On April 20th, 2010 an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, instantly killing 11 workers and injuring 15. The rig was owned by Transocean Ltd. and under contract with British Petroleum. Halliburton was contracted to perform a variety of operations on the rig including a well-plugging procedure called “cementing”, which they performed less than 24 hours before the explosion. Faulty cementing was the cause of a November 2005 oil spill that the Deepwater Horizon was involved in, as well as one that occurred one week later at a different oil rig in the same area. Two days later (which happened to be 2010’s Earthday) the Deepwater Horizon sank, causing two large breaks in the oil pipeline at the ocean floor (about 5,000 feet below the surface). The Coast Guard originally estimated 1,000 barrels of oil a day were leaking into the ocean but the number was revised to 5,000 barrels a day soon after. The precise rate of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico has yet to be determined, but scientists who specialize in spill calculations have warned of a worst case scenario of tens of thousands of barrels a day, which would amount to an Exxon Valdez magnitude disaster every few days.

As of May 18th, the official wildlife death toll caused by the oil spill was 189 sea turtles, 23 birds and 12 dolphins. In actuality the numbers are certainly much higher and will get worse in the future even years after the well is plugged, which it still has not been completely. Throughout the unfolding disaster, the responsible corporations acted swiftly and decisively…to limit their liability, protect profits and pass the buck. Interestingly, most of the “solutions” to the spill attempted by BP, including the failed “top hat” containment strategy on May 8 and the “syphon tubes” installed on May 16, allowed BP to keep collecting oil and did nothing to actually stop the spill. At some unspecified point during the cleanup efforts, BP began spraying a chemical dispersant called Corexit onto the surface oil, despite the fact that dispersants only hide the appearance of oil by breaking it into tinier drops more easily absorbed by living organisms and such chemicals have also been linked to cancer and genetic mutations. BP has bought up a third of the world’s supply of dispersant, and by their own accounts have dumped at least 800,000 gallons of it into the Gulf of Mexico (as of 5/25/10). Not surprisingly, Nalco Co., the manufacturer of Corexit, has board members who are also executives at BP and Exxon. To BP’s further embarassment, on May 25 attorney Brent Coon released internal BP documents showing explicitly that BP had a policy of cutting costs at the expense of upholding optimum safety standards. On May 13th, Transocean Ltd. petitioned the Houston federal court to cap their liability at less than $27 million using an archaic maritime law from 1851. Less than a week later, Transocean informed shareholders that they would be receiving a $1 billion payout starting in July. Given the legal recognition of corporate personhood in the U.S., which allows corporations all the rights and benefits of individuals, perhaps it’s time to give them the same responsibilities and penalties as well? If any corporations are deserving of a death penalty, it’s BP and Transocean Ltd.

As callous, incompetent and self-serving as the corporate response to the disaster has been, the government’s response has not been much better. This would be expected from the Republicans, who have a long history of denial and ignorance regarding environmental issues, but most of us had more hope for Obama. His administration supported BP’s initial conservative assessment of the rate of the oil spill which even at the time contradicted the analysis from many environmental scientists. This in effect downplayed the true scale of the disaster and helped BP stall for time before taking action. In recent press conferences Obama has appeared very apologetic, accepting responsibility for the mishandling of the disaster response, yet he continues to reject the idea of a federal takeover of the situation while defending BP’s inadequate and ineffective measures. But perhaps this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise because during the last election Obama was the biggest recipient of BP cash of all the candidates, and just weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Obama announced plans for expansion of oil and gas drilling off the coast of the eastern seaboard and Alaska. Rather than a full reversal of this decision in light of the Gulf Spill disaster, Obama has called for a 6 month moratorium on new drilling permits (enough time for people to forget?) but has not halted plans for 49 offshore drills that were approved without a full environmental review. Despite his flaws, I hope Obama doesn’t become the scapegoat because there are many guilty parties that deserve to share the blame, including the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service division, who during the Bush administration were involved in sex, drug and bribe scandals with oil executives and may have improperly awarded safety certificates to BP and Transocean Ltd.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/bp-gulf-oil-spill-timeline.php

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/24/gulf-oil-spill-bad-cement_n_586952.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14oil.html
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/17/bp-dispersant-toxic/
http://themoderatevoice.com/73831/epa-orders-bp-to-cut-back-corexit-dispersant-on-gulf-oil-slick/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-25/shocking-bp-memo-and-the-oil-spill-in-the-gulf/
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62T06520100331
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/bp-bill-nelson-oil-spill
http://dieoff.org/page55.htm

On Saturday May 8 CAGJ joined over 250 other Seattleites for “Spring into Bed”, a city-wide day of action dedicated to creating individual and community vegetable gardens as well as “food justice” gardens throughout Seattle. We couldn’t have asked for a lovelier day or a more exciting event for our first Teach-out of the season! We visited Croft Place Townhomes in the Delridge Neighborhood and helped to create a community garden space for the folks who live there.

I arrived a bit early and was sent to help Sandy Rathbun, a resident of the community, gather materials for the day’s project. As a long time gardener, Sandy has wanted to start a community garden at Croft Place since she moved there. I was excited about the space outside of the housing units that appeared to be perfect for vegetable gardening until I was informed that those beds were intended for ornamental plants (though not much was planted in them at all) and were regularly sprayed with Round-up.  Sandy had planted some herbs and vegetables outside of her own home but that space, too, had been recently sprayed.  Naturally, she was concerned about eating the tainted vegetables.  She told me that she has continually asked the property managers to stop spraying the area, so far to no avail.  The compromise: to build raised beds for vegetable gardening at the front of the property, far from the Round-up’s range.

When the rest of the volunteers arrived we met with Ariana Taylor-Stanley, who works for the Delridge Neighborhood Development Association. She informed us that Delridge is a “food desert”, meaning that there is no place in the neighborhood where residents can buy fresh produce.  The bus that travels to the nearest grocery store requires the ability to walk a decent distance up hill to get to it, so those who are less able-bodied have little choice about the kinds of foods that they can buy.  People who live in Delridge who don’t have access to transportation have to purchase their food at places like gas stations and corner stores, which only sell snack foods and highly processed canned or boxed “meals” that are high in calories but low in nutrients.  This project is particularly special because it is the third community garden in Delridge; the DNDA owns seven housing communities in Delridge and hopes to eventually provide opportunities for all residents of these communities to increase their food sovereignty. The Croft Place garden will be able to provide some fresh produce to residents of all 21 units at Croft Place if they want it.

Ariana and Sandy worked together for months planning out the garden and holding meetings to get other community members excited and involved. Croft Place also has an after-school kids gardening club which meets weekly and had already started several seeds for the community’s garden including tomatoes, spinach, kale, chard, broccoli and salad greens. The plan for the day was to build 10 raised beds (1 for each duplex unit to share), a perennial border to protect the garden from roadside emissions and an herb garden.  With the help of several kids from the gardening club, a few other adult residents of Croft Place and15 CAGJ volunteers, the project was underway!  Some of us began by cutting boards for the 4’ x 8’ raised bed frames while others dug holes around the perimeter of the soon-to-be garden for the shrubs that were later transplanted there.

It was remarkable to witness the speedy transformation of the relatively barren tract of land into a beautiful garden space.  Before lunch time, all 10 beds were built and set into place and the perennial border finished.  We worked the earth beneath the bed frames to provide more space for the vegetables’ root systems and filled the beds with rich compost that was sure to make the kids’ veggie seedlings happy very soon. Parche Stevens, a resident who helped to build the raised beds, spent the better part of the morning leveling out the earth in the spot of one bed in particular.  Before returning home, he requested claim for his duplex in that spot, the one that he had already made a connection with through shovel and rake.

During lunch, a few more Croft Place residents joined us to give a heart-felt “thank you” to Sandy and Ariana for all of their hard work and help in seeing the project through. After filling our bellies, we joined back together in the garden to finish topping off the beds with compost and planting in the herb garden.  As we were moving those last wheel barrels of compost down the hill, I couldn’t help but imagine what the garden might look like in a few months; what shapes and colors will fill the ten empty earthen canvases? What culinary artwork will be created from the herb and vegetable gardens? How many more people will develop a connection to this garden?  Will gardening help to connect members of the community more closely together?  Will it help to better connect adults with children?  What will they learn from each other?

What have we learned from one another?  I learned that it takes only one beautiful vision to inspire many others to take action.  I learned that if we work together and share knowledge openly we can accomplish anything.  Although we worked with no real sense of urgency, we created a community garden in half a day while other groups were doing the same throughout the city!  A wise teacher once told me that we must do everything that we do with the genuine intention of love; she said that if we do this, love will be reflected in whatever it is that we have created indefinitely and whomever encounters that creation will experience and be nourished by that love.  I believe that love flowed freely through Seattle on May 8; love for gardening, for community, for justice, for the earth.  While we were all working separately in our respective gardens under the banner of “Spring into Bed”, that love connected us all together and will continue to connect others who enter those gardens in the future to the original intention of the community’s creations.

For more on the Spring Into Bed event and outcome, visit their website!

By AGRA Watch members Ashley Fent, Phil Bereano, and Katie Talbot

May 18, 2010

Download the PDF here!

Full text:

AGRA Watch formed in 2008 to challenge the Gates Foundation’s participation in the problematic Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and to support sustainable, agro-ecological alternatives already practiced in Africa. We have witnessed an acceleration in the push for genetic engineering as a “solution” to hunger in Africa, a criminalization of GE’s opponents as eco-imperialists unwilling to accept scientific advancements, and a deification of philanthropic support for corporate solutions to global food issues. The Lugar-Carey bill is a case study in the interlocking interests of big business, big philanthropy, US foreign policy and US aid. Furthermore, several new developments in Kenyan legislation and in the international political economy threaten to use the global food crisis as an opening to solidify genetic engineering as a necessary part of food security strategies.

In 2009, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act (S. 384), which seeks to reform aid programs to focus on long-term agricultural development and the restructuring of aid agencies for better crisis response.[i] As part of this new reorganization, Lugar-Casey mandates funding for genetic engineering (GE) research.[ii] The bill is supported by CARE, Oxfam, Bread for the World, ONE, and US land grant colleges.[iii] In his opening statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar argued that worldwide food security is critical to US national security, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan where he says hunger has fueled conflict and extremism. [iv] Lugar believes that agricultural development in these “troubled” regions will ensure more peaceful conditions. He states specifically that he is “excited by [the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s] vision” and their “beneficence.”[v] Bill Gates and Bill Clinton expressed their support for the highly controversial, pro-GE Lugar-Casey bill before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.[vi]

In appeasing national security priorities and corporate interests, the Lugar-Casey bill overlooks key findings of the peer-reviewed International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which was initiated by United Nations agencies and the World Bank, and involved over four hundred scientists from around the world.[vii] The IAASTD found that agro-ecological methods (research, extension and farming) offer enormous potential, and that a multi-faceted approach to agriculture is needed, rather than a narrow focus of GE technologies on higher yield and nutritional enhancement.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has powerful sway in Seattle over employment (through Microsoft), the global development industry, and local non-profits, in a way that parallels their dominance in African agricultural and health sectors. AGRA Watch’s proximity to the Foundation places us in a prime position to challenge the undemocratic nature of its philanthropic stranglehold and its impacts, both locally and globally. The Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation are partners in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and are also involved in numerous other projects that are aimed at spreading the purported benefits of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Africa. The International Fund for Agricultural Development works closely with the Gates Foundation, ostensibly helping small farmers improve their livelihoods through more productive agriculture, breakthrough technologies, and better markets.[viii] Their shared goals pertain to the idea that, “Small farmers often need … access to markets, better seeds and more fertile soil, to better farm management practices, storage and transport facilities and market information. Technologies and innovations must be developed to meet the needs of the poorest people.”[ix]

The Gates Foundations, like other mega-philanthropies, use their financial power to push policies that they have decided are “needed.”  In this case, Gates has decided that GMOs are the solution for African agriculture. In 2009, the Gates Foundation gave $5.4 million to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, as part of its Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.[x] This funding went to the creation and management of the BioSafety Resource Network (BRN), and to research under the Gates’ Grand Challenges #9 Project, which seeks to develop nutritionally “enhanced” crop varieties of cassava, banana, sorghum and rice for subsistence farmers in the Global South. The Danforth Center states that the, “Results of this research will help to reduce the burden of malnutrition and … will support the creation and management of a resource network that will help African scientists incorporate biotech advances into subsistence farming.”[xi]

Among the key funders of The Danforth Center is the Monsanto Fund, the “philanthropic” arm of the Monsanto Company.[xii] One of the Fund’s main goals is, “Nutritional Improvement through Agriculture: Working to implement sustainable agricultural improvements through education and research. Focus areas include field techniques, education in the areas of nutrition and vitamin deficiency and reducing the impact of pest and virus’ on subsistence crops,” and to do this philanthropic work in areas where the company has important interests. This means that, like most philanthropic organizations set up by corporations, their business interests are barely distinguishable from their charitable ones. Monsanto—like other agri-corporations–has re-branded genetic engineering with a softer touch. Namely, they have painted themselves as concerned with the welfare of the world’s poor. In truth, these corporations are concerned with social responsibility only to the extent that it allows them to maintain good public relations and their bottom-line. At a deeper level, corporate agendas and philanthropic agendas are linked to US policy, and are thereby granted legitimacy and enormous influence over global political systems.

Yet, genetic engineering is politically, socially, and environmentally problematic. It poses risks to health, ecology, and biodiversity, and remains a highly uncontrolled experiment that impacts the lives and livelihoods of the world’s farmers while enriching corporations rooted in reckless violence and exploitation. (Monsanto, for example, still has not taken responsibility for manufacturing the chemical Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and has never renounced any of the enormous profits it made off of related deaths and deforestation in Vietnam.)[xiii] Genetic engineering does not remedy the root causes of global hunger, which lie in the politics of food distribution and poverty that keeps millions unable to buy adequate nourishment, rather than in insufficient global production. Furthermore, it often does not accomplish its basic goal of improving yield: there is growing evidence (even with huge corporate control over research universities) that GMOs do not work. Marcia Ishii-Eiteman of the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) states that, “Despite twenty years of research and thirteen years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to increase US crop yields, while driving up costs to farmers….”[xiv] In challenging the Lugar-Casey bill, Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First, said, “Past public-private partnerships on GM crops for Africa have proven to be colossal failures. The failed GM sweet potato project between Monsanto, USAID and a Kenyan research institute is a good example of fourteen years’ worth of wasted money and effort.”[xv] Nevertheless, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Syngenta Foundation jointly fund the Insect Resistant Maize for Africa Project (IRMA), a project of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI).[xvi] IRMA, KARI, and the International Maize and Wheat Centre (CIMMYT) are currently preparing to release genetically modified maize on a large-scale to Kenyan farmers in 2011, with a “pre-release” set for 2010.[xvii]

Given scientific data that discount the claims of genetic engineering, why would the “beneficent” structures of food aid and philanthropy remain tied to claims of GE’s usefulness in the Global South, particularly in Africa? According to numerous academics, policy observers, and activists, these structures are not about hunger. They are about capitalism and philanthro-capitalism: the opening of markets, the spending of wealth through tax-free foundations in order to surround wealthy principals with the aura of altruism, the expropriation of valuable resources at the lowest cost, the perpetuation of the myth that technology solves all problems, even social ones, and the intentional obfuscation of the exploitative roles of corporations.

This troubling trend in support for GE diffusion is evident in a recent Kenyan GM maize scandal. In January 2010, Dreyfus Commodities Ltd., an international grain handling company, received an export permit from South Africa to bring 40,000 metric tons—500,000 bags—of GM maize varieties into Kenya. In April, South Africa authorized another 240,000 tons after GM opponents blocked the initial shipment in the port of Mombasa.[xviii] When the Kenyan government opened a window for importation of duty-free maize in late 2009, it was predicated on an anticipated food shortage.[xix] However, at the time of this recent importation, Kenya was experiencing a bumper harvest of cereals. In early April 2010, MP John Mututho, chairman of the parliamentary committee on agriculture, protested the importation, arguing that “The government should buy the surplus maize from the farmers. We have maize rotting in farms…As the Parliamentary Select Committee chairman on agriculture, I will lead a protest and the people who are importing … should take back this maize.”[xx] . Mututho echoes the concerns of civil society groups: Kenya does not need to import grain, and there has not been an adequate assessment of the potential risks of GMOs to human and environmental health.

The Kenya Biodiversity Coalition (KBioC), an alliance of nearly seventy organizations from farming, animal welfare, youth and other sectors, have expressed similar concerns. In response to the major influx of imported grain, the KBioC posed the question, “Why did the government extend the window to import duty free maize when farmers in Kenya are struggling with lack of storage facilities and low prices of their recently harvested cereals?”[xxi] This question supports the repeated calls for a critical exposé of the political and economic forces involved in GE technology, food aid, and agricultural development in Africa.

The recent importation of GM grains into Kenya is not unlike earlier uses of food aid in the service of corporations and industry. Proponents of genetic engineering often seek ingenious means of creating markets for biotechnology, with hopes of circumventing controversy and debate and intentionally fostering contamination of non-GM production. In 2002, USAID used the looming famine in Southern Africa as an opening for genetic engineering—they assumed that starving people would readily accept anything and everything that was sent, even if it was genetically engineered.[xxii] The same year, Emmy Simmons, assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said, “In four years, enough GE crops will have been planted in South Africa that the pollen will have contaminated the entire continent.”[xxiii] When the governments of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique resisted the GM maize, the responses of pro-GM officials in the US led Professor Noah Zerbe to argue that, “the promotion of biotechnology has nothing to do with ending hunger in the region…US food aid policy following the 2002 crisis was intended to promote the adoption of biotech crops in Southern Africa, expanding the market access and control of transnational corporations and undermining local smallholder production thereby fostering greater food insecurity on the Continent.” Similarly, the shipment to Kenya is taking numerous and dangerous shortcuts with the Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety, the African Model Law on Biosafety, and even Kenya’s own Biosafety Act, newly signed into effect by President Kibaki in 2009. And like the USAID shipment to Southern Africa in 2002, it has very little to do with hunger, and very much to do with politics.

The pro-GM lobby has frequently used the specter of hunger to disenfranchise Africans of their rights to make meaningful decisions about their lives. At the same time the World Bank and IMF push for “good governance” on the part of African governments, they and their partners support projects that suppress democracy and self-determination. Against this international political economy of powerful interests, grassroots civil society organizations are attempting to represent the demands of small farmers, pastoralists, and the poor. In response to the Lugar-Casey Bill, Ishii-Eitemann stated that, “The bigger, more fundamental challenge today is about restoring fairness and democratic control over our food systems. It is about increasing the profitability, well-being and resilience of small-scale and family farmers in the face of massive environmental and global economic challenges.”[xxiv] Similarly, AGRA Watch aims to re-center the debate on agricultural development in Africa within these larger challenges.

This resiliency depends in part on the wealth of biodiversity in African agriculture. It depends on the cultivation of a diversity of crops that are communally shared and saved, and are traditionally less susceptible to pests, droughts, and diseases than the very few varieties of staple crops consumed in the US. It depends on access to a varied, nutritional diet of locally available foods. The model of agriculture in the US does not promote safe and nutritious food for consumers, nor does it promote sustainable farming practices—it should not be upheld as a model for the world. Smallholders’ agricultural and economic resiliency must be ensured and protected by political and legislative channels as well: through strong national biosafety laws that follow the recommendations of the Cartegena Protocol and the African Model Law on Biosafety; through international trade relationships that do not privilege corporate and Global North interests over the demands of the Global South; and through national political arenas that recognize and reflect the needs of the electorate.

Groups such as KBioC draw from broader demands made by civil society organizations, which refute those in the pro-GM lobby who argue that resistance to genetic engineering is primarily a form of imperialism in which Global North activists attempt to deny Africans life-saving food and seed, or that the opposition within Africa is driven by the European bans on genetic engineering and the European desires not to lose market access. In response to the Southern Africa famine of 2002, Robert Zoellick—then US Trade Representative, now World Bank president—argued that the “dangerous effect of the EU’s moratorium became painfully evident last fall when some famine-stricken African countries refused US food aid because of fabricated fears stoked by irresponsible rhetoric about food safety.’”[xxv] The demands of KBioC and other GE opponents within Kenya indicate that despite concerns about “imperialism” on the part of the Global North activists, the more paramount and urgent concerns focus on contamination and destruction of biodiversity, and the associated lack of democracy and accountability in terms of biosafety.  In response to the case of Southern Africa in 2002, Noah Zerbe said, “…the decision to reject US food aid was based not merely on the environmental and health considerations typically raised by biotechs’ critics, but focused more directly on questions of domestic and international political economy, and on market access to the European Union and the potential premium paid for certified non-GM agriculture in particular.”[xxvi] Yet mainstream understandings of genetic engineering portray Africans as passive recipients of development, food aid, technology, and the controversies around them, rather than as actors in forming and articulating these international debates.

As KBioC and other small farmer organizations have shown, external forces will never solely determine the fate of African farming. Organizations working for food sovereignty have persistently and successfully stood up to some of the most powerful alliances in the world, and have asserted the rights of small farmers to determine agricultural policies that work for their own local and regional communities, rather than for the global market. We stand with them.

Comments are welcome. Please contact AGRA Watch, a campaign of the Community Alliance for Global Justice: agrawatch@seattleglobaljustice.org

Find us on the web: http://www.seattleglobaljustice.org/agra-watch/

[i] http://www.foodfirst.org/files/pdf/PB_18_Lugar-Casey_Full_15Apr09.pdf, http://www.panna.org/files/Press-Release-G8-16May09.pdf.

[ii] http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2412

[iii] http://lugar.senate.gov/food/legislation/

[iv] http://lugar.senate.gov/food/legislation/

[v] http://lugar.senate.gov/food/legislation/

[vi] http://globalfoodforthought.typepad.com/global-food-for-thought/2010/03/twin-bill.html

[vii] http://www.panna.org/files/Press-Release-G8-16May09.pdf

[viii] http://www.ifad.org/media/press/2009/nwanze_gates.htm

[ix] http://www.ifad.org/media/press/2009/nwanze_gates.htm

[x] http://www.danforthcenter.org/NEWSMEDIA/leaflet/Danforth_Leaflet_Feb_2009.pdf

[xi] http://www.danforthcenter.org/NEWSMEDIA/leaflet/Danforth_Leaflet_Feb_2009.pdf

[xii] http://www.danforthcenter.org/about/mission.asp

[xiii] http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/for_the_record/agent_orange.asp

[xiv] http://www.panna.org/files/Press-Release-G8-16May09.pdf

[xv] http://www.panna.org/files/Press-Release-G8-16May09.pdf

[xvi] Mbaria, John. http://allafrica.com/stories/200810060873.html

[xvii] Mbaria, John. http://allafrica.com/stories/200810060873.html

[xviii] http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=nw20100412223452635C732103, Reuters pdf

[xix] http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Company%20Industry/-/539550/668996/-/u6gpadz/-/index.html

[xx] Wekesa, Chrispinus. http://www.marsgroupkenya.org/multimedia/?StoryID=287174

[xxi] KBioC Press Release Tuesday, March 23, 2010

[xxii] Zerbe, Noah. http://www.humboldt.edu/~nrz3/research/zerbe_feeding.pdf

[xxiii] Bereano, Philip http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20021119&slug=bereano19

[xxiv] http://www.panna.org/files/Press-Release-G8-16May09.pdf

[xxv] Zerbe, Noah. http://www.humboldt.edu/~nrz3/research/zerbe_feeding.pdf

[xxvi] Zerbe, Noah. http://www.humboldt.edu/~nrz3/research/zerbe_feeding.pdf

Thursday, April 29th
7:00-9:00pm
FREE
Gowen Hall Room 201 at the University of Washington, just north of Suzzallo Library

Josphat Ngonyo Executive Director of African Network for Animal Welfare, a lead organization in the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, is coming to Seattle!  Kenya is currently at a crossroads between burgeoning organic movements, and its participation in the “New Green Revolution” for Africa, financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their partners. As a representative of farmer organizations in Kenya, Mr. Ngonyo will discuss the social, economic, and environmental consequences of the new green revolution agricultural model. He will also share stories with us of resistance to this approach and information about actual alternative agricultural practices.

Josphat Ngonyo is Founder and Executive Director of African Network for Animal Welfare, a lead organization in the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition (KBioC). CAGJ’s Director, Heather Day, recently met with Josphat and many of his colleagues in KBioC, who are taking the lead in resisting the introduction of GMOs into Kenya, and promoting agroecological alternatives.

Other ways to catch Mr. Ngonyo:

April 29^th Tune in to hear Mr. Ngonyo on KUOW’s The Conversation 12 – 1pm

Join Brown-Bag luncheon with African Studies Program, UW Thomson Hall Rm 317, 1:30 – 2:30

Questions?  Contact 206-405-4600 or email AGRA Watch

Sponsored by UW Community Environment and Planning, Anthropology, African Studies Program, Geography, UW Bothell, Village Volunteers and Community Alliance for Global Justice

President Bill Clinton, now the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, publicly apologized last month for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported, subsidized US rice during his time in office. The policy wiped out Haitian rice farming and seriously damaged Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient. On Wednesday, journalist Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté questioned Clinton about his change of heart and his stance on the return of ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim Ives, I wanted to ask you about former President Bill Clinton, now the UN special envoy to Haiti. Last month he publicly apologized for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported subsidized US rice during his time in office. The policy wiped out Haitian rice farming and seriously damaged Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient. Well, Clinton apologized at a hearing last month before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

BILL CLINTON: Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.

AMY GOODMAN: That was former President Bill Clinton speaking last month. Well, on Wednesday, Kim Ives asked Bill Clinton about his change of heart at the donors conference.

KIM IVES: But what about the change in your thinking to have you issue your apology the other day about the food policies?

BILL CLINTON: Oh, I just think that, you know, there’s a movement all around the world now. It was first—I first saw Bob Zoellick say the same thing, the head of the World Bank, where he said, you know, starting in 1981, the wealthy agricultural producing countries genuinely believed that they and the emerging agricultural powers in Brazil and Argentina, which are the only two places that have, parenthetically, increased wheat yields per acre, grain yields per acre in the last decade, because they’re the only places with more than twenty feet of topsoil, that they really believed for twenty years that if you moved agricultural production there and then facilitated its introduction into poorer places, you would free those places to get aid to skip agricultural development and go straight into an industrial era.

And it’s failed everywhere it’s been tried. And you just can’t take the food chain out of production. And it also undermines a lot of the culture, the fabric of life, the sense of self-determination. And I have been involved for several years in agricultural products, principally in Rwanda, Malawi, other places in Africa, and now increasingly in Latin America, and I see this.

So we genuinely thought we were helping Haiti when we restored President Aristide, made a commitment to help rebuild the infrastructure through the Army Corps of Engineers there, and do a lot of other things. And we made this devil’s bargain on rice. And it wasn’t the right thing to do. We should have continued to work to help them be self-sufficient in agriculture. And we—that’s a lot of what we’re doing now. We’re thinking about how can we get the coffee production up, how can we get other kinds of—the mango production up—we had an announcement on that yesterday—the avocados, lots of other things. And so—

KIM IVES: What about the return of Aristide, which has been asked for by demonstrations even right across the street today?

BILL CLINTON: Well, that’s not in my purview. That’s up to the Haitians, including those that aren’t demonstrating.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Clinton being questioned by Kim Ives. Kim Ives in the studios with us, along with Roger Leduc, who is a radio host and activist with KAKOLA, the Haitian Coalition to Support the Struggle in Haiti. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Kim, that repudiation by Clinton of his previous policies is really a stunning statement, because, in effect, he is in large part renouncing even NAFTA, even though he hasn’t said it, because obviously NAFTA had a major impact on agriculture in Mexico, where millions of people were thrown off their farms because they couldn’t compete with American corn flooding the country. Your sense of whether the possibility of policies like this actually being implemented?

KIM IVES: Well, that’s just it, Juan. I think it’s a lot of bluff. We have to remember, we’re not in the age of Bush anymore, with all the chest pounding and, you know, America first and capitalism first. This is Slick Willie, and they come with the message. They know the sensitivity of the Haitian community—I can say of the progressive American community, too—to all these maneuvers. And so they know the language. We hear the word “solidarity.” We hear the word “sovereignty.” We hear the word—we hear all the right words. But once again, to me, it’s total smoke.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Roger, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the role of the Haitian government, you mentioned that obviously the government had failed in the early—in the aftermath. There have been calls, for instance, for some transparency in what happened to the original aid that came into the country. Your sense of your faith in the ability of the Haitian government to be a major partner in the distribution and the execution of this aid?

ROGER LEDUC: There is no faith at all. What I was referring to was the principle of recognizing a government that was voted in by the people of Haiti, even though the government failed miserably, not only just in terms of its response to the disaster, but even before that. What Préval applied himself to do was to gather the political class and put them in his pocket and then deliver it to the international community, mostly the United States government, so they could do whatever they needed to do with Haiti.

With the disaster, the program that they already had in mind to capture Haiti’s state, can be accelerated. If they were going to do it in ten years, this disaster is really a boon, a godsend, for everybody, actually, for the reactionary, for the imperial powers, and also for Haitian progressives who want to take the opportunity to do something and establish public forums throughout Haiti and build a national popular grassroots movement to say, “Hey, we’re here, and we need to be involved. We must be involved. This is our country. And no reconstruction of Haiti, no building of Haiti, can be done without us.”

This is the key moment here. After the carnival of conferences and the beautiful show of universal support, now this is serious business. Are we going to let them take hold of our country for thirty, forty years, as they’ve done since 1915? Or are we going to step up to the plate and, you know, go through the usual nonsense, secondary contradictions, that we have among us and really build a national front and do the right thing?

We plant but we can’t produce or market. We plant but we have no food to eat. We want agriculture to improve so our country can live and so we peasants can live, too.

- Rilo Petit-homme, peasant organizer from St. Marc, Haiti

What would it take to transform Haiti’s economy such that its role in the global economy is no longer that of providing cheap labor for sweatshops? What would it take for hunger to no longer be the norm, for the country no longer to depend on imports and hand-outs, and for Port-au-Prince’s slums no longer to contain 85% of the city’s residents? What would it take for the hundreds of thousands left homeless by the earthquake to have a secure life, with income?

According to Haitian peasant organizations, at the core of the solutions is a commitment on the part of the government to support family agriculture, with policies to make the commitment a reality.

Haiti is the only country in the hemisphere which is still majority rural. Estimates of the percentage of Haiti’s citizens who remain farmers span from 60.5% (UN, 2006) to 80% (the figure used by peasant groups).

Despite that, food imports currently constitute 57% of what Haitians consume (World Bank, 2008).  It didn’t used to be that way; policy choices made it so. In the 1980s, the U.S. and international financial institutions pressured Haiti to lower tariffs on food imports, leading to a flood of cheap food with which Haitian farmers could not compete. At the same time, U.S.A.I.D. and others pressured Haiti to orient its production toward export, leaving farmers vulnerable to shifting costs of sugar and coffee on the world market.

Because of the poor state of their production and marketing and the lack of basic services, 88% of the rural population lives in poverty, 67% in extreme poverty (UNDP, 2004).  Things have grown worse for them since the 2008 hurricane season, when four storms battered Haiti in three weeks, destroying more than 70% of agriculture and most rural roads, bridges, and other infrastructure needed for production and marketing. At least during the earthquake, only one farming area, around Jacmel, was badly damaged.

There is a direct relationship between the state of agriculture and the earthquake’s high toll in deaths, injuries, and homelessness. The quake was so destructive because more than three million people were jammed into a city meant for a 200,000 to 250,000, with most living in extremely precarious and overcrowded housing.  This is partly due to the demise of peasant agriculture over the past three decades, which has forced small producers to move to the capitol to enter the ranks of the sweatshop and informal sectors. It is also due, in part, to the fact that government services effectively do not exist for those in the countryside. ID cards, universities, specialized health care, and much else is available exclusively, or almost exclusively, in what Haitians call the Republic of Port-au-Prince, forcing many to visit or live there to meet their needs.

“It’s not houses which will rebuild Haiti, it’s investing in the agriculture sector,” says Rosnel Jean-Baptiste of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Peasant Farmers of Haiti). Those interviewed for this article, including dozens of peasant farmers from five organizations as well as economists and development experts, agree that the current moment offers opportunities for secure employment for the majority, rural development, diminished hunger, and resettlement with employment of those displaced from earthquake-hit areas.

If reinforced, agriculture could help feed the nation, which is currently suffering a dire food crisis. More than 2.4 million Haitians are estimated to be food-insecure. Acute malnutrition among children under the age 5 is 9% and chronic malnutrition for that age group is 24% (World Food Programme, 2010). The poverty is political in origin, largely due to World Bank and IMF conditions on loans which have squeezed the poor, and free trade policies which have made it impossible for farmers to grow enough food to meet the needs. Securing adequate and affordable Haitian-grown food is one step toward diminishing that poverty, while another is rejecting IMF prescriptions.

Agriculture could also offer a solution for the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people now residing in rural areas. In interviews with dozens of Port-au-Prince residents who are taking refuge in the Central Plateau, most say they would stay there if they could find a way to sustain themselves. If they could be given the land and resources necessary to begin farming, they would not need to return to city sweatshops, with their lack of living wage, job security, or health or safety protections. Port-au-Prince could become a livable city, without its overcrowded and inhumane conditions, without more than eight out of ten people residing in slums (as suggested by UN Human Settlements Program reports).

“We are meeting with different sectors to construct a Haiti where all Haitians feel like children of the land,” says Sylvain Henrilus of Tèt Kole. Peasant groups – even those with historic distrust of each other – and other allies are meeting regularly to plan their advocacy and mobilization for reorienting Haiti’s political economy in favor of agriculture, based on the following priorities.

• Food sovereignty, the right of a people to grow and consume its own food. With trade policies which support local production, Haiti’s levels of self-sufficiency could increase. Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay and the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress says, “The country has the right to determine its own agricultural policies, its own food production policies, to produce for family and for local consumption in healthy and simple agriculture which respects the environment, Mother Earth, as the mother of future generations.”
• Decentralization of services. The ‘people outside,’ as rural inhabitants are known, must have access to services equal to the people of Port-au-Prince. The ability to meet their needs where they are is both their right and a way to keep Port-au-Prince from again becoming overcrowded. Rosnel Jean-Baptiste says, “We need to deconstruct the capital, bringing services into the country and helping people find jobs there.”
• Technical support, especially for sustainable, ecological farming. Farmers in the region of the Artibonite, for example, stated that their melons, bananas, and tomatoes are not producing well, but they don’t know what the problem is or how to resolve it. They need advice from agronomists. They also need credit to help them buy equipment, support with storage and marketing, reforestation, and assistance with irrigation and water management. Elio Youyoute, a member of a community peasant association in the South, says, “We are trying to grow enough food to feed the cities, but we need help from the state.”
• Land reform. Those who work the land need secure tenure. Otherwise they will continue to be unable to support themselves on what Haitians call ‘a handkerchief of land,’ plots sometimes no larger than 15’ x 15’. Land reform must be not just a one-time hand-off, which would quickly revert to its previous concentration as struggling farmers are forced to sell their small gardens, but a change in tenure laws accompanied by technical support. Sylvain Henrilus of Tèt Kole says, “The land reform we need is not what Préval did in his first term, which was to just divide a bit of land into very small plots without any support, but where those who work the land have the right to that land with all the infrastructure and means – not just to adequately feed the people but to export as we used to do, to have our sovereignty in all dimensions.”
• Seeds, what Doudou Pierre of Vía Campesina’s coordinating committee calls “the patrimony of humanity.” Haiti’s seed stock is not going towards the March planting season as intended, but rather toward feeding the flood of internally displaced people. Farmers need help in procuring seed supplies, which they insist not be genetically modified. Chavannes Jean-Baptiste insists that “If people start sending hybrid, NGO seeds, that’s the end of Haitian agriculture.”
• A ban on food aid in the medium- to long-term. U.S.A.I.D. alone is giving $113 million in food aid this year, according to an Associated Press article on February 26. Farmers agree that aid is critical in this moment of crisis, but say that the government needs to quickly do everything it can to shore up production so that domestic agriculture can begin replacing the aid. Otherwise, Haiti will grow even more dependent, and multinational food and seed companies will overtake Haiti’s market even more.

The challenges are many. They include advanced environmental destruction and concentration of land. The chief challenge is securing the state’s commitment of the priorities outlined above. The government has a long history of responding not to peasant farmers but to the needs of the large landowning class and more recently, to the U.S. and other foreign powers looking to dump or sell food in Haiti.

Farmer after farmer interviewed indicated a resolve to work to change this state of affairs, recognizing that it will be a long haul. Says Tèt Kole’s Rosnel Jean-Baptiste, “It’s up to us social movements to put our heads together to change the situation of food production and the model of the state in Haiti.”

“The night before, about 250 independent family farmers and community activists gathered for a town hall meeting to share their own experiences with big ag.”

Part IV, reported March 26

Read parts I-III of WhyHunger’s reports on the Department of Justice’s hearings on anti-trust issues in agriculture

The March 12 workshop that the Department of Justice and USDA held in Ankeny, Iowa, was called “A Dialogue on Competition Issues Facing Farmers in Today’s Agricultural Marketplaces,” but did not leave much room for dialogue. It instead consisted of six panel presentations, mostly made up of government officials, academics, and industry representatives. There was also a farmer presentation, including independent farmers; and two WhyHunger partners from the US Working Group on the Food Crisis were represented on an afternoon panel.

An estimated 800 people attended the workshop at the Des Moines Area Community College in Ankeny, Iowa.

While it was encouraging that Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack were in attendance — and that Holder called the focus of these hearings “a national security matter,” indicating that the government is taking this issue seriously — the discussions at the workshop felt far removed from the stories we had heard the night before at the town hall. There was a lot of seductive rhetoric about the need for large-scale, industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population, and repeated references to local agriculture as a niche market. There was no mention of the difficulties that independent farmers are having feeding themselves or the fact that industrial agriculture hasn’t helped the 1 billion people worldwide currently suffering from chronic hunger.

There was also no mention of the strong research indicating that small scale, community-based agriculture is an incredibly effective and efficient way to feed people. Study after study, including the UN- and World Bank-sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD), show that to feed a growing population, we need much greater investment in local markets, local control of seeds and growing methods, and access to land. In short, we need to significantly invest in sustainable agriculture so that it can grow beyond a niche market — and we need to break up the monopolies that control agricultural markets and make it impossible for newcomers to compete.

The Department of Justice investigation is therefore an exciting opportunity — but it is also a moment of great responsibility for advocates. If the March 12 workshop was any indication, we need to continue to educate our elected officials about the practicality of alternatives to conventional agriculture and show them that the public wants those alternatives. Write a comment to the Department of Justice or a letter to the editor of your local paper. Come to the next workshops in Alabama (May 22) and Wisconsin (June 7) and make your voice heard in person. Keep up with the latest on the issue — and read the great media coverage of the workshop – at www.bustthetrust.org.

Pascual Bernabe Velásquez

Assembly of Huehuetenango in Defense of Natural Resources Friday, March 5, 2010 | 6:30 – 8:30pm
Ethnic Cultural Center at the UW
3931 Brooklyn Ave NE, Black Room
FREE EVENT

Maya-Q’anjob’al women vote to express their opposition to mining  in a community consultation in Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala  in August, 2006. (Phil Neff photo)

Let the Communities Decide!

- More than 600,000 people participating in community consultations have voted NO to the expansion of harmful mining projects in Guatemala.
- In his presentation, Pascual Bernabe Velásquez will speak about the consulta movement and civil resistance against the expansion of mining projects in Guatemala.
- At the same time, mining companies are using DR-CAFTA to sue the government of El Salvador for refusing to approve mining projects.

With a photo exhibit by James Rodriguez

Hosted by the UU Central America Network and Seattle CISPES.  Co-sponsored by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, the UW Student Labor Action Project, Casa Latina, and the Community Alliance for Global Justice.
Speaking tour organized by Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA)

17 April 2010 – Join the International Day of Peasant Struggle

To commemorate the International Day of Peasant Struggle on April 17^th 2010, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina calls upon member organisations, allies and supporters to unite against transnational corporations (TNCs), which seek complete control over food and agriculture systems around the world.

On April 17^th 1996, nineteen landless Brazilian peasants who were defending their right to produce food by demanding access to land were massacred by the military police. Since the massacre at El Dorado dos Carajás, every year on this date actions are organised around the world by farmers’ organisations, communities, student groups, non-governmental organizations and activists, in order to demand food sovereignty and peasants’ rights to produce food.

The year 2009 ended with three international summits: the Food and Agriculture Organization World Summit on Food Security in Rome, the World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference in Geneva and the United Nations’ Climate Summit in Copenhagen. At each event, TNCs displayed their intention to control food and agriculture systems, markets, lands, seeds and water—indeed all of nature—worldwide. TNCs such as Monsanto Company, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Nestlé deployed armies of lobbyists at these events to shape policies to their benefit.

For example, US-based Monsanto Company is lobbying to receive public subsidies for Roundup Ready soybeans, which are genetically-modified to resist glyphosate (sold by the corporation as Roundup), the most widely used herbicide in the world. Monsanto claims Roundup Ready soybeans reduce climate change because resistance to Roundup means the soybeans can be grown without ploughing the soil (which releases carbon dioxide), known as ‘no tillage’ or ‘conservation tillage’ agriculture. Monsanto argues that it should therefore be eligible for carbon credits from the Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change.

Yet the reality is that Monsanto and other TNCs are some of the primary contributers to climate change and other environmental crises, because they promote an unsustainable model of industrial agriculture.

Additionally, TNCs exacerbate poverty and economic recession, worldwide. As they consolidate their control over lands and agricultural markets, TNCs expel small farmers and peasants from their lands and reduce employment opportunities in rural areas, thereby swelling urban slums with even more desperate and unemployed families.

TNCs are making huge profits while hunger and poverty are on the rise. Thus, an offensive against TNCs is now a priority for La Via Campesina. Our movement envisions a world in which TNCs such as Monsanto, Cargill, Carrefour and Walmart, and their destruction of nature and humanity, will cease to exist. To replace them will be billions of peasants on small and medium-sized farms, producing healthy food for local and regional markets, preserving biodiversity, protecting water aquifers, sequestering carbon and revitalizing rural economies.

To mark the 17th of April 2010, La Via Campesina calls upon its members and allies to join forces and increase resistance against TNCs, and to amplify the voices and rights of peasants worldwide.

What can you do?

• To raise awareness about the destruction being caused by TNCs, and the benefits of peasant agriculture, organise an event or action in your community, school, city or organization. Possible events might be a protest, public debate, direct action, film screening, farmers’ market, heirloom seed exchange, song or picture contest;
• Subscribe to La Via Campesina’s 17^th of April mailing list to stay informed about the actions being organised around the world, to receive our mobilisation kit, and to tell others about your plans. Subscribe here: http://viacampesina.net/mailman/listinfo/via.17april_viacampesina.net
• Tell us what you are planning as early as possible to be included in the activities’ list published on www.viacampesina.org
• Send us pictures, articles and videos after the event at viacampesina@viacampesina.org