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Sun Apr 04, 2010 at 21:47:39 PM PDT
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Al Gore calls himself a "recovering politician." Clearly, that's exactly what Bill Clinton is too. He recently testified before the Senate Foreign Relations committee, where he said the following:
Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.
Clinton's doesn't entirely get it about food sovereignty yet, but he's getting there. He's certainly not talking about sustainability or dealing with the problems of free trade. But at least he's getting something, and he's thinking about these issues. Democracy Now covers this here. I've posted about this when it happened but now I'm providing the full quotes and links so you can get more information. Below, I've added comments he made to a reporter after the hearing. You can watch him say this at the Democracy Now link. |
| Jill Richardson :: More on Clinton Starting to Understand Food Sovereignty |
I just think that there's a movement all around the world now. It was first - I first saw Bob Zoellick say the same thing, the head of the World Bank, where he said, you know, starting in 1981, the wealthy agricultural producing countries genuinely believed that they and the emerging agricultural powers in Brazil and Argentina, which are the only two places that have, parenthetically, increased wheat yields per acre, grain yields per acre in the last decade, because they're the only places with more than twenty feet of topsoil, that they really believed for twenty years that if you moved agricultural production there and then facilitated its introduction into poorer places, you would free those places to get aid to skip agricultural development and go straight into an industrial era.
And it's failed everywhere it's been tried. And you just can't take the food chain out of production. And it also undermines a lot of the culture, the fabric of life, the sense of self-determination. And I have been involved for several years in agricultural products, principally in Rwanda, Malawi, other places in Africa, and now increasingly in Latin America, and I see this.
So we genuinely thought we were helping Haiti when we restored President Aristide, made a commitment to help rebuild the infrastructure through the Army Corps of Engineers there, and do a lot of other things. And we made this devil's bargain on rice. And it wasn't the right thing to do. We should have continued to work to help them be self-sufficient in agriculture. And we - that's a lot of what we're doing now. We're thinking about how can we get the coffee production up, how can we get other kinds of-the mango production up - we had an announcement on that yesterday - the avocados, lots of other things. |
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