[Reader-list] Bill Gates & Africa's Food Supply

[Ananth]

June 6, 2007
The Profits of Philanthropy
Is Bill Gates Trying to Hijack Africa's Food Supply?

By BRUCE DIXON

http://www.counterpunch.org/dixon06062007.html

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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.) 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 robert_horschprogram 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.

BRUCE DIXON is editor of the Black Agenda Report.