Food, Dispossession and Dependency.Resisting the New World Order
New Global Research e-Book
Food, Dispossession and Dependency.
Resisting the New World Order
by
Colin Todhunter
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain.The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google,
have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘
Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.
Of course, the billionaire interests behind this try to portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’.In the cold light of day, however, what they are really doing is repackaging and greenwashing the
dispossessive strategies of imperialism.
The following text sets out some key current trends affecting food and agriculture and begins by looking at the Gates Foundation’s promotion of a failing model of industrial, (GMO) chemical-intensive agriculture and the deleterious impacts it has on indigenous farming and farmers, human health, rural communities, agroecological systems and the environment.
Alternatives to this model are then discussed which focus on organic agriculture and specifically agroecology.However, there are barriers to implementing these solutions, not least the influence of global agri-capital in the form of agritech and agribusiness conglomerates which have captured key institutions.
The discussion then moves on to focus on the situation in India because that country’s ongoing agrarian crisis and the farmers’ struggle encapsulates what is at stake for the world.
Finally, it is argued that the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ is being used as cover to manage a crisis of capitalism and the restructuring of much of the global economy, including food and agriculture.
About the Author
Colin Todhunter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
In 2018, he was named a Living Peace and Justice leader/Model by Engaging Peace Inc.in recognition of his writing.
Table of Contents
Chapter I.
Toxic Agriculture – From the Gates Foundation to the Green Revolution
Chapter II.
Genetic Engineering – Value Capture and Market Dependency
Chapter III.
Agroecology – Localisation and Food Sovereignty
Chapter IV.
Distorting Development – Corporate Capture and Imperialist Intent
Chapter V.
The Farmers’ Struggle in India – The Farm Laws and a Neoliberal Death Knell
Chapter VI.
Colonial Deindustrialisation – Predation and Inequality
Chapter VII.
Neoliberal Playbook – Economic Terrorism and Smashing Farmers’ Heads
Chapter VIII.
The New Normal – Crisis of Capitalism and Dystopian Reset
Chapter IX.
Post-COVID Dystopia – Hand of God and the New World Order
Chapter I
Toxic Agriculture
From the Gates Foundation to the Green Revolution
As of December 2018, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had $46.8 billion in assets.It is the largest charitable foundation in the world, distributing more aid for global health than any government.
The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) – a global partnership whose stated aim is to strive for a food-secure future.
In 2016, the Gates Foundation was accused of dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development.The charges were laid out in a report by Global Justice Now: ‘
Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?‘
The report’s author, Mark Curtis, outlined the foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, which would undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food across the continent.
Curtis described how the foundation works with US agri-commodity trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa.
Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya monocrops (and associated agrochemicals) have displaced rural populations and caused health problems and environmental damage.
The Gates-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce genetically modified (GM) soya onto the continent.The Gates foundation is also supporting projects involving other chemical and seed corporations, including DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer.It is promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of agrochemicals and GM patented seeds and the privatisation of extension services.
What the Gates Foundation is doing is part of the
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative, which is based on the premise that hunger and malnutrition in Africa are mainly the result of a lack of technology and functioning markets.AGRA has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land, opening up African markets to US agribusiness.
More than 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year.
But AGRA is supporting the introduction of commercial (chemical-dependent) seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.
Since the 1990s, there has been a steady process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with Gates and others, opening the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.
The Gates Foundation is also very active in the area of health, which is ironic given its promotion of industrial agriculture and its reliance on health-damaging agrochemicals.
The foundation is a prominent funder of the World Health Organization and UNICEF.Gates has been the largest or second largest contributor to the WHO’s budget in recent years.
Perhaps this sheds some light onto why so many international reports omit the effects of pesticides on health.
Pesticides
According to the 2021 paper ‘
Growing Agrichemical Ubiquity: New Questions for Environments and Health’ (Community of Excellence in Global Health Equity), the volume of pesticide use and exposure is occurring on a scale that is without precedent and world-historical in nature; agrochemicals are now pervasive as they cycle through bodies and environments; and the herbicide glyphosate has been a major factor in driving this increase in use.
The authors state that when the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate to be a “probable carcinogen” in 2015, the fragile consensus about its safety was upended.
They note that in 2020 the US Environmental Protection Agency affirmed that glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) pose no risk to human health, apparently disregarding new evidence about the link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as well as its non-cancer impacts on the liver, kidney and gastrointestinal system.
The multi-authored paper notes:
“In just under 20 years, much of the Earth has been coated with glyphosate, in many places layering on already chemical-laden human bodies, other organisms and environments.”
However, the authors add that glyphosate (Roundup being the most well-known – initially manufactured by Monsanto – now Bayer) is not the only pesticide to achieve broad-scale pervasiveness:
“The insecticide imidacloprid, for example, coats the majority of US maize seed, making it the most widely used insecticide in US history.Between just 2003 and 2009, sales of imidacloprid products rose 245% (Simon-Delso et al.
2015).The scale of such use, and its overlapping effects on bodies and environments, have yet to be fully reckoned with, especially outside of countries with relatively strong regulatory and monitoring capacities.”
Imidacloprid was licensed for use in Europe in 1994.In July of that year, beekeepers in France noticed something unexpected.Just after the sunflowers had bloomed, a substantial number of their hives would collapse, as the worker bees flew off and never returned, leaving the queen and immature workers to die.The French beekeepers soon believed they knew the reason: a brand new insecticide called Gaucho with imidacloprid as active ingredient was being applied to sunflowers for the first time.
In the 2022 paper ‘
Neonicotinoid insecticides found in children treated for leukaemias and lymphomas’ (Environmental Health), the authors stated that multiple neonicotinoids were found in children’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), plasma and urine.
As the most widely used class of insecticides worldwide, they are ubiquitously found in the environment, wildlife and foods.
As for the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate-based formulas affect the gut microbiome and are associated with a global metabolic health crisis.They also cause epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.
A
French team has found heavy metals in chemical formulants of GBHs in people’s diets.As with other pesticides, 10–20% of GBHs consist of chemical formulants.Families of petroleum-based oxidized molecules and other contaminants have been identified as well as the heavy metals arsenic, chromium, cobalt, lead and nickel, which are known to be toxic and endocrine disruptors.
In 1988, Ridley and Mirly (commissioned by Monsanto) found bioaccumulation of glyphosate in rat tissues.Residues were present in bone, marrow, blood and glands including the thyroid, testes and ovaries, as well as major organs, including the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, spleen and stomach.Glyphosate was also associated with ophthalmic degenerative lens changes.
A Stout and Rueker (1990) study (also commissioned by Monsanto) provided concerning evidence with regard to cataracts following glyphosate exposure in rats.It is interesting to note that
the rate of cataract surgery in England “increased very substantially” between 1989 and 2004: from 173 (1989) to 637 (2004) episodes per 100,000 population.
A 2016 study by the WHO also confirmed that the incidence of cataracts had greatly increased: ‘A global assessment of the burden of disease from environmental risks’ says that cataracts are the leading cause of blindness worldwide.
Globally, cataracts are responsible for 51% of blindness.In the US, between 2000 and 2010 the number of cases of cataract rose by 20% from 20.5 million to 24.4 million.
It is projected that by 2050, the number of people with cataracts will have doubled to 50 million.
The authors of ‘Assessment of Glyphosate Induced Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance of Pathologies and Sperm Epimutations: Generational Toxicology’ (Scientific Reports, 2019) noted that ancestral environmental exposures to a variety of factors and toxicants promoted the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult onset disease.
They proposed that glyphosate can induce the transgenerational inheritance of disease and germline (for example, sperm) epimutations.Observations suggest the generational toxicology of glyphosate needs to be considered in the disease etiology of future generations.
In a 2017 study, Carlos Javier Baier and colleagues documented behavioural impairments following repeated intranasal glyphosate-based herbicide administration in mice.Intranasal GBH caused behavioural disorders, decreased locomotor activity, induced an anxiogenic behaviour and produced memory deficit.
The paper contains references to many studies from around the world that confirm GBHs are damaging to the development of the foetal brain and that repeated exposure is toxic to the adult human brain and may result in alterations in locomotor activity, feelings of anxiety and memory impairment.
Highlights of a
2018 study on neurotransmitter changes in rat brain regions following glyphosate exposure include neurotoxicity in rats.And in a 2014 study which examined mechanisms underlying the neurotoxicity induced by glyphosate-based herbicide in the immature rat hippocampus, it was found that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup induces various neurotoxic processes.
In the paper ‘Glyphosate damages blood-testis barrier via NOX1-triggered oxidative stress in rats: Long-term exposure as a potential risk for male reproductive health’ (Environment International, 2022) it was noted that glyphosate causes blood-testis barrier (BTB) damage and low-quality sperm and that glyphosate-induced BTB injury contributes to sperm quality decrease.
The study
Multiomics reveal non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in rats following chronic exposure to an ultra-low dose of Roundup herbicide (2017), revealed non-fatty acid liver disease (NFALD) in rats following chronic exposure to an ultra-low dose of Roundup herbicide.NFALD currently affects 25% of the US population and similar numbers of Europeans.
The 2020 paper ‘Glyphosate exposure exacerbates the dopaminergic neurotoxicity in the mouse brain after repeated of MPTP’ suggests that glyphosate may be an environmental risk factor for Parkinson’s.
In the 2019 Ramazzini Institute’s 13-week pilot study that looked into the effects of GBHs on development and the endocrine system, it was demonstrated that GBHs exposure, from prenatal period to adulthood, induced endocrine effects and altered reproductive developmental parameters in male and female rats.
Nevertheless, according to Phillips McDougall’s Annual Agriservice Reports, herbicides made up 43% of the global pesticide market in 2019 by value.Much of the increase in glyphosate use is due to the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize, and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil and Argentina.
A corporation’s top priority is the bottom line (at all costs, by all means necessary) and not public health.
A CEO’s obligation is to maximise profit, capture markets and – ideally – regulatory and policy-making bodies as well.
Corporations must also secure viable year-on-year growth which often means expanding into hitherto untapped markets.Indeed, in the previously mentioned paper ‘Growing Agrichemical Ubiquity’, the authors note that while countries like the US are still reporting higher pesticide use, most of this growth is taking place in the Global South:
“For example, pesticide use in California grew 10% from 2005 to 2015, while use by Bolivian farmers, though starting from a low base, increased 300% in the same period.Pesticide use is growing steeply in countries as diverse as China, Mali, South Africa, Nepal, Laos, Ghana, Argentina, Brazil and Bangladesh.Most countries with high levels of growth have weak regulatory enforcement, environmental monitoring and health surveillance infrastructure.”
And much of this growth is driven by increased demand for herbicides:
“India saw a 250% increase since 2005 (Das Gupta et al.
2017) while herbicide use jumped by 2500% in China (Huang, Wang, and Xiao 2017) and 2000% in Ethiopia (Tamru et al.2017).The introduction of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize, and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil, and Argentina is clearly driving much of the demand, but herbicide use is also expanding dramatically in countries that have not approved nor adopted such crops and where smallholder farming is still dominant.”
The UN expert on toxics, Baskut Tuncak, said in
a November 2017 article:
“Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides.It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds.”
In February 2020, Tuncak rejected the idea that the risks posed by highly hazardous pesticides could be managed safely.
He
told Unearthed (Greenpeace UK’s journalism website) that there is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture.
Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, Tuncak argued that these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely and should have been phased out of use long ago.
In his 2017 article, he stated:
“The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child… makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health.These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime.These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible.”
Tuncak added that paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability.
He noted that exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes and cancer and stated that children are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals: increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.
He concluded that the overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.
A joint investigation by Unearthed and the NGO Public Eye has found the world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products, chemicals that pose serious hazards to human health and the environment.
An analysis of a huge database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ revealed the world’s
leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as highly hazardous to people, animals or ecosystems.The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.
This investigation is based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall.The data covers around 40% of the
$57.6bn global market for agricultural pesticides in 2018.It focuses on 43 countries, which between them represent more than 90% of the global pesticide market by value.
While Bill Gates promotes a chemical-intensive model of agriculture that dovetails with the needs and value chains of agri-food conglomerates, there are spiralling rates of disease, especially in the UK and the US.
However, the mainstream narrative is to blame individuals for their ailments and conditions which are said to result from ‘lifestyle choices’.But Monsanto’s German owner Bayer has confirmed that more than 40,000 people have filed suits against Monsanto alleging that exposure to Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks.
Each year, there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers; at the same time, these treatments maximise the bottom line of the drug companies while the impacts of agrochemicals remain conspicuously absent from the mainstream disease narrative.
As part of its hegemonic strategy, the Gates Foundation says it wants to ensure global food security and optimise health and nutrition.But it seems happy to ignore the deleterious health impacts of agrochemicals as it continues to promote the interests of the firms that produce them.
Why does Gates not support agroecological approaches? Various high-level UN reports have advocated agroecology for ensuring equitable global food security.
This would leave smallholder agriculture both intact and independent from Western agri-capital, something which runs counter to the underlying aims of the corporations which Gates supports.
Their model depends on dispossession and creating market dependency for their inputs.
A model that has been imposed on nations for many decades and which relies on the dynamics of a system based on agri-export mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange revenue linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives.
The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of Western agri-food oligopolies and
the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.
Gates is consolidating Western agri-capital in Africa in the name of ‘food security’.It is very convenient for him to ignore the fact that at the time of decolonisation in the 1960s Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter with exports
averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70.The continent now imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer.More generally, developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s but by 2004 were importing US$ 11 billion a year.
The Gates Foundation promotes a corporate-industrial farming system and the strengthening of a global neoliberal, fossil-fuel-dependent food regime that by its very nature fuels and thrives on unjust trade policies, population displacement and land dispossession (something which Gates once called for but euphemistically termed “land mobility”), commodity monocropping, soil and environmental degradation, illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, pollution and the eradication of biodiversity.
Green Revolution
At the same time, Gates is helping corporate interests to appropriate and commodify knowledge.Since 2003, CGIAR and its 15 centres have received more than $720 million from the Gates Foundation.In a June
2016 article, Vandana Shiva notes that the centres are accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.
Gates is also funding Diversity Seek, a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping.Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks.This could allow five corporations to own this diversity.
Shiva says:
“DivSeek is a global project launched in 2015 to map the genetic data of the peasant diversity of seeds held in gene banks.
It robs the peasants of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to ‘code’.It is an extractive project to ‘mine’ the data in the seed to ‘censor’ out the commons.”
She notes that the peasants who evolved this diversity have no place in DivSeek – their knowledge is being mined and not recognised, honoured or conserved: an enclosure of the genetic commons.
Seed has been central to agriculture for 10,000 years.Farmers have been saving, exchanging and developing seeds for millennia.Seeds have been handed down from generation to generation.Peasant farmers have been the custodians of seeds, knowledge and land.
This is how it was until the 20th century when corporations
took these seeds, hybridised them, genetically modified them, patented them and fashioned them to serve the needs of industrial agriculture with its monocultures and chemical inputs.
To serve the interests of these corporations by marginalising indigenous agriculture, a number of treaties and agreements in various countries over breeders’ rights and intellectual property have been enacted to prevent peasant farmers from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds.Since this began, thousands of seed varieties have been lost and corporate seeds have increasingly dominated agriculture.
The UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) estimates that globally just 20 cultivated plant species account for 90% of all the plant-based food consumed by humans.
This narrow genetic base of the global food system has put food security at serious risk.
To move farmers away from using native seeds and to get them to plant corporate seeds, seed ‘certification’ rules and laws are often brought into being by national governments on behalf of commercial seed giants.In Costa Rica, the battle to overturn restrictions on seeds was lost with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, although this flouted the country’s seed biodiversity laws.
Seed laws in Brazil created a corporate property regime for seeds which effectively marginalised all indigenous seeds that were locally adapted over generations.
This regime attempted to stop farmers from using or breeding their own seeds.
It was an attempt to privatise seed.The privatisation of something that is a common heritage.The privatisation and appropriation of inter-generational knowledge embodied by seeds whose germplasm is ‘tweaked’ (
or stolen) by corporations who then claim ownership.
Corporate control over seeds is also an attack on the survival of communities and their traditions.Seeds are integral to identity because in rural communities, people’s lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.
This is also an attack on biodiversity and – as we see the world over –
on the integrity of soil, water, food, diets and health as well as on the integrity of international institutions, governments and officials which have too often been corrupted by powerful transnational corporations.
Regulations and ‘seed certification’ laws are often brought in on behalf of industry that are designed to eradicate traditional seeds by allowing only ‘stable’, ‘uniform’ and ‘novel’ seeds on the market (meaning corporate seeds).
These are the only ‘regulated’ seeds allowed: registered and certified.
It is a cynical way of eradicating indigenous farming practices at the behest of corporations.
Governments are under immense pressure via lop-sided trade deals, strings-attached loans and corporate-backed seed regimes to comply with the demands of agribusiness conglomerates and to fit in with their supply chains.
The Gates Foundation talks about health but facilitates the roll-out of a highly subsidised and toxic form of agriculture whose agrochemicals cause immense damage.It talks of alleviating poverty and malnutrition and tackling food insecurity, yet it bolsters an inherently unjust global food regime which is responsible for perpetuating food insecurity, population displacement, land dispossession, privatisation of the commons and neoliberal policies that remove support from the vulnerable and marginalised.
Bill Gates’s ‘philanthropy’ is part of a neoliberal agenda that attempts to manufacture consent and buy-off or co-opt policy makers, thereby preventing and marginalising more radical agrarian change that would challenge prevailing power structures and act as impediments to this agenda.
Gates and his corporate cronies’ activities are part of the hegemonic and dispossessive strategies of imperialism.This involves displacing a food-producing peasantry and subjugating those who remain in agriculture to the needs of global distribution and supply chains dominated by Western agri-capital.
And now, under the notion of ‘climate emergency’, Gates et al are promoting the latest technologies – gene editing, data-driven farming, cloud-based services, lab created ‘food’, monopolistic e-commerce retail and trading platforms, etc.
– under the guise of one-world precision agriculture.
But this is merely a continuation of what has been happening for half a century or more.
Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri-infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.
Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of GM seeds.
In her report, ‘
Reclaim the Seed’, Vandana Shiva says:
“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super profits.They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks, tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, and took patents.”
Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge.She says that 768,576 accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:
“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their creativity and knowledge of breeding.The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”
It is interesting to note that prior to the Green Revolution many of the older crops carried
dramatically higher counts of nutrients per calorie.The amount of cereal each person must consume to fulfil daily dietary requirements has therefore gone up.
For instance, the iron content of millet is four times that of rice.Oats carry four times more zinc than wheat.As a result, between 1961 and 2011, the protein, zinc and iron contents of the world’s directly consumed cereals declined by 4%, 5% and 19%, respectively.
The high-input chemical-intensive Green Revolution model helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in
less diverse diets and less nutritious foods.Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health.
Adding weight to this argument, the authors of
the 2010 paper ‘Zinc deficiencies in Agricultural Systems’ in the International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development state:
“Cropping systems promoted by the green revolution have… resulted in reduced food-crop diversity and decreased availability of micronutrients.Micronutrient malnutrition is causing increased rates of chronic diseases (cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis) in many developing nations; more than three billion people are directly affected by the micronutrient deficiencies.Unbalanced use of mineral fertilizers and a decrease in the use of organic manure are the main causes of the nutrient deficiency in the regions where the cropping intensity is high.”
The authors imply that the link between micronutrient deficiency in soil and human nutrition is increasingly regarded as important:
“Moreover, agricultural intensification requires an increased nutrient flow towards and greater uptake of nutrients by crops.
Until now, micronutrient deficiency has mostly been addressed as a soil and, to a smaller extent, plant problem.Currently, it is being addressed as a human nutrition problem as well.Increasingly, soils and food systems are affected by micronutrients disorders, leading to reduced crop production and malnutrition and diseases in humans and plants.”
Although India, for example, might now be self-sufficient in various staples, many of these foodstuffs are high calorie-low nutrient, have led to the displacement of more nutritionally diverse cropping systems and have arguably mined the soil of nutrients.The importance of renowned agronomist
William Albrecht, who died in 1974, should not be overlooked here and his work on healthy soils and healthy people.
In this respect, India-based botanist Stuart Newton states that the answer to Indian agricultural productivity is not that of embracing the international, monopolistic, corporate-conglomerate promotion of chemically dependent GM crops: India has to restore and nurture its depleted, abused soils and not harm them any further, with dubious chemical overload, which is endangering human and animal health.
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is become deficient in nutrients and fertility.The country is losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of the indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides.
Aside from these deleterious impacts and the health consequences of chemical-dependent crops (see Dr Rosemary Mason’s reports on the
academia.edu website), New Histories of the Green Revolution (Glenn Stone, 2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity, The Violence of the Green Revolution (Vandana Shiva, 1989) details (among other things) the negative impacts on rural communities in Punjab and Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation.
And for good measure, in a
2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, the authors note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties.This is important to note given that Professor Glenn Stone argues that all the Green Revolution actually ‘succeeded’ in doing was put more wheat in the Indian diet (displacing other foodstuffs).Stone argues that food productivity per capita showed no increased or even actually decreased.
Sold on the promise that hybrid seeds and associated chemical inputs would enhance food security on the basis of higher productivity, the Green Revolution transformed agriculture in many regions.
But in places like Punjab, Shiva notes that to gain access to seeds and chemicals farmers had to take out loans and debt became (and remains) a constant worry.Many became impoverished and social relations within rural communities were radically altered: previously, farmers would save and exchange seeds but now they became dependent on unscrupulous money lenders, banks and seed manufacturers and suppliers.
In her book, Shiva describes the social marginalisation and violence that resulted from the Green Revolution and its impacts.
It is also worthwhile discussing Bhaskar Save.He argued that the actual reason for pushing the Green Revolution was the much narrower goal of increasing the marketable surplus of a few relatively less perishable cereals to fuel the urban-industrial expansion favoured by the government and a few industries at the expense of a more diverse and nutrient-sufficient agriculture, which rural folk – who make up the bulk of India’s population – had long benefited from.
Before, Indian farmers had been largely self-sufficient and even produced surpluses, though generally smaller quantities of many more items.
These, particularly perishables, were tougher to supply urban markets.And so, the nation’s farmers were steered to grow chemically cultivated monocultures of a few cash-crops like wheat, rice, or sugar, rather than their traditional polycultures that needed no purchased inputs.
Tall, indigenous varieties of grain provided more biomass, shaded the soil from the sun and protected against its erosion under heavy monsoon rains, but these were replaced with dwarf varieties, which led to more vigorous growth of weeds and were able to compete successfully with the new stunted crops for sunlight.
As a result, the farmer had to spend more labour and money in weeding or spraying herbicides.
Furthermore, straw growth with the dwarf grain crops fell and much less organic matter was locally available to recycle the fertility of the soil, leading to an artificial need for externally procured inputs.Inevitably, the farmers resorted to use more chemicals and soil degradation and erosion set in.
The exotic varieties, grown with chemical fertilisers, were more susceptible to ‘pests and diseases’, leading to yet more chemicals being poured.But the attacked insect species developed resistance and reproduced prolifically.Their predators – spiders, frogs, etc.
– that fed on these insects and controlled their populations were exterminated.So were many beneficial species like earthworms and bees.
Save noted that India, next to South America, receives the highest rainfall in the world.Where thick vegetation covers the ground, the soil is alive and porous and at least half of the rain is soaked and stored in the soil and sub-soil strata.
A good amount then percolates deeper to recharge aquifers or groundwater tables.The living soil and its underlying aquifers thus serve as gigantic, ready-made reservoirs.
Half a century ago, most parts of India had enough fresh water all year round, long after the rains had stopped and gone.But clear the forests, and the capacity of the earth to soak the rain, drops drastically.Streams and wells run dry.
While the recharge of groundwater has greatly reduced, its extraction has been mounting.
India is presently mining over 20 times more groundwater each day than it did in 1950.But most of India’s people – living on hand-drawn or hand-pumped water in villages and practising only rain-fed farming – continue to use the same amount of ground water per person, as they did generations ago.
More than 80% of India’s water consumption is for irrigation, with the largest share hogged by chemically cultivated cash crops.For example, one acre of chemically grown sugarcane requires as much water as would suffice 25 acres of jowar, bajra or maize.The sugar factories too consume huge quantities.
From cultivation to processing, each kilo of refined sugar needs two to three tonnes of water.Save argued this could be used to grow, by the traditional, organic way, about 150 to 200 kg of nutritious jowar or bajra (native millets).
Save wrote:
“This country has more than 150 agricultural universities.
But every year, each churns out several hundred ‘educated’ unemployables, trained only in misguiding farmers and spreading ecological degradation.In all the six years a student spends for an MSc in agriculture, the only goal is short-term – and narrowly perceived – ‘productivity’.For this, the farmer is urged to do and buy a hundred things.But not a thought is spared to what a farmer must never do so that the land remains unharmed for future generations and other creatures.It is time our people and government wake up to the realisation that this industry-driven way of farming – promoted by our institutions – is inherently criminal and suicidal!“
It is increasingly clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.
Even where yields may have increased, we need to ask: what has been the cost of any increased yield of commodities in terms of local food security, overall nutrition per acre, water tables, soil structure and new pests and disease pressures?
Chapter II
Genetic Engineering
Value Capture and Market Dependency
As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.
Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvellous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage.GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity.
Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.
There is no global shortage of food.Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his paper “
The Myth of a Food Crisis” (2020).
However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.
It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling.
This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
It really is a case of old GMO wine in new bottles.
And this has not been lost on 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations that have
called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO (genetically modified organisms) standards.
The coalition
argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes.Its open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.
The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws.However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation,
aided financially by the Gates Foundation.
The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new GM techniques allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.These new
GMOs pose similar or greater risks than older-style GMOs.
In addition to these concerns, a paper from Chinese scientists, ‘
Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.
The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores.At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.
By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.
Bt cotton in India
This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India (the only officially approved GM crop in that country) which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers.
Prof
A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.
Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.
On 24 August 2020, a webinar on Bt cotton in India took place involving Andrew Paul Gutierrez, senior emeritus professor in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, Keshav Kranthi, former director of Central Institute for Cotton Research in India, Peter Kenmore, former FAO representative in India, and Hans Herren, World Food Prize Laureate.
Dr Herren said that “the failure of Bt cotton” is a classic representation of what an unsound science of plant protection and faulty direction of agricultural development can lead to.
He explained:
“Bt hybrid technology in India represents an error-driven policy that has led to the denial and non-implementation of the real solutions for the revival of cotton in India, which lie in HDSS (high density short season) planting of non-Bt/GMO cotton in pure line varieties of native desi species and American cotton species.”
He argued that a transformation of agriculture and the food system is required; one that entails a shift to agroecology, which includes regenerative, organic, biodynamic, permaculture and natural farming practices.
Dr Kenmore said that Bt cotton is an aging pest control technology:
“It follows the same path worn down by generations of insecticide molecules from arsenic to DDT to BHC to endosulfan to monocrotophos to carbaryl to imidacloprid.In-house research aims for each molecule to be packaged biochemically, legally and commercially before it is released and promoted.Corporate and public policy actors then claim yield increases but deliver no more than temporary pest suppression, secondary pest release and pest resistance.”
Recurrent cycles of crises have sparked public action and ecological field research which creates locally adapted agroecological strategies.
He added that this agroecology:
“…now gathers global support from citizens’ groups, governments and UN FAO.
Their robust local solutions in Indian cotton do not require any new molecules, including endo-toxins like in Bt cotton”.
Gutierrez presented the ecological reasons as to why hybrid Bt cotton failed in India: long season Bt cotton introduced in India was incorporated into hybrids that trapped farmers into biotech and insecticide treadmills that benefited GMO seed manufacturers.
He noted:
“The cultivation of long-season hybrid Bt cotton in rainfed areas is unique to India.It is a value capture mechanism that does not contribute to yield, is a major contributor to low yield stagnation and contributes to increasing production costs.”
Gutierrez asserted that increases in cotton farmer suicides are related to the resulting economic distress.
He argued:
“A viable solution to the current GM hybrid system is adoption of improved non-GM high-density short-season fertile cotton varieties.”
Presenting data on yields, insecticide usage, irrigation, fertiliser usage and pest incidence and resistance, Dr Kranthi said an analysis of official statistics (
eands.dacnet.nic.in and cotcorp.gov.in) shows that Bt hybrid technology has not been providing any tangible benefits in India either in yield or insecticide usage.
He said that cotton yields are the lowest in the world in Maharashtra, despite being saturated with Bt hybrids and the highest use of fertilisers.Yields in Maharashtra are less than in rainfed Africa where there is hardly any usage of technologies such as Bt hybrids, fertilisers, pesticides or irrigation.
It is revealing that Indian cotton yields rank 36th in the world and have been stagnant in the past 15 years and insecticide usage has been constantly increasing after 2005, despite an increase in area under Bt cotton.
Kranthi argued that research also shows that the Bt hybrid technology has failed the test of sustainability with resistance in pink bollworm to Bt cotton, increasing sucking pest infestation, increasing trends in insecticide and fertiliser usage, increasing costs and negative net returns in 2014 and 2015.
Dr Herren said that GMOs exemplify the case of a technology searching for an application:
“It is essentially about treating symptoms, rather than taking a systems approach to create resilient, productive and bio-diverse food systems in the widest sense and to provide sustainable and affordable solutions in it’s social, environmental and economic dimensions.”
He went on to argue that the failure of Bt cotton is a classic representation of what an unsound science of plant protection and a faulty direction of agricultural development can lead to:
“We need to push aside the vested interests blocking the transformation with the baseless arguments of ‘the world needs more food’ and design and implement policies that are forward-looking… We have all the needed scientific and practical evidence that the agroecological approaches to food and nutrition security work successfully.”
Those who continue to spin Bt cotton in India as a resounding success remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs –
Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India) farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).
However, in recent times, the Indian government in league with the biotech industry has been trying to pass of Bt cotton in the country as a monumental success, thereby promoting its rollout as a template for other GM crops.
In general, across the world the performance of GM crops to date has been questionable, but the pro-GMO lobby has wasted no time in wrenching the issues of hunger and poverty from their political contexts to use notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of its promotional strategy.There exists a ‘haughty imperialism’ within the pro-GMO scientific lobby that aggressively pushes for a GMO ‘solution’ which is a distraction from the root causes of poverty, hunger and malnutrition and genuine solutions based on food justice and food sovereignty.
The performance of GM crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in
a 2018 piece by PC Kesavan and MS Swaminathan in the journal Current Science, there is already sufficient evidence to question their efficacy, especially that of herbicide-tolerant crops (which by 2007 already accounted for approximately 80% of biotech-derived crops grown globally) and the devastating impacts on the environment, human health and food security, not least in places like Latin America.
In their paper, Kesavan and Swaminathan argue that GM technology is supplementary and must be need based.In more than 99% of cases, they say that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient.In this respect, conventional options and innovations that
outperform GM must not be overlooked or side-lined in a rush by powerful interests like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to facilitate the introduction of GM crops into global agriculture; crops which are highly financially lucrative for the corporations behind them.
In Europe, robust regulatory mechanisms are in place for GMOs because it is recognised that GM food/crops are not substantially equivalent to their non-GM counterparts.Numerous studies have highlighted the
flawed premise of ‘substantial equivalence’.Furthermore, from the outset of the GMO project, the side-lining of serious concerns about the technology has occurred and, despite industry claims to the contrary, there is no scientific consensus on the health impacts of GM crops as noted by Hilbeck et al (Environmental Sciences Europe, 2015).
Adopting a precautionary principle where GM is concerned is therefore a valid approach.
Both the Cartagena Protocol and Codex share a precautionary approach to GM crops and foods, in that they agree that GM differs from conventional breeding and that safety assessments should be required before GMOs are used in food or released into the environment.There is sufficient reason to hold back on commercialising GM crops and to subject each GMO to independent, transparent environmental, social, economic and health impact evaluations.
Critics’ concerns cannot therefore be brushed aside by claims from industry lobbyists that ‘the science’ is decided and the ‘facts’ about GM are indisputable.Such claims are merely political posturing and part of a strategy to tip the policy agenda in favour of GM.
Regardless, global food insecurity and malnutrition are not the result of a lack of productivity.As long as food injustice remains an inbuilt feature of the global food regime, the rhetoric of GM being necessary for feeding the world will be seen for what it is: bombast.
Take India, for instance.Although it
fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food (in terms of calories) available to feed its entire population.It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton.According to FAO, food security is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
But food security for many Indians remains a distant dream.Large sections of India’s population do not have enough food available to remain healthy nor do they have sufficiently diverse diets that provide adequate levels of micronutrients.
The Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey 2016-18 is the first-ever nationally representative nutrition survey of children and adolescents in India.It found that 35% of children under five were stunted, 22% of school-age children were stunted while 24% of adolescents were thin for their age.
People are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food.Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, including inadequate food distribution, (gender) inequality and poverty; in fact, the country
continues to export food while millions remain hungry.It’s a case of ‘scarcity’ amid abundance.
Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GMO lobby says GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income.
Again, this is misleading: it ignores crucial political and economic contexts.
Even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.
India’s farmers are not experiencing hardship due to low productivity.They are reeling from
the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace smallholder agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations.Little wonder then that the calorie and essential nutrient intake of the rural poor has drastically fallen.No number of GMOs will put any of this right.
Nevertheless, the pro-GMO lobby, both outside of India and within, has twisted the situation for its own ends to mount intensive PR campaigns to sway public opinion and policy makers.
Golden Rice
The industry has for many years been promoting Golden Rice.
It has long argued that genetically engineered Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets.Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk for infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.
Some scientists believe that Golden Rice, which has been developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, could help save the lives of around 670,000 children who die each year from Vitamin A deficiency and another 350,000 who go blind.
Meanwhile, critics say there are serious issues with Golden Rice and that alternative approaches to tackling vitamin A deficiency should be implemented.Greenpeace and other environmental groups say the claims being made by the pro-Golden Rice lobby are misleading and are oversimplifying the actual problems in combating vitamin A deficiency.
Many critics regard Golden Rice as an over-hyped Trojan horse that biotechnology corporations and their allies hope will pave the way for the global approval of other more profitable GM crops.The Rockefeller Foundation might be regarded as a ‘philanthropic’ entity but its
track record indicates it has been very much part of an agenda which facilitates commercial and geopolitical interests to the detriment of indigenous agriculture and local and national economies.
As Britain’s Environment Secretary in 2013, the now disgraced
Owen Paterson claimed that opponents of GM were “casting a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world”.He called for the rapid roll-out of vitamin A-enhanced rice to help prevent the cause of up to a third of the world’s child deaths.
He claimed:
“It’s just disgusting that little children are allowed to go blind and die because of a hang-up by a small number of people about this technology.I feel really strongly about it.I think what they do is absolutely wicked.”
Robin McKie, science writer for The Observer,
wrote a piece on Golden Rice that uncritically presented all the usual industry talking points.
On Twitter, The Observer’s Nick Cohen chimed in with his support by tweeting:
“There is no greater example of ignorant Western privilege causing needless misery than the campaign against genetically modified golden rice.”
Whether it comes from the likes of corporate lobbyist Patrick Moore, political lobbyist Owen Paterson, biotech
spin-merchant Mark Lynas, well-remunerated journalists or from the lobbyist CS Prakash who engages more in spin than fact, the rhetoric takes the well-worn cynically devised PR line that anti-GM activists and environmentalists are little more than privileged, affluent people residing in rich countries and are denying the poor the supposed benefits of GM crops.
Despite the smears and emotional blackmail employed by supporters of Golden Rice, in a 2016 article in the journal
Agriculture & Human Values Glenn Stone and Dominic Glover found little evidence that anti-GM activists are to blame for Golden Rice’s unfulfilled promises.Golden rice was still years away from field introduction and even when ready may fall far short of lofty health benefits claimed by its supporters.
Stone
stated that:
“Golden Rice is still not ready for the market, but we find little support for the common claim that environmental activists are responsible for stalling its introduction.GMO opponents have not been the problem.”
He added that the rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done.While activists did destroy one Golden Rice test plot in a 2013 protest, it is unlikely that this action had any significant impact on the approval of Golden Rice.
Stone said:
“Destroying test plots is a dubious way to express opposition, but this was only one small plot out of many plots in multiple locations over many years.Moreover, they have been calling Golden Rice critics ‘murderers’ for over a decade.”
Believing that Golden Rice was originally a promising idea backed by good intentions, Stone argued:
“But if we are actually interested in the welfare of poor children – instead of just fighting over GMOs – then we have to make unbiased assessments of possible solutions.The simple fact is that after 24 years of research and breeding, Golden Rice is still years away from being ready for release.”
Researchers still had problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GM strains already being grown by farmers.
Stone and Glover point out that it is still unknown if the beta carotene in Golden Rice can even be converted to vitamin A in the bodies of badly undernourished children.There also has been little research on how well the beta carotene in Golden Rice will hold up when stored for long periods between harvest seasons or when cooked using traditional methods common in remote rural locations.
Claire Robinson, an editor at GMWatch,
has argued that the rapid degradation of beta-carotene in the rice during storage and cooking means it is not a solution to vitamin A deficiency in the developing world.
There are also various other problems, including absorption in the gut and the low and varying levels of beta-carotene that may be delivered by Golden Rice in the first place.
In the meantime, Glenn Stone says that, as the development of Golden Rice creeps along, the Philippines has managed to slash the incidence of Vitamin A deficiency by non-GM methods.
The evidence presented here might lead us to question why supporters of Golden Rice continue to smear critics and engage in abuse and emotional blackmail when activists are not to blame for the failure of Golden Rice to reach the commercial market.Whose interests are they really serving in pushing so hard for this technology?
In 2011, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with a background in insect ecology and pest management
asked a similar question:
“Who oversees this ambitious project, which its advocates claim will end the suffering of millions?”
She answered her question by stating:
“An elite, so-called
Humanitarian Board where Syngenta sits – along with the inventors of Golden Rice, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and public relations and marketing experts, among a handful of others.Not a single farmer, indigenous person or even an ecologist or sociologist to assess the huge political, social and ecological implications of this massive experiment.And the leader of IRRI’s Golden Rice project is none other than Gerald Barry, previously Director of Research at Monsanto.” Sarojeni V.
Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific, called on the donors and scientists involved to wake up and do the right thing:
“Golden Rice is really a ‘Trojan horse’; a public relations stunt pulled by the agribusiness corporations to garner acceptance of GE crops and food.The whole idea of GE seeds is to make money… we want to send out a strong message to all those supporting the promotion of Golden Rice, especially donor organisations, that their money and efforts would be better spent on restoring natural and agricultural biodiversity rather than destroying it by promoting monoculture plantations and genetically engineered (GE) food crops.”
And she makes a valid point.To tackle disease, malnutrition and poverty, you have to first understand the underlying causes – or indeed want to understand them.
Renowned writer and academic
Walden Bello notes that the complex of policies that pushed the Philippines into an economic quagmire over the past 30 years is due to ‘structural adjustment’, involving prioritising debt repayment, conservative macroeconomic management, huge cutbacks in government spending, trade and financial liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, the restructuring of agriculture and export-oriented production.
And that restructuring of the agrarian economy is something touched on by Claire Robinson who notes that leafy green vegetables used to be grown in backyards as well as in rice (paddy) fields on the banks between the flooded ditches in which the rice grew.
Ditches also contained fish, which ate pests.People thus had access to rice, green leafy veg and fish – a balanced diet that gave them a healthy mix of nutrients, including plenty of beta-carotene.
But indigenous crops and farming systems have been replaced by monocultures dependent on chemical inputs.
Green leafy veg were killed off with pesticides, artificial fertilisers were introduced and the fish could not live in the resulting chemically contaminated water.
Moreover, decreased access to land meant that many people no longer had backyards containing leafy green veg.People only had access to an impoverished diet of rice alone, laying the foundation for the supposed Golden Rice ‘solution’.
Whether it concerns The Philippines,
Ethiopia, Somalia or Africa as a whole, the effects of IMF/World Bank ‘structural adjustments’ have devastated agrarian economies and made them dependent on Western agribusiness, manipulated markets and unfair trade rules.And GM is now offered as the ‘solution’ for tackling poverty-related diseases.The very corporations which gained from restructuring agrarian economies now want to profit from the havoc caused.
In 2013, the Soil Association
argued that the poor are suffering from broader malnourishment than just vitamin A deficiency; the best solution is to use supplementation and fortification as emergency sticking-plasters and then for implementing measures which tackle the broader issues of poverty and malnutrition.
Tackling the wider issues includes providing farmers with a range of seeds, tools and skills necessary for growing more diverse crops to target broader issues of malnutrition.Part of this entails breeding crops high in nutrients; for instance, the creation of sweet potatoes that grow in tropical conditions, cross-bred with vitamin A rich orange sweet potatoes, which grow in the USA.There are successful campaigns providing these potatoes, a staggering five times higher in vitamin A than Golden Rice, to farmers in Uganda and Mozambique.
Blindness in developing countries could have been eradicated years ago if only the money, research and publicity put into Golden Rice over the last 20 years had gone into proven ways of addressing Vitamin A deficiency.
However, instead of pursuing genuine solutions, we continue to get smears and
pro-GM spin in an attempt to close down debate.
Many of the traditional agroecological practices employed by smallholders are
now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate for high-productive, nutritious, sustainable agriculture.
Agroecological principles represent a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises local food security, local calorific production, cropping patterns and diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures.Ideally, such a system would be underpinned by a concept of food sovereignty, based on optimal self-sufficiency, the right to culturally appropriate food and local ownership and stewardship of common resources, such as land, water, soil and seeds.
Value capture
Traditional production systems rely on the knowledge and expertise of farmers in contrast to imported ‘solutions’.
Yet, if we take cotton cultivation in India as an example, farmers continue to be nudged away from traditional methods of farming and are being pushed towards (illegal) GM herbicide-tolerant cotton seeds.
Researchers
Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs note the results of this shift from traditional practices to date does not appear to have benefited farmers.This is not about giving farmers ‘choice’ where GM seeds and associated chemicals are concerned (another much-promoted industry talking point).It is more about GM seed companies and weedicide manufactures seeking to leverage a highly lucrative market.
The potential for herbicide market growth in India is enormous.The objective involves opening India to GM seeds with herbicide tolerance traits, the biotechnology industry’s biggest money maker by far (86% of the world’s GM crop acres in 2015 contained plants resistant to glyphosate or glufosinate and there is a new generation of crops resistant to 2,4-D coming through).
The aim is to break farmers’ traditional pathways and move them onto corporate biotech/chemical treadmills for the benefit of industry.
It is revealing that, according to a report on the ruralindiaonline.org website, in a region of southern Odisha, farmers have been pushed towards a reliance on (illegal) expensive GM herbicide tolerant cotton seeds and have replaced their traditional food crops.
Farmers used to sow mixed plots of heirloom seeds, which had been saved from family harvests the previous year and would yield a basket of food crops.They are now dependent on seed vendors, chemical inputs and a volatile international market to make a living and are no longer food secure.
Calls for agroecology and highlighting the benefits of traditional, small-scale agriculture are not based on a romantic yearning for the past or ‘the peasantry’.
Available evidence suggests that smallholder farming using low-input methods is more productive in overall output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable and resilient to climate change.It is for good reason that numerous high-level reports call for investment in this type of agriculture.
Despite the pressures, including the fact that globally industrial agriculture grabs
80% of subsidies and 90% of research funds, smallholder agriculture plays a major role in feeding the world.
That is a massive amount of subsidies and funds to support a system that is only made profitable as a result of these financial injections and because agri-food oligopolies externalise
the massive health, social and environmental costs of their operations.
But policy makers tend to accept that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be owners and custodians of natural assets (the ‘commons’).These corporations, their lobbyists and their political representatives have succeeded in cementing a ‘
thick legitimacy’ among policy makers for their vision of agriculture.
Common ownership and management of these assets embodies the notion of people working together for the public good.
However, these resources have been appropriated by national states or private entities.For instance,
Cargill captured the edible oils processing sector in India and in the process put many thousands of village-based workers out of work; Monsanto conspired to design a system of intellectual property rights that allowed it to patent seeds as if it had manufactured and invented them; and India’s indigenous peoples have been forcibly ejected from their ancient lands due to state collusion with mining companies.
Those who capture essential common resources seek to commodify them – whether trees for timber, land for real estate or agricultural seeds – create artificial scarcity and force everyone else to pay for access.The process involves eradicating self-sufficiency.
From World Bank ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ directives to the World Trade Organization ‘agreement on agriculture’ and trade related intellectual property agreements, international bodies have enshrined the interests of corporations that seek to monopolise seeds, land, water, biodiversity and other natural assets that belong to us all.These corporations, the promoters of GMO agriculture, are not offering a ‘solution’ for farmers’ impoverishment or hunger; GM seeds are little more than a value capture mechanism.
To evaluate the pro-GMO lobby’s rhetoric that GM is needed to ‘feed the world’, we first need to understand the dynamics of a globalised food system that fuels hunger and malnutrition against a backdrop of (subsidised) food overproduction.
We must acknowledge the destructive, predatory dynamics of capitalism and the need for agri-food giants to maintain profits by seeking out new (foreign) markets and displacing existing systems of production with ones that serve their bottom line.
And we need to reject a deceptive ‘
haughty imperialism’ within the pro-GMO scientific lobby which aggressively pushes for a GMO ‘solution’.
Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined for instance in the paper
Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies.
Marika Vicziany and Jagjit Plahe, the authors of that paper, note that for thousands of years Indian farmers have
experimented with different plant and animal specimens acquired through migration, trading networks, gift exchanges or accidental diffusion.They note the vital importance of traditional knowledge for food security in India and the evolution of such knowledge by learning and doing, trial and error.Farmers possess acute observation, good memory for detail and transmission through teaching and storytelling.
The very farmers whose seeds and knowledge have been
appropriated by corporations to be bred for proprietary chemical-dependent hybrids and now to be genetically engineered.
Large corporations with their seeds and synthetic chemical inputs have eradicated traditional systems of seed exchange.
They have effectively hijacked seeds, pirated germ plasm that farmers developed over millennia and have ‘rented’ the seeds back to farmers.Genetic diversity among food crops has been drastically reduced.
The eradication of seed diversity went much further than merely prioritising corporate seeds: the Green Revolution
deliberately side-lined traditional seeds kept by farmers that were actually higher yielding and climate appropriate.
However, under the guise of ‘climate emergency’, we are now seeing a push for the Global South to embrace the Gates’ vision for a one-world agriculture (’Ag One’) dominated by global agribusiness and the tech giants.But it is the so-called developed nations and the rich elites that have plundered the environment and degraded the natural world.
The onus is on the richer nations and their powerful agri-food corporations to put their own house in order and to stop rainforest destruction for ranches and monocrop commodities, to stop pesticide run-offs into the oceans, to curtail a meat industry that has grown out of all proportion so it serves as a ready-made market for the overproduction and surplus of animal feed crops like corn, to stop the rollout of GMO glyphosate-dependent agriculture and to put a stop to a global system of food based on long supply chains that relies on fossil fuels at every stage.
To say that one model of a (GMO-based) agriculture must now be accepted by all countries is a continuation of a colonialist mindset that has already wrecked indigenous food systems which worked with their own seeds and practices that were in in harmony with natural ecologies.
Chapter III
Agroecology
Localisation and Food Sovereignty
Industry figures and scientists claim pesticide use and GMOs are necessary in ‘modern agriculture’.But this is not the case: there is now
sufficient evidence to suggest otherwise.It is simply not necessary to have our bodies contaminated with toxic agrochemicals, regardless of how much the industry tries to reassure us that they are present in ‘safe’ levels.
There is also the industry-promoted narrative that if you question the need for synthetic pesticides or GMOs in ‘modern agriculture’, you are somehow ignorant or even ‘anti-science’.This is again not true.What does ‘modern agriculture’ even mean? It means a system adapted to meet the demands of global agri-capital and its international markets and supply chains.
As writer and academic Benjamin R Cohen
recently stated:
“Meeting the needs of modern agriculture – growing produce that can be shipped long distances and hold up in the store and at home for more than a few days – can result in tomatoes that taste like cardboard or strawberries that aren’t as sweet as they used to be.Those are not the needs of modern agriculture.
They are the needs of global markets.”
What is really being questioned is a policy paradigm that privileges a certain model of social and economic development and a certain type of agriculture: urbanisation, giant supermarkets, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs (seeds, synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, machinery, etc), chemical-dependent monocropping, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency at the expense of rural communities, small independent enterprises and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient dense diets and food sovereignty.
It is clear that an alternative agri-food system is required.
The 2009 report
Agriculture at a Crossroads by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture.It cites the largest study of ‘sustainable agriculture’ in the Global South, which analysed 286 projects covering 37 million hectares in 57 countries and found that on average crop yields increased by 79% (the study also included ‘resource conserving’ non-organic conventional approaches).
The report concludes that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture.
The message conveyed in the paper
Reshaping the European Agro-food System and Closing its Nitrogen Cycle: The potential of combining dietary change, agroecology, and circularity00289-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS259033222100289X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue) (2020), which appeared in the journal One Earth, is that an organic-based, agri-food system could be implemented in Europe and would allow a balanced coexistence between agriculture and the environment.This would reinforce Europe’s autonomy, feed the predicted population in 2050, allow the continent to continue to export cereals to countries which need them for human consumption and substantially reduce water pollution and toxic emissions from agriculture.
The paper by Gilles Billen et al follows a long line of studies and reports which have concluded that organic agriculture is vital for guaranteeing food security, rural development, better nutrition and sustainability.
In the 2006 book
The Global Development of Organic Agriculture: Challenges and Prospects, Neils Halberg and his colleagues argue that there are still more than 740 million food insecure people (at least 100 million more today), the majority of whom live in the Global South.They say if a conversion to organic farming of approximately 50% of the agricultural area in the Global South were to be carried out, it would result in increased self-sufficiency and decreased net food imports to the region.
In 2007, the FAO noted that organic models increase cost-effectiveness and contribute to resilience in the face of climatic stress.The FAO concluded that by managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping) organic farmers can use their labour and environmental factors to intensify production in a sustainable way and organic agriculture could break the vicious circle of farmer indebtedness for proprietary agricultural inputs.
Of course, organic agriculture and agroecology are not necessarily one and the same.Whereas organic agriculture can still be part of the prevailing globalised food regime dominated by giant agri-food conglomerates, agroecology uses organic practices but is ideally rooted in the principles of localisation, food sovereignty and self-reliance.
The FAO recognises that agroecology contributes to improved food self-reliance, the revitalisation of smallholder agriculture and enhanced employment opportunities.It has argued that organic agriculture could produce enough food on a global per capita basis for the current world population but with reduced environmental impact than conventional agriculture.
In 2012, Deputy Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
Petko Draganov stated that expanding Africa’s shift towards organic farming will have beneficial effects on the continent’s nutritional needs, the environment, farmers’ incomes, markets and employment.
A
meta analysis conducted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UNCTAD (2008) assessed 114 cases of organic farming in Africa.
The two UN agencies concluded that organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems and that it is more likely to be sustainable in the long term.
There are numerous other studies and projects which testify to the efficacy of organic farming, including those from the
Rodale Institute, the UN Green Economy Initiative, the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu, Newcastle University and Washington State University.We also need look no further than the results of organic-based farming in Malawi.
But Cuba is the one country in the world that has made the biggest changes in the shortest time in moving away from industrial chemical-intensive agriculture.
Professor of Agroecology
Miguel Altieri notes that due to the difficulties Cuba experienced as a result of the fall of the USSR it moved towards organic and agroecological techniques in the 1990s.From 1996 to 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2% yearly during a period when production was stagnant across the wider region.
By 2016, Cuba had 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables.The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square metre, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals.
Urban farms
supply 50 to 70% or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in Havana and Villa Clara.
It has been
calculated by Altieri and his colleague Fernando R Funes-Monzote that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.
A systems approach
Agroecological principles represent a shift away from the reductionist yield-output chemical-intensive industrial paradigm, which results in among other things enormous pressures on human health, soil and water resources.
Agroecology is based on traditional knowledge and modern agricultural research, utilising elements of contemporary ecology, soil biology and the biological control of pests.This system combines sound ecological management by using on-farm renewable resources and privileging endogenous solutions to manage pests and disease without the use of agrochemicals and corporate seeds.
Academic
Raj Patel outlines some of the basic practices of agroecology by saying that nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of using inorganic fertilizer, flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests and weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting.The result is a sophisticated polyculture: many crops are produced simultaneously, instead of just one.
However, this model is a direct challenge to the interests of global agribusiness interests.With the emphasis on localisation and on-farm inputs, agroecology does not require dependency on proprietary chemicals, pirated patented seeds and knowledge nor long-line global supply chains.
Agroecology stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing industrial chemical-intensive model of farming.
That model is based on a reductionist mindset which is fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm that is unable or more likely unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach to food and agriculture.
Localised, democratic food systems based on agroecological principles and short supply chains are required.An approach that leads to local and regional food self-sufficiency rather than dependency on faraway corporations and their expensive environment-damaging inputs.If the last two years have shown anything due to the closing down of much of the global economy, it is that long supply chains and global markets are vulnerable to shocks.
Indeed, hundreds of millions are now facing food shortages as a result of the various economic lockdowns that have been imposed.
In 2014, a report by the then UN special rapporteur
Olivier De Schutter concluded that by applying agroecological principles to democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and poverty challenges.
But Western corporations and foundations are jumping on the ‘sustainability’ bandwagon by undermining traditional agriculture and genuine sustainable agri-food systems and packaging their corporate takeover of food as some kind of ‘green’ environmental mission.
The Gates Foundation through its ‘Ag One’ initiative is pushing for one type of agriculture for the whole world.A top-down approach regardless of what farmers or the public need or want.A system based on corporate consolidation and centralisation.
But given the power and influence of those pushing for such a model, is this merely inevitable? Not according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, which has released a report in collaboration with the ETC Group: ‘
A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045‘.
It calls for civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – to collaborate more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.
The report’s lead author,
Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.
Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.
Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.
And he has a point.
A few years ago, the Oakland Institute
released a report on 33 case studies which highlighted the success of agroecological agriculture across Africa in the face of climate change, hunger and poverty.The studies provide facts and figures on how agricultural transformation can yield immense economic, social, and food security benefits while ensuring climate justice and restoring soils and the environment.
The research highlights the multiple benefits of agroecology, including affordable and sustainable ways to boost agricultural yields while increasing farmers’ incomes, food security and crop resilience.
The report described how agroecology uses a wide variety of techniques and practices, including plant diversification, intercropping, the application of mulch, manure or compost for soil fertility, the natural management of pests and diseases, agroforestry and the construction of water management structures.
There are many other examples of successful agroecology and of farmers abandoning Green Revolution thought and practices to embrace it.
Upscaling
In an interview on the Farming Matters website, Million Belay sheds light on how agroecological agriculture is the best model for Africa.Belay explains that one of the greatest agroecological initiatives started in 1995 in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, and continues today.
It began with four villages and after good results, it was scaled up to 83 villages and finally to the whole Tigray Region.It was recommended to the Ministry of Agriculture to be scaled up at the national level.The project has now expanded to six regions of Ethiopia.
The fact that it was supported with research by the Ethiopian University at Mekele has proved to be critical in convincing decision makers that these practices work and are better for both the farmers and the land.
Bellay describes an agroecological practice that spread widely across East Africa – ‘push-pull’.This method manages pests through selective intercropping with important fodder species and wild grass relatives, in which pests are simultaneously repelled – or pushed – from the system by one or more plants and are attracted to – or pulled – toward ‘decoy’ plants, thereby protecting the crop from infestation.
Push-pull has proved to be very effective at biologically controlling pest populations in fields, reducing significantly the need for pesticides, increasing production, especially for maize, increasing income to farmers, increasing fodder for animals and, due to that, increasing milk production, and improving soil fertility.
By 2015, the number of farmers using this practice had increased to 95,000.One of the bedrocks of success is the incorporation of cutting-edge science through the collaboration of the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology and the Rothamsted Research Station (UK) who have worked in East Africa for more than 15 years on an effective ecologically based pest management solution for stem borers and striga.
It shows what can be achieved with the support of key institutions, including government departments and research institutions.
In Brazil, for instance, administrations have supported peasant agriculture and agroecology by developing supply chains with public sector schools and hospitals (Food Acquisition Programme).
This secured good prices and brought farmers together.It came about by social movements applying pressure on the government to act.
The federal government also brought native seeds and distributed them to farmers across the country, which was important for combatting the advance of the corporations as many farmers had lost access to native seeds.
But agroecology should not just be regarded as something for the Global South.Food First Executive Director Eric Holtz-Gimenez argues that it offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture.
In doing so, it challenges – and offers alternatives to – prevailing moribund doctrinaire neoliberal economics.
The scaling up of agroecology can tackle hunger, malnutrition, environmental degradation and climate change.By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work in the richer countries, it can also address the interrelated links between labour offshoring and the displacement of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out the outsourced jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal globalisation that
has undermined the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India to produce a reserve army of cheap labour.
Various official reports have argued that to feed the hungry and secure food security in low-income regions we need to support small farms and diverse, sustainable agroecological methods of farming and strengthen local food economies.
Olivier De Schutter says:
“To feed nine billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available.Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live, especially in unfavourable environments.”
De Schutter indicates that small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions by using ecological methods.Based on an extensive review of scientific literature,
the study he was involved in calls for a fundamental shift towards agroecology as a way to boost food production and improve the situation of the poorest.The report calls on states to implement a fundamental shift towards agroecology.
The success stories of agroecology indicate what can be achieved when development is placed firmly in the hands of farmers themselves.The expansion of agroecological practices can generate a rapid, fair and inclusive development that can be sustained for future generations.This model entails policies and activities that come from the bottom-up and which the state can then invest in and facilitate.
A decentralised system of food production with access to local markets supported by proper roads, storage and other infrastructure must take priority ahead of exploitative international markets dominated and designed to serve the needs of global capital.
Countries and regions must ultimately move away from a narrowly defined notion of food security and embrace the concept of food sovereignty.‘Food security’ as defined by the Gates Foundation and agribusiness conglomerates has merely been used to justify the rollout of large-scale, industrialised corporate farming based on specialised production, land concentration and trade liberalisation.
This has led to the widespread dispossession of small producers and global ecological degradation.
Across the world, we have seen a change in farming practices towards mechanised industrial-scale chemical-intensive monocropping and the undermining or eradication of rural economies, traditions and cultures.We see the ‘structural adjustment’ of regional agriculture, spiralling input costs for farmers who have become dependent on proprietary seeds and technologies and the destruction of food self-sufficiency.
Food sovereignty encompasses the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems.
‘Culturally appropriate’ is a nod to the foods people have traditionally produced and eaten as well as the associated socially embedded practices which underpin community and a sense of communality.
But it goes beyond that.Our connection with ‘the local’ is also very much physiological.
People have a deep microbiological connection to local soils, processing and fermentation processes which affect the gut microbiome – the up to six pounds of bacteria, viruses and microbes akin to human soil.
And as with actual soil, the microbiome can become degraded according to what we ingest (or fail to ingest).Many nerve endings from major organs are located in the gut and the microbiome effectively nourishes them.There is ongoing research taking place into how the microbiome is disrupted by the modern globalised food production/processing system and the chemical bombardment it is subjected to.
Capitalism colonises (and degrades) all aspects of life but is colonising the very essence of our being – even on a physiological level.With their agrochemicals and food additives, powerful companies are attacking this ‘soil’ and with it the human body.As soon as we stopped eating locally grown, traditionally processed food cultivated in healthy soils and began eating food subjected to chemical-laden cultivation and processing activities, we began to change ourselves.
Along with cultural traditions surrounding food production and the seasons, we also lost our deep-rooted microbiological connection with our localities.
It was replaced with corporate chemicals and seeds and global food chains dominated by the likes of Monsanto (now Bayer), Nestle and Cargill.
Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, neurotransmitters in the gut affect our moods and thinking.Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression and Parkinson’s.
Science writer and neurobiologist Mo Costandi has discussed gut bacteria and their balance and importance in brain development.Gut microbes controls the maturation and function of microglia, the immune cells that eliminate unwanted synapses in the brain; age-related changes to gut microbe composition might regulate myelination and synaptic pruning in adolescence and could, therefore, contribute to cognitive development.Upset those changes and there are going to be serious implications for children and adolescents.
In addition, environmentalist Rosemary Mason notes that increasing levels of obesity are associated with low bacterial richness in the gut.Indeed, it has been noted that tribes not exposed to the modern food system have richer microbiomes.Mason lays the blame squarely at the door of agrochemicals, not least the use of the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, a strong chelator of essential minerals, such as cobalt, zinc, manganese, calcium, molybdenum and sulphate.Mason argues that it also kills off beneficial gut bacteria and allows toxic bacteria.
If policy makers were to prioritise agroecology to the extent Green Revolution practices and technology have been pushed, many of the problems surrounding poverty, unemployment and urban migration could be solved.
The 2015 Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production.
It says that agroecology should not be co-opted to become a tool of the industrial food production model; it should be the essential alternative to it.
The declaration stated that agroecology is political and requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.
However, the biggest challenge for upscaling agroecology lies in the push by big business for commercial agriculture and attempts to marginalize agroecology.Unfortunately, global agribusiness concerns have secured the status of ‘thick legitimacy’ based on an intricate web of processes successfully spun in the scientific, policy and political arenas.This perceived legitimacy derives from the lobbying, financial clout and political power of agribusiness conglomerates which set out to capture or shape government departments, public institutions, the agricultural research paradigm, international trade and the cultural narrative concerning food and agriculture.
Chapter IV
Distorting Development
Corporate Capture and Imperialist Intent
Many governments are working hand-in-glove with the agritech/agribusiness industry to promote its technology over the heads of the public.Scientific bodies and regulatory agencies that supposedly serve the public interest have been subverted by the presence of key figures with industry links, while the powerful industry lobby holds sway over bureaucrats and politicians.
In 2014, Corporate Europe Observatory released a critical report on the European Commission over the previous five years.
The report concluded that the commission had been a willing servant of a corporate agenda.It had sided with agribusiness on GMOs and pesticides.Far from shifting Europe to a more sustainable food and agriculture system, the opposite had happened, as agribusiness and its lobbyists continued to dominate the Brussels scene.
Consumers in Europe reject GM food, but the commission had made various attempts to meet the demands from the biotech sector to allow GMOs into Europe, aided by giant food companies, such as Unilever, and the lobby group FoodDrinkEurope.
The report concluded that the commission had eagerly pursued a corporate agenda in all the areas investigated and pushed for policies in sync with the interests of big business.It had done this in the apparent belief that such interests are synonymous with the interests of society at large.
Little has changed since.
In December 2021,
Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE) noted that big agribusiness and biotech corporations are currently pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques.Since the beginning of their lobbying efforts (in 2018), these corporat.
