- Multi-national food corporations are increasingly using
global food insecurity as a tool for political control. The International
Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reports that "land grabbing"
by foreign investors in developing countries has resulted in a new form
of colonialism. Spanish NGO, GRAIN reports that rich countries are buying
poor countries' fertile soil, water and sun to ship food and fuel back
home. IFPRI researcher Joachim von Braun states, "About one-quarter
of these investments are for biofuel plantations."
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- Agribusiness imposes a devastating toll on small farmers
worldwide. Landowners in African countries, where there are no official
land deeds, have no legal recourse against foreign companies that steal
their farmland. In the United States ranchers and farmers lose their land
to agribusinesses and end up working as employees. American cattle ranchers
have the highest suicide rate among American professions. Similar humiliations
have also led thousands of farmers in India to take their own lives.
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- The `Global Food Security Act' [S384] recently introduced
in the US Senate will give USAID $7.5 billion over five years. Arun Shrivastava
of the Centre for Research on Globalization reports: "USAID is actually
an arm of the US-Department of Defense; it serves US foreign policy interest
and has little to do with humanism." There are two other similar pending
bills, HR875 and S425.
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- Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater's
Manifesto, points out that while purporting to address issues of global
nutrition and health, "the US Congress is hell bent on introducing
laws with global reach that would destroy the very basis of people's food
security and food sovereignty."
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- HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009,
writes Barbara Minton in Natural News, "would effectively hand over
control of America's food supply to such a nefarious giant as Monsanto
and its lesser counterparts such as Tyson and Cargill."
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- Monsanto GMO corn plants, which were designed with a
built-in resistance to Monsanto's weed killers, have already devastated
thousands of South African farmers. The corn plants look healthy, but inside
the husks there are no kernels! This GMO crop failure highlights the dangers
of agribusiness domination of the global food supply.
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- "To ensure the perpetuation of its near monopoly,
Monsanto is helping to install the right people in the right places,"
Minton continues. "To that end, Michael Taylor, the ex FDA head who
approved the use of bovine growth hormone (rBGH), has just become ensconced
in the Obama transition team where he may soon be overseeing food safety.
He will join already well placed Tom Vilsack, the pro-GMO Secretary of
Agriculture."
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- South Africa repeats the pattern of Iraq and of Afghanistan,
where new laws prohibit farmers to save or trade their own seeds. These
laws being promoted within the US would also block access to non-GMO seeds.
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- "Iraq, it must be remembered, has the oldest history
of farming and one of the longest traditions of cultivation in the civilized
world," writes Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard of India. According
to the Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS) in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, "Farm-saved seeds and the free exchange of planting
materials among farmers have long been the basis of agricultural practice
in Iraq."
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- The Oil-for-Food program in Iraq forced the large-scale
importation of food after the first Gulf War. Devastated Iraqi farmers
then became the victims of USAID.
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- Under US occupation, Iraqi farmers must pay a "technology
fee" plus an annual license fee to agribusinesses supplying the seeds
and equipment. Similar policies exist in Afghanistan, which compel dependency
on supplies from multi-national agribusinesses while industrial agricultural
training courses provide the US military with opportunities to gather intelligence
from the local population. A US Special Forces civil affairs manager in
Afghanistan explains, "The presence of this agricultural center is
a security measure in and of itself."
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- GRAIN reports, "The war provides these corporations
with both a lucrative short-term market in the blossoming "reconstruction"
industry and an opportunity to integrate Afghanistan into their global
production networks and markets in the long term."
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- Industrial agriculture is based on mono-cropping, use
of GMO seeds, fertilizers, lethal pesticides, and expensive farm machinery.
Environmentalists say these methods cause topsoil erosion, depleted soil
fertility, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, decreased nutritional
value of food, and serious health risks. Iowa State University biotech
researchers are putting flu vaccines into the DNA of corn, reports Bryan
Salvage in the Meat and Poultry Journal. This genetic manipulation is likely
to increase the rate of viral mutation, rather than to reduce disease as
claimed.
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- French Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, molecular endocrinologist
at the University of Caen found that Monsanto's GMO corn damages the liver
and kidneys like pesticides. Hungarian biology professor Bela Darvas of
Debrecen University discovered that Monsanto's corn endangers protected
insect species. Spiegel reports that because corn is a wind-pollinated
plant, GMO crops inevitably contaminate nearby farms. Because of these
dangers, Germany has banned GMO corn.
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- Those wishing to avoid GMO should buy foods certified
"organic."
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- Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East
affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil
Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.
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- http://karinfriedemann.blogspot.com/2009/06/
industrialized-farming-endangers-wor\ ld.html
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