GMOs = More Ebola and the Faster Spread of Ebola

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1. For centuries medical science has known that conditions of overcrowding combined with lack of good sanitation incubate epidemics. Densely crowded slums are often the source or proliferation point for epidemics of cholera, typhus, dengue, typhoid, Chagas disease, plague, yellow fever, influenza, and many others. This artificial socioeconomic circumstance provides the right terrain for potentially pathogenic germs to go kinetic. Today this is true of ebola, which is spreading most aggressively in the shantytowns of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Nigeria.

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2. The main goal and effect of the “Green Revolution” has been to dispossess huge numbers of indigenous tribes as well as small farmers and their families and drive them into vast slums ramifying from the fringes of the cities. These are the infamous shantytowns, corporate neoliberalism’s terminal waste dumps for the ever-growing legions of economically superfluous people. Over the last fifty years the green revolution and the “structural adjustment” assaults of the IMF caused the explosive growth of these immiseration camps.

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The IMF usury campaigns which have indentured whole countries (while those countries’ political leadership uses the money for urban luxuries for the homegrown 1%, or just directly embezzles it and puts it back in Western banks), and the onslaught of globalized commodity agriculture which indentures and destroys millions of farmers and tribesmen, have gone hand in hand. The globalization compacts of the former have always extorted ever greater license for the latter, as New Deal-style public agricultural investment programs have always been among the IMF’s primary targets. The IMF’s hostile takeover of Ukraine is a current example, while the G8’s “New Alliance” plan for Africa intends to expose Africa and its millions of farmers to the full fury of Western banks, agribusiness, and commodity dumping. Such onslaughts across Asia and Africa have been accompanied by the accelerating plague of land-grabbing. One of the conditions of IMF and New Alliance money is always that recipient governments privatize tribal and communal land, driving off the moral owners and replacing them with rich and corporate owners of duly legal “property”. This kind of robbery goes back at least as far as the Big Lie of how the natives allegedly “sold” Manhattan for a handful of beads (my Economics 101 textbook in college was still repeating this, good old Samuelson and Nordhaus), and today Rajiv Shad of USAID openly says it’s a primary goal of the New Alliance.

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The effect of all these crimes – land-grabbing, debt indenture of farmers, the violent transformation of agriculture from thousands of small farmers producing food mostly for their own communities to a handful of gargantuan monoculture plantations producing only export commodities and employing a relative handful of ex-farmers as laborers, the dumping of the West’s heavily subsidized agricultural commodities on the agriculture and food sectors of these same countries – has been to force millions of people off their land and into globalization’s sprawling concentration camps, shantytowns. All shantytowns are created by the enclosure of arable land. This is an intended goal of all such policy. The people are to be driven off their land and, as in the past, turned into low-wage urban workers, or as today, permanently incarcerated in economic misery and political helplessness. That’s what the US government and global corporate agriculture have planned for Africa.

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The main difference between Stalinist collectivization and the neoliberal “green revolution” is that the latter, fully mechanized and dependent upon the input, processing, and transportation infrastructure temporarily afforded by cheap oil, has been able to dispense with the people. Instead of forcing the ex-farmers and tribesmen into slavery, it just drives them off as terminally homeless vagrants. The green revolution and its subsequent land-grabbing epidemic comprise the extension of the enclosure onslaught of earlier centuries.

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3. These shantytowns are the incubators of hunger, misery, and despair. As has been empirically proven since the 1970s, corporate agriculture does not “feed the world”, but on the contrary generates mass hunger and malnutrition. The GMO onslaught shall only aggravate hunger, as it aggravates every other pathology of corporate industrial agriculture – medical, environmental, genetic, economic, political.

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As I wrote above, in addition to the socioeconomic and cultural misery they enforce, shantytowns are the incubators of disease. Today ebola is festering in these ghettos which are intentional byproducts of industrial agriculture. Ebola is festering, spreading, striving to mutate so that it can spread more readily. It’s doing this amid the most favorable terrain for its success. If Big Ag had set out intentionally to generate a lethal pandemic, it could hardly have designed a better scenario than the one it’s imposing today.

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(Since shantytowns are implicitly waste dumps for people who are, from the point of view of the corporate austerity system, surplus, worthless, and potentially dangerous, pandemics among them may indeed be the intended effect, just as corporate-enforced mass hunger certainly is intentional. As I’ve written before, shantytowns make no sense from any point of view – moral, rational, practical. The only way to make sense of them is to theorize that Western governments and corporations view them as putative death camps.)

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The calculus is crystal clear. Shantytowns = the greatly increased probability of lethal pandemics.

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Corporate agriculture and its GMO deployment = the accelerating sprawl of shantytowns and surge in the number of inmates.

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Therefore, advocacy of GMOs and poison-based agriculture = wanting to increase the probability and incidence of lethal pandemics. It’s willful mass murder and intent to commit further mass murder.

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4. The way corporate ag sets up terrain favorable for lethal pandemics is similar to how it strives to make itself vulnerable to terrorism. As Bush’s Agriculture Secretary Tommy Thompson said, “For the life of me, I can’t understand why terrorists haven’t attacked our food supply.” Indeed, terrorism is a major threat to centralized industrial agriculture, while it could only ever be a minor, local threat to decentralized polyculture agroecology. The same goes for pest threats, disease, floods or drought, temperature extremes, anything which can affect crops or food. (Of course in spite of Thompson’s bout of truth-telling, the Bush administration, continued acting to increase the vulnerability of our crops and food, like every other administration before or since.)

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5. The insane abuse of antibiotics in factory farms and with GMO antibiotic resistance markers continues to escalate. This is nothing less than a campaign to destroy the medical miracle of antibiotics once and for all. In a textbook equal and opposite reaction, this calls down upon humanity the corresponding antibiotic-resistant disease-causing germs. This too will bring lethal pandemics.

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6. We must always keep in mind how industrial ag causes society’s total dependence upon an ever more fragile, top-heavy Tower of Babel. Industrial agriculture is unsustainable and sooner or later will collapse from any of a number of possible death blows: The end of cheap fossil fuels, the failure of fossil water (effectively non-renewable aquifers) or industrially mined phosphorus, the collapse of the wrecked and poisoned soil, the failure of the crops which are physiologically weakened by genetic engineering, their endless bombardment by enervating herbicides (genetically engineered herbicide tolerance doesn’t let the crop get off unscathed, but merely enables it to survive in a weakened state and produce a nutritionally denuded harvest), and/or out of their extreme vulnerability to pests and disease on account of their insanely narrowed genetic base.

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The extreme narrowing of agricultural germplasm has been an intentional and necessary aspect of monoculture agriculture. The same is true of crop epidemics like the 1970 Southern corn leaf blight which decimated the US crop and was widely forecast among agronomists right before it happened (cf. Jack Kloppenburg’s First the Seed, 2nd edition p. 122). This was on account of the parlous state of US corn genetics, specifically how the cytoplasmic male sterility gene (to save the labor costs of detasseling during hybrid seed production), deployed in all US hybrid varieties at that time, also rendered the crop more vulnerable to that exact disease.

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This campaign of agricultural biodiversity destruction constitutes the destruction of the genetic basis for all future agriculture. If Big Ag intentionally set out to set up humanity for mass famine from systemic crop failure, it could hardly have done better than it has in setting up the system based on poisons, monoculture, hybridization, and GMOs.

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Speaking generally, globalization renders us all ever more vulnerable to an ever greater array of diseases and disasters.

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7. Then there’s the proven health and environmental devastation of such agricultural poisons as commercial glyphosate, DDT, 2,4-D, atrazine, neonicotinoids, chlorpyrifos, industrialized Bt (in GMO form), and many others. These are known to cause reproductive damage, sterility, miscarriages, stillbirths, birth defects, developmental difficulties, DNA damage, neurological disease, organ toxicity, and cancer. We must keep in mind how Mad Cow Disease, horrific as it was, was a relatively minor example of the diseases which CAFO diets can spread through our meat and dairy. Then there’s how the Showa Denko and X-SCID incidents prove that any genetically engineered product has the potential to cause a lethal outbreak. Meanwhile the exponential surge of chronic diseases such as cancer, gastrointestinal tract diseases, allergies, asthma, Crohn’s disease, and autism has gone in tandem with the radical escalation of pesticides and GMOs in our food.

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8. These are examples of what Black Swan author Nassim Taleb recently wrote about in his paper, “The Precautionary Principle: Fragility and Black Swans from Policy Actions”. Taleb and his co-authors concluded that globalized monocultural GMO deployment comprises a systemic risk of massive destruction, through health, environmental and/or agricultural destruction, and for that reason must be subject to the Precautionary Principle. I’ll add that GMOs comprise two shoddy, badly designed, badly performing, failed product lines (herbicide resistance and insecticide expression; i.e. two kinds of poison plants) and serve no purpose at all according to the Need Principle (do we need it). GMOs have zero benefits for farmers or eaters. Therefore, given the proven harms and the even greater risks, GMOs should never have been deployed and now must be abolished.

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9. GMOs and corporate industrial agriculture also fail the Alternatives Principle – is there a better alternative? The alternative to high-risk, doomed-to-fail, astronomically expensive, horrifically destructive industrial monoculture poison-based agriculture set up to produce export commodities is robust, resilient, inexpensive, healthy, environmentally and socially productive decentralized polyculture agroecological practice, set up to produce food for human communities. Scores of studies and trials have proven that acre for acre agroecology produces more calories and nutrition than industrial ag. This is true right now while we’re still in the time of cheap fossil fuels. Once cheap oil is a thing of the past, as it shall soon become, this difference will become infinite, as industrial ag will become physically impossible. Therefore decentralized polyculture agroecology is the most productive form of agriculture in an absolute sense, and it shall inevitably be the most productive in the future, as it shall be the only form possible.

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10. All such prospects are contingent on humanity making it that far. But the pro-GMO activists are doing their best to wipe out any possible future for humanity, as they’re implicitly working hard to generate the lethal pandemic that’ll wipe us out. If they can’t do it with ebola, they’ll try with something else, whether they can incubate it in the shantytown or in the CAFO. And if the pandemics fail there’s always the mass famines they implicitly have planned.

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Whatever comes, humanity must become conscious of this stark fact. The activists of corporate agriculture and food, and the political and economic elites who give them their marching orders are, out of conscious malice or willful disregard for human life, preparing mass murder. When these pandemics come, or any of the other likely disasters I’ve surveyed here, humanity must treat these as the world-historical crimes they are and deal with these malefactors according to the dictates of justice.

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Or better yet, let’s reattain sanity in time. We can take preemptive self-defense action before it’s too late. We can forestall the worst by abolishing GMOs, ending the reign of corporate agriculture, dissolving globalization. We can restore human economies based on producing goods, and above all food, for human beings. This is the only way forward, the only solution to our crises and problems, the only way we can regain freedom and prosperity, the only way we can save and redeem ourselves.

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