‘GMO cash for food’
As you read, keep in mind that India is the seventh-largest country on the planet by area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous “democracy” in the world, and its agricultural sector accounted for about 50% of the total workforce in 2013.
A year ago Colin Todhunter (based in India and the UK) had written in his ‘Monsanto and the Subjugation of India’ that the vicious Bt cotton was India’s only genetically modified crop grown. As we know, Monsanto and other gen-tech corporations were very busy patenting every seed in sight, even wild plants sacred to the various cultures.
But against all scientific reports in India urging ‘no more GMOs’ and the whys of their opinions, last year the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture gave the go-head to ‘field trials’ for five food crops.
“The World Bank/IMF/WTO’s goals on behalf of Big Agritech and the opening up of India to it are well documented [‘Cash for Food’, Devinda Sharmer]. With the help of compliant politicians, transnational companies want farmers’ lands and unmitigated access to Indian markets. This would entail the wholesale ‘restructuring’ of Indian society under the bogus banner of ‘free trade’, which will lead (is leading) to the destruction of the livelihoods of hundreds of millions.
Moreover, Monsanto, Walmart and other giant US corporations had a seat at the top table when the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture was agreed with the US. Monsanto also dominates the cotton industry in India and is increasingly shaping agri-policy and the knowledge paradigm by funding agricultural research in public universities and institutes: it is the “contemporary East India Company.”
“American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports, not on industrial exports as people might think. It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.”
Professor Michael Hudson
US foreign policy is about power and control: the power to control food, states and entire populations.”
Todhunter had recently Tweeted this exposé at the Timesofindia.com: ‘Modi’s chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian had opposed India on IPR till recently’:
“Subramanian was a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development. As recently as March this year, in a written testimony submitted during the process of review by the US of intellectual property (IP) protection of various countries including India, Subramanian wrote, “If India does not address the problems created by Section 3(d) of the patent legislation or by compulsory licensing for nonworking, the United States should consider initiating WTO disputes against India.” [snip]
“These recommendations are in line with the demands of the US pharmaceutical industry, which has been lobbying against compulsory licencing and demanding the dilution of section 3(d) of the Indian patent law, though India insists it is well within the flexibilities allowed under the WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Properties (TRIPS) Agreement.” (the rest is here.)
Just another US multinationalist comprador whore, it seems. But do remember: Modi announced that India was ‘open for bidness’ during his last several entrances into DeeCee, and we all know what that means: ready for plunder by multinational kleptocrats-, and the further immerseration of everyday working people.
In his June 24 ‘Modi, Monsanto, Bayer and Cargill: Doing Business or Corporate Imperialism?’, Colin shows that Narenda Modi hired one of the giants of PR/lobbying firms, APCO, to burnish his image as ‘electable PM material’. He has a link, but here’s a snippet from the beyondheadlines.in link concerning APCO:
“Doing public relations for dictatorships is perhaps the more charitable part of Apco’s activities. Apco has a battalion of pro-war lobbyists under its wing. The firm is also a strong advocate of expanding armaments and the US military role in world affairs. In October 2004, Apco and Kissinger Associates (owned by Henry Kissinger) formed a strategic alliance. Beside Kissinger Associates, Apco also built a broad network or coalition of conservative pro-Zionist lobbyists and consultancy groups including Heritage Foundation, Frontier of Freedom, Jewish Policy Center, etc. In the name of war against terror, Apco helped to coordinate government communications to convince the public of the necessity of war. Its job also included manufacturing public opinion and feedback in supporting the war efforts. Basically it exploited Islam-phobia in Western society to sell aggression as the solution to regain security in the West.” (more on Blair/Iraq, phony ‘grassroots’ front groups, ‘legalizing’ the plunder of Iraq, postulating legal justification for an attack on Iran, and more unsavory/criminal bidness.) It’s about a mile long, and too long to read for now, but: to remember. Back to Todhunter:
“With Modi now at the political helm, the government is doing the bidding of global biotech companies and is currently trying to push through herbicide-tolerant GM mustard based on fraudulent tests and ‘regulatory delinquency‘, which will not only open the door to further GM crops but will boost the sales of Bayer’s glufinosate herbicide. In addition, plans have been announced to introduce 100% foreign direct investment in certain sectors of the economy, including food processing.
Neoliberal dogma
“The opening up of India to GMOs and foreign capital is supported by rhetoric about increasing agricultural efficiency, creating jobs and boosting GDP growth. Such rhetoric mirrors that of the pro-business, neoliberal dogma we see in APCO’s brochure for India. It is the type of jargon that is rolled out by powerful corporate players and their compliant politicians across the world who seek to try to convince the public that an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a relative few – via deregulations, privatisations and lower labour and environmental protection standards, etc – is for their own benefit because it is good for ‘growth’.”
From Africa to India, corporate America and global agribusiness are intent on colonising food and agriculture by recasting them in their own financially lucrative images, picking out only the most profitable sections of supply chains, while relying on public money to facilitate their profits.”
Now the Markets were insanely atwitter over the likely merger of Monsanto and Bayer, although some spoke of it as ‘a takeover’, but it hasn’t happened yet, and a few pockets of resistance op-eds and petitions have sprouted online.
‘A Bayer and Monsanto Merger Would Be Disastrous for Humans and the Environment; The union of Monsanto’s seeds and Bayer’s herbicides would perfectly position the merged giant to fully exploit a toxic but highly profitable cycle of increasing herbicide use and weed resistance.’ by Bill Freese, Center for Food Safety, June 23, 2016
NYTimes: ‘A Bayer Deal for Monsanto Would Get E.U. Regulatory Scrutiny’:
“In a letter to two German members of European Parliament, Margrethe Vestager, the commissioner in charge of European competition policy, said that the European Commission would consider concerns they had raised about the potential impact that a merger between Bayer and Monsanto might have on prices, on the availability of seed products and on research and innovation.
She said competition authorities would carefully examine other deals in the seed and agrochemical sector, including China National Chemical Corporation’s takeover of Syngenta and a plan to merge Dow Chemical and DuPont, then split the combined company into three.” [snip]
“United States regulators would also examine any merger of the two companies.”
(Ha ha ho; they’d likely examine the deals all the way to the bank!)
“Bayer is hoping to combine Monsanto with its own pesticide operations, forming a one-stop shop for farmers. The combined company would have $67 billion in annual sales and would produce an array of products including pain medication, G.M.O. seeds and pesticides.”
Well, garsh, Mickey, get a load of this!: ‘EU offers temporary approval of weedkiller glyphosate’ (Update), June 29, 2016, via phys.org
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(I’ll do a Part Two on the Monsanto/Bayer merger, seed biopiracy as opposed to ‘sovereignty’, the revolting ‘’Green Revolution’ and ‘Green Capitalism’, as this is already far too long, and there’s so much more of this Snidely Whiplash stuff afoot.)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
the visit was in march, 2015
did you note the recent nyt article on “100 nobel laureates agree that eugenics & the dominance of the aryans is good for the species?” oh wait, i meant, “100 nobel laureates eat GMO’s in every bite & demand people stop being meany poopy heads to the GMO’s who (sic) are a more persecuted lifeform than the Jews in the holocaust”? oh those poor GMO’s. 1st they came for the GMO’s, and i said nothing…they don’t want this crap to be labeled in food products for starters and once this cat is out of the bag, there’s no going back. cross-pollination & all that & adios to whatever nature has evolved over millenia x millenia. the undemocratic process, at least in the US & now spreading, of the rollout of GMO products in our current food supply is already testament to its anti-democratic nature. anti-democratic as “against the people, hostile to the populace.” the undemocratic process contains the anti-democratic result.
i don’t know…am i being too paranoid? mind control via mass trauma (9/11, etc., etc., etc.), psycho-pharmacology as a gigantic MKULTRA experiment, population control via vaccines & perhaps (or no doubt?) via GMO products, the endless “enter/info-tainment” BS including the quasi & not so quasi-gladiatorial nature of sports & lots of big public events, the sheer soul-numbing, insulting stupidity of public politics.
unfortunately i never saw this movie. not taking the reptiloid overlord part of it so literally, though it is amazing how many “big thinkers” believe in cosmic panspermia, anyway, what are people in, e.g., Davos doing but undemocratically planning what’s “best” for the rest of us, w/ the noblest intentions (for some anyway). w/o our input, how can it not be antidemos, hostile to the populace? they are already far into an Orwellian world of unfreedom.
even better: “they are entrepeneurs!”
i did see a thang by ’50 nobel laureates’ telling greenpeace to stfu cuz GMOs are feeding the world, and only they can, plus: gates’ golden rice is preventing blindness in chirren! (allus gotta go wid the women and the chirren to make yer benevolent point about biopiracy and war, yanno.)
srsly i dunno if you’re paranoid or not, meaning: there’s a concerted plan, or whether it’s just a punch of puzzle pieces that just happen to look like they’re smart enough to hatch such an over-arching plan. but clearly ‘they’ know best, and the rest of us are just…nutters. didyou see the compromise dark act in congress? boils down to: there’s an app for that for your smart phone, srsly. love the first video, i’ll not to take the time now to watch the second one.
loads of chores in RL here on the weekends, and i kinda got behind making this diary yesterday… part II may even make you more sick than this one, i dunno. i guess you nailed the most depressing part to me: these modifications are not only irreversible, but the freaking crops are crap in many ways, require more and more herbicides since: superweeds, the herbicides kill the good microbes in the soil, neonics are killing insects, and glyphosate is showing up everywhere in humans. and as you say, the pollen bastardizes organic crops, AND those farmers are being sued because if it.
it didn’t have to be this way; there are ways to farm organically and sustainably, but *that* science is a lie, yanno?
Svalvard Global Seed Vault
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
Note who turns up like a bad penny.
There is a problem going back before GMO crops should something go wrong.
There is already a problem going back before hybrids. We know the names of various heritage varieties of fruits and for some the pedigree (is that the word in plant breeding) but not all. And the qualities most sought have changed. For example, the rave reviews from two centuries ago were for cider apples, not cooking or “eating” apples.
Food deserts might soon refer to more serious issues that just an absence of grocery stores.
that indeed was to be included in part II, as per vandana shiva. but it gets even more dastardly than that, tragically, although i only scanned the wiki.
yes to the coming meaning of ‘food deserts’, and yes to seed exchanges for heirlooms. a few folks in our valley are resurrecting old orchards with an eye toward that, as we tried to do decades ago when we lived…in an old apple orchard. more later, i think, once again i find i’m pressed for time, dagnabbit.
yep, i read the wiki, and it is indeed far worse than portrayed. i even read the Talk section, lame, but for Monsanto hacks.
jason: i loved your davos snark since that’s exactly what their claim was: “we’re looking out for you Rabble!”
even prior to the GMO thing, what percentage of food in a safeway or ralph’s or piggly wiggly is not really fit for consumption? how about a 7/11? in some communities, a 7/11 or a truck stop is *the only place to get food.*
and McDonald’s and the like? why do these places exist except to make the eating process mortal/fatal? this from the wiki page on the history of mcdonald’s, started in Hollywood of course: “they used such things as turning off the heating to prevent people wanting to stay so long, fixed and angled seating so the customer would sit over their food promoting them to eat faster, spreading the seats further apart so being less of a socialble place to dine in, and giving their customers branded cone shaped cups forcing them to hold their drink whilst eating which would speed up the eating process, many other companies followed Mc Donald’s strategies…” the “Fordization”, or Taylorism, of eating right at the foundation of this satan-spawn, even before you get the god-awful chemicalization of everything so that one is actually hungrier & malnourished after eating! Supersize Me! and these fast food monsters’ rise parallels the demolition of the american life & landscape bro’t about by suburbanization & the automobile and the development of Big Ag to produce the Big Mac. (who the hell comes up w/these things? maybe reptilian overlords after all? pull off your mask Killary!)
anyway, long story short: yes, we are guinea pigs. human life & labor as someone else’s profit vector is a short step to shoving us all into the ovens. the desire to control, be it information or the biosphere, is the desire to kill. a satanic Iago character blares in every naive Rodrigo’s ears, “put money in thy purse,” money will buy you love, happiness, etc. meanwhile, colossal murder most foul is really afoot as we get distracted by the bright & shiny gizmos & promises of a techno-utopia.
‘Big Ag for Bic Macs’ is brilliant, jason. whooosh on the mcDogfood wiki ploys narrative. i’d always thought that in the early days they were just drive-thrus and cheeeep and Fast! but no longer even that. i loved the first 29 cent burger i ever ate at age ten (iirc), myownself. my mum was a ‘healthy cook’ at the time when all veggies were either frozen of (yech) canned, except for the summer road-side stands, which in our area was mainly fruit.
now when petro-chemical fertilizers and ddt came into vogue, no big farm products were safe to eat, not to mention toxifying any local wells or aquifers. how many recalls are there even now due to veggies being contaminated by raw sewage? ooopsie; sorry ’bout that! hard to trust stuff in .natural food’ stores, as well, although i forget all the headline scandals about ‘whole foods’ and such. and of course, when ddt was outlawed in the US, dumped on mexico, because: nafta, crops were just sent right back into this country.
but modern food was known to be essentially denatured of nutrients for a variety of reasons even before genetic mods. in addition, was it the massive ad campaigns of ‘things go better w/ coca cola’ and ‘he’s after me lucky charms’ that helped get USians so addicted to sugar? now of course, almost ready-made foods are without high-fructose corn syrup, all gmo, of course. mr wd reports that at walmart, shoppers’ (i mean ‘consumers’) trolleys are often stacked with case upon case of soda, my stars.
but the thing about the GM crops is that, never mind the disappearing beneficial soil microbes, ingesting them causes little pesticide and herbicide factories in our guts, eradicating the many, many beneficial flora required for health and immunity to diseases, and allowing the bad bacteria to reproduce wildly. some claim that GMOs are even changing our dna, and of course that of the new generations, as well. think of the burgeoning numbers of food and pollen allergies, insulin resistance, increased amerikan poundage, and so forth: lots of it can be traced to the reptilian overlords, as you say. slow death, illness and subclinical health along the way, but O those genius laureates tell the GMO Complainers to stfu. wasn’t stephen hawking arguing the same just recently? proving again that geniuses aren’t always that smart.
yes, i’d heard that about gut flora. would not be surprised about DNA. i know so many people w/allergies, not just the seasonal kind, and if i say to them: have you tried not eating meat? then i’m one of the “They Live” reptiloids. I guess i was trying to suggest that while GMO’s do represent a quantum leap forward in awfulness, there’s lots of precedent. yes, pesticides, animal “husbandry,” (scare quotes b/c one of the original meanings of husbandry is “thrift”). the kind of “scientific” food of denatured, packaged, chemical-laced garbage.
dont’t tip any sacred cows this 4th of july. if i hear anyone else praising Elie Wiesel, i think i’ll lose my marbles.
“As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”
ooof; what a great melville allegory in a single paragraph you’ve brought us, jason. ‘But pity there was none’ won’t stop in my mind now; what an image, really to live by in these increasingly dark, benighted times. although the ‘misgrown masses in oak knotholes’ mimics what i often muse but be inside those who rule us so cavalierly; i fancy their breaths would smell like putrefaction left to their own devices.
how interesting that you seem to mean that veegans/vegetarians don’t develop food sensitivities, though. i do eat some meat, and especially disgusting grass-fed marrow bone soups for my condition.
i assume weisel must have died, then? whassup w/ the homage to the colonel of double-fried grease fame? does his ghost now walk abroad? (nice satire, by the by.)
i couldn’t resist sharing this, makin’ the rounds on facespace & mybook. it’s so effin’ awful on so many levels. billions of chickens wish he had committed suicide. you too can a be titanic life-destroying asshole if you try really, really hard!
——————————————
At age 5 his father died.
At age 16 he quit school.
At age 17 he had already lost four jobs.
At age 18 he got married.
Between ages 18 and 22, he was a railroad conductor and failed.
He joined the army and washed out there.
He applied for law school, he was rejected.
He became an insurance sales man and failed again.
At age 19 he became a father.
At age 20 his wife left him and took their baby daughter.
He became a cook and dishwasher in a small cafe.
He failed in an attempt to kidnap his own daughter, and eventually he convinced his wife to return home.
At age 65 he retired.
On the 1st day of retirement he received a check from the Government for $105.
He felt that the Government was saying that he couldn’t provide for himself.
He decided to commit suicide, life wasn’t worth living anymore; he had failed so much.
He sat under a tree writing his will, but instead, he wrote what he would have accomplished with his life. He realized there was much more that he hadn’t yet done. There was one thing he could do better than anyone he knew. And that was how to cook.
So he borrowed $87 against his check and bought and fried up some chicken using his recipe, and went door to door to sell them to his neighbors in Kentucky.
Remember, at age 65 he was ready to commit suicide.
But at age 88 Colonel Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Empire was a billionaire.
Moral of the story: It’s never too late to start all over.
MOST IMPORTANLY, IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR ATTITUDE. NEVER GIVE UP NO MATTER HOW HARD IT GETS.
You have what it takes to be successful. Go for it and make a difference.
http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html
here’s the letter. it’s up to 110 nobel laureates. why anyone cares what a physicist or chemist has to say on the subject of GMO’s escapes me, except appeal to rank authority & prestige. and economists & literary figures? major eye roll.
yes weasel croaked. finally. the mass murderers’ favorite Voice of Conscience. he gave GHW Bush in 1991 the EW Humanitarian Foundation award for bringing peace to the middle east. Madoff stiffed him, saints & angels be praised, of 15 million. too bad he didn’t bankrupt him.
no, i’m not suggesting that crunchitarians have no food allergies. it may not be meat per se, but, you know, meat consumed at restaurants. and people’s unwillingness to look at their diets in general re allergies.
wasn’t that col. sanders thing just awful? it’s fetishizing of “hard work” for starters. ugh. w/enough happy talk, you can make it after all! and that check he got? it was his own damn money, called Social Security. the special olympics of idiocy there.
that melville quote is great ain’t it? made me think of a little church i know all too well, with some of whose congregants i’ll be sharing what promises to be a completely inoffensive 4th where we middlers talk about our refined consumer preferences over miller light & hot dogs. irony? what’s that? the opposite of wrinkly?
lol; sounds as though you’re looking forward to you kentucky-fried-grease fourth. or…not. thanks for the letter, i’d had colin todhunter’s version of it on my long word doc. but i did dig up his controversy over golden rice, and discovered i’d remembered incorrectly. turns out, they’re blaming greenpeace and all anti-gmo-killers pf chirren that it’s not actually in production yet. i’d thought i remembered that the spliced-in beta carotene wasn’t able to convert to vitamin a, and in any event, would have have been too small an amount to…amount to a hill of beans. but that’s just theory for now. rockefeller, not gates, too. bad wd.
but there are other alternatives, to boot.
anyway, i’d ‘misremembered’ it. ‘irony’ (john irving said) is the failure of events to bear out what they’d promised incipiently (or close). and dayum, i’ve had to learn to love the opposite of wrinkly over my lifetime. had three more chunks of it come barrelin’ at us yesterday again.
p.s. tube steaks: allowable standards for rodent hairs and rat feces: happy fourth tail-gatein’!
yes, but it’s supposed to rain. i don’t mind fireworks but also not crazy about them. the dead cow/dead pig fest has a stellar view onto the potomac & washington monument, if one can stomache it. i think this holiday epitomizes this country: lots of dead animals & trash piling up everywhere.
as does the colonel’s ‘miracle on kentucky’s main street’. what i’d been trying to say is that his new recipe, at least one i saw years ago on the teevee, was to batter a thigh, deep-fry it, batter it again, deep-fry it until is fair’ glistened with grease! and was 32% larger, thus more finger lickin’ good!
have a nice time, srsly; take a fried tofu burger or four wid ya. (another gripe: we love tofu fixed a dozen ways, and 90% of the soybeans grown in the world are now…what? gmo.)
yer tweaking of ‘amerikkka the beautiful’: yayuss, well…and so it goes for now.
tofu? lol. trying to get my lynched?
har har, ho ho, ha ha…and ;-)
Morning the day after, and kudos on this post, wendye. As Jason and Prof. Hudson point out, this is all about control, not only there (India et al) but here.
counterpunch.org has two very good articles on the subject today – first one:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/05/genetically-engineered-crops-the-grand-and-failed-promise/
I know we know, but it’s a good overview of the death of midwestern soil due to the practices associated with GM farming, the author Jim Goodman. First sentence:
“The endless miles of dead, brown fields are finally gone. . .”
Contemplate that sentence for a few moments. He’s talking about a springtime landscape, which ought to be, in a better world, green. I bake all the bread I eat. I realize after this that it is playing russian roulette to use anything but organic flour, and that I must do the latter as a protest, and not only that but for health reasons, as often as I humanly can.
Second one is about those “100 Nobels”: Ghostbusters, GMOs and the Feigned Expertise of Nobel Laureates, by Devon G. Pena.
Both are good and not long. My thought on the latter is it is so fiddlesticks-susceptible that it may in the long run be helpful. We are not as dumb as they think. (See Brexit)
thank you, juliania; goodman…done good. i’m glad he had vandana’s numbers on golden rice, too; i couldn’t find them again.
pena’s expose was fine as well, esp. ““We may also need to recruit the Ghostbusters since at least two of the signers are dead. Alfred G Gilman died on Dec 23 2015 and Norman Borlaug died on Sept 12, 2009.”
when in the past monsanto hacks would get on my gmo posts, they’d often drag borlaug into the arguments. but as far as i ever knew, his short stemmed wheat was accomplished by selective breeding, not gene spicing, so…i dunno if pena’s right on that. but as far as i know, that’s when the race to the bottom for transgenic crops began in earnest.
some of part II may likely make you wild with rage and/or despair. how many evil deeds can a human do before called ‘evil’? (i’ll try to get it up soon.)