Posted on: Friday, June 1st 2012 Written By: Rady Ananda
Last
year, at the G8 Summit held at Camp David, President Obama met with
private industry and African heads of state to launch the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition,
a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic
agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations,
while destroying the ecosphere for profit.
And Bono, of the rock group U2, is out shilling for Monsanto on this one.
It's phase 2 of the Green Revolution. Tanzania, Ghana, and Ethiopia
are the first to fall for the deception, with Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire,
Burkina Faso and other African nations lining up for the "Grow Africa
Partnership," under Obama's "Global Agricultural Development" plan.
In Obama Pitches India Model of GM Genocide to Africa, Scott Creighton writes:
But African civil society wants no part of this latest Monsanto
aligned 'public private partnership.' Whatever will the progressives do
now that their flawless hero has teamed up with their most hated nemesis
to exploit an entire continent like they did to India not that long
ago?
With a commitment of $3 billion, Obama plans to 'partner
up' with mega-multinationals like Monsanto, Diageo, Dupont, Cargill,
Vodafone, Walmart, Pepsico, Prudential, Syngenta International, and
Swiss Re because, as one USAID representative says 'There are things
that only companies can do, like building silos for storage and
developing seeds and fertilizers.'
Of course, that's an
outrageous lie. Private citizens have been building their own silos for
centuries. But it's true that only the biowreck engineers will foist
patented seeds and toxic chemicals on Africa.
Creighton continues:
Bono says that there has to be a 'public private partnership' in order
to get this done and that they are going to be using the ideas of the
African people and farmers. Really? This is what the African farmers say
to that...
'We request that:
– governments, FAO, the G8, the World Bank and the GAFSP reconsider
their promotion of Public/Private Partnerships which, as they are now
conceived, are not suitable instruments to support the family farms
which are the very basis of African food security and sovereignty.' African Civil Society Organizations
I wonder if that could be any clearer. They don't WANT the public
private partnerships involved in this process.... It's not enough that
huge mega-corporations are bleeding the nations of Africa dry by sucking
the valuable mineral resources out of their hills. No. As Bono says about the development in Africa:
'They're future consumers for the United States. The president is talking business. This is good. It's a whole new development paradigm today. The old donor/recipient relationship... it's over.'
Volatility chimed in:
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.
But, in the Green Revolution, writes Volatility:
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....
[T]he 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.
Like with Monsanto's Bt cotton deployed in India, at first yields improved and farmers profited. Now, however, according to a leaked Advisory from the Minister of Agriculture obtained by the Hindustan Times last month:
Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt cotton.... In
fact cost of cotton cultivation has jumped...due to rising costs of
pesticides. Total Bt cotton production in the last five years has
reduced.
The Advisory definitively links farmer suicides to
debt-enslavement enabled by the synthetic food model spawned by
Monsanto, Dupont and other ecocidal corporations: "The spate of farmer
suicides in 2011-12 has been particularly severe among Bt cotton
farmers."
That's not all the harm wrought by the
petrochemical synthetic ag industry, as this 2012 superweed map by the
University of Wisconsin shows:
Over half of US states are now plagued by agrochemically-induced superweeds. An industry sponsored study of pesticide use predicts that by 2016, nearly a billion pounds of these toxic chemicals will be poured on US soils.
Insects have also developed resistance. As reported
last August, “The Western rootworm beetle – one of the most serious
threats to corn – has developed resistance to Monsanto’s Bt-corn, and
entire crops are being lost.”
In March, two dozen corn entomologists
warned regulators that the only way to defeat growing insect
resistance to genetically modified corn is to plant non-GMO seed.
“Increasing pesticide use or buffer zone size will not solve the
growing problem of rootworm resistance to corn genetically modified.”
But if that doesn’t deter African farmers, these petrochemicals have
also been linked to human birth defects. Where “Roundup Ready soy is
being cultivated on a massive scale,” reports Dr. Mercola, “widespread reports exist of immediate illness defects from massive glyphosate spraying operations.”
In fact, “Monsanto, Philip Morris and other U.S. tobacco giants
knowingly poisoned Argentinean tobacco farmers with pesticides,” reports
Courthouse News Service, “causing ‘devastating birth defects’ in their children, dozens of workers claim in court.”
The Bt toxin used to engineer cotton and corn also kills human kidney cells, reports Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji, and the drift from aerial application of Roundup prompted the Mississippi Rice Council to sound a national alarm over genetic damage to natural rice, calling for severely restricted aerial application.
Newly
emergent pathogens have appeared, reports Dr. Don M. Huber, a plant
pathologist who coordinates the Emergent Diseases and Pathogens
committee of the American Phytopathological Society, as part of the USDA
National Plant Disease Recovery System. Last year, his team discovered
a “self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be
causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in
Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto’s RR corn.”
Huber’s warning to the USDA to halt GM crop approvals, and
specifically, genetically modified alfalfa, was not only ignored, but
two months ago, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack hastened the approval process
for genetically engineered crops.
“The new rules will cut the time needed to approve biotech crops in half,” reports Dr. Mercola,
“from an average of three years, to about 13 months for new versions
of already existing crop technologies, and about 16 months for brand
new technologies.”
Obama’s Global Agricultural Development plan conspires with
multinational corporations to foist these ecological and human health
costs onto the public while siphoning the profits. As Creighton says,
“Socialized costs, privatized profits. All in the name doing good and
saving the people of Africa.”
Let’s hope these “public/private partnerships” are met with firm resistance by African farmers, as supported by this Declaration
from a group of African civil society organizations. The last thing
Planet Earth and all its organisms need is more toxic industrial
chemicals.
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/05/u2-bono-celeb-partners-with-monsanto-g8.html
