and Technology for Development (IAASTD) provides valuable insights and recommendations recognizing the need for complementary and diversified approaches to sustainable agriculture, pointing out that agricultural models based on small farming can present alternatives appropriate for a human rights based food security. While the report was strongly welcomed by NGOs for its calls for immediate radical changes in international agriculture, there was a strong opposition from countries such as US, UK, Canada and Australia.²⁰ A few months before the launch of the report, major private sector stakeholders, such as Monsanto and Syngenta, resigned altogether from the IAASTD project in October 2007 as the conclusions were clearly against their interests.

Some of IAASTD’s observations and suggestions are²⁰ :

• modern agriculture has brought significant increases in food production. But the benefits have been spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment;
• the way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse;
• prioritize the promotion of small farmer agriculture and the livelihood of indigenous peoples, giving special attention to the role and situation of women in food production;
• take measures to promote and protect the security of land tenure, especially with respect to women and vulnerable groups, with special attention to equitable land distribution, with agrarian reform if necessary, as mentioned in Article 11(2) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Voluntary Guidelines for the progressive realization of the right to adequate food;
• take measures to strengthen local markets, shortening the chain from food production to food consumption;
• promote small scale agriculture as important source of employment and livelihood.
• All national and international policies should be guided by a human rights based approach, to guarantee that they respect, protect and fulfill the progressive realization of the right to adequate food;
• develop mechanisms to monitor private companies in order to ensure that they respect the right to adequate food, consistent with the obligation of States to protect this right.

The formulation and implementation of national strategies for the right to food requires full compliance with the principles of accountability, transparency, people’s participation, decentralization, legislative capacity and the independence of the judiciary. Good governance is essential to the realization of all human rights, including right to adequate food.³ When political elites recognize that promotion of human rights, including economic and social rights such as the right to adequate food, actually enhances sustainable economic growth, we can start to expect that freedom from hunger will become a matter of the past.

1. George Kent, Swaraj against Hunger, University of Hawaii, August 9, 2009.
2. “The Right to Food and the WTO,” (April 8, 2009).
3. The Right to Adequate Food (Art. 11): 12/05/99. E/C. 12/1999/5. (General Comments).
4. The Cordoba Declaration on the Right to Food, December 12, 2008.
5. Arun Shrivastava, “Poverty and Food Insecurity in the Developing World: For Us, Tolls the Bell,” in Global Research (May 7, 2009).
6. “U.S. weapons sales are likely to continue to fuel conflict and abet human rights abuses. During the two Bush terms, the majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world went to countries that our own State Department defined as undemocratic regimes and/or major human rights abusers. And over two-thirds of the world’s active conflicts involved weapons that had been supplied by the United States.” Frida Berrigan, “Weapons: Our No#1 Export?” in Foreign Policy In Focus (July 1, 2009).
7. Annual Report 2005-Right to Food, Action Aid International.
8. ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: The Right to Food. Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, in accordance with Commission on Human Rights resolution 2003/25, E/CN.4/2004/10, 9 February 2004.
9. According to the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 (Rs. 56.13) per day, the number of poor in India during 2004-2005 was 456 million, that is, 41.6% of the population.
10. ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: The right to food. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, Addendum MISSION TO INDIA (20 August-2 September 2005), E/CN.4/2006/44/Add.2, 20 March 2006.
11. Asbjorn Eide, “The Human Right to Food and Contemporary Globalization.”
12. See Whitehouse.
13. See Oxfam.
14. “Food Security in a Volatile World,” International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).
15. “ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: The right to food,” Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, in accordance with Commission on Human Rights resolution 2003/25. E/CN.4/2004/10, 9 February 2004.
16. Kamalakar Duvvuru, “Monsanto, a Contemporary East India Company, and Corporate Knowledge in India,” in Dissident Voice (July 25, 2009).
17. Dinesh C. Sharma, “Preparing for New Challenges,” in Span (March/April 2007).
18. Julia Debes, “U.S.-India Agricultural Cooperation: A New Beginning,” in FAS Worldwide (September 2006).
19. Background Document Prepared by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Mr. Olivier De Schutter, on His Mission to the World Trade Organization (WTO), presented to the Human Rights Council in March 2009 (background study to UN doc. A/HRC/10/005/Add.2
20. Wenche Barth Eide and Uwe Kracht, “Official Responses to the World Food Crisis in Light of the Human Right to Food,” (February 11, 2009).

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.

In 2008, poverty reached 13.2% of the population, its highest level in 11 years, the result of millions losing jobs during the first year of the gravest economic crisis since the 1930s. For blacks, the figure was nearly double at 24.7%, and 31% of all Americans were impoverished for at least two months between 2004 and 2007, years of economic expansion.

At year-end 2008, even by the Bureau’s conservative measures, 39.8 million people were impoverished, the highest level since 1960, and 17.1 million lived in extreme poverty at below one-half the official threshold. In addition, for the first time since the 1930s, median household income failed to increase over a 10-year period from 1999 – 2008.

The Census Bureau states that it “presents annual estimates of median household income and poverty by state and other smaller geographic units based on data collected in the American Community Survey (ACS)” covering population areas of 20,000 or more. The Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program also produces yearly figures “for states and all counties, as well as population and poverty estimates for school districts.” It uses data from a variety of sources, including surveys, administrative records, inter-censal population estimates, and personal income data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Critics maintain that official government figures way understate the gravity of today’s crisis, and the Bureau says:

“The official poverty thresholds were developed more than 40 years ago and have been criticized for not taking into account rising (or since the 1970s inflation-adjusted falling) standards of living, expenses such as child care that are necessary to hold a job, variations in medical costs across population groups (that have skyrocketed nationally and are now unaffordable for millions), and geographic differences in the cost of living.”

In addition, income and poverty estimates are pre-tax and exclude non-cash benefits, usually employer-provided. Disposable personal income, after income, payroll, sales, property and other taxes, reveals a far higher poverty level than the Census Bureau reports and a much graver crisis for growing millions as the economic decline deepens.

The Bureau reported that 2008 median (inflation adjusted) household income fell 3.6%, the largest single-year decline on record to the lowest level since 1997 and falling as conditions continue to worsen.

The plight of the poor and impoverished shows up in numerous other reports that paint a darker picture than the Census Bureau and suggest much worse ahead:

* an unprecedented, growing disparity between the very rich and other income groups;

* economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s research showing the top 1% of households got two-thirds of the national income growth during the last recovery, a larger share than at any time since the 1920s;

* wages losing ground to inflation;

* millions of children dependent on school lunches for a hot meal;

* the Economic Policy Institute estimates one-quarter of all children living in poverty by year-end 2009;

* the continued erosion of employer and government-provided benefits, including at the state and local levels; the growing uninsured crisis is discussed below;

* greater numbers of households unable to meet expenses, even with two working members;

* added duress from state budget cutbacks;

* record numbers of food stamp recipients;

* persistent and growing hunger and homelessness; and

* job losses and higher unemployment continuing for many more months, with some analysts projecting record high numbers before peaking.

A September 11 story in Time magazine by Kissinger Associates’ Joshua Ramo highlights the problem. Titled, “Jobless in America: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay,” it quotes Larry Summers’ remarks last July before the Peterson Institute for International Economics about the disturbing rate of job losses. He suggested something strange was happening, unpredicted by experts:

“I don’t think that anyone fully understands this phenomenon,” he said. Will job losses mount longer than expected? At the “recession’s” end, will low numbers of new ones follow, and will double-digit unemployment persist and remain common?

Without saying it, Summers wondered if America’s economic model was broken and, if so, how to fix it. Or can it be fixed? According to the Peterson Institute’s Jacob Kirkegaard, “It is entirely possible that what started as a cyclical rise in unemployment could end up as an entrenched problem.”

Summers earned his reputation as an employment theorist. He now believes that earlier unemployment views are “importantly wrong. I thought if you could have areas where there was long-term substantial unemployment, then that raised some questions about the functioning of markets.”

In 1986, he wrote an article titled, “Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem.” Hysteresis is the Greek word for late, referring to what happens when something snaps and can’t be fixed. It’s an idea economists deplore applying to economies, preferring instead to cite normal business cycle ups and downs. Yet in 1986, Summers argued that Europe’s unemployment might be chronic and persist in times of growth.

Today’s situation is another matter, coming at a time of changing economic landscape, perhaps suggesting that hysteresis is confronting America, and many lost jobs aren’t coming back, especially better paying ones. That’s Kirkegaard’s view in saying growth won’t put Americans back to work, and new jobs created will be of poorer quality than old ones.

So what can be done? Unlike in the 1930s, machines now do much of the work that people did on infrastructure projects. And it’s a lot harder converting white-collar workers to blue-collar ones. Moreover, Summers’ own research concludes that the traditional Western economic model won’t alleviate the jobs crisis. So what will?

Summers won’t say it, but short of a total remake of “free market” economics, likely nothing. And perhaps that’s America’s future: growing millions consigned to a permanent underclass, while an elite few at the top grow richer, until one day “hysteresis” snaps the system in a disruptive convulsion, the old model passes from the scene, and nothing is the same again.

More Evidence of Economic Duress in the Latest Federal Research Report on Consumer Credit

On September 8, the Federal Reserve reported that total consumer credit fell by a record $21.6 billion in July (the sixth consecutive monthly decline) and year-over-year by $2.47 trillion or 10.4%. According to Bernard Baumohl, The Economic Outlook Group’s chief global economist:

“It is one more important sign that consumers are not going to be contributing very much to the economy for the balance of this year and probably for (at least) a good part of next year.” Shrinking credit’s impact on consumption indicates an economy in decline. It shows up in growing poverty, falling incomes, and greater duress for growing millions, sure to be reflected in the Bureau’s 2009 report.

Continued Erosion of Health Care Coverage

In 2008, the Bureau also collected data on health insurance coverage, putting the number of uninsured at 46.3 million last year (15.4% of the population), an increase of 682,000 over 2007. It was the eighth consecutive year that fewer workers got employer-provided coverage, and those with insurance had to pay more of the cost.

Other estimates are far grimmer. Some, including the Congressional Budget Office, place the current uninsured total at about 50 million, and a May 2009 Todd Gilmer/Richard Kronick study estimated that 191,670 more lose coverage monthly, 2.3 million annually at the present rate, and an expected 6.9 million more Americans (over 2007) will lack it by year-end 2010 if the present trend continues.

Add to these the underinsured. According to the American Public Health Association, at least another 25 million are at great risk if they face a serious health problem not covered by their present plan. In addition, Families USA estimates about 90 million Americans had no health insurance during some portion of 2007 or 2008. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reported that over 80% of the uninsured come from working families, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimated that 27% of under aged-65 year old Americans lack coverage.

Still other estimates project up to 60 million uninsured if the commonly reported U-3 unemployment rate hits 10%, and the Urban Institute sees around 66 million without coverage by 2019, given the present trend of rising costs forcing employers increasingly to cut back.

Bureau data show that coverage weakened across most sectors of the population, including full-time workers and the middle class, the result of economic decline and years of employers putting a greater burden on their workforce.

Since at least 2001, the percent of workers with employer-provided insurance has steadily eroded, and it’s the main reason behind growing numbers of uninsured and underinsured. In 2008, 61.9% of the below-age 65 population had job-provided coverage, down from 67% in 2001 and falling due to cost cutting, continued job losses, and the trend to lower-paying ones.

In addition, holding a job no longer guarantees coverage. Plans offered have been greatly eroded, and medical expenses today are the leading cause of personal bankruptcies. America is the world’s only industrialized country denying its citizens universal coverage, yet spends on average more than double what the other 30 OECD countries spend, and delivers less because of unaffordable private insurance and overpriced drugs.

Nothing being debated in Washington addresses this, so whatever legislation emerges will make a dysfunctional system worse with the American public betrayed by “a slick-talking street hustler” — what analyst Bob Chapman calls Obama, or according to James Petras, “the greatest con man in recent history.” Make that plural with Congress under Democrat or Republican leadership because both parties are beholden to the corporate interests that own them and are indifferent to growing public needs.

Since taking office in January, Obama kept reform off the table, made progressive change a nonstarter, and achieved the impossible by governing worse than George Bush on virtually all of his domestic and foreign policies. Along with looting the federal Treasury, wrecking the economy, selling out to Wall Street, and continuing imperial wars, Obamacare is the centerpiece of his failed agenda and a betrayal of the public’s trust.

On September 9, he presented his vision to a joint congressional session, reassuring providers that their interests are secure. Rejecting universal single-payer coverage, he said it “makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.” And while favoring a “public option,” he assured private insurers that it’s not a deal-breaker, guaranteeing that no final plan will include one because enough votes can’t be gotten in the Senate.

Key also is the lowering of costs by:

* cutting hundreds of billions in Medicare and Medicaid benefits as a prelude to eliminating or greatly gutting these programs with perhaps Social Security and other social gains to follow;

* placing caps on what tests and treatments doctors can provide;

* putting “medical expert” gatekeepers in charge of deciding the most cost-effective care, thus preventing doctors from prescribing what’s best for their patients and denying people the right to make their own health care choices if their cost exceeds what Washington will allow;

* taxing so-called “Cadillac” plans (mostly covering state employees, municipal union members, and other working Americans, not just the super-rich) to encourage employers to provide fewer benefits, thus placing a greater burden on workers; forcing everyone to have insurance; and placing a surtax on non-compliers with incomes of between 100 – 300% of the poverty level under the Baucus Senate plan;

* creating a “deficit trigger” to reduce the growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending if anticipated savings aren’t met; and

* making everyone more responsible for their own care by forcing them to cover more of the cost in return for less coverage when they need it most.

Numerous details remain hidden from the public, but the goal of Obamacare is clear. It’s a scheme to ration care; charge people more for it; enrich private insurers, PhRMA, and large hospital chains; mandate insurance for everyone; and penalize non-compliers.

It’s up to public outrage to stop it.

The Indian Biotechnology sector is gaining global visibility and is being picked for emerging investment opportunities. India has 40 state agriculture universities, five deemed universities, one central agricultural university and more than 200 agricultural colleges. These institutions produce about 14,000 graduates and 7,800 postgraduate and Ph.D. scholars every year.

With Monsanto’s progress in European markets frozen, growing economies like India and their markets took on greater significance. The company urgently needed to expand the market for its GM crops internationally. Monsanto’s agriculture division had already begun to focus on Asian, African and Latin American markets in the early 1990s, towards the goal of “transforming agriculture” in a number of countries, a target that became known as the “developing country goal”. Monsanto’s commercial vision has been projected as a benevolent vision for the world. When Robert Shapiro was appointed as Monsanto’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in 1995, he engaged in a program to reorient the company’s business around “sustainability”. He linked the urgent need to grow enough food to feed a growing population with “inadequate” existing technologies and agricultural practices. So Monsanto’s “sustainability” vision, it is claimed, could be realized through GM technology.

Monsanto India (MI), which began its operations in 1949 as a trader of industrial chemicals and later an agrochemical company in 1975 with the launch of the herbicide, Machete (butachlor), has evolved into an agribusiness giant of GM seeds. The Monsanto research centre established at Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bangalore in 1998 is the only R&D centre established outside the US.

The foundation for Monsanto to tap into the research potential of students as well as the research facilities available in Indian universities was laid by a trade agreement between India and the United States, known as the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA) or Agricultural Knowledge Initiative (AKI). This trade deal was influenced by Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland Company and Wal-Mart.

Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA)

The India-US Agreement on Agriculture and Science and Technology emerged from a joint statement by Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, and George W. Bush, then US President, on July 18, 2005. This far-reaching bilateral pronouncement was the genesis of the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA). Later, in March 2006 Singh and Bush signed a joint declaration on enhanced cooperation in agricultural education and research. This cooperation is based on the KIA.

The KIA is implemented through KIA Board, which consists of US and Indian members from government, universities, and the private sector. Dr. Norman Borlaug and Dr. M.S. Swaminathan are honorary advisors for the KIA. The US private sector members are: Monsanto, the largest seller of GM seeds in the world; Archer Daniels Midland, a US grain purchaser and trader and is, with Cargill, one of the companies that maintains “oligopolistic control of the American food-manufacturing and food-processing markets”; and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

The Board has decided to focus initially on four core areas: agricultural education, food processing and marketing, biotechnology and water management.¹ “The KIA is part of the US comprehensive strategy on revitalizing the bilateral relationship in agriculture with India,” said Susan Owens, director of the FAS Research and Scientific Exchanges Division. A key feature of KIA is university-business partnership. Owen stated: “We want to broaden the scope of the AKI beyond just research…We want to use the AKI to increase agricultural production in India….”² That means, industry helps in not only reshaping the universities’ curricula, but also identifying research areas that have the potential for rapid commercialization.¹ This new Knowledge Initiative required development of “effective policy, regulatory, and institutional frameworks.”¹ As Owen said, “The AKI aims to promote science and technology to create a sound regulatory environment that promotes investment and trade.”²

The KIA Board discussed rights (Intellectual Property Rights) to products that the research in public-funded universities will develop. US land-grant universities and industry representatives are asked to help reshape the curricula of Agricultural education. Some of suggested new courses were in entrepreneurship development, agribusiness, biotechnology, international trade, patent regimes and environmental science in various disciplines. Under KIA endowment of industry-sponsored chairs in Indian universities are allowed.

However, there is fear that India’s Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act could face threats under US pressure. Along with multinationals such as Monsanto, the US has been lobbying for a change in India’s intellectual property laws, to introduce patents on seeds and genes and dilute the provisions protecting farmers’ rights. Vandana Shiva, a physicist and environmentalist, said,

The Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement between the US and India establishes intellectual property protocols of research, bypassing consultation with Indian scientists and the Indian public which has been resisting IPR regimes that force countries to patent life, and create monopolies on seeds, medicine and software…For us, these agreements are instruments of corporate dictatorship; they are not instruments of democracy. And as dictatorship, they will fuel more anger, more discontent, more frustration.³

The Protection and Utilization of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill 2008

Yielding to the pressures of both the US government and the MNCs such as Monsanto, Indian government introduced in the Parliament a controversial legislation titled “The Protection and Utilization of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill 2008”. The Bill is modeled on the US’ 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. It provides for the protection and utilization of intellectual property originating from public-funded research. It would alter the existing IP rules to allow government funded universities and autonomous research institutions, rather than the government, to patent their innovations and research outcomes, and to reward institutions and inventors with a share of the royalties and licensing fees generated from the commercial products that result.⁴ It also recommends universities to have a committee, called an intellectual property management committee, to “identify, assess, document and protect public funded intellectual property having commercial potential.” The objective of the IP Bill, it is claimed, is to create an environment in which wealth can be generated from the university system, stimulate national competitiveness, and forge closer academia-industry partnerships.

The IP Bill has attracted considerable debate due to its perceived and potential adverse impact on the R&D, innovation and public interest.⁵ Pushpa Bhargava, who resigned in 2007 as vice-chairman of National Knowledge Commission, an Indian government advisory body that recommended the Bill, says that there was no major open discussion at the commission and he was “taken aback” by the recommendation. The IP Bill also goes against the National Knowledge Commission’s policy objectives of promoting, sharing and using new knowledge to maximize public good.

Supporters of the Bill, mostly government officials and some section of industry argued that “protection of IP creates incentive for more knowledge and technology generation as innovators are recognized and rewarded.”⁶ Officials from India’s Department of Biotechnology, which helped draft the bill, say that the Bill will promote innovation in Indian universities and research institutes by generating funds through patents. According to Somenath Ghosh, managing director of India’s National Research Development Corporation, it has brought “much-needed change,” as “there was no mechanism or incentive to protect knowledge and their research networks have limited interaction with industry.”

IP Legislation and Corporate Knowledge

Since “The Protection and Utilization of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill 2008” is modeled on the 1980 US’ Bayh-Dole Act, the latter’s impact on US universities imparts some important lessons to Indian academia.

Jim Patrico gives three reasons for bringing US public universities and private companies closer⁷ :

1. Stagnant levels of public research funding by the Federal Government for agriculture research since 1980s. In 2008 National Budget under George Bush, surprisingly there was nearly one third cut in the public funding for agriculture research at the land grant institutions. This seems to be the government’s strategy to gradually eliminate regular public research funding. Giving the rationale for the massive reduction in grants, a USDA deputy secretary said, “We feel like our agricultural research should not be earmarked; it should be competitively awarded, and that’s how you’re going to get the most bang for the buck.”

Due to increase in cost of research, universities had to find their own ways to raise the extra amount of money from outside sources such as big companies. Because of its partnership with Monsanto, University of Missouri was nicknamed “University of Monsanto.”

2. The 1980’s US Bayh-Dole Act, which gave US universities, for the first time, ownership of patents arising from government funded research.

3. The 1980 US Supreme Court verdict that life forms could be patented. This made agriculture a prime target for patents. Private industry and universities mainly focused on the promising field of biotechnology. Patrico notes, “Within months of that Supreme Court decision, faculty members of UC-Davis created Calgene, a private company and one of the first biotech companies of the chute.”

Although the university-corporate relationship existed even before 1980, Boyh-Dole Act gave public institutions a kick towards the market by encouraging them to patent their public funded research. A shift in universities’ research focus towards creation of marketable products has dawned. The habit of patenting their research has developed a taste for private business deals. This put the public funded institutions in a conundrum, because they no longer existed as “public” institutions. Paul Gepts, professor of agronomy and plant genetics at UC Davis, says, “Public universities are a contradiction.”⁷

Patenting of research and university-industry alliance raise troublesome questions about academic freedom, the purity of research, and research agendas. Patenting of research necessitates confidentiality. Agricultural universities and research centers become no longer places of open academic sharing and collaboration. William Folk, a plant geneticist at the University of Missouri says, “When I started in the 70s, meetings were filled with people criticizing each other and sharing ideas…(But today) if you have an idea that has any potential commercial value, you are reluctant to share.”⁷ Thus, colleagues are seen as potential competitors.

Moreover, scientists who perform industry-sponsored research routinely sign agreements requiring them to keep both the methods and the results of their work confidential for a certain period of time. As biotech and pharmaceutical companies involve more in funding research, confidentiality becomes very important for the funding company. From a company’s point of view, confidentiality may be necessary to prevent potential competitors from pilfering ideas. However, one of the basic tenets of science is open sharing of ideas and information. That is why Steven Rosenberg, cancer researcher of the National Cancer Institute, says, “The ethics of business and the ethics of science do not mix well.”

There is also genuine fear that university-corporate relationship might lead to tampering the research manuscripts to serve corporate commercial interests. In 1996 four researchers working on a study of calcium channel blockers accused their sponsor Sandoz that passages highlighting the drug’s potential dangers were removed from a draft manuscript. They wrote in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association: “We believed that the sponsor…was attempting to wield undue influence on the nature of the final paper. This effort was so oppressive that we felt it inhibited academic freedom.”⁷

As the research in the public institutions is market-driven, there is a potential danger that the research focus or agenda of universities converge with corporate agendas and interests. The one possibly negative impact of research collaboration with industry is the impact on public sector research priorities. Major victim will be the “minor crops”, which are commercially not profitable for the companies. Market-driven research also suppresses ideas that may not have immediate commercial value. Organic farming will get affected for lack of not only public funds, but also enthusiasm among agricultural researchers. Students, who wish to pursue their research in organic farming, will face a bleak future.

University-Corporation relationship gives legitimacy to the company and its products. The company can use this legitimacy to promote its products. In 2007, Monsanto gave royalty-free license of its GM papaya seeds to the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, India. License will be valid for ten years and royalty will be decided thereafter. “This is the first product delivery from Monsanto to the university, and Monsanto has been working on this for the past year,” said Bhagirath Choudhary, National Coordinator, International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications that assists universities acquire technology from private companies.⁸ The reason for the collaboration between the university and Monsanto was that famers buy papaya seeds from the university.

Therefore, IP law makes public funded universities and research centers excessively focus on income generation and sharing of royalties. This may derail public funded academic institutions from their mission of unqualified pursuit and public dissemination of truth and knowledge. The university serves the broad public interest, to the extent that it treasures informed analysis, critical inquiry and uncompromising standards of intellectual integrity. However, university-industry alliance converts these public centers of knowledge into centers to serve the greed of private companies. However, Rob Hersch, Monsanto’s vice president of product and technology cooperation, disagrees. He says, “The No.1 issue for us with universities and with science is to get good information…unbiased, believable, reproducible information.”⁷ Ignacio Chapela, a UC-Berkeley professor of microbial ecology, admits that a deal between university and company “institutionalizes the university’s relationship with one company, whose interest is profit. Our role should be to serve the public good.”⁹ Therefore, there is a real danger of “business of the universities” becoming business. Consequentially, the knowledge of universities will help widen the gap between the rich and the poor by providing knowledge that helps rich to become richer, rather than bridging the gap between the rich and the poor. So, research will be geared towards making profit for the big corporations.

Thus, university education system is converted to essentially profit making commercial enterprise. It is structured like any other commercial enterprise that looks primarily at its bottom line. A deeper analysis of nature, which has no immediate commercial market, is now being downgraded in favor of what the industry considers as “lucrative” research. It shifts research priorities away from what society needs as a whole to the greed of the corporations. Science is no longer for advancing knowledge and the well-being of society but almost entirely for generating profits for the educational enterprise, and consequently to the funding corporations. Professor Steve Rose of UK’s Open University, succinctly puts it,

Well I think there is a very real problem from the point of view of university research in the way that private companies have entered the university, both with direct companies in the universities and with contracts to university researchers. So that in fact the whole climate of what might be open and independent scientific research has disappeared, the old idea that universities were a place of independence has gone. Instead of which one’s got secrecy, one’s got patents, one’s got contracts and one’s got shareholders.

Stifling downstream R&D, hindering free scientific exchange of scientific information, data and materials and increasing opportunities for conflict of interest and other unethical practices not consistent with the best interests of science is not the way to go.

In India Monsanto has started country-wide campaign to attract research talent into the development of hybrid rice and wheat. For this, it has linked with some of the country’s premier universities and research institutes. In 2009 Monsanto announced $10 million grant to establish Monsanto’s Beachell-Borlaug International Scholars Program (MBBISP) to improve research on breeding techniques for rice and wheat. The program will be administered by Texas AgriLife Research, and agency of the Texas A&M University system, for the next five years. What is alarming is not that agribusiness giant Monsanto is seeking answers from the Indian public funded universities and research institutions. It is that Monsanto is the one asking the questions at Indian public funded institutions. As Andrew Neighbour, former administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, who managed the university’s multiyear and multimillion dollar relationship with Monsanto, admits, “There’s no question that industry money comes with strings. It limits what you can do, when you can do it, who it has to be approved by.”⁷ This raises the question: if Agribusiness giant Monsanto is funding the research, will Indian agricultural researchers pursue such lines of scientific inquiry as “How will this new rice or wheat variety impact the Indian farmer, or health of Indian public?” The reality is, Monsanto is funding the research not for the benefit of either Indian farmer or public, but for its profit. It is paying researchers to ask questions that it is most interested in having answered.

Now, the basic role of the public funded agricultural institutions and research centers in a democratic society is at risk. The new developments in India are vehicles to empower food giants such as Monsanto, destroy small farmers, and harm the public health. In 1970 Henry Kissinger said: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.”¹⁰ What we are witnessing in India today are developments towards that end, under the disguise of “food security.” Concentrating control in the hands of the US Agbusiness company Monsanto (and few others) places Indian public at risk, and leads to its control of India, as the British East India Company did.

1. Dinesh C. Sharma, “Preparing for New Challenges,” Span, March/April 2007.
2. Julia Debes, “U.S.-India Agricultural Cooperation: A New Beginning,” FAS Worldwide, September 2006.
3. Rahul Goswami, “A Bargain-Basement Knowledge ‘Mandi’,” InfoChange News &Features, August 2006.
4. Rahul Vartak and Manish Saurashtri, “The Indian Version of Bayh-Dole Act,” Intellectual Asset Management, March/April 2009.
5. “The Indian Public Funded IP Bill: Are We Ready?” Indian J Med Res, 128, December 2008, 682-685.
6. Sharad Pawar, India’s Union Minister for Agriculture, at Conference of Vice-Chancellors of Agricultural Universities, New Delhi, February 16-17, 2009.
7. Jim Patrico, “Universities for Sale?” Progressive Farmer, November 2001.
8. Padmaparna Ghosh, “Monsanto’s Gift to Tamil Nadu University: GM Papaya Licence,” livemint.com,india, October 24, 2007.
9. Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, “The Kept University,” The Atlantic Monthly, 285/3, March 2000, 39-54.
10. Stephen Lendman, “Destroying America’s Family Farm: HR 2749. A Stealth Agribusiness Empowering Act,” Global Research, June 12, 2009.

Recent recalls of pathogen tainted milk, meat, chicken and cheese make you wonder if E.coli, campylobacter, salmonella and listeria are the new four food groups.

Of course just because our food harbors harmful microbes doesn’t mean it’s not also full of antibiotics. Especially since dosing farm animals with antibiotics is why so many resistant microbes are in the food.

Seventy percent of all US antibiotics are fed to farm animals according to the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (PAMTA) introduced by Louise Slaughter (D-NY) this spring. Over 80 percent of pig and sheep farms and cattle feedlots put antibiotics in the feed or water to produce growth with less feed and compensate, “for crowded, unsanitary and stressful farming and transportation conditions,” says the bill.

Forty-eight percent of our national streams are tainted with antibiotics says the bill and meat and poultry bought in US grocery stores shows, “disturbingly high levels of Campylobacter and Salmonella bacteria.”

Nor are the antibiotics only in the stream.

In April the FDA wrote Nappanee, IN dairy farmer Lyle J. Borkholder that a cow he sold “for slaughter as food” had excessive sulfadimethoxine–an antibiotic which affects the thyroid–hypothalamus axis– in its liver and muscle. In May, it wrote dairy farmers Alva Carter Jr. and Allen Carter in Portales, NM that their cow, also sold as human food, had excessive flunixin in its liver and desfuroylceftiofur in its kidneys, two other antibiotics.

Both farmers were told, “you hold animals under conditions that are so inadequate that medicated animals bearing potentially harmful drug residues are likely to enter the food supply.”

Worse, veterinarians who condemn the use of gentamicin in food animals, a tenacious antibiotic that destroys kidneys and hearing in humans, revealed in a survey in the current issue of Journal of Dairy Science that they believe Ohio farmers routinely and illegally use the drug in the cows they market.

Nor is mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy a distant fear after the largest meat recall in US history last year, much of it destined for school lunch programs. In its final report on Chino, CA-based Hallmark Meat Company in November, the USDA found disease-spreading tissue called Specified Risk Material (SRM) is routinely left on edible carcasses–hello–and Food Safety and Inspection Services staff believe hand sanitizers kill prions. Not even radiation, Formaldehyde or 18 minutes in an autoclave kills prions, the agent that spreads mad cow disease.

The American Medical Association, Union of Concerned Scientists, Pew Charitable Trusts, most of the antibiotic-taking public and even Chipotle Gourmet Burritos and Tacos support PAMTA. But the pharmaceutical industry, which call itself the American Meat Institute when it is selling animal drugs, does not.

Not only would the legislation ban its current gravy train of penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, lincosamides, streptograminds, aminoglycosides and sulfonamides–the pharmaceutical industry wants to replace human drug profits with animal now that insurers are saying YOU WANT US TO SPEND WHAT? about new blockbuster drugs.

Nor is Big Meat happy. When the FDA announced a ban of just one type of antibiotic last year–cephalosporins–shills from the egg, chicken, turkey, dairy, pork and cattle industries stormed the Hill complaining that a ban would threaten their ability to keep animals “healthy.” But what do they mean by healthy?

Veal calves described in a government slaughter manual as “unable to rise from a recumbent position and walk because they are tired or cold”? (And refused by the wife of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Sarah, this month during her G8 visit to Italy?)

Tyson chickens, 11 percent of which “die of respiratory insufficiency; their bodies not found until six weeks later–or on slaughterhouse day,” according to Yanna Smith in Namibia’s SPACE Magazine? Suffering from “chicken madness” from ammonia fumes?

Antibiotic-enabled animal “health” was manifest when officials raiding an egg farm in Turner, Maine in December–on a tip from Mercy For Animals–had to be treated by doctors for breathing distress after entering the egg barns.

Photos show dazed state workers in Hazmat suits leaving the Quality Egg of New England barns, as disoriented by the sanitation abuses as the cruelty.

Nor were they hungry for lunch.

Organic farmers don’t use fungicides. Copper dust is acceptable, but it doesn’t do much against this form of blight that can wipe out a crop in a matter of days. Most organic farmers buy clean seed or save their own, but blight can travel for miles. I have to worry about the family down the street who bought a six pack of Big Boys at Home Depot. And if blight found my tomatoes, I would watch them rot in the field. So far, so good, but it’s been a tough year for tomatoes all around.

A word about the term “organic.” In order to use it, a farmer whose gross is more than $5,000 a year must be certified by the federal government. This is a process that many small farmers cannot afford, nor do they want to be involved with the paperwork and oversight. There are penalties for calling yourself an organic farmer, or your produce organically grown, if you are not certified, and they can be considerable.

As an alternative, many small farmers say they grow their crops “sustainably.” This generally means they use methods that would enable them to be certified organic if they so chose. If I were a consumer, I would rather buy from them than from commercial organic growers who get blanket certification for their crops. Remember that the small grower feeds his or her children and grandchildren from their gardens. Or you could rely on the collaboration of the federal government and a handful of huge corporations to keep our food safe and sound. Given recent history, this is a no-brainer.

The loss of our tomato crop would be devastating, especially because of the investment of time in producing eight varieties, including heirlooms. And then there are the potatoes. I walk between the hills each morning, filled with dread that I might find a telltale spot, but so far I’ve seen only a few Colorado potato beetles coupling in the sun. Squish. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Many of the big California farms that supply so much of our produce are hurting, really hurting. Hard to grow vegetables without water. Fruit trees are dying, fields turning to dust. And the drought is being felt in Mexico, to which many growers, including large organic growers, are transferring a substantial percentage of their operations. This is a situation that will not improve. So, where will we get our food? From China? Wouldn’t it be preferable to support small farms around the country, and wouldn’t government at all levels better serve its citizens and taxpayers by working on the food security issue. There are really just a few basic needs. This happens to be one of them.

Generic press releases that advocate buying local, supporting ag, etc. appear with frequency, but how much is actually being done to help the small farmer—help you. A local NPR station aired a talk during which the speaker suggested that farmers be provided with health insurance. Many have to leave the farm and take low-wage jobs in cities miles from home in order to get benefits to protect their families. What a waste of good men and women. They would rather be on the farm, growing and harvesting, and personally, that’s where I would rather have them.

Subsidies and tax breaks go to agribusiness. The small farmer gets nothing or close to it. Governments should set up farm markets in parking lots, school playgrounds, and parks. The small farmer often pays hundreds of dollars each season to be part of a market because there is no free alternative. Then the markets, and the need for local food security, should be publicized until every family understands that food shortages could become a possibility. Some of the small farmers’ costs could be subsidized. They typically have modest needs, and modest means. Having a good tiller or greenhouse or irrigation system can make a huge difference in output and will more than pay for itself in available produce for the consumer in the community.

Because of the scale of the small farm, everything is expensive compared to the costs of commercial producers. Feed is bought in bags or grown and mixed on site, for example, not stored by the ton in huge warehouses. The profits are tiny, if there are any at all. And labor isn’t even counted in the calculations. There is a lot of labor.

So why does the small farmer do it? If not for money, it must be love, and it is. It is also about directly serving a person or family who appreciates his efforts. It’s for the woman who said she hadn’t eaten real free-range eggs since she was a child on the family farm in Australia. Or the customer who asked for advice on cooking a vegetable he had never before tried, one that must be grown on a small scale and carefully tended, as opposed to the standard easy-store/easy-ship varieties commercially produced. These are the people who want to savor the delicious purple tomato, the blue potato, the red kale, and the really incredible egg with the bright orange yolk. I love having them to offer.

Crops are closely watched and tended, and always with the customer in mind. Local chefs and restaurant owners come to the farm or market to buy so that they can use the finest, most healthful ingredients in their dishes. All of these customers are supporting the growers who may someday be their lifelines. With a future that could include fuel shortages or other disruptions, can we always count on trucks being able to carry commercial produce from California and Mexico and other distant regions where it is grown? That’s a long way baby.

The huge operations that grow just one type of vegetable, fruit, or grain are practicing monoculture, a system that is cost-effective and efficient for them but one in which an entire crop can be decimated in a fell swoop by an invasive organism or a weather event. Then there’s the other way, the one that is also supported by people who save and share seeds and the seed cooperatives and companies that find new sources for heirloom varieties and encourage their production. May they grow and prosper.

And may we all do whatever it takes, including putting pressure on our legislators to provide food security and safety. This is an issue about which they can do something. The question now is, will they?

The poor and hungry have lived in a dark abyss for over 60 years now, waiting endlessly for their daily morsel of grain. India’s new draft Food Security Bill, with its underlying promise of food-for-all, surely provides a ray of hope for the hungry millions. It could be a new beginning, if enacted properly, and could turn the appalling hunger in India into history.

From what I read in the newspapers, however, and from what is emerging from the hectic parleys that the Food Ministry as well as the Planning Commission are engaged in, the path being developed is unlikely to deviate from the present direction to hell for the hungry. If the primary objective of the new law is simply to re-classify below-poverty-line (BPL) families by identifying who is entitled to receive 25 kg of grain (wheat and rice) per month at a price of Rs 3/kg (approx. 6 US cents), then I think we have missed the very purpose of bringing in a statutory framework to ensure the right to food.

What makes me more apprehensive is the urgency with which the proposed law is being drafted. Meeting the deadline of putting this law into gear in the first ‘100 days’ of UPA-II (the new cabinet of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh) without first adequately debating the finer details and trying to work out a plausible structure for a long-term food security plan, is fraught with dangers. Merely replicating the Public Distribution System (PDS) in a new avatar will not be sufficient to lift people out of hunger.

Towards Zero Hunger

There have been earlier attempts at fighting hunger. Brazil’s Zero Hunger program launched by President Lula in 2003, for instance, was the result of a year of inputs from various stakeholders, and is still far away from alleviating hunger. It was launched with the objective of providing three square meals a day to an estimated 46 million people living in hunger and extreme poverty.

By 2005, Brazil had invested US $12 billion in the Zero Hunger program, although President Lula was not satisfied and later criticized the program for being riddled with mistakes. Drawing inspiration from the Brazilian program, Egypt also launched a US $2 billion program for a food insecure population.

There are further lessons to be drawn from Mexico’s Progresa-oportunidades human development program launched in 1997, which took one year to research and roughly two years to plan. The program serves 4.2 million households, and costs almost US $1 billion every year.

Even in the United States, which invests heavily in food stamp program, hunger is on the rise. More than 31.6 million people, or one in every 10 Americans, are either a beneficiary of the food stamp program or takes part in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program.

At present, the government of India provides 35 kg of food grains, including wheat and rice, to 65.2 million families classified as living below the poverty line (BPL). These subsidized rations are made available at a price of Rs 4.15 per kg for wheat, and Rs 5.65 per kg for rice. For the 24.3 million families classified under the Antyodya scheme (also part of the BPL category), the price of grains is reduced to Rs 2 for wheat and Rs 3 for rice.

In other words, India’s Public Distribution Scheme technically caters to 316 million people. These are the poorest of the poor, and the way the BPL line has been drawn (which in my opinion should be dubbed the ‘starvation line’) the PDS should provide them with their minimal daily food intake. If the PDS had been even partially effective, I see no reason why India should be saddled with the largest population of hungry in the world. There is no reason why the Punjab, for example, the best performing state in terms of hunger, should be ranked below Gabon, Honduras and Vietnam in the Global Hunger Index.

Any program aimed at providing food-for-all on a long-term basis has to look beyond food stamps and public distribution schemes. India must move to a Zero Hunger program by attacking the structural causes of poverty and hunger. Creating adequate employment opportunities and promoting sustainable livelihoods by involving the village communities has to be woven into any long-term food security plan. Better health care facilities, access to safe drinking water and sufficient micro-nutrient intake will ensure that food is properly absorbed.

An empty stomach cannot wait. With the passage of time it will inevitably lead to social upheavals, and the repercussions could be still more damaging to society at large. It is so painful to see that while the government is trying to fight the growing menace of naxalism on the one hand, on the other it is actually perpetuating the conditions that help promote extremism. Agriculture is being sacrificed for the sake of industry, mining and exports, and land acquisitions are divesting Indian farmers of their only form of economic security by forcing them to quit agriculture.

The proposed National Food Security Act cannot be a stand-alone activity. It has to be integrated with various other program and policy initiatives to ensure that hunger becomes history. To achieve this objective, the food security plan should essentially aim at adopting a five-point approach:

* Public Policies for Zero Hunger: A combination of structural policies aimed at the real causes of hunger and poverty, specific policies to meet the household needs for long-term access to food and nutrition, and local policies based on local needs that keep the concept of sustainable livelihoods in focus. For instance, all policies should be aimed at reversing the rural-urban migration. The more migration escalates, the more urban centers will be chocked, and the greater the burden on government support for fighting hunger. Agriculture and rural development remains the best defense against the growing threat of naxalism.

* Sustainable livelihoods: In a country where agriculture is the mainstay of the economy, all efforts must be directed towards strengthening low external input sustainable agricultural practices. There is an urgent need to revitalize the natural resource base, restore groundwater levels, and provide higher incomes to farmers. A monthly take-home income package based on land holdings has to be worked out for farmers. The NREGA has to be integrated with agriculture, and the interest on micro-credit for the poorest of the poor has to be brought down to 4 per cent from the existing 20-48 per cent.

* Public Distribution System: There is an urgent need to dismantle the PDS except for the Antyodya families (those identified by the Indian government as the poorest of the poor who should receive state-provided wheat and rice). The present classification of BPL and APL (‘below poverty levels’ and ‘above poverty levels’) needs to be done away with. The recommendation of the National Commission on Enterprise in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), which states that 836 million people in India spend less than Rs 20 (40 US cents) a day, should be the criteria for a meaningful food-for-all program. The average ration per family at 25 kg also needs to be revised upwards, and there is a need to expand the food basket by including coarse cereals and pulses.

* Foodgrain Banks: The dismantling of the Public Distribution System has to be followed by the setting up of foodgrain banks at the village and taluka level. Any long-term food security plan cannot remain sustainable unless the poor and hungry become partners in the fight against hunger. There are ample examples of successful models of traditional grain banks (for instance, the famed gola system in Bihar), which need to be replicated through a nationwide program involving self-help groups and NGOs. Program and projects must be drawn up to make foodgrain banks sustainable over the long-term and viable without government support in a couple of years, involving charitable institutions, religious bodies, self-help groups (SHGs) and the non-profit organizations to ensure speedy implementation.

* International commitments: Global commitments and neoliberal economic policies should not be allowed to interfere with the food security plan. The World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements, the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and various bilateral trade deals should not be allowed to displace farming communities and play havoc with national food security. For instance, India cannot compromise agriculture in the ongoing Doha Round of negotiations in the WTO which will allow cheaper and subsidized imports. Importing food for a country like India is like importing unemployment, thereby increasing the number of hungry.

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.

The news media is pigging out (sorry, I’ll try to contain myself) with 24/7 coverage of the potential pandemic and breathless reports that this is the new Black Death and millions could die. According to MSNBC, “H1N1 swine flu is seen as the biggest risk since H5N1 avian flu re-emerged in 2003, killing 257 people of 421 infected in 15 countries. In 1968 a “Hong Kong” flu pandemic killed about 1 million people globally, and a 1957 pandemic killed about 2 million. Seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people in a normal year, including healthy children in rich countries.” However, as I write this, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that, only 12 people have died so far of this outbreak of H1N1.

To put all of this in further perspective, it is useful to compare these numbers to the annual number of deaths from other causes. According to WHO:

• 1 million people die from malaria each year
• 2 million from AIDS
• 2 million from air pollution
• 7.4 million from cancer
• 17.5 million from cardiovascular disease
• 1.6 million from tuberculosis

In other words, we KNOW that 31.5 million people will die each year from causes that in large part could be prevented, but 7 deaths a pandemic makes? Have we, as Simon Jenkins suggests in the Guardian all gone demented? Perhaps. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that WHO knows what it is talking about and that a lot of people could get sick from this virus, the question then becomes whether it is the virus we should fear or our ability to react to it.

Like any other disease, the first question should always be what is causing it and how can we prevent it, not the pharmaceutical industry driven approach of how can we (profitably) treat it with drugs such as Tamiflu, which as I noted during the bird flu scare is made by a company in which former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield has a significant financial stake.

Another critical point is that unlike birds that can fly pretty much anywhere, human and pig interaction is for the most part limited to farms, especially factory farms and circumstantial evidence indicates that this outbreak may have originated at a Smithfield Foods facility in Perote, Mexico. Grist reports that, “Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year.” According to Grist, 30% of the population living near the plant have become ill with flu-like symptoms which they believe is due contamination from the hog factory.

But as Narco News points out, the real culprit in swine flu may be NAFTA which went into effect the same year that Smithfield opened its Mexican facility in the aftermath of being hit with huge fines for environmental pollution in the U.S., “The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.”

The issue of whether agri-business run factory farms are the source of the problem has been all but ignored by the U.S. media. Instead we are being told to stay home if sick and seek medical care if really sick. Nice advice presuming you have paid sick leave benefits and health insurance. And even for those able to seek medical care, there are real questions about the adequacy of whether our problem-plagued healthcare infrastructure to handle a massive additional medical incident. As John Nichols points out, we need to reinstate funding for pandemic response; disaster preparedness and infrastructure maintenance aren’t luxuries, they are a necessity, something we surely should have learned from Hurricane Katrina.

So while we need to take this threat seriously, we need to do so in the context of the many existing health pandemics that already exist, we need to take steps to insure that our healthcare system itself is healthy and we need to address the root causes of what allowed the conditions in which the H1N1 virus manifested and take the necessary steps to correct policies that endanger public health.

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.

The Spring Break hordes returned from Cancún this year with an invisible but sinister souvenir.

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. Initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection rate already traveling at higher velocity than the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin — the otherwise vigorously mutating H5N1, known as bird flu — this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. Certainly, it seems far less lethal than SARS in 2003, but as an influenza, it may be more durable than SARS and less inclined to return to its secret cave.

Given that domesticated seasonal Type-A influenzas kill as many 1 million people each year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if coupled with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached in the pews of the World Health Organization (WHO), that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health.

Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with anti-viral drugs and (if available) a vaccine.

An army of skeptics has rightly contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than the WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often nonexistent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases.

But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the U.S. and Britain, which prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot Lines, rather than dramatically increase aid to epidemic frontlines overseas — as well as to Big Pharma, which has battled Third World demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche’s Tamiflu.

The swine flu, in any case, may prove that the WHO/Centers for Disease Control (CDC) version of pandemic preparedness–without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health and global access to lifeline drugs — belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as AIG derivatives and Madoff securities.

It isn’t so much that the pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn’t exist, even in North America and the EU.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases and their public health impacts, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.

Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists in the field has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a laboratory in Winnipeg (which has less than 3 percent of the population of Mexico City) in order to identify the strain’s genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

But no one was less alert than the legendary disease controllers in Atlanta. According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after the Mexican government had begun to impose emergency measures. Indeed, the Post reported, “U.S. public health officials are still largely in the dark about what’s happening in Mexico two weeks after the outbreak was recognized.”

There should be no excuses. This is not a “black swan” flapping its wings. Indeed, the central paradox of this swine flu panic is that while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted.

Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story (reported by the admirable Bernice Wuethrich) to evidence that “after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track.”

Since its identification at the beginning of the Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then, in 1998, all hell broke loose.

A highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a factory hog farm in North Carolina, and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a weird variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers whom Wuethrich interviewed worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu. That admonition, of course, went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies while neglecting obvious dangers.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Probably the same thing that has favored the reproduction of avian flu.

Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China — an immensely productive ecology of rice, fish, pigs, and domestic and wild birds — is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal “drift” and episodic genomic “shift.” (More rarely, there may occur a direct leap from birds to pigs and/or humans, as with H5N1 in 1997.)

But the corporate industrialization of livestock production has broken China’s natural monopoly on influenza evolution. As many writers have pointed out, animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in schoolbooks.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million American hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities, with half of the hogs kept in giant facilities with 5,000 animals or more.

This has been a transition, in essence, from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, unprecedented in nature, containing tens, even hundreds of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems, suffocating in heat and manure, while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates and pathetic progenies.

Anyone who has ever driven through Tar Heel, N.C., or Milford, Utah — where Smithfield Foods subsidiaries each annually produce more than 1 million pigs as well as hundreds of lagoons full of toxic shit — will intuitively understand how profoundly agribusiness has meddled with the laws of nature.

Last year, a distinguished commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a landmark report on “industrial farm animal production” underscoring the acute danger that “the continual cycling of viruses . . . in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human-to-human transmission.”

The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (a cheaper alternative to sewer systems or humane environments) was causing the rise of resistant Staph infections, while sewage spills were producing nightmare E. coli outbreaks and Pfisteria blooms (the doomsday protozoan that has killed more than 1 billion fish in the Carolina estuaries and sickened dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology, however, would have to confront the monstrous power exercised by livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Foods (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The Pew commissioners, chaired by former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers.

Moreover, this is a highly globalized industry, with equivalent international political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress investigations into its role in the spread of bird flu throughout Southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stone wall of the pork industry.

This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicenter around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in the state of Veracruz.

But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO’s failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of Big Pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialized and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

This article first appeared in Socialist Worker. Thanks to Alan Maass.