Poor-Washing, the Gates Foundation & the 'Green Revolution' in Africa

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=236&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=40

*By Bruce Dixon, blackagendareport.com <http://www.blackagendareport.com/>*
*
June 07, 2007*

Genetically altered crops will rescue Africa from endemic shortfalls in food
production, claim corporate foundations that have announced a $150 million
"gift" to spark a "Green Revolution" in agriculture on the continent. Of
course, U.S.-based agribusiness holds the patents to these wondercrops, and
can exercise their proprietary "rights" at will. Are corporate foundations
really out to feed the hungry, or are they hypocritical Trojan Horses on a
mission to hijack the world's food supply - to create the most complete and
ultimate state of dependency.

"Poor-washing" is the common public relations tactic of concealing bitterly
unfair and predatory trade policies that create and deepen hunger and
poverty with clouds of hypocritical noise about feeding the hungry and
alleviating poverty. It's hard to imagine a better case of media
poor-washing than the hype around the recently announced $150 million
"gifts" of the Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations to the cause of reforming
African agriculture, feeding that continent's impoverished millions and
sparking an African "Green Revolution"

For ADM, Cargill, Monsanto and other agribusiness giants farming as humans
have practiced it the last ten thousand years is a big problem. The problem
is that when farmers plant and harvest crops, setting a little aside for
next year's seed, people eat, but corporations don't get paid. That problem
has been so thoroughly solved in US food production that chemical
fertilizers and pesticides create a biological dead zone of hundreds of
square miles in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi, draining much of
the continent's richest farmland, empties into it. U.S. law requires the
registration all crop varieties, and makes it extraordinarily difficult for
farmers to save and plant their own seed year to year without paying
royalties to corporations who "own" the genetic code of those crops.

But until recently in the developing world, farmers still planted, plowed
and harvested without paying American agribusiness anything. The first
attempt to "monetize" food production took place a generation ago in
Southeast Asia and India. Called the "Green Revolution" its public face was
a masterpiece of pious poor-washing. A thin layer of native academic,
"experts" and local officials were bought off, and slick ad campaigns were
told local farmers the road to prosperity was the use of vast quantities of
pesticides, herbicides, and high-yield crops grown for international markets
instead of feeding local populations.

The "Green Revolution" in India worked out well for the middlemen who sold
the chemicals and lent poor farmers money to buy them, and for its
wealthiest farmers. But when millions of farmers, on the advice foreign and
domestic "experts" produced cotton, sugar and export crops for the world
market instead of food to feed their neighbors, several nasty things
happened. The prices for those export staples went down, so poor farmers
wound up without the cash to repay loans for the year's seed and chemicals.
Food which used to be abundant and locally grown became scarce, expensive
and had to come from other regions or overseas. The chemicals killed many
beneficial plants and insects, and promoted the emergence of newer, tougher
pests and diseases. Export crops needed more water than traditional ones, so
wealthy farmers monopolized what water there was to feed their export crops.
Man-made famines occurred. People starved or became dependent on imported
foreign grain. Millions of farmers were forced to sell their land (or
sometimes their children) to pay off their debts, and move to the cities.

In the tradition of the European explorers unleashed on the rest of humanity
with letters from their kings entitling them to claim and seize the lands,
treasure and inhabitants of all places not under the rule of white Christian
princes, the US patent office began in the 1990s, granting American
corporations exclusive "patents" for varieties of rice produced in Asia for
thousands of years, for beans grown in Mexico centuries before Columbus, and
for all the products which were or might be made from trees, plants, roots
and molds growing in the rain forests of Africa and Asia. Indian courts,
under pressure from their citizens, rebuffed for now American attempts to
collect royalties for the production of basmati rice, which farmers in India
and Pakistan have cultivated for centuries. But every developing country
can't bring to the table against the U.S. the power that India, with a fifth
of the world's population can.

In the US media this privatization of nature is called "the biotech
industry". Most of humanity outside the U.S. call it biopiracy. In the last
decade, corporate "life scientists" in the biotech industry have invented,
and the US Department of Agriculture has patented a perverse but profitable
technology which prevents a current year's crop from producing usable seed
for next year's planting. These "terminator seeds" will force farmers to
return to corporate seed suppliers every year.

For the last 20 years, the US has, with varying degrees of success, bullied,
bribed and threatened governments on six continents to enforce its
skull-and-crossbones patent laws through bilateral trade agreements ---
think NAFTA and CAFTA - through World Bank and International Monetary Fund
dictates, and the World Trade Organization. Today UN bodies and dozens of
individual countries are under pressure to allow the introduction of
genetically modified crops and terminator seed technologies into their food
chains. Despite their poverty and need for development aid, African
countries, informed by the world media (outside the US) have been forced by
their own citizens, scientists and farmers to stoutly resist Western efforts
to undermine their food security. But the slick and shiny PR campaign around
the Gates and Rockerfeller initiatives, supposedly addressed at alleviating
world hunger seem to mark a new stage in the continuing scramble for African
resources.

Last year, the Gates Foundation hired former Monsanto VP Robert Robert
Horsch as senior program officer for Africa. Monsanto is the company that
invented "biotechnology" and the patenting of life forms by corporations.
This is the context for the "philanthropy" of the Gates and Rockerfeller
Foundations, and their expressed concern for foisting a "Green Revolution"
upon Africa. Will African farmers and their governments be forced to pay
American corporations to cultivate the crops they have for centuries? Global
capital and competition to control the world's remaining energy have put
Africa's oil resources in the sights of America's strategic planners. If the
Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations, along with Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and
other agribusiness and biotech and "life science" players have anything to
say about it, Africa's food supply is up for grabs too.

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