- Is there more than meets the eye in the sudden flurry
of talk about a world food crisis, asks Eric Walberg...
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- Food protests and riots have swept more than 20 countries
in the past few months, including Egypt. On 2 April, World Bank President
Robert Zoellick told a meeting in Washington that there are 33 countries
where price hikes could cause widespread social unrest. The UN World Food
Programme called the crisis the silent tsunami, with wheat prices almost
doubling in the past year alone, and stocks falling to the lowest level
since the perilous post-WWII days. One billion people live on less than
$1 a day. Some 850 million are starving. Meanwhile, world food production
increased a mere 1 per cent in 2006, and with increasing amounts of output
going to biofuels, per capita consumption is declining.
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- The most commonly stated reasons include rising fuel
costs, global warming, deterioration of soils, and increased demand in
China and India. So is it all just a case of hard luck and poor planning?
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- There is just too much of a pattern, and too many elements
all pointing in the same direction. Anyone following the news will have
heard of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which first met in 1921
and the group that represents the inner circle within the inner circle,
the Bilderberg Club, which first met in 1954. The latter, once a highly
secretive organisation bringing together select world political and business
leaders, was exposed to the media spotlight in 1990s and since then has
had to endure increasing criticism for its, to say the least, undemocratic
role in shaping political leaders' thinking and actions in accordance with
the desires of the world business elite.
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- The US has never been shy about flaunting world opinion.
A case in point is its sole "nay" to multiple UN General Assembly
and conference resolutions which declare that "health care and proper
nourishment are human rights". The resolution was approved by a vote
of 135-1 in 1981 under president Ronald Reagan, and at UN-sponsored food
summits by similar margins in 1996 under president Bill Clinton and in
2002 under President Bush, dismissing any "right to food".
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- Whether Republican or Democrat, Washington instead champions
free trade as the key to ending the poverty which it argues is at the root
of hunger, and expresses fears that recognition of a right to food could
lead to lawsuits from poor nations seeking aid and special trade provisions.
And these are only resolutions by a powerless body which is in any case
virtually subservient to the US. We can see at this very moment how this
international humanitarian body is not above using starvation of innocent
Gazans as a political tool in the interests of the status quo. Despite
loud protestations to the contrary, there is little real international
will opposing a future where millions die of starvation while a world elite
consolidate their power.
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- Trying to come to grips with the world food crisis, it's
hard not to subscribe to some version of a conspiracy theory - that somehow,
for some reason, this rush towards widespread world famine is actually
a plan by a world clique intent on drastically reducing the world population,
accelerating the collapse of national governments, allowing gigantic world
corporations effectively to take their place, controlling vast areas of
land, leading towards a world governed by these corporations. Especially
with the US so clear in its assumption that indeed widespread famine is
in the cards, for which it does not want to be held responsible. Forget
about global warming (which is of course very real and harmful to food
production). Here are a few more red flags.
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- First, the WB and IMF, set up largely by the US following
WWII, are notorious for refusing to advance loans to poor countries unless
they agree to Structural Adjustment Programmes that require the loan recipients
to devalue their currencies, cut taxes, privatise utilities and reduce
or eliminate support programmes for farmers. The results are a weakened
state, impoverished local farmers and increased economic domination by
international corporations. Combined with this is constant pressure on
poor countries to lower tariffs, preventing them from building up their
industrial potential, often destituting their farmers who cannot compete
with heavily subsidised produce from rich nations.
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- Second, rich country subsidies, in Canada, for example,
allow the federal government to pay farmers $225 for each pig killed in
an ongoing mass cull of breeding swine, as part of a plan to reduce hog
production. Some of the slaughtered hogs may be given to local Food Banks,
but most will be destroyed or made into pet food. None will go to, say,
Haiti.
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- Third, biofuel programmes are now channelling massive
quantities of cereal and other crops to produce fuel for the world's wealthy
to run their second and third family cars while close to a billion starve.
Add in GMO products, which are now being forced on poor countries (and
not only) by large multinationals, protected by copyright laws, effectively
enslaving farmers in perpetuity, not to mention their likely dire effects
on loss of crop variety.
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- Last but not least, the current US-sponsored wars in
the Middle East, with the resultant sky-rocketing oil prices, are merely
accelerating a descent into the abyss, as it and its conjunct, NATO, continue
to expand beyond all responsible limits and venture into Asia, threatening
more and more recalcitrant countries with loss of sovereignty, subversion
and outright invasion.
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- But you don't have to believe in a "Made it Happen
On Purpose" (MHOP) conspiracy for either 9/11 or the food crisis.
As political analyst William Blum, famously cited by Osama Bin Laden on
one of his video missives, writes, "we're speaking of men making decisions,
based not on people's needs but on pseudo-scientific, amoral mechanisms
like supply and demand, commodity exchanges, grain futures, selling short,
selling long, and other forms of speculation, all fed and multiplied by
the proverbial herd mentality - a system governed by only two things: fear
and greed; not a rational way to feed a world of human beings."
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- Blum subscribes to a "Let it Happen On Purpose"
(LHOP) explanation concerning 9/11, that whatever conspiracy there is is
loose and unorganised, that a big dose of incompetence mixed with justified
anger by the oppressed is producing an explosive concoction, but that it
is still possible that leaders will wake up and address the issues sensibly.
This is a much more comforting worldview, but one that looks thinner and
thinner as the whirlwind gathers momentum. While Blum dismisses speculation
about the food crisis as conspiracy, the links between the current world
upheavals starting with 9/11 are there for all to see, and less and less
seems to separate MHOP from LHOP as time marches on.
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- In fact there has been a food crisis ever since imperialism
really got underway three centuries ago. Perhaps the most extensive famines
in history were presided over by Britain in India in the 18-20th centuries.
It has merely metamorphosed over time, just as has the "one world"
movement that imperialism itself launched. Back then, it was more obvious:
burn, rape, dispossess, enslave, create monopolies for trade and production
(plantations), talk about "darkest Africa". Now it is the WTO,
WB, IMF, emergency loans, privatisation, GMO crops, just possibly, the
gathering "food crisis".
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- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez perhaps said it best:
"It is a massacre of the world's poor. The problem is not the production
of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The
capitalist model is in crisis."
- Then what is really going on?
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- First of all, let's get rid of the idea that we are seeing
"impersonal market forces" at work. Supply and demand is not
a law, it's a policy, one that clearly cannot solve the problem. Second,
let's ask the question which any competent investigator should pose when
starting out on the trail of a possible crime: "Who benefits?"
Indeed we can even describe the crime as genocide if the events in question
are avoidable or planned. Those who benefit are obviously the ones who
finance agricultural operations, those who are charging monopoly prices
for the commodities in demand, the various middlemen who bring the products
to market, and the owners of the land and other assets used in the production/consumption
cycle.
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- In other words, it's the financial elite of the world
who have gained control of the most basic necessity of life, guided by
a long-term strategy by international finance to starve much of the world's
population in order to seize their land and control their natural resources.
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- In Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They
Are Making (2008), David Rothkopf, currently at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, former deputy undersecretary of commerce for international
trade under Clinton and managing director of Kissinger and Associates,
brazenly outlines the real situation. As a consummate insider, he is clearly
someone who should know. He argues that a global elite now run
the planet and have usurped the power of national governments while ensuring
laws constrained by borders are all but obsolete. "Each one of them
is one in a million. They number six thousand on a planet of six billion.
They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of
international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows,
the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organisations. They are
the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time,"
states the promo for the book. This elite "see national governments
as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the
elite's global operations. Their connections to each other have become
more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments."
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- But why would an insider give the plot away to us plebes,
you may well ask. For one thing, the exposure of the conspirators in the
world media - yes, the Internet and satellite communications work both
ways - has meant that there is a pressing need for some soothing PR, showing
us that whatever conspiracy there is is benign, for our own good, necessary,
if you will. That's the only explanation for such a startlingly frank insider's
account as Superclass provides.
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- Secondly, it seems the time is ripe to move forward on
this plan to drastically reduce world population, and increase control
of the Earth's land and resources for a world elite in perpetuity. One-world
government, super imperialism, call it what you will.
- The expansion of the US military empire abroad, the Trojan
Horse of the conspiracy, comes with the creation of a totalitarian system
of surveillance at home and abroad, put into place as part of the "War
on Terror". Human microchip implants for tracking purposes are starting
to be used. The military-industrial complex has become the US's largest
and most successful industry, intent on destroying both foreign and domestic
"enemies". The pieces are now in place for world domination.
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- The 20th century - any conspiracy really can only be
clearly argued starting from the Great War-to-end-all-war - surely was
the US century, meaning it was able to impose its ideology of markets,
consumerism and individualism even to the far reaches of Communist Russia
and China, and hence ensure that the global elite it set in motion will
subscribe in some form to its agenda - if indeed there is one.
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- This situation is in fact a perverse form of Kant's recipe
for world peace: countries must be willing to cede sovereignty to prevent
war. His idealistic proposal floundered on the unwillingness of countries
to cede meaningful autonomy to a world body, as the experience of the League
of Nations and the UN have shown in spades. However, once the US succeeded
in amassing overwhelming economic might in the world and in splitting up
the SU, it proceeded to use NATO as just such a world body, successfully
tempting the resultant statelets to join it. The plan was for Russia to
be coaxed into the fold as well, though this part of the plan has, as it
turns out, hit a snag.
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- What about foreign aid? Yes, Bush just proposed spending
an additional $770 million, bringing next year's budget of food assistance
to $2.6 billion. But since this is tied aid, forcing countries to import
subsidised US produce, less than half the amount actually reaches the starving
peasants, and combined with WB/IMF structural adjustment policies such
aid really does more to compound the problem than provide any real long-term
change for the better.
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- For sceptics about the possibility of some form of LHOP/MHOP,
just consider the following: if indeed 6,000 elite business leaders control
the world's fate, surely such an immensely wealthy and powerful coterie
could solve the food crisis in a flash. The massive expenditures on arms
and the wanton destruction they cause every second, could, if stopped,
provide the will and resources to restructure the world to end starvation,
let alone poverty, leaving lots left over for the elite to wallow in. There
is no organised force of any consequence opposing this world elite. What's
stopping it?
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- ***
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- Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach
him at <http://www.geocities.com/walberg2002/>www.geocities.com/walberg2002/
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