Let's start with our friend Bill Gates, who was quoted in The Economist as follows:
Finally, I believe that agriculture-our foundation's second-biggest commitment after health-offers one of the greatest opportunities in Africa. If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, led by a former United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is working to develop and distribute new seeds that have higher yields and stronger resistance to pests, drought, and disease. If citizens and their governments ensure that African farmers can use these new seeds and have all the advantages of recent advances, the farmland of Africa can become the answer to hunger and poverty-and a trigger for wide economic growth.
Interestingly enough, a friend just came back from the West African nations of Mali and Senegal with pictures of protesting Africans carrying signs saying "Non a la Revolution Verte 'AGRA'" (No to the Green Revolution and AGRA - Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, mentioned by Gates above).
In addition to the recent Gates column, there was an op ed in the Wall Street Journal by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. called "Let's Restart the Green Revolution." It starts out by pointing out that "Agricultural output has been falling behind population growth for almost two decades, and so has productivity." From there, the piece jumps straight to the recent deregulation of GE alfalfa, noting that organic growers would be "inconvenienced" by it. The piece goes on to say:
But organic alfalfa represents about 1% of the market. Functionally, it is not different from bio-engineered alfalfa. Only the label is different. "Organic" alfalfa is fed to "organic" cows so consumers can splurge on milk that says "organic" on the label.
Shoppers have every right to indulge themselves in this fashion, and farmers to make a buck meeting their need. But should other farmers be stopped from planting a new seed just because it would complicate their niche marketing strategy? When the gauze of environmental correctness is peeled away, the battle here isn't about much more than keeping organic alfalfa (also known as hay) cheap so organic dairy operators will be less tempted to substitute another feed.
What this has to do with feeding the world, I don't know, but clearly the author did not do a very thorough job researching the issue of GE alfalfa and why, exactly, the organic community is so outraged. Going on to talk about GE sugarbeets, the author says:
It's too bad when change upsets somebody's livelihood, but these lawsuits seek to award organic farmers a civil right not to have their high-end, advertising-created market segment disturbed by industrial progress.
Pardon me, but is this piece about feeding the world, or just giving Americans more cheap food while helping out Monsanto's sales? Then the article shifts into its main argument. The world needs more decisions like the USDA's recent deregulations of GE alfalfa and sugarbeets. After making a case against government regulation, the author compares farmers wanting to grow Roundup Ready crops with the vegetable seller who set himself on fire in Tunisia, beginning the wave of rebellions in the Middle East and North Africa:
A street vendor in central Tunisia set himself afire as a protest after being harassed by police for trying to make a living selling vegetables without a permit. The nature of the modern regulatory state everywhere is to be hard on those trying to do anything new.
So who is this author, the genius who finally solved our problem of ending hunger by ending government regulation? He's a Wall Street Journal columnist whose wikipedia page quotes him as doubting the reality of a man-made climate crisis, making fun of Prius drivers, and noting that Hitler wanted energy independence too. Please excuse me if I don't trust him as an expert on solving world hunger. Perhaps not surprisingly, Monsanto thought the op ed was right on.
Switching over to the other side of the debate, let's take a look at Eric Holt-Gimenez's piece "Onward Corporate Food Crusaders!," about the multinational corporations that have pledged to join Bill Gates in feeding the world:
Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the business leaders of the global corporate food regime announced a new Corporate Food Crusade.
Seventeen agrifood monopolies (ADM, BASF, Bunge, Cargill, The Coca-Cola Company, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro, Monsanto Company, Nestlé, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever, Wal-Mart Stores and Yara International) rolled out a new report financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation entitled "Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture."
Holt-Gimenez asks: "why should the private sector invest in global hunger?" Bill Gates provides the answer. After quoting Gates, Holt-Gimenez summarizes: "The poor may not have much money, but since they are the fastest growing sector of the sagging global economy, they represent an important new market for the monopolies of the corporate food regime."
I find it hard to summarize the remainder of the piece without quoting it. Holt-Gimenez makes a number of points and it's hard to choose a few highlights to quote here. For example:
The problem is that the world's big banks, financial houses and agrifood monopolies thrive on the very price volatility that brings about food rebellions. While these corporations talk a well-financed line about serving the poor, they need the poor (and lots of them) in order to help them out of their own crisis of accumulation. Thirty years of globalization has concentrated so much wealth at the top, corporations are having a hard time finding places to reinvest. Poverty (and speculation) is their last frontier. There is little historical evidence that this kind of colonization actually helps the poor in question.
He finishes with the point that the corporate crusade against hunger will not happen unless taxpayers - us - agree to subsidize it. That certainly explains the repeated op eds over the past several years, telling us again and again why a Second Green Revolution is so badly needed. If they could just do it, you'd think that they would - and, if their plans worked, the rest of us would applaud their wonderful success when we received word that global hunger was no more.
For a far less profitable (to agribusiness multinationals and oil companies) but much more GREEN (in the modern, environmental sense of the word) Green Revolution, take a look at the Rodale Institute's proposal for an organic green revolution. One that can feed the world while reducing the need for fossil fuel inputs. |
