GMO Labeling Vis the True Food Sovereignty, GMO Abolition Movement

>

Commenter Lidia posted an excellent report on her experience at an organizational meeting for Vermont Right to Know.

 

Here’s my somewhat negative review of the campaign, so far as I’ve learned about it from her and elsewhere. I’ll let this criticism of the Vermont effort stand in for my growing doubts about the whole “labeling” premise, which I see as, in general, a typical collaborationist “market solution” which by its nature cannot be any real solution; and in particular as part of the GMO ”co-existence” scam. This is the scam whose basic premise is that organic agriculture and humanity can live in the same world with GMOs and the corporations who purvey them.

 

But we know this is false. GMOs are totalitarian, politically and environmentally. Totalitarian means there is literally no limit to one’s aspired domination, and that one in fact has the potential power to aspire to total domination. We know that Monsanto, the rest of the GMO cartel, and their flunkey governments recognize no limits to agricultural enclosure and domination. We know that’s the one and only reason GMOs exist in the first place. (They have no redeeming qualities, don’t work even at the two things they’re “supposed” to do, be herbicide tolerant and produce their own insecticide, have no natural market among farmers or eaters, and are 100% dependent on corporate welfare, government lies and thuggery, and trapping farmers on an indenture treadmill. Their one and only purpose, as Monsanto has been quite frank in stating, is total domination of the world food supply.)

 

We also know that GMOs cannot be prevented from contaminating and polluting every possible part of the ecology. Organic canola is basically impossible in Canada. Same for sugar beets in Oregon. It’s less and less possible to find non-polluted corn and soy shipments. This isn’t even counting the cartel’s intentional planting so as to contaminate the entire agriculture in Brazil, India, and perhaps with alfalfa in the US. Here too, there can be no co-existence. 

 

Are the organizers of labeling campaigns sincere about Food Sovereignty and abolishing GMOs? The fact that the Vermont organizers are already flouting the boycott of the corporations who gave money to defeat Right to Know doesn’t bode well. Nor is their evident place as part of the industrial organic complex. I don’t doubt that they’ve internalized much of the system mindset. Thus they’ve unilaterally dumbed the bill down to comply with central government directives, voluntarily racing to the bottom. (In California they did the same thing, and then added stupidity to timidity by saying stuff about THEIR OWN BILL like “loopholes are good”! I’d almost have wanted to vote No just out of contempt for such a lame campaign.)

 

It’s Politics 101 that you demand far more than you really want to achieve, and that where you’re trying to get Better Elitism (begging the elites for labeling is certainly an elitist strategy; indeed, here it’s not even a ballot initiative, but trying to get a law passed), you supplement it with as much grassroots direct action as possible. Therefore anyone sincere and competent would encourage direct labeling in the supermarkets, as one example of the kind of things citizens of a real democracy can and will do, as their right and responsibility.

 

The strategic principles listed at the event contain one good point – they acknowledge that the central government won’t do anything. (I hope they acknowledge that anything the central government does would be a scam.) So they’re capable of digesting the evidence that far. Maybe it’s possible for them to do so about state governments as well.

 

There’s also several bad points:

 

“Common language among all the state bills will offer “as level a playing field as possible” for food companies to comply”

 

As I said, voluntary racing to the bottom. And why would the people want to “offer a level playing field” to criminal organizations that never offered it to us? That have done all they can to deprive us of any playing field at all, let alone a “level one”. And why should we want to “play” this game at all, and with such cheaters?

 

“They “didn’t want retailers to have to be responsible” under the law (instead, producers)”

 

Why not? Is there a tactical rationale for this, or is it some stupid moral misguidance? Retailers had their chance to strangle GMOs in the cradle and chose instead to join the conspiracy against humanity. They’re enemies, not bystanders. As for what’s good tactics, I haven’t thought it through completely, but my first thought is that targeting the weak link, the most publicly exposed and vulnerable link, is often a good tactic. Supermarket chains are far more vulnerable than Monsanto. (Not to mention all their other bad effects.) It’s worked well in keeping most GMOs out of Europe. Perhaps the winningest union going, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (one of the few that’s been winning at all), has based its strategy on targeting one retailer after another.

 

Most of all, it’s up to we the people to take matters into our own hands, not “the states”. But that truth may be frightening for some of these cadres, who by training and temperament may identify more with Monsanto than with small farmers, indigenous peoples, and true democracy activists (that is, active participatory citizens).

 

But here’s the core question to ask any advocate of system reformism, i.e. Better Elitism – When this fails, THEN what do you want to do? If the answer is vague, or boils down to, “keep doing what’s already failed, ad infinitum and ad nauseum”, we know we’re dealing with con artists whose only real agenda is to keep dissent firmly within system-endorsed bounds.

 

The right question would be, “If this doesn’t work, will you then convene a conference dedicated to enshrining abolition as the only goal, and working on strategy only toward this goal?”

 

We already have the fact that this was already tried in Vermont and already failed, for one reason and one reason only, because the state government doesn’t want to do it. So why would that same government change its mind? The same has been true in every other state where the legislative route has been tried. How much evidence will be needed? The fact is, where the propagators of the “co-existence” scam (of which labeling is a part) aren’t conscious liars (I think the likes of Whole Foods Market, Hirshfield, etc. certainly are), they’re still acting according to indelible system-compliant limitations. They’ve internalized the rules of the criminal system, and by now voluntarily collaborate with it. The real goal is to try to prevent a real anti-GMO and anti-corporate food movement from cohering and gathering force.

 

What could cause me to change my mind about this tactic and goal? It’s tough, because I argue that these campaigns have unilaterally pre-failed by making their proposed legislation so lame. I think labels for GMO-fed meat and dairy are also necessary. (I’m well aware that the central government claims to have “pre-emptive” power over this. So what? To unilaterally cave in on account of such a bogus and tyrannical presumption is hardly in the Spirit of ’76. Why not go ahead and challenge these usurpers? We can at least agree upon and publicize the fact of this usurpation and this illegitimacy. Would that cost the state money from the central government? If so, that should be seen as a feature and not a bug. We’re never going to take back our political and economic sovereignty while we remain a dependent cog of the central money system. Everything is interrelated, and we must be organic and holistic about our philosophy and activism. To think anti-GMO activism can be a stand-alone campaign which doesn’t fundamentally challenge the entire structure is, ironically, a perfect example of the NPK mentality that’s destroying our agriculture, and which was the ideological fount of GMOs in the first place.

 

On that note, I’ve heard of an ongoing secession movement in Vermont. I don’t know its specific ideology, but perhaps there’s a ready-made ally, once people get serious about Food Sovereignty.)

 

Leaving aside the scope of the labeling, I’d have to see the thing passed and fully enforced. More importantly, I’d have to see the campaign organize itself as a permanent grassroots organization dedicated to enforcement of this measure, and to expanding the action as far as it can go, toward full abolition. This is a non-negotiable baseline for any democracy activism worthy of the name. Within-the-system reforms like getting a law passed are always to be seen as supplementary to directly democratic movement-building and direct action.

 

But more likely, the elite organizers of the campaign wouldn’t see grassroots action as even a supplement to the “legalistic” action. On the contrary, we’d have proof that the campaign had been a con job if, once the bill was passed, the Leaders were to turn to whatever grass roots had sprung up and say, “We won! Now you can disband and go home. We, Your Betters, will now confer with our fellow elites in government and at the corporations. We’ll try to keep you posted.”

 

I’d say that if we the people want to support a labeling campaign, we must do so as a parallel grassroots organization, built from day one to be a permanent, ever-growing movement. Under no circumstances should we let ourselves be “led” by elites, however well-meaning they may seem. We must lead ourselves.

 

I think the answer is that existing groups won’t be part of the true wellspring which shall one day surge to a purifying Flood.
>

How A “Supreme Court” Should Be (Brazil GM Soy Extortion Case)

>

Brazil’s Supreme Court of Justice denies one of Monsanto’s patent extensions. This will help bolster the ongoing “royalty” fraud case where a snowballing alliance of soy farmers has been winning court decisions and favorable supreme court rulings going back two years now. Monsanto’s already on the hook for over $2 billion in back royalties, taxes they fraudulently extracted from indentured farmers. (The term “royalty” is apt. It’s explicitly redolent of autocratic taxes imposed by monarchs. Modern “intellectual property” taxes are just as mystically based, just as arbitrary, just as tyrannical, as the most offensive monarchical extractions which provoked revolutions and beheadings.)

 

The reason the system in Brazil is more responsive to the people is because the people there are aggressive in forcing it to be, for example through the Landless Workers’ Movement.

 

(Not really responsive of course, no centralized hierarchy is. (And humanity should have a much higher aspiration than “responsive” elites anyway.) But more responsive than amid the pits of Western corporatism. We can compare this to the upcoming Bowman vs. Monsanto decision, where 9-0 for corporate totalitarianism wouldn’t surprise me. Of course there’s no anti-corporatists on the court, but only activist and more passive corporatists.)

 

What’s the world status of the aggressive but structurally very weak GMO onslaught? If we can just hold the line in Europe and especially Africa, and start rolling them back in Latin America and India, that might quickly be the end of them.

 

Sometimes I wonder if I should go to Africa, which may be the coming ground zero battlefield.

 
>

Some Draft Precepts

>

1. All sovereignty lies with the people, so it must rightfully stay at the ground level.

 

2. All power therefore can only be legitimately dispersed at the ground level.

 

3. The only legitimate governmental form can be local councils. (Which can federate upward, but with all real power and control remaining at the local/regional level.)

 

4. The natural boundaries are watersheds/foodsheds and similar geographical features.

 

5. By definition, wherever power has been concentrated up a hierarchy, we have tyranny. This is regardless of alleged benevolence (though such allegations are always lies in practice) or alleged electoral validation (the inertia of an already atomized and massified electorate doesn’t count as validation; and where did intact communities ever vote in a free, transparent election to surrender their sovereignty? and even if they did, this wouldn’t legitimize the power concentration but merely mean, as Rousseau said, that the people dissolve themselves as a people, leaving a legitimacy vacuum).

 

***

 

These are not only self-evidently true (the only alternative is straight might-makes-right), they’re also the implicit and sometimes explicit basis of all modern mass society and hierarchical power. These all claim ultimately to be based on the sovereignty of the people. I’m merely analyzing this proclaimed basis, which of course they don’t want anyone to analyze. I’m pointing out the fact that according to their proclaimed basis all these forms have zero legitimacy.

 

That’s in addition to their proven malevolence in practice.

 

And in addition to the fact that they don’t work at doing the things they claim they’ll do.

 

And in addition to the fact that they’re all 100% dependent on fossil fuels and shall collapse without them, leaving mass devastation and famine in their aftermath.

 

All this is toward the proposition that we need to organize for this ahead of time, that our organization needs to be on a basis in accord with nature, and that the political forms in accord with nature are the same which, according to existing political philosophy, are the only legitimate ones.

 

Politics, like everything else, is ultimately organic and must always return to this mean.

 
>

Pollan is Mystified

>

Michael Pollan:

 

Q: Are there any positive advances that biotech has made recently in the food industry? Any on the horizon?

 

A: They’ve been on the ever-retreating horizon for a long time. I started writing about biotech in ’98 and I remember being told by executives at Monsanto that Roundup and Bt were just the first chapter in this wonderful story and within five years so many other interesting crops, crops that could withstand saline or salty soil or crops that could withstand drought or crops that might even be able to fertilize themselves with fixed nitrogen, crops with higher yields and for reasons that remain something of a mystery to me, those wonders have yet to appear. I don’t know why, whether they’re proving harder to engineer than expected might be one reason. Or they could tell you regulatory hurdles are standing in the way but in fact there are very few regulatory hurdles introduced in these crops.

 

Allow me to lift the veil of mystery for Mr Pollan:

 

G……M……Os……DON’T……WORK.

 

The fact is that only two things about GMOs ever sort-of worked for a little while: Herbicide tolerance and internal pesticide expression. As predicted by anyone who knows even the slightest bit about how nature works, the weeds and pests which Roundup and Bt expression were supposed to suppress quickly transformed themselves into Roundup-resistant superweeds and Bt-resistant superbugs. Roundup has totally collapsed. (Which is why the next generation of 2,4-D resistant GMOs is in the pipeline. This ever-escalating herbicide treadmill is an intended outcome of corporate/government policy. Otherwise the USDA would admit that herbicide tolerant GMOs don’t work and refuse to authorize any further commercialization of them.) Bt crops no longer work, and ever more toxic pesticides need to be sprayed on them.

 

In fact, we’re left with only two meager things that GMOs do as advertised: Bt crops do express Bt toxin, even though it no longer works. And glyphosate-resistant crops can have glyphosate sprayed upon them without killing them, which doesn’t help because glyphosate also doesn’t kill the weeds it was supposed to kill.

 

That’s all GMOs do.

 

And for that worthless performance, we’re willing to physically poison ourselves and economically and politically enslave ourselves? I think humanity better wake up and abolish GMOs, by whatever means necessary, while there’s still time.

 

But the fact that we’re not likely to do so with any help from liberal elitists is exemplified here: “I await those products and I would love to see this industry make a significant contribution to solving one of the world’s problems. But they’ve been promising that for a long time and have so far grossly under-delivered.”

 

Pollan doesn’t specify which “problems” he means. He knows perfectly well that the only problems with the world’s food are problems caused by corporatism, especially GMO corporatism, and that the only solution is the abolition of food corporatism. But as a good technocratic and pro-corporate elitist he can’t countenance real solutions.

 

Like all liberals, in the end he’s a triangulator in the total war of corporations vs. humanity. He wants to procure somewhat Better Policy within the corporate framework, but also wants to run interference on behalf of corporatism. In the end, when they’re finally forced to choose, most of them will side with Monsanto.

>

Food is Dead

>

When Nietzsche wrote “God is dead”, he didn’t mean that if you polled people they wouldn’t avow belief in god, or that they don’t consciously think they believe in god when it occurs to them at all.

 

He meant that in people’s regular lives, their day-to-day actions, their day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute thoughts, god and religion play no role. God is no longer a significant part of the lives of people in general, as a guide to action or as a feature of our inner lives. Modern Westerners live as atheists, they think as atheists, so they actually are atheists. The fact that upon request they’ll consciously “believe in god”, like a dog salivating when it hears a bell, doesn’t change that fact.

 

We have the same decadent* phenomenon with food. Where does food comes from? Does it come from healthy soil and a stable farming culture, organic within a healthy ecology and socioeconomic environment? Or does it come from the supermarket? Most people, if specifically asked, would consciously agree that food comes from farms. But that’s not what people really think and do. In people’s regular lives, their day-to-day actions, their day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute thoughts, farms play no role. The possible existence (or extinction) of farms is no longer a significant part of the lives of people in general, as a guide to action or as a feature of their inner lives. People think and act as if food comes from the supermarket. The imminent lifting of New York’s fracking moratorium is a perfect example. Forget the committed fascists like Cuomo and Bloomberg – for people in general to have any doubt about fracking’s evil is to demonstrate their disbelief in farms and their compensatory faith in supermarkets.

 

We should see supermarkets as cult shrines. At the moment they do indeed seem to produce food (at least for those who can afford it and can physically get there). But to believe, in direct defiance of all the evidence of physical energy and the environment, that these totem plots will continue to bring forth food once the farms hidden behind them perish, is a nadir of pseudo-religious compensation for people’s lost connection with the Earth.

 

Cults have often called upon their believers to relinquish all their earthly possessions and gather passively awaiting the end. In this case, we’re to relinquish all human responsibility for our very food, its production and distribution, our human right to the land, our very presence on the land, and gather passively awaiting our next feeding.

 

But while the promised end never came for other cults, the promised bounty of the supermarket cult will indeed come to a brutal end. The common thread is the failure of the cult promise. This is because food does not in fact come from the supermarket, or from the car, or from wars for oil, or from government, or from the corporate form, or from “property”, or from any of the other things people try to psychologically and spiritually substitute for the farm. I fear that many will have to learn this the hard way, since for Western humanity at large, Food is Dead.

 

That’s why the Food Sovereignty movement must be, in all ways, a completely new beginning.    

 

[*This blog's not about religious matters, so for now I won't elaborate on what I mean by religious decadence. I'll just say that part of the human condition is a spiritual and cultural life, which has to be an organic part of a human community. The mass functional atheism characteristic of modernity is inhuman. We see how desperately people strive to fill the void, with everything from consumerism to pseudo-religious ideology.]

>

The Real Purpose of Svalbard

>

What’s the real purpose of Svalbard?

 

1. For the short to mid-run: Monsanto and the other rackets chuck a few bucks into the kitty funding this effort, while the vast majority of the funds come from the public of countries around the world. (As the Global Crop Diversity Trust chirps, this is a “public-private partnership”, and we know what that means.)

 

The Trust (a corporate front group which is simply a conduit for US govt, CGIAR globalization cadre, and biotech racket lies and policy) then uses the people’s money to do the work of collecting and assembling the seeds.

 

Then, as per the membership agreement, Monsanto, Dupont, and the rest can use the seeds for their proprietary research. Any patented product they develop out of this biopiracy will then be used as a weapon against the farmers and people of the region where the original variety came from and anywhere else it can be deployed.

 

If you doubt this, or if any hack defender of the program denies it, simply ask why Dupont, Syngenta, and other biotech corporations “donate” to it. It’ll be cute to hear the hacks at the Trust say they do it out of the kindness of their hearts.

 

2. Over the long run: When/if corporate agriculture catastrophically fails (it will, but those within the system probably have lots of different levels of consciousness vs. delusion on this), they can use the seeds to have food grown for themselves.

>

We’re All Lumpenproles Now – GMO Death Camps

>

The Green Revolution is still fraudulently touted as having helped to “feed the world”. This Big Lie is necessary to justify the sequel, that a second GMO revolution is necessary to continue this feeding.

 

In reality, agriculture doesn’t strive to feed a population which spontaneously increases. Cause and effect go in the opposite direction – industrial agriculture is a supply-driven process, and to the extent this extra food is available to the populace, population will increase in response.

 

What the Green Revolution really did was drive up the population while accelerating the arc of enclosure, driving ever more people off the land and into the cities. Shantytowns were the direct, intended result of this agricultural policy. The goal (as proven by the fact that it’s been the clear result, and that elites have continued the policy in light of this result; that proves that they intend the result) was to further separate humanity from the land, further assault subsistence food economies and replace them with food commodification, forcibly turn subsistence farmers into “job”-seekers, drive up the population, drive up the proportion of the population which is food insecure, drive up the number of unemployed, in both of the latter ways increase the desperation and infighting among the destitute masses, and in all these ways aggravate and accelerate the processes of colonialism and corporatism in general. Today’s GMO onslaught is an escalated version of all this. That’s why neoliberalism calls GMOs a “second green revolution”.

 

It doesn’t increase yield (temporarily cheap, plentiful fossil fuels, along with age-old traditional breeding, did that), and it’s not intended to. It’s not more efficient, and it’s not intended to be. It’s more “efficient” only from the point of view of purging human labor from the corporate economy and purging human beings from the land.

 

I defy anyone to explain how the logic isn’t that human beings (except for a rump slave class) must be physically purged from the Earth itself.

 

A real Nazi like Hitler at least had intellectual and moral clarity regarding his policy, unlike corporate liberals or conservatives. They follow the exact same logic, but out of cowardice or stupidity remain willfully ignorant of the fact.

 

But what could it mean to want to purge all people from the land, but not want their physical deaths? A shantytown makes zero sense from ANY point of view – moral, rational, practical. Even from the point of view of the most predatory, exploitative corporation, a shantytown is nothing but a waste dump, filled with potentially dangerous toxic waste. (It’s rare, but the inhabitants do sometimes rise up against the system.) The only way to make any sense whatsoever of the phenomenon is to view shantytowns as putative death camps.

>

Who Wants To Feed the World?

>

There’s lots of morbidly ignorant people of all political stripes who believe the Big Lie that industrial agriculture can Feed the World (TM) and has any intention of feeding the world. (Never mind that it’s Capitalism 101 that capitalism needs conditions of scarcity and seeks to create and aggravate this scarcity, as much as possible. What’s the very first sentence one learns in Econ 101?)

 

For these flat-earthers, the mere mention that fossil fuels are finite is tantamount to calling for the starvation of millions.

 

Meanwhile for those who aren’t morbidly ignorant, there’s the facts. The fact is that organic and low-external input (LEI) agriculture even now outproduces industrial monoculture in terms of calories and nutrients. The fact is that this margin will extend astronomically as cheap fossil fuels become unavailable.

 

But this kind of agroecology can’t be adapted to corporatism. It doesn’t scale up, it can’t be Taylorized, it doesn’t fit well into political and economic hierarchies.

 

So when the morbidly ignorant blather about “feeding the world”, what they really mean is that they consider corporatism to be normative. But since corporatism cannot feed the world and does not want to, those ignoramuses are really the ones who want the world to starve.

 

>

>

African Wannsee Conference; Or, Bono Parties With Monsanto

>

The history of corporate agriculture and its “Green Revolution” is a perfect example of the unfulfilled promises, and therefore proven lies, of corporatism.

 

What was the Green Revolution? With a huge one-off injection of fossil fuels, and building upon ten thousand years of agronomy, corporate agriculture temporarily increased yields within the monoculture framework.

 

(This shouldn’t be confused with being more productive than holistic organic agriculture. Agronomy has proven that organic yields, in calories and nutrition, are comparable and often superior to those of industrial agriculture. But this assumes a natural human agricultural economy, not a corporatized one, for naturally local/regional markets, not for artificially commodified and globalized ones. It assumes diversified smallholder agroecology, which is inherently resistant to tyranny, instead of monocropping, which was designed to be dominated by hierarchies, and is inherently hierarchical.)

 

The “green revolution” (literally the first bogus corporate “color revolution”) increased commodification monoculture yields only by building a Tower of Babel. The soil is stripped of all nutrition and zombified by ever-increasing applications of synthetic fertilizer. Monoculture is ever more dependent on the increasing application of ever more toxic herbicides and pesticides. Deployment of GMOs escalates these vulnerabilities. Factory farms can exist only with ever increasing use of antibiotics. All these systems are extremely tenuous, vulnerable, not robust, not resilient. They’re all guaranteed to collapse. Hermetic monoculture, and industrial agriculture as such, is one big hothouse flower which requires perfect conditions to survive.

 

And all that’s before taking Peak Oil into account. The Green Revolution has been the massive one-off application of fossil fuels to agriculture (in the fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, fuel to run the machinery and globalized distribution networks). With Peak Oil and energy descent, agriculture shall return to its pre-fossil energy baseline. We have the option to apply the right political and economic dispensation, along with the agronomic knowledge we’ve accumulated in the modern era, to produce sufficient food post-oil (through relocalized organic agriculture), and to do so in such a socially and culturally more fruitful way that we end up making a virtue of necessity. This is the Food Sovereignty movement.

 

Meanwhile, given the industrial monoculture framework (but see here for the truly productive and sustainable agroecological alternative), the Green Revolution did temporarily increase yields. The world produces far more than enough food for everyone – over 4.3 pounds per day of a diverse diet for everyone. But this potential food bounty was never used to “feed the world” and was never intended to do so. In reality this alleged increase in the globe’s “carrying capacity” really meant a great increase in the population of the food insecure, while the West temporarily benefited from lower food prices. This was just another aspect of the West’s temporary debt economy which was meant to misdirect middle class attention away from how their ultimate liquidation was being structurally prepared. Today’s food stagflation is a sign that the party’s over.

 

So the Green Revolution was a scam to use cheap fossil fuels to increase monocrop yield, drive tens of millions off the land, and use the stolen land and food to render food temporarily artificially cheap for Western consumerism.

 

This puts in perspective the new GMO colonialism planned for Africa. Africa has so far been relatively unpenetrated by GMOs, except for cotton in South Africa which has already proven a socioeconomic and declining-yield disaster. For some years now Monsanto, its flunkey Bill Gates (via his Association for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)), and the US government via its political aggression arm USAID, have been scheming to launch a full scale GMO invasion, replicating the 19th century colonial onslaught which submerged and devastated the continent. The people of Africa, subject to every kind of political and economic assault, kept as weak and divided as possible, considered culturally and racially inferior by Western elites and elitists, will always be a prime target.

 

So it is with the GMO Master Plan (the “New Alliance for Food and Nutrition Security”) unveiled at the recent G8 “Global Agricultural Development” forum at Camp David (after it was chased out of Chicago), held at the same time as the NATO summit. (Why does NATO still exist? If the system doesn’t disband the army when the external threat ceases to exist, that can only mean it’s meant to be turned within, as an instrument of internal aggression and domination. Meanwhile to this day “national security” types struggle to come up with a pseudo-plausible “mission” explaining why NATO still exists.) This elite conclave basically validated the agenda already presented by its host, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

 

In March, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs released a white paper calling on the U.S. government to make global agricultural development and food security a priority agenda item at the G8 Summit. The white paper, developed by a bi-partisan working group, recommends G8 members spur innovation and engage the private sector by reducing regulatory barriers, building capacity, strengthening intellectual property protections and adopting and implementing policies to increase trade in commodities and food.

 

They basically set out to list every policy which is evil in intent and a proven failure in practice, and call for doubling down on it. This kind of Food Austerity is parallel to finance austerity. Every crime must be continued, escalated, accelerated, intensified. Everything proven to fail must be continued. Everything proven to humanly work must be suppressed.

 

The plan calls for billions in “public-private” investment from GMO rackets Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, along with affiliated assaults like a massive synthetic fertilizer factory to be built in Africa. Of course, the money for all this will come directly or indirectly from governments, i.e. the people. That’s the “public” part of the public-private scam, while what’s left “private” is all the profit and power. The people of Africa will be left to suffer the main physical and socioeconomic devastation.

 

The basic Big Lie is perfectly summed up by Obama hack Rajiv Shah, head of USAID:

 

We are never going to end hunger in Africa without private investment. There are things that only companies can do, like building silos for storage and developing seeds and fertilizers.

 

We know that this is a proven lie in every sector. There is no sector, including food, where corporatization doesn’t bring deteriorating results (and ever more frequent disaster) while our prosperity, freedom, democracy, and happiness are destroyed. In this case, we know that organic production and distribution bring better practical results than the corporate system, we know that only it can sustain the environment, we know that ALL innovation in agriculture throughout history has been the result of cooperative action in the public domain, while corporate enclosure like the intellectual property regime has functioned only to smother innovation, we know that the industrial system in unsustainable in terms of energy consumption, we know that even in the West it’s no longer keeping prices down, and we know that at every point it diminishes our freedom, autonomy, and community.

 

(Needless to say, cooperative and autonomous farmers have developed seeds and fertilizers for ten thousand years with no help from “companies”, although in recent decades companies have been great at stealing this heritage. We’ve also been building our own silos for awhile now.)

 

Meanwhile the real plan for African agriculture, prosperity, and democracy, based on agroecology and Food Sovereignty, is already functioning. Here’s just two proven examples, part of what could be a vast beneficial revolution:

 

19. Sometimes, seemingly minor innovations can provide high returns. In Kenya, researchers and farmers developed the “push-pull” strategy to control parasitic weeds and insects that damage the crops. The strategy consists in “pushing” away pests from corn by inter-planting corn with insect-repellent crops like Desmodium, while “pulling” them towards small plots of Napier grass, a plant that excretes a sticky gum which both attracts and traps pests. The system not only controls pests but has other benefits as well, because Desmodium can be used as fodder for livestock. The push-pull strategy doubles maize yields and milk production while, at the same time, improves the soil. The system has already spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools.

20. Agroecology is also gaining ground in Malawi, a country that has been at the centre of attention in recent years. Malawi successfully launched a fertilizer subsidy programme in 2005-2006, following the dramatic food crisis due to drought in 2004-2005. However, it is now implementing agroforestry systems, using nitrogen-fixing trees, to ensure sustained growth in maize production…By mid-2009, over 120,000 Malawian farmers had received training and tree materials from the programme, and support from Ireland has now enabled extension of the programme to 40 per cent of Malawi’s districts, benefiting 1.3 million of the poorest people. Research shows that this results in increased yields from 1 t/ha to 2–3 t/ha, even if farmers cannot afford commercial nitrogen fertilizers…An optimal solution that could be an exit strategy from fertilizer subsidy schemes would be to link fertilizer subsidies directly to agroforestry investments on the farm in order to provide for long-term sustainability in nutrient supply, and to build up soil health as the basis for sustained yields and improved efficiency of fertilizer response. Malawi is reportedly exploring this “subsidy to sustainability” approach.

21…One key reason why agroecology helps to support incomes in rural areas is because it promotes on-farm fertility generation. Indeed, supplying nutrients to the soil does not necessarily require adding mineral fertilizers. It can be done by applying livestock manure or by growing green manures. Farmers can also
establish a “fertilizer factory in the fields” by planting trees that take nitrogen out of the air and “fix” it in their leaves, which are subsequently incorporated into the soil. That, in essence, is the result of planting Faidherbia albida, a nitrogen-fixing acacia species indigenous to Africa and widespread throughout the continent. Since this tree goes dormant and sheds its foliage during the early rainy season at the time when field crops are being established, it does not compete significantly with them for light, nutrients or water during the growing season; yet it allows a significant increase in yields of the maize with which it is combined, particularly in conditions of low soil fertility. In Zambia, unfertilized maize yields in the vicinity of Faidherbia trees averaged 4.1 t/ha, compared to 1.3 t/ha nearby, but beyond the tree canopy. Similar results were observed in Malawi, where this tree was also widely used. The use of such nitrogen-fixing trees avoids dependence on synthetic fertilizers, the price of which has been increasingly high and volatile over the past few years, exceeding food commodity prices, even when the latter reached a peak in July 2008. In this way, whatever financial assets the household has can be used on other essentials, such as education or medicine.

 

These demonstrate what organic agriculture can accomplish in Africa. (The Malawi fertilizer subsidy also demonstrates, for any “sincere” supporters of industrial ag, that if one wanted to continue with food industrialization, the way to do it is with the old public-interest agricultural investment model, which worked well, given industrial premises. That’s why the IMF set out to eradicate all such programs. But Malawi proves that if elites wanted to preside over it, they could reinstate the old public investment model. So even given the industrial premise, there’s definitely no need for corporatism and the “public-private” scam.)

 

They also demonstrate how the method of propagating this knowledge and political consciousness must be decentralized, through truly democratic networks which involve small farmers as full participants. The most glaring symbol of the bad faith of this elite gala is how, even as it mouths platitudes about improving the condition of Africa’s small farmers, particularly women (that part’s a sop to Western liberal feminists), it included exactly zero legitimate representatives of these groups. On the contrary, the list of participants – corporate rackets, government elites including Obama, corporate liberal front groups, and useful-idiot celebrity tinsel – reads like a Tom Friedman dream guest list. it includes every illegitimate elite alien to the Earth, and excludes every part of humanity. Just like corporatism in general, and GMO imperialism in particular.   

 

The fact is that there’s no yield issue as far as feeding the world. We produce far more than enough food. The only problem is with the corporate distribution system. Anyone who truly wants to feed people has to want to change the distribution of the food we have, not struggle to produce “more” within a framework which has already proven it won’t distribute that food to humanity.

 

Anyone who truly wants to feed the world must want to abolish food corporatism, abolish food commodification, restore natural food markets (local/regional), and build the Food Sovereignty movement based upon truly organic agriculture.

 

Meanwhile anyone, like these elites in Chicago, who claims to want to “feed the world” but wants to do so by doubling down on the proven failure of a ”Green Revolution”, is really a liar and a criminal.

 

***

 

I won’t waste space writing here about my subtitle, but anyone who wants a rundown on how our liberal “celebrity” scum have been operating under Obama fascism, check it out here.

>
>

GMO Empire: Thesis Statement

>

Wednesday’s post sums up my thesis: Capitalism/corporatism must reach its fatal limit at the limits of the Earth itself, at which point, like the proverbial shark no longer able to swim, it must stagnate, sink, collapse.

 

GMOs comprise an attempt to overcome this limit by using technology to turn the globe itself into a slate which can be wiped clean and written on all over again, over and over and over. Each iteration is a new round of capitalist accumulation, each more vicious than the last, each following more closely upon the other.

 

This is the totalitarian extreme of the corporate imperative, and the basis of total corporate domination.

 

I’ll expand upon this. I’ll describe corporate food imperialism in general, and how GMOs are its ultimate manifestation. I’ll describe how the corporate state’s thuggery on behalf of the GMO rackets and welfare handouts to them are the most typical actions of this state’s general activity.

 

To provide evidence for this thesis, I’ll also demonstrate:

 

1. That no one within the system cares about whether GMOs increase yield. (They don’t.)

 

2. That no one cares about “feeding the world”. (It’s long been proven that corporate agriculture cannot do this and doesn’t want to do this. GMOs continue the pattern of decades.)

 

3. That no one cares whether GMOs reduce herbicide or pesticide use. (They increase it.)

 

4. That no one cares whether GMOs control weeds or insects. (On the contrary, they automatically generate superweeds and superbugs.)

 

5. That no one cares about drought resistance and other alleged traits. (GMOs can’t accomplish these.)

 

6. That no one cares if GMOs contaminate other crops and the environment at large. (They inevitably do.)

 

7. That no one cares if GMOs are safe. (As a matter of policy and dogma, no systematic safety testing was ever done on ANY GMO.)

 

8. That no amount of evidence that they’re unsafe will ever sway system policy and propaganda. (The ad hoc testing which has been done, and by now there’s been a lot of it, including rigged tests done by the GMO rackets themselves, has unanimously found potential problems for human health, usually severe ones. Not a single test has EVER given GMOs a clean bill of health.)

 

9. That no one cares that every polity everywhere, with no exceptions, given any chance to democratically express its will, has rejected GMOs.

 

10. That no one cares that agroecology has been proven to outperform industrial ag, including GMOs, according to every measure.

 

I think that if you put 1-10 together (and there may be others I’m not thinking of offhand), they constitute proof that the system’s top-down forcing of GMOs (a command economic policy by any measure; no polity anywhere has ever endorsed them or failed to reject them given a chance) has nothing to do with any consideration at all other than the profit imperative, the corporate domination imperative, the totalitarian power imperative.

 

I’m planning to write this up as a long essay/draft for a book. My posts here will be at first notes toward this project, and later drafts for it.