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Category: farming

  • BR-319: paving the way for Indigenous displacement and environmental catastrophe

    Since European colonisers set foot in Brazil, Indigenous people have fought a relentless battle to protect their lands and preserve their way of life. Centuries of oppression have forced them to alter their cultures, traditions and beliefs, yet their resilience remains unbroken. Today, they still endure violent invasions by farmers, loggers, miners, and organised crime, keeping their communities locked in a constant fight for survival.

    The protection of Brazil’s Indigenous lands is crucial for the survival of the Amazon rainforest. However, multiple projects – including oil and gas exploration, agribusiness expansion, cattle farming, biofuel production, legal and illegal mining, logging, and organised crime – threaten this vital ecosystem.

    BR-319 highway: a road to nowhere for local Indigenous people

    The reconstruction of Amazon’s BR-319 highway, one of the world’s most environmentally damaging projects, serves as a catalyst for these destructive activities. Stretching 885km, the highway connects the capital of Amazonas, Manaus, to Porto Velho, cutting through pristine areas of the rainforest. A proposed 408km reconstruction would open a gateway to deforestation, crime, and corporate exploitation, directly impacting over 18,000 Indigenous people.

    The Amazon plays a critical role in regulating global climate and generating water vapour that brings rain across Brazil through the “flying rivers”. The reconstruction of BR-319 will disrupt this vital system, threatening the region’s health and overall environmental balance.

    Deforestation and degradation along BR-319 will disrupt the “flying rivers”, potentially leading to devastating droughts, food and water shortages, and a collapse of Brazil’s agribusiness sector, including family farming – ultimately destabilising the country’s economy.

    NGOs propping up the BR-319 at the expense of Indigenous communities

    Indigenous territories are not merely land – they are living, breathing places, rich with history, culture, and meaning. These lands hold the heartbeat of traditions, where communities coexist in a delicate, sacred balance with the animals, the water, the forests, and the earth itself. Their bond with nature is deep and sacred, as their very survival depends on its health and strength. It is a bond built on respect and care, a promise to nurture the land that sustains them, ensuring that it flourishes for generations to come.

    However, this bond is now under threat. In the areas surrounding the BR-319 highway, Indigenous leaders from Lake Capanã Grande and Baetas have reported serious violations of their rights and growing threats due to the degradation of their territories and the expansion of the highway. There has also been an alarming attempt by a non-governmental organisation (NGO) to validate the consultation protocol with the communities.

    This concerning situation emerged during an event at the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), which included the participation of the federal prosecution office, a representative from the ministry of the environment, an NGO, and Indigenous leaders. The meeting was organised by researcher Lucas Ferrante and covered by Revista Cenarium.

    The issue was further detailed in the article BR-319: Narratives, Business and Power, published by Revista Cenarium in February. According to the article, NGO Instituto Internacional de Educação do Brasil (IEB) produced a document falsely claiming that the Indigenous community had been consulted and had agreed to the reconstruction of the highway, provided that an extractive reserve was created to protect them. Shockingly, the community only learned of this approval after they had signed the document.

    BR-319 highway: a ‘manipulation of rights’ and ‘violation’ of traditional lands

    In 2020, Ferrante travelled along the BR-319 highway, interviewing several Indigenous people and leaders impacted by the road. Since then, their views on the highway’s effects have remained consistent. One Indigenous leader from Lake Capanã shared his concerns about the highway’s impact on his village (his name has been withheld to ensure his safety):

    I would like to express my indignation in front of everyone regarding the impact of the BR-319 highway on the Indigenous lands of Lake Capanã. This brings us problems, manipulation of rights, violation of our traditional areas, occupation by land grabbers, pollution of our river, destruction of our nature.

    And this is causing major problems in the flow of our rivers. Streams are being buried. Here we use the water from the river. The result of this BR will become an open door for the entry of criminals, drug dealers, all types of drugs, as already exists.

    The Indigenous population lives off food from nature, the Indigenous population does not live off livestock. The Indigenous people live off traditional objects. They live off the subsistence of nature and subtract nature for itself for their survival and protect their own nature. I am against this paving.

    The expansion of BR-319 is driving the rapid growth of agribusiness in the region, particularly on unallocated public lands. Soybean farmers from Mato Grosso do Sul are increasingly moving into Rondônia, buying land from livestock farmers who are then shifting southward within the BR-319 corridor to plant soybeans. These lands are often seized illegally through land-grabbing, illegal deforestation, or violent evictions of Indigenous and traditional communities.

    This situation brings attention to critical issues like the Soy Moratorium, especially as there have been growing attempts to abolish it, which could have devastating effects on the environment and Indigenous and traditional communities.

    Agribusiness lobby target the Soy Moratorium

    Brazil’s Soy Moratorium, established in 2006, is an agreement where signatory companies pledge not to buy soy grown on land deforested in the Amazon after July 2008. This agreement has been a vital tool in the fight against deforestation. Yet now it faces a threat, as Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby intensifies efforts to dismantle it. As the world’s largest producer and exporter of soybeans, Brazil’s agricultural policies hold immense global consequences.

    In October 2024, the state of Mato Grosso, leading soy producer, enacted Bill 12.709/2024, effectively cutting tax incentives for companies that adhere to the Soy Moratorium. On February 19, Brazil’s Legislative Assembly president, Max Russi, made the following statement:

    We are all united in defence of one of the most important pillars of our economy – agribusiness.

    During the same month, a troubling report from Repórter Brasil revealed that Cargill, one of Brazil’s largest grain exporters, was suggesting distancing itself from the Soy Moratorium rules.

    On 11 March, Brazil’s agriculture minister, Carlos Fávaro, arranged a meeting with agribusiness leaders and supreme court minister Flávio Dino, who is overseeing the case concerning the Soy Moratorium. Among the key figures were Blairo Maggi, chairman of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (Abiove) and Fávaro’s political mentor, as well as representatives from major agricultural giants such as Grupo Bom Futuro and Amaggi, the nation’s largest agricultural trading company.

    Concerns emerge from the overlapping roles and connections involved. Maggi’s significant influence in both policymaking and agribusiness, coupled with family ties and Amaggi’s vested interests in the Soy Moratorium, raise questions about impartiality of these discussions.

    Fávaro has expressed strong opposition to the Soy Moratorium, calling it “discrepant” and “unprofessional,” and has firmly declared his position:

    I tried to demonstrate that the Soy Moratorium is also not constitutional, and I am confident that Minister Dino will act in this sense.

    Indigenous communities: a mere roadblock in agribusiness’s pursuit of profit

    If the Soy Moratorium is lifted, soybean farmers will migrate to the Amazon, triggering rampant deforestation, environmental degradation, pollution, and violation of Indigenous rights, including violence and land invasion. This could also result in a sharp rise in greenhouse gas emissions, leading to disastrous social and environmental consequences.

    In a nation where agribusiness drives the economy, Indigenous territories are seen as obstacles to relentless capitalist growth. With Brazil’s Congress dominated by the powerful rural caucus, the “ruralistas,” there is little concern for Indigenous rights as they push relentlessly for laws that serve their own interests. For them, the survival of Indigenous communities is a mere roadblock in their pursuit of profit.

    The future of the Amazon, its Indigenous communities, and our planet is at risk. Rebuilding BR-319 isn’t just about a road – it’s a dangerous move that could destroy centuries of heritage and harm the environment beyond repair. If Brazil takes this path, the damage will be permanent, leaving deep scars on the land, its people, and the world.

    As the world prepares for COP30, the urgency for protecting the Amazon and its ecosystems has never been clearer. The decisions made at this summit will have a profound impact on the preservation of the Amazon, and we must ensure that sustainability, Indigenous rights, and environmental protection take centre stage in these discussions.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Monica Piccinini

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • 20 of the world’s biggest supermarkets aren’t being upfront about their methane emissions

    Despite mounting evidence of the environmental impact of methane emissions, the world’s largest supermarkets are failing to take responsibility for their role in the crisis.

    Methane emissions in the food retailer supply chain

    A new report by Changing Markets Foundation and NGO Mighty Earth reveals that 20 major retailers – including Carrefour, Lidl, Tesco, Walmart, and Ahold Delhaize – are ignoring the need to track or reduce the methane emissions linked to their supply chains:

    Scorecard assessed the 20 largest food retailers in Europe and the US to evaluate their progress towards reducing methane emissions. Graph: Changing Markets Foundation and Mighty Earth.

    With meat and dairy responsible for at least a third of their total emissions, this alarming failure raises serious questions about their commitment to sustainability and climate action.

    The findings expose a troubling lack of transparency, as none of these industry giants publicly report their methane emissions, despite methane being 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the short term.

    As global efforts intensify to curb greenhouse gases, the failure of these companies to acknowledge and address their methane footprint puts them under increasing scrutiny. With pressure mounting from regulators, investors, and consumers, these retailers must move beyond greenwashing and take concrete steps to slash emissions before it’s too late.

    Gemma Hoskins, global methane lead at Mighty Earth, said:

    Food retailers are ignoring the methane problem hidden in the meat and dairy aisles and risk losing consumer trust. Methane is a superheater greenhouse gas responsible for about a quarter of the heating the planet has already experienced. But it’s short-lived, so rapid cuts would be a win for climate and nature.

    Retailers are uniquely positioned to urgently drive down agricultural methane emissions in their supply chains. That starts with being honest about the impact of the products they sell and working harder and faster to reduce that impact.

    Meat and dairy: lack of transparency on methane emissions

    The report reveals that over 90% of European food retailers’ emissions come from their supply chains, with meat and dairy accounting for nearly half. Yet, none of the retailers analysed disclose methane emissions or the footprint of the meat and dairy products they sell.

    Food retailers also fail to commit to deforestation-free supply chains for key commodities like beef, soy, and palm oil, despite the 2025 EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) deadline. Livestock farming is a leading driver of the Amazon’s destruction, responsible for 88% of deforestation.

    While fossil fuel companies face intense scrutiny, the climate impact of the meat and dairy industry remains largely neglected. Rapidly cutting methane emissions by transforming this sector – alongside phasing out fossil fuels – could be a game changer in the fight against climate disaster.

    Methane alert: supermarkets’ ‘complete lack of action’

    Methane levels have more than doubled in the past 200 years, with around 600 million tonnes released into the atmosphere annually – roughly 40% from natural sources and 60% driven by human activity.

    As a greenhouse gas, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, responsible for 25% of global heating. Though it remains in the atmosphere for a shorter time than CO₂, it is far more effective at trapping heat, earning its reputation as a ‘super-heater’.

    Animal agriculture is a major contributor, responsible for 16.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 32% of human-caused methane emissions – largely from a byproduct of livestock digestion process (burps) called enteric fermentation, and manure. Each year, 83 billion land animals are slaughtered for meat production, further driving these emissions.

    Changing Markets Foundation and Mighty Earth are calling on food retailers to take responsibility by publicly reporting their emissions, setting science-based climate targets, and reducing methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030, in line with the Global Methane Pledge adopted at COP26. With their vast influence over supply chains and consumer choices, food retailers must lead the shift toward a sustainable food system, rather than placing the burden on consumers.

    As key players in the global food industry, major food retailers have the power – and the duty – to pressure dominant meat and dairy producers, including JBS, Tyson, and Cargill, to adopt more transparency and sustainable practices, and cut methane emissions at the source.

    Maddy Haughton-Boakes, senior campaigner at the Changing Markets Foundation, said:

    Methane emissions are a major blind spot of supermarkets. Our scorecard reveals a complete lack of action, with the most powerful players in the food supply chains completely ignoring their government’s commitments to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. This must change urgently.

    Some retailers acknowledge the problem and have taken small steps, but none are treating it with the urgency it demands – there are no real leaders here. Cutting methane this decade is our emergency brake on runaway global heating, yet retailers are barely pressing it. The companies that dominate our food system must step up now and take real action to slash their methane emissions.

    Health impact: antibiotic-resistant bacteria

    Excessive meat consumption is a major threat to both the planet and human health. It drives greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and destroys ecosystems rich in biodiversity. But the dangers don’t stop there – scientific studies reveal that high intake of red and processed meat significantly increases the risk of ischaemic heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes, colon polyps, and diverticular disease.

    The World Health Organisation (WHO) has found compelling evidence that processed meat directly contributes to colorectal cancer, a finding further reinforced by research from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS).

    Adding to these dangers, the meat industry’s rampant use of antibiotics in livestock farming has accelerated the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a looming public health catastrophe.

    Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) results in higher mortality rates, prolonged illness, the spread of epidemics, and an overwhelming strain on global healthcare systems.

    A call for companies to step up

    Changing Markets Foundation and Mighty Earth are urging food retailers to urgently develop climate plans to reduce methane from meat and dairy sources, adopt public transparency in climate reporting and disclose methane emissions, and set a target for methane reductions.

    The pressure is mounting for food retailers to confront the methane problem head-on. As consumers become more aware of the environmental and health implications of their food choices, the demand for transparency and accountability will only grow.

    Food retailers can no longer afford to ignore the environmental cost of the products they sell. By taking quick and decisive action to reduce methane emissions, they not only have the chance to be at the forefront of the sustainable food movement but also to regain consumer trust and position themselves as true leaders in the fight against climate change.

    With the urgency of the climate crisis at an all-time high, it is crucial that these companies step up to the challenge. If they fail to address methane emissions now, they risk locking in further damage to the planet, compromising both our future, our health, and their role in the global economy.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Monica Piccinini

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Starmer defends slashing aid budget to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP – as it happened

    This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

    The rightwing historian Niall Ferguson is in the audience for Badenoch’s speech, according to James Heale from the Spectator.

    Niall Ferguson spotted at Kemi Badenoch’s big speech on foreign affairs… hearing we might get some policy too

    Tractors’ horns interrupt Badenoch’s speech shortly after she begins speaking. Attendant spinner heard swearing furiously

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • No One Is Coming To Feed Us

    It’s January 2025, LA is burning, Richmond has no water, Helene survivors are getting kicked out of hotels by FEMA. The level of government response you grew up with is gone. This has left millions wondering; what is it going to take for Americans to say enough is enough?

    The missing piece of the puzzle is food. If we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t disrupt the system that feeds us. If we don’t source our food locally, we won’t fight to stay. We urgently need communities that can feed themselves while withholding labor, communities that trust and rely on each other, and communities that understand the vital importance of the land they’re living on.

    The post No One Is Coming To Feed Us appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Billionaire James Dyson hoovering up land to avoid inheritance tax isn’t working out quite as he planned

    Inventor of the bagless vacuum-cleaner James Dyson is the latest billionaire to kick up a fuss about chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Autumn Budget. It’s over the inheritance tax changes on Agricultural Relief that far-right Reform MPs and Jeremy Clarkson have been bleating on about hitting farmers. In reality, this is little more than a steaming pile of bull-crap. Dyson wading into the debate is only more proof of this.

    Digging a hole over inheritance tax

    Dyson penned a piece for the Sunday Times lambasting the Labour Party’s inheritance tax changes and its impact on “family firms and farmers” banging on about how:

    Labour has shown its true colours with a spiteful budget. It detests the private sector and has chosen to kill off individual aspiration and economic growth.

    Of course, Dyson hoovering up vast tracts of UK land couldn’t have anything to do with his protestations. As many highlighted on X, the article somehow failed to mention his 36,000 acres:

    Land justice and environmental campaigner Guy Shrubsole has previously uncovered some of the vast land-holdings Dyson has sucked up. It includes enormous estates across Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire.

    In 2017, Shrubsole pointed out that he’d been sweeping up all this land for a combination of lucrative purposes. These included farm subsidies, alongside land subsidies for anaerobic digestion (AD).

    Crucially though, it was also to avoid paying inheritance tax:

    Unsurprisingly, Dyson would have avoided a significant sum:

    Won’t somebody think of the Dysons?

    Moreover, when Dyson says “family firms and farmers”, he really means the gilded fortunes of an elite landed class.

    That’s because as the Canary’s Steve Topple already highlighted, it applies to landowners with estates worth over £1m. And more likely, for most, this will be £2m – due to existing rules around inheritance tax and married couples. He underscored that:

    According to CenTax research based on HMRC data, between 2018 to 2020, an average of £900 million in Agricultural Property Relief went to around 1,300 estates per year. Almost two thirds (64%) of all Agricultural Relief went to roughly 200 estates per year that each claimed more than £1 million in relief, with an average estate value of £6 million.

    The government’s own analysis suggests that 73% of estates with agricultural property won’t be affected by these changes.

    In other words, the new 20% inheritance tax will actually only hit a small proportion of UK landowners. Naturally, these largely happen to be the wealthiest, with the most land.

    Of course, Dyson is one of these filthily rich landed families. For one, he’s among the biggest landowners in the UK. He and his family also currently sit at number five in the ‘Sunday Times Rich List’ with over £20bn.

    Dyson double-standards

    Not to mention that Dyson was also a raging Brexiteer. You reap what you sew:

    And in Dyson’s case, as with most billionaires who use UK land for subsidies and as a tax shelter, that would be few crops, if any. Notably, as Topple also pointed out:

    among estates that benefited from Agricultural Relief between 2018 and 2020, less than half (44%) of individuals had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death.

    Only 10% of all beneficiaries of agricultural relief received an average of more than £10,000 per year in agricultural income over the five tax years prior to their death.

    Apparently, he owns the biggest farming company in the UK:


    But he doesn’t look to be using all that much of his land for that. Specifically, Dyson opined how he’d produced:

    40,000 tonnes of wheat, 9,000 tonnes of spring barley, 12,000 tonnes of potatoes, 29,000 tons of sugar beet and 1,250 tonnes of year-round strawberries, as well as rearing 2,000 sheep and 800 cattle.

    However, this actually isn’t a lot next to his enormous tracts of land. If you take just potatoes for instance, it approximately means he was using just over 640 acres of his enormous land holdings to produce them. This is because, if you take the average middle producers’ rate at 46 tonnes per hectare, 12,000 tonnes is just 260 hectares, or roughly 644 acres.

    In reality, it’s the likes of Dyson who’ve harmed those family firms and farmers through pushing Brexit and his land-banking racketeering:

    What’s more, some of those chickens are coming home to roost:

    Days after the election in July, Dyson announced plans to axe jobs for more than a quarter of its UK workforce.

    The fact is, Dyson is the archetype of the profiteering capitalist class. He wanted a hard Brexit and batted for Liz Truss and Kwarteng’s disastrous economy-wrecking mini-budget. Now, he thinks a 20% inheritance tax on his immense land wealth is a step too far.

    But Dyson is as much a farmer and a voice for them as the Times is a source of genuine, honest journalism. Because at the end of the day, both serve the interests of the billionaire capitalist class; both are full of bullshit.

    Feature image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • California Ballot Measure Could Provide National Model for Factory Farm Bans

    Every fall, Mary Bull prepares for the olive harvest at her small-scale permaculture farm, Chalice Farm, in Sonoma County, California. She expects this year to be their biggest harvest yet, with more than 50 volunteers coming to help harvest over a thousand pounds of olives to make premium olive oil. Along with olives, Chalice Farm also grows perennial vegetables, fruit and nuts on their…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Inside Bamban: A small Philippine farming town and its mysterious hub

    The sprawling compound with high buildings and resort-like facilities contrasts starkly with the rural surroundings in Bamban, a small farming town a few hours’ drive north of Manila. 

    For several years, this compound symbolized the town’s newfound growth propelled by China-backed investments. Locals interviewed by BenarNews mostly credited Bamban’s prosperity to a young, bespectacled mayor, Alice Guo, who is now at the center of a controversy in the Philippines over her suspected role in crimes, corruption, and even espionage.

    “There was really an increase in the number of Chinese nationals here when the compound started,” said 61-year-old Vladimir Lingat, a Bamban native who drives a motorcycle taxi.

    “[The Chinese nationals] rarely interacted with us. Some of them were boastful, but we were just happy to have passengers and customers,” Lingat told BenarNews in an interview on Sept. 23.

    Guo, the former mayor of Bamban, is in Philippine custody after being arrested and deported from Indonesia last month. She faces criminal charges of human trafficking and graft connected to the compound, which was a hub of activity during her mayorship. 

    In addition, Philippine officials and lawmakers have floated allegations that Guo may have also been spying for China – Manila’s main territorial rival in the hotly contested South China Sea – but Philippine authorities so far have offered no evidence to back up this suspicion.

    An image from video footage filmed and released by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in July 2024 shows an aerial shot of some of the buildings and features at a compound that housed two Philippine offshore gaming operators in Bamban town, Tarlac province, Philippines. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)
    An image from video footage filmed and released by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in July 2024 shows an aerial shot of some of the buildings and features at a compound that housed two Philippine offshore gaming operators in Bamban town, Tarlac province, Philippines. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)

    This sleepy town in northern Tarlac province was thrust into the national spotlight earlier this year when authorities raided two Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs) operating inside the compound. Officials said they had received tips that crimes and human rights abuses were allegedly being committed inside the property.

    In May, the Philippine Senate started its probe into alleged criminal activities involving POGOs. 

    Documents presented to the Senate allegedly showed that Guo had personally applied for one of the two firm’s business permits.

    Guo had said she once controlled half of the stakes in the company that owned the property where the two POGOs were operating. However, Guo said she had divested from the business before running for mayor of Bamban in 2022.

    Guo also allegedly backed the license of the operators before and after becoming mayor, documents presented at the hearing showed.

    Alice Guo, also known as Chinese national Guo Hua Ping, a former mayor of Bamban, Tarlac province, attends a Senate hearing in Pasay city, Metro Manila, Sept. 9, 2024. (Eloisa Lopez/Reuters)
    Alice Guo, also known as Chinese national Guo Hua Ping, a former mayor of Bamban, Tarlac province, attends a Senate hearing in Pasay city, Metro Manila, Sept. 9, 2024. (Eloisa Lopez/Reuters)

    Senators also questioned the former mayor’s alleged links to mainland China, accusing her of being a “Chinese spy” and faking her Philippine nationality – allegations she has vehemently denied. 

    In June, Manila’s National Bureau of Investigation said that the fingerprints of Guo matched those of Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese national who arrived in the country in July 2003. Guo Hua Ping was listed as a dependent of a Chinese citizen holding a special investor resident visa, officials said.

    But Guo maintained she was a natural-born Filipino.

    Guo later fled to Indonesia in July, but was caught by Indonesian authorities and deported to face the charges against her.

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    Erlyn Villareal, 51, who works as a food vendor in Bamban town, Tarlac province, Philippines, spoke with BenarNews on Sept. 23, 2024. (Camille Elemia/BenarNews)
    Erlyn Villareal, 51, who works as a food vendor in Bamban town, Tarlac province, Philippines, spoke with BenarNews on Sept. 23, 2024. (Camille Elemia/BenarNews)

    Erlyn Villareal, a food vendor, moved to Bamban in 2011. She told BenarNews she had not heard about Alice Guo back then. 

    “We only knew her when she started campaigning for mayor in 2021,” Villareal, a Guo supporter, told BenarNews in an interview on Sept. 23. “All we know is that she has farm businesses here because we know friends and neighbors who are working there.” 

    Guo’s predecessor, Jose Antonio Feliciano, endorsed her in the 2022 mayoral election. However, Feliciano admitted he was “not that close” to her and that his relationship with Guo was only “civil” and casual, according to an ABS-CBN news report. 

    Feliciano, who served as town mayor from 2013 until 2022, said he had endorsed Guo because he thought the town needed somebody like her, a businesswoman who knew about agriculture, the main source of livelihood for many of its residents.

    ‘Patronage’ at work 

    Some residents said they liked Guo’s election campaign promise of lifting up the town and helping the poor residents. They described Guo as “very sweet” and said she was able to forge a political alliance with the other politicians in the town.

    Guo only served as mayor for two years but some locals argued that she had raised their town’s profile. They said they had received a host of financial assistance packages from Guo, and sometimes, even birthday cakes.

    This is “patronage and clientelism” at work – a defining characteristic of Philippine politics, said Aries Arugay, head of the political science department at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

    “Patronage politics may include establishing clientelist relationships with voters where politicians exchange favors like financial assistance for political support and electoral votes,” Arugay told BenarNews.

    This is why even when there was growing evidence against Guo, the people in Bamban would rather look away, Arugay said.

    Bamban native Vladimir Lingat, 61, who works as a motorcycle-taxi driver in Bamban, is photographed Sept. 23, 2024. (Camille Elemia/BenarNews)
    Bamban native Vladimir Lingat, 61, who works as a motorcycle-taxi driver in Bamban, is photographed Sept. 23, 2024. (Camille Elemia/BenarNews)

    BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Camille Elemia for BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The War on Food and the War on Humanity: Platforms of Control and the Unbreakable Spirit

    Max Weber (1864-1920) was a prominent German sociologist who developed influential theories on rationality and authority. He examined different types of rationality that underpinned systems of authority. He argued that modern Western societies were based on legal-rational authority and had moved away from systems that were based on traditional authority and charismatic authority.

    Traditional authority derives its power from long-standing customs and traditions, while charismatic authority is based on the exceptional personal qualities or charisma of a leader.

    According to Weber, the legal-rational authority that characterises Western capitalist industrial society is based on instrumental rationality that focuses on the most efficient means to achieve given ends. This type of rationality manifest in bureaucratic power. Weber contrasted this with another form of rationality: value rationality that is based on conscious beliefs in the inherent value of certain behaviour.

    While Weber saw the benefits of instrumental rationality in terms of increased efficiency, he feared that this could lead to a stifling “iron cage” of a rule-based order and rule following (instrumental rationality) as an end in itself. The result would be humanity’s “polar night of icy darkness.”

    Today, technological change is sweeping across the planet and presents many challenges. The danger is of a technological iron cage in the hands of an elite that uses technology for malevolent purposes.

    Lewis Coyne of Exeter University says:

    We do not — or should not — want to become a society in which things of deeper significance are appreciated only for any instrumental value. The challenge, therefore, is to delimit instrumental rationality and the technologies that embody it by protecting that which we value intrinsically, above and beyond mere utility.

    He adds that we must decide which technologies we are for, to what ends, and how they can be democratically managed, with a view to the kind of society we wish to be.

    A major change that we have seen in recent years is the increasing dominance of cloud-based services and platforms. In the food and agriculture sector, we are seeing the rollout of these phenomena tied to a techno solutionist ‘data-driven’ or ‘precision’ agriculture legitimised by ‘humanitarian’ notions of ‘helping farmers’, ‘saving the planet’ and ‘feeding the world’ in the face of some kind of impending Malthusian catastrophe.

    A part-fear mongering, part-self-aggrandisement narrative promoted by those who have fuelled ecological devastation, corporate dependency, land dispossession, food insecurity and farmer indebtedness as a result of the global food regime that they helped to create and profited from. Now, with a highly profitable but flawed carbon credit trading scheme and a greenwashed technology-driven eco-modernism, they are going to save humanity from itself.

    The world according to Bayer

    In the agrifood sector, we are seeing the rollout of data-driven or precision approaches to agriculture by the likes of Microsoft, Syngenta, Bayer and Amazon centred on cloud-based data information services. Data-driven agriculture mines data to be exploited by the agribusiness/big tech giants to instruct farmers what and how much to produce and what type of proprietary inputs they must purchase and from whom.

    Data owners (Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet etc.), input suppliers (Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, Cargill etc.) and retail concerns (Amazon, Walmart etc) aim to secure the commanding heights of the global agrifood economy through their monopolistic platforms.

    But what does this model of agriculture look like in practice?

    Let us use Bayer’s digital platform Climate FieldView as an example. It collects data from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply etc.

    To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in FieldView. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: reduced tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.

    Through the app, the company monitors these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets.

    Bayer also has a programme in the US called ForGround. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for equipment, seeds and other inputs.

    For example, getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer (sold on the basis of it being ‘climate friendly’). The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with its RoundUp (toxic glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically engineered Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.

    And what of the cover crops referred to above? Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel.

    But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim emissions reductions in their supply chains.

    Agribusiness corporations and the big tech companies are jointly developing carbon farming platforms to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are major buyers of carbon credits).

    The non-profit GRAIN says (see the article The corporate agenda behind carbon farming) that Bayer is gaining increasing control over farmers in various countries, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use through its ‘Carbon Program’.

    GRAIN argues that, for corporations, carbon farming is all about increasing their control within the food system and is certainly not about sequestering carbon.

    Digital platforms are intended to be one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.

    Technofeudalism

    Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, argues that what we are seeing is a shift from capitalism to technofeudalism. He argues that tech giants like Apple, Meta and Amazon act as modern-day feudal lords. Users of digital platforms (such as companies or farmers) essentially become ‘cloud serfs’, and ‘rent’ (fees, data etc) is extracted from them for being on a platform.

    In feudalism (land) rent drives the system. In capitalism, profits drive the system. Varoufakis says that markets are being replaced by algorithmic ‘digital fiefdoms’.

    Although digital platforms require some form of capitalist production, as companies like Amazon need manufacturers to produce goods for their platforms, the new system represents a significant shift in power dynamics, favouring those who own and control the platforms.

    Whether this system is technofeudalism, hypercapitalism or something else is open to debate. But we should at least be able to agree on one thing: the changes we are seeing are having profound impacts on economies and populations that are increasingly surveilled as they are compelled to shift their lives online.

    The very corporations that are responsible for the problems of the prevailing food system merely offer more of the same, this time packaged in a  genetically engineered, ecomodernist, fake-green wrapping (see the online article From net zero to glyphosate: agritech’s greenwashed corporate power grab).

    Elected officials are facilitating this by putting the needs of monopolistic global interests ahead of ordinary people’s personal freedoms and workers’ rights, as well as the needs of independent local producers, enterprises and markets.

    For instance, the Indian government has in recent times signed memoranda of understanding (MoU) with Amazon, Bayer, Microsoft and Syngenta to rollout data-driven, precision agriculture. A ‘one world agriculture’ under their control based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail in their hands.

    This is part of a broader strategy to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture, ensure India’s food dependence on foreign corporations and eradicate any semblance of food democracy (or national sovereignty).

    In response, a ‘citizen letter’ (July 2024) was sent to the government. It stated that it is not clear what the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) will learn from Bayer that the well-paid public sector scientists of the institution cannot develop themselves. The letter says entities that have been responsible for causing an economic and environmental crisis in Indian agriculture are being partnered by ICAR for so-called solutions when these entities are only interested in their profits and not sustainability (or any other nomenclature they use).

    The letter raises some key concerns. Where is the democratic debate on carbon credit markets. Is the ICAR ensuring that the farmers get the best rather than biased advice that boosts the further rollout of proprietary products? Is there a system in place for the ICAR to develop research and education agendas from the farmers it is supposed to serve as opposed to being led by the whims and business ideas of corporations?

    The authors of the letter note that copies of the MoUs are not being shared proactively in the public domain by the ICAR. The letter asks that the ICAR suspends the signed MoUs, shares all details in the public domain and desists from signing any more such MoUs without necessary public debate.

    Valuing humanity

    Genuine approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces are being ignored by policymakers or cynically attacked by corporate lobbyists. These solutions involve systemic shifts in agricultural, food and economic systems with a focus on low consumption (energy) lifestyles, localisation and an ecologically sustainable agroecology.

    As activist John Wilson says, this is based on creative solutions, a connection to nature and the land, nurturing people, peaceful transformation and solidarity.

    This is something discussed in the recent article From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia in which it is argued that co-operative labour, fellowship and our long-standing spiritual connection to the land should inform how as a society we should live. This stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of capitalism and technology based on instrumental rationality and too often fuelled by revenue streams and the goal to control populations.

    When we hear talk of a ‘spiritual connection’, what is meant by ‘spiritual’? In a broad sense it can be regarded as a concept that refers to thoughts, beliefs and feelings about the meaning of life, rather than just physical existence. A sense of connection to something greater than ourselves. Something akin to Weber’s concept of value rationality. The spiritual, the diverse and the local are juxtaposed with the selfishness of modern urban society, the increasing homogeneity of thought and practice and an instrumental rationality which becomes an end in itself.

    Having a direct link with nature/the land is fundamental to developing an appreciation of a type of ‘being’ and an ‘understanding’ that results in a reality worth living in.

    However, what we are seeing is an agenda based on a different set of values rooted in a lust for power and money and the total subjugation of ordinary people being rammed through under the false promise of techno solutionism (transhumanism, vaccines in food, neural laces to detect moods implanted in the skull, programmable digital money, track and trace technology etc.) and some distant notion of a techno utopia that leave malevolent power relations intact and unchallenged.

    Is this then to be humanity’s never-ending “polar night of icy darkness”? Hopefully not. This vision is being imposed from above. Ordinary people (whether, for example, farmers in India or those being beaten down through austerity policies) find themselves on the receiving end of a class war being waged against them by a mega rich elite.

    Indeed, in 1941, Herbert Marcuse stated that technology could be used as an instrument for control and domination. Precisely the agenda of the likes of Bayer, the Gates Foundation, BlackRock and the World Bank, which are trying to eradicate genuine diversity and impose a one-size-fits-all model of thinking and behaviour.

    A final thought courtesy of civil rights campaigner  Frederick Douglass in a speech from 1857:

    Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

    The post The War on Food and the War on Humanity: Platforms of Control and the Unbreakable Spirit first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia

    A total demolition of the previous forms of existence is underway: how one comes into the world, biological sex, education, relationships, the family, even the diet that is about to become synthetic.

    — Silvia Guerini, radical ecologist, in From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology (2023)

    We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The 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. [1]

    The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and big financial institutions, like BlackRock and Vanguard, are also involved, whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland,  pushing biosynthetic (fake) food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating and financing the aims of the mega agri-food corporations. [2]

    The billionaire interests behind this try to portray their techno-solutionism as some kind of humanitarian endeavour: saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’. But what it really amounts to is repackaging and greenwashing the dispossessive strategies of imperialism.

    It involves a shift towards a ‘one world agriculture’ under the control of agritech and the data giants, which is to be based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food, ‘precision’ and ‘data-driven’ agriculture and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail, being governed by monopolistic e-commerce platforms determined by artificial intelligence systems and algorithms.

    Those who are pushing this agenda have a vision not only for farmers but also for humanity in general.

    The elites through their military-digital-financial (Pentagon/Silicon Valley/Big Finance) complex want to use their technologies to reshape the world and redefine what it means to be human. They regard humans, their cultures and their practices, like nature itself, as a problem and deficient.

    Farmers are to be displaced and replaced with drones, machines and cloud-based computing. Food is to be redefined and people are to be fed synthetic, genetically engineered products. Cultures are to be eradicated, and humanity is to be fully urbanised, subservient and disconnected from the natural world.

    What it means to be human is to be radically transformed. But what has it meant to be human until now or at least prior to the (relatively recent) Industrial Revolution and associated mass urbanisation?

    To answer this question, we need to discuss our connection to nature and what most of humanity was involved in prior to industrialisation — cultivating food.

    Many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories, myths and rituals that helped them come to terms with some of the most fundamental issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

    As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs.

    Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal and people had a necessary and immediate relationship with the sun, seeds, animals, wind, fire, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life. Our cultural and social relationships with agrarian production and associated deities had a sound practical base.

    People’s lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.

    Silvia Guerini, whose quote introduces this article, notes the importance of deep-rooted relationships and the rituals that re-affirm them. She says that through rituals a community recognises itself and its place in the world. They create the spirit of a rooted community by contributing to rooting and making a single existence endure in a time, in a territory, in a community.

    Professor Robert W Nicholls explains that the cults of Woden and Thor were superimposed on far older and better-rooted beliefs related to the sun and the earth, the crops and the animals and the rotation of the seasons between the light and warmth of summer and the cold and dark of winter.

    Humanity’s relationship with farming and food and our connections to land, nature and community has for millennia defined what it means to be human.

    Take India, for example. Environmental scientist Viva Kermani says that Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion that:

    … recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. It views the earth as our Mother and hence advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse and the exploitation of the earth and its resources.

    Kermani notes that ancient scriptures instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered. She adds that this understanding of, and reverence towards, the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

    According to Kermani, the Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes.

    She notes that the Vrikshayurveda, an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees, contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.

    Like Nicholls, Kermani provides insight into some of the profound cultural, philosophical and practical aspects of humanity’s connection to nature and food production.

    This connection resonates with agrarianism, a philosophy based on cooperative labour and fellowship, which stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of urban life, capitalism and technology that are seen as detrimental to independence and dignity. Agrarianism, too, emphasises a spiritual dimension as well as the value of rural society, small farms, widespread property ownership and political decentralisation.

    The prominent proponent of agrarianism Wedell Berry says:

    The revolution which began with machines and chemicals now continues with automation, computers and biotechnology.

    For Berry, agrarianism is not a sentimental longing for a time past. Colonial attitudes, domestic, foreign and now global, have resisted true agrarianism almost from the beginning — there has never been fully sustainable, stable, locally adapted, land-based economies.

    However, Berry provides many examples of small (and larger) farms that have similar output as industrial agriculture with one third of the energy.

    In his poem ‘A Spiritual Journey’, Berry writes the following:

    And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
    no matter how long,
    but only by a spiritual journey,
    a journey of one inch,
    very arduous and humbling and joyful,
    by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
    and learn to be at home.

    But in the cold, centralised, technocratic dystopia that is planned, humanity’s spiritual connection to the countryside, food and agrarian production are to be cast into the dustbin of history.

    Silvia Guerini says [3]:

    The past becomes something to be erased in order to break the thread that binds us to a history, to a tradition, to a belonging, for the transition towards a new uprooted humanity, without past, without memory… a new humanity dehumanised in its essence, totally in the hands of the manipulators of reality and truth.

    This dehumanised humanity severed from the past is part of the wider agenda of transhumanism. For instance, we are not just seeing a push towards a world without farmers and everything that has connected us to the soil but, according to Guerini, also a world without mothers.

    She argues that those behind test-tube babies and surrogate motherhood now have their sights on genetic engineering and artificial wombs, which would cut women out of the reproductive process. Guerini predicts that artificial wombs could eventually be demanded, or rather marketed, as a right for everyone, including transgender people. It is interesting that the language around pregnancy is already contested with the omission of ‘women’ from statements like ‘persons who can get pregnant’.

    Of course, there has long been a blurring of lines between biotechnology, eugenics and genetic engineering. Genetically engineered crops, gene drives and gene editing are now a reality, but the ultimate goal is marrying artificial intelligence, bionanotechnology and genetic engineering to produce the one-world transhuman.

    This is being pushed by powerful interests, who, according to Guerini, are using a rainbow, transgenic left and LGBTQ+ organisations to promote a new synthetic identity and claim to new rights. She says this is an attack on life, on nature, on “what is born, as opposed to artificial” and adds that all ties to the real, natural world must be severed.

    It is interesting that in its report Future of Food, the UK supermarket giant Sainsburys celebrates a future where we are microchipped and tracked and neural laces have the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms that could work out exactly what food (delivered by drone) we need to support us at a particular time in our life. All sold as ‘personal optimisation’.

    Moreover, it is likely, according to the report, that we will be getting key nutrients through implants. Part of these nutrients will come in the form of lab-grown food and insects.

    A neural lace is an ultra-thin mesh that can be implanted in the skull, forming a collection of electrodes capable of monitoring brain function. It creates an interface between the brain and the machine.

    Sainsburys does a pretty good job of trying to promote a dystopian future where AI has taken your job, but, according to the report, you have lots of time to celebrate the wonderful, warped world of ‘food culture’ created by the supermarket and your digital overlords.

    Technofeudalism meets transhumanism — all for your convenience, of course.

    But none of this will happen overnight. And whether the technology will deliver remains to be seen. Those who are promoting this brave new world might have overplayed their hand but will spend the following decades trying to drive their vision forward.

    But arrogance is their Achilles heel.

    There is still time to educate, to organise, to resist and to agitate against this hubris, not least by challenging the industrial food giants and the system that sustains them and by advocating for and creating grass-root food movements and local economies that strengthen food sovereignty.

    NOTES:

    [1] See the author’s open-access e-book Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order here (Academia.edu), here (heyzine.com) or here (Centre for Research on Globalization)

    [2] See the author’s open-access e-book Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth here (Academia.edu) , here (heyzine.com) or here (Centre for Research on Globalization)

    [3] A debt of gratitude is owed to Paul Cudenec and his article Truth, reality, tradition and freedom: our resistance to the great uprooting on the Winter Oak website, which provides quotes from and insight into the work of Silvia Guerini.

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  • $18 million AgTech rebates reloaded for on farm productivity

    The second round of a federal government AgTech connectivity rebate program launched Tuesday, offering to match Australian farmers up to $30,000 to invest in equipment like sensors, antennas, cameras and radio transmitters. The new round expands the program to more technologies and farmers by lowering the threshold for eligible technology costs and increasing the farm…

    The post $18 million AgTech rebates reloaded for on farm productivity appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Stranglehold of Imperialism: Inflicting Hunger and Hardship in Africa

    In late June, Kenyan President William Ruto backtracked on a tax-hiking finance bill after protests left at least 20 people dead and more than 150 injured when police opened fire with live ammunition.

    According to Patrick Gathara of The New Humanitarian, the youth-led protests were triggered by a range of proposed new taxes that will increase the financial burden on families already struggling with rising prices.

    In response to the ongoing nationwide protests that led up to the aforementioned incident, Ruto said he would withdraw the bill as “members of the public insist on the need for us to make more concessions. The people have spoken.”

    Fine words, but Amnesty International had previously reported that 21 social media activists had been abducted by state security agents as the government moved to curb the growing dissent.

    Ruto has withdrawn the bill and sacked cabinet members to appease the demonstrators. Whether it will remains to be seen.

    Triggering a multi-trillion-dollar debt crisis

    In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. This, despite the IMF’s own research showing austerity worsens poverty and inequality.

    Days into the shutdown of the global economy in April 2020, the IMF and World Bank were facing a deluge of aid requests from countries in the Global South. Apparently, financial institutions had $1.2 trillion to lend.

    Prior to that, in late March, World Bank Group President David Malpass said that poorer countries would be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the lockdowns.

    However, such ‘help’ would be provided on condition of the acceptance of a booster shot of neoliberalism:

    For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.

    Two years later, in an April 2022 press release, Oxfam International insisted that the IMF must abandon demands for neoliberal-driven austerity as hunger and poverty continued to increase worldwide.

    According to Oxfam, 13 out of the 15 IMF loan programmes negotiated during the second year of the COVID event required new austerity measures such as taxes on food and fuel or spending cuts that could put vital public services at risk. The IMF was also encouraging six additional countries in Africa to adopt similar measures.

    Kenya and the IMF agreed a $2.3 billion loan programme in 2021, which included a three-year public sector pay freeze and increased taxes on cooking gas and food. More than three million Kenyans were facing acute hunger as the driest conditions in decades spread a devastating drought across the country. Oxfam said nearly half of all households in Kenya were having to borrow food or buy it on credit.

    It was similar in Cameroon, Senegal and Surinam, for example, which were required to introduce or increase VAT, a tax that disproportionately impacts people living in poverty.

    In Sudan, nearly half of the population live in poverty, but it was directed to scrap fuel subsidies, which would hit the poorest hardest.

    Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion between 2022 and 2027.

    Many governments are nearing debt default and being forced to slash public spending to pay creditors and import food and fuel. The world’s poorest countries were due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.

    Oxfam has shown that low- and middle-income countries paid $106 billion in debt repayments and interest to G7 countries in 2023.

    In a recent article, journalist Thin Lei Win shared a comment from Professor Raj Patel, member of the International Panel of Experts on Food Systems (IPES-Food). He is reported as saying:

    Debt servicing at these insane interest rates is making it even harder for countries to make sure the hungry are fed. In Kenya, a neoliberal government has met its citizens’ hunger not with food but with violence and tax increases. This is, alas, an augury of the world to come.

    According to the recently released report The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, one in 11 people went hungry in 2023 and more than one in four were cutting back on the quantity and quality of the food they consume.

    One in five people faced hunger and more than a half were eating less or nothing at all for days at a time.

    Thin Lei Win notes that soaring inflation and stagnant incomes have put healthy food out of reach for many people, while a reliance on global markets to feed the population has made them hostages to either spiking import bills or market volatility.

    Solutions

    Aside from releasing nations from their heavy debt burdens, the solution involves boosting the resilience of local food systems. With nearly 30% of the world food insecure and 42% unable to afford a healthy diet, it is essential to challenge and move away from a global food regime that relies on corporate-controlled supply chains, creates food insecurity (not least in Africa: see the online article Destroying African Agriculture) and uses debt and dependency to leverage compliance with the demands of powerful agribusiness conglomerates.

    That much is made clear in the new report Food From Somewhere (IPES-Food) that argues for building food security and resilience through ‘territorial markets’. It notes that the past three years have seen big cracks emerge in global commodity markets and corporate-controlled supply chains resulting in supply chain chaos, lost harvests, volatile food prices and empty shelves.

    The authors say:

    Feeding a hungry world requires resilient and robust food systems. In this comprehensive review, IPES-Food finds that a fundamental shift towards close-to-home food supply chains (‘territorial markets’) offers a more resilient, robust and equitable approach to food security.

    The report notes that a wide variety of vibrant food provisioning systems exist beyond corporate-controlled supply chains:

    From public markets and street vendors to cooperatives, urban agriculture to online direct sales, food hubs to community kitchens; territorial market channels are contributing to feeding as much as 70% of the world’s population every day. They are based around small-scale prducers, processors and vendors, rooted in territories and communities, and play multiple roles within them. Yet they are continuously overlooked.

    Territorial markets are the backbone of food systems in many countries and regions, and the report highlights how they build resilience on multiple fronts, including ensuring access to seasonal, diverse, more nutritious foods and diets, demonstrating high degrees of resilience and adaptability to shocks, providing decent prices and steady incomes for small-scale producers and enhancing environmental sustainability by promoting low-input, biodiverse farming.

    They also sustain traditional food cultures and foster community connections, solidarity and social capital.

    However, governments are propping up fragile, disaster-prone global supply chains through agricultural subsidies, trade and investment agreements, tax breaks and food supply infrastructure skewed towards large-scale, industrial export agriculture.

    The report adds:

    At the same time, corporate power continues to grow, eroding traditional practices and food cultures, co-opting local and territorial chains and reshaping diets around staple commodities and ultra-processed foods.

    It concludes that public procurement and state purchasing should be redirected to schemes that support sustainable small-scale producers and subsidies should be shifted to invest in the infrastructure, networks and people that underpin territorial markets, including public marketplaces, collectives and cooperatives.

    Moreover, local markets need to be protected from corporate co-optation. This involves breaking up supply chain monopolies and encouraging sustainable, biodiverse farming practices and diverse healthy diets.

    By moving towards food sovereignty in this way, we can not only avert future food crises and the ramping up of a debt-trap strategy but also challenge a food regime that has its roots in a persistent colonialism and imperialism facilitated by the imposition of neoliberal trade policies and World Bank/IMF directives at the behest of global agribusiness interests.

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  • The Great Arizona Water Grab

    For years, a Saudi-owned hay farm has been using massive amounts of water in the middle of the Arizona desert and exporting the hay back to Saudi Arabia. 

    The farm’s water use has attracted national attention and criticism since Reveal’s Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke this story more than eight years ago.

    Since then, the water crisis in the American West has only worsened as megafarms have taken hold there. And it’s not just foreign companies fueling the problem: Halverson uncovers that pension fund managers in Arizona knowingly invested in a local land deal that resulted in draining down the groundwater of nearby communities. So even as local and state politicians have fought to stop these deals, their retirement fund has been fueling them.

    Since we first aired this story in July, our reporting has spurred Arizona’s governor and attorney general into action. 

    On this week’s Reveal, learn about water use in the West, who’s profiting and who’s getting left behind.

    For more of Halverson’s reporting into a global scramble for food and water, watch “The Grab.” By Center for Investigative Reporting Studios and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the film will be in theaters and available to stream starting June 14.

    This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2023.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • After Tory dither and delay, parliament FINALLY passes Animal Welfare Bill to protect farmed animals

    On Tuesday 14 May, the UK House of Lords passed a landmark new bill on animal welfare. Of course, it’s a major win for animal rights. However, it likely could have happened a lot sooner if not for Tory wrangling on previous bills.

    Animal Welfare Bill passes through parliament

    The Animal Welfare (Livestock Exports) Bill prohibits the export of cattle, goats, pigs, and horses for slaughter, and fattening for slaughter.

    It aims to improve animal welfare in farming by ending long, arduous journeys to other countries. These journeys regularly put animals through overcrowding, exhaustion, dehydration and stress.

    However, on 14 May, the House of Lords passed the new bill that will bring this appalling practice to a close. It will now head for royal assent before becoming law.

    Activists have been calling for the ban for decades. Emma Slawinski, director of policy, prevention and campaigns at the RSPCA animal charity, described it as “an extraordinary achievement” that activists had campaigned on for 50 years. She said that:

    Back in the 90s we had more than a million animals going out from the UK. It’s an abhorrent trade. The suffering is intense and it goes on for a long time.

    Some of those journeys were measured in days, not in hours, and they’re never going to happen again.

    Activists launched particularly fierce and dedicated campaigning during this time. Notable among this was a coordinated wave of protests and direct action against the practice at the port of Brightlingsea in Essex in 1995. UK media dubbed the event “The Battle of Brightlingsea”.

    In tandem with this, on February 1, 1995, Jill Phipps was one of a few dozen animal rights activists who broke through a police line at Coventry Airport in central England. She was crushed to death under a lorry as she protested against the export of live calves for veal in 1995.

    Political “stumbling blocks”

    While the bill marked a step forward for animal welfare, it could have come into effect sooner. Compassion in World Farming’s CEO Philip Lymbery noted how:

    It has been a very difficult journey to get this policy over the line with many stumbling blocks along the way.

    The legislation is part of the Conservatives boon of Brexit branding in which it promised to centre animal welfare. Specifically, the party first proposed the ban in 2017 and touted it as a benefit of Brexit because European Union trade rules prevent member states from banning live exports to other countries in the bloc. As a result, the live exports ban became a pillar of its “action plan for animal welfare” which it launched in 2021.

    The Tories first had the chance to put this into action through a Commons bill in 2021. Notably, the Kept Animals Bill previously contained these provisions. In June 2023, the Tories shelved the bill at the final hurdle.

    Alongside banning live animal exports, the Kept Animals Bill had offered a range of measures to improve the situation for farmed animals, non-human primates, and other species kept as pets. However, as the Canary’s Glen Black reported, the Tories mothballed the bill. Naturally, they did this to appease their friends in the hunting industry. As Black explained, the government said that instead they would:

    unbundle the bill’s various measures and push them through as single-issue legislation. As HSI/UK said, this likely means through private members’ bills (PMBs).

    However, as he also detailed at the time:

    However, as the Electoral Reform Society recently pointed out, PMBs’ rates of success are low. And it seems it was done to protect the vile ongoing abuse of wildlife.

    In other words, the private member’s bills like the Animal Welfare (Live Exports) Bill has laid cover for the Tories pander to an abusive, abhorrent, animal-killing industry.

    A “truly momentous day” for animal rights

    Despite the delay and diversion, this key facet of animal rights protections will now become law.

    Given this, animal rights charities have celebrated the success. Compassion in World Farming’s patron Joanna Lumley said:

    Finally, finally, finally, we can celebrate the news that live farm animals will never again be exported on long, horrendous journeys from our shores only to be fattened or slaughtered. For decades, we at Compassion in World Farming have worked tirelessly to bring this campaign to everyone’s attention.

    The organisation called it a “truly momentous day” for farmed animals. Moreover, Kent Action Against Live Exports’ (KAALE) Yvonne Birchall hailed it as a testament to the committed work of long-term campaigners. She said:

    For 29 years, KAALE and their supporters have demonstrated outside UK ports as live export shipments have been loaded on vessels bound for Europe. It has been truly heartbreaking to witness these animals crammed into trucks.”

    Whatever the weather, whatever the time of day, KAALE have attended these sailings, and our members are the last friendly faces millions of animals will have seen before being exported. We are delighted that the law will finally ban this cruel trade and the people of Kent will no longer need to stand up in opposition to it.

    Feature image via Compassion in World Farming

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Mining, big agribusiness, and fossil fuel sectors linked to over 600 attacks against 20,000 human rights defenders in 2023

    Mining, big agribusiness, and the fossil fuel sectors have unleashed an astronomical spate of attacks on human rights defenders (HRDs) throughout 2023. Crucially, perpetrators linked to companies and projects in these sectors account for the majority of over 600 attacks across the course of the year.

    This is according to a new damning report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).

    Staggering scale of attacks against human rights defenders

    On Tuesday 7 May, the BHRRC published its annual briefing on attacks against HRDs.

    Alarmingly, the data recorded 630 attacks which directly impacted an estimated 20,000 people. In particular, these were those involved in speaking out against business-related harms during 2023.

    The BHRRC records multiple types of attacks against HRDs. It has most frequently recorded cases of judicial harassment (328), killings (87), physical violence (81), and intimidation or threats (80) throughout 2023.

    Despite the staggering scale of attacks, the BHRRC impressed that these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. Crucially, this is because the data only reflects what is accessible through public sources of information. As such, the briefing noted that:

    many attacks, especially non-lethal attacks (including death threats, judicial harassment and physical violence), never make it to media sources and there remains a significant gap in government monitoring of attacks, the problem is even more severe than these figures indicate. In addition, an “attack” may be against one person named in public sources or against a large number of unidentified people, such as an instance of charges being filed against 11,000 garment workers protesting for higher wages in Bangladesh. Thus, the number of individual HRDs experiencing attacks is higher than the number of attacks mentioned here.

    Corporations driving attacks

    Although attacks were recorded in almost every sector in 2023, certain extractive sectors stood out. Specifically, the BHRRC found that mining (165), agribusiness (117) and oil, gas & coal (112) were the most prolific sectors connected to attacks.

    Of course, the briefing noted that the mining sector is a hotbed for allegations in part due to the drive to transition to greener technology.

    For instance, a separate BHRRC report recently documented the soaring number of rights allegations tied to transition minerals in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

    Largely, companies did not directly perpetrate these attacks directly. Notably, state actors including the police and judicial systems, as well as the military carried out most of these attacks. However, allegations mentioned specific businesses in 50% of these cases. Moreover, as the report stated for instance:

    Companies are often connected with attacks on HRDs, even when state actors are the direct perpetrator. This includes calling police or state security forces to disperse peaceful protests; cooperating with state repression, for example by providing services or products enabling surveillance; and obstructing unionisation. Other tactics used by companies to gain control over land and resources, often leading to conflict and attacks, include dividing communities and engaging in inadequate consultation processes.

    As such, they have consistently been the most dangerous sectors since BHRRC began documenting these attacks in 2015. In tandem with this, these are of course the very sectors fueling the climate and biodiversity crises in the first place.

    Indigenous defenders

    Additionally, companies, states, and organised crime outfits perpetrated over three-quarters (78%) of these attacks against people taking action to protect the climate, environment and land rights.

    Indigenous Peoples are particularly at risk when fighting for our planet. Since January 2015, the BHRRC has recorded more than 1,000 attacks against Indigenous defenders globally.

    The majority of these – 93% – were raising concerns about harms to their lands and territories, our climate and/or the environment.

    In 2023 alone, over a fifth of attacks (22%) were against Indigenous defenders. Indigenous defenders protect over 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. However, they comprise approximately 6% of the global population. Over three-quarters (78%) of these attacks against Indigenous defenders took place in Latin America, which has been one of the most dangerous regions for attacks against defenders consistently since 2015.

    Voluntary action is “insufficient”

    Co-head of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s civic freedoms and human rights defender programme Christen Dobson said:

    We have been documenting attacks against those speaking out about harmful business activities since 2015 – and every year are appalled at the continued violence against people protecting our rights and planet. Mining, agribusiness, and the fossil fuels sectors – those fuelling the planetary crisis – are yet again connected with the highest number of attacks against human rights and environmental defenders. Companies in these sectors must adopt and implement policy commitments to zero tolerance for attacks on defenders. These sectors also urgently need to shift their practice to prioritise a just transition to renewable energy grounded in respect for human rights, including Indigenous Peoples’ rights to self-determination and free, prior and informed consent. This includes the right to say no.

    Many business actors are failing in their responsibility to respect human rights, resulting in harm to people and the environment, fuelling the triple planetary crisis we currently face. Listening to defenders is vital to understanding the risks and harms associated with business activity and to ensuring the transition to green economies is just and benefits workers, environmental defenders and their communities.

    Moreover, Dobson noted that companies’ voluntary action is “insufficient”. As such he argued that:

    there is an urgent need for robust mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation, grounded in safe and effective stakeholder engagement and containing strong safeguards for human rights defenders. Governments must step in and fulfil their duty to protect the rights of defenders. One critical step is legally recognising and protecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights, including their rights to self- determination and to their lands, territories and resources.

    Feature image via Youtube – Bloomberg Quicktake

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Globalised capitalism’s eating habits are responsible for one third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions

    According to a new report from the World Bank, changing how we farm could cut global emissions by almost one third. Greenhouse gas emissions could be drastically reduced by simply altering how food is produced around the world. The agrifood industry – which combines agriculture and food – takes into account the whole production process.

    It involves the whole journey, from food to plate including manufacture and retail. It is responsible for nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This is one sixth more than the whole world’s heat and electric emissions. 

    Middle income countries are responsible for two thirds of emissions, taking seven of the top ten spots for emitters worldwide. The biggest culprits being China, Brazil, and India respectively.

    Protecting our planet from agrifood risks

    In line with the Paris Agreement on the climate crisis, emissions from agrifood must be cut to net zero by 2050. This is vital to keep global average temperatures from rising above 1.5º from pre-industrial levels. Agrifood emissions alone could make the world miss this target. 

    In the foreword to the report, Axel van Trotsenburg, Senior Managing Director for Development Policy and Partnerships at the World Bank said: 

    To protect our planet, we need to transform the way we produce and consume food.

    Undeniably, the agrifood sector has a huge opportunity. It could single handedly cut nearly a third of global emissions through “affordable and readily available actions.” The new report is urging countries to invest more money in the solutions. 

    The report said that middle-income countries should be making changes, including using land in more sustainable ways, and moving to livestock practices that are low-emissions. 

    Trotsenburg commented:

    Simply changing how middle-income countries use land, such as forests and ecosystems, for food production can cut agrifood emissions by a third by 2030.

    Additionally, to pay for the shift to methods that use less emissions, countries should also think about cutting wasteful agriculture subsidies.

    Countries like the United States should be doing more to provide technical assistance. Undoubtedly, their high income coupled with being the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter means they should be “shifting subsidies away from high-emitting food sources.”

    Meanwhile, the report added that:

    Low-income countries should focus on green and competitive growth and avoid building the high-emissions infrastructure that high-income countries must now replace.

    Low-cost climate action

    The agrifood industry has the potential to create substantial and low cost climate change action. Unlike other sectors, it has the ability to draw carbon out from the atmosphere through ecosystems and soils. 

    The payoffs for investing in reducing agrifood emissions could be huge. Annual investments will need to increase by up to 18 times, to $260bn per year. This would halve current agrifood emissions by 2030 and put the world on track for net zero emissions by 2050. However, estimates show that the benefits in health, economic, and environmental terms could be as much as $4.3tn in 2030. 

    Although additional resources would be needed, some of the costs can be covered by shifting money away from wasteful subsidies. Importantly, these costs are less than half the amount the world spends each year on agricultural subsidies. Many of which are both wasteful and harmful for the environment.

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    Feature image via Lars Plougmann/Wikimedia, cropped and resized to 1200 by 900, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • EPA Changes Course on Widely Used Pesticide With Proposed Ban

    The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to ban a controversial pesticide that is widely used on celery, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables. The EPA released its plan on Tuesday, nearly a week after a ProPublica investigation revealed the agency had laid out a justification for increasing the amount of acephate allowed on food by removing limits meant to protect…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • European Parliament ploughs ahead with environmentally destructive agricultural reforms

    Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have rolled over for big agribusiness, sabotaging the EU’s agricultural reform via the Common Agricultural Policy – key to fighting the climate and biodiversity crises.

    Agricultural reform via Common Agricultural Policy

    On Thursday 11 April, the European Parliament gave its green light to fast-track the vote on a last-minute reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

    The CAP is the EU’s system of agricultural subsidies, to support farmers across the bloc. The EU has been in the process of reforming it for the 2023 to 2027 period. In December 2021, EU member states formally adopted the agreement. Following this, the new legislation came into force on 1 January 2023.

    Historically, the EU CAP has mainly benefited big landowners – in other words large farms and the agribusiness industry – over smallholder farmers. This is because the EU ties subsidies to the land area, meaning if you had more land, you’d receive greater financial support. [Pdf, p7]

    Invariably, by propping up large-scale intensive agriculture, the CAP has been a key driver of the biodiversity crisis. Moreover, it has ploughed funding into the hands of some of the most climate destructive parts of the industry. For example, a study in Nature found that the EU was funneling over 80% of CAP subsidies to carbon emissions-intensive animal agriculture.

    Given this, the EU has been updating the CAP to align with the EU’s Green New Deal. As a result, it introduced a series of new green measures. For instance, this included leaving land fallow and maintaining some permanent grassland.

    Farmer protests

    However, farmers across Europe have held huge demonstrations against the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in its current form.

    Partly, this was indeed in response to some of the new green regulations. Despite this, the protesters’ demands have been far from homogenous. Notably, a Carbon Brief analysis identified that not all the issues the protesters are raising, are related to climate, conservation, biodiversity, or greenhouse gas emissions.

    Moreover, as Desmog reported, while some farmers have campaigned against the climate-focused elements of the new CAP, others have called for the EU to strengthen it.

    For instance, this included members of the European chapter of peasant, Indigenous, and landworker movement La Via Campesina. On the same day MEPs fast-tracked these reforms, European Coordination Via Campesina penned a letter with IFOAM Organics Europe to commission president Ursula von der Layen. In it, they argued:

    while reducing administrative burdens for farmers is necessary, this must not result in lower environmental ambitions and further exacerbating the impact of climate change and of the biodiversity collapse that farmers already witness. On the contrary, any revision of European legislation should strengthen and protect the most sustainable, organic and agroecological models of agriculture and prepare the necessary transition of the European agri-food system. The proposed simplification rules will
    ultimately only exacerbate discontent in the farming community as they neither support farmers in
    increasing their resilience nor do they address the real issues that farmers face, which is the lack of fair
    prices for their products and lack of a decent income.

    By contrast, Desmog also underscored how far-right groups across Europe have capitalised on the discontent to garner electoral gains. They have teamed up with big agribusiness to rail against so-called net zero ‘red tape’.

    On top of this, it pointed to a EU-wide lobby group – Copa-Cogeca – that has been lobbying against the green reforms. It noted that the group has largely championed the interests of the agribusiness industry. A separate investigation by Lighthouse Reports highlighted that many small-holder farmers do not feel that Copa-Cogeca speaks for them.

    Parliament “muzzling democratic debate”

    Nevertheless, the EU has bowed to the pressure from big agribusiness. First, in March, the European Commission put forward new reforms for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Primarily, these will overhaul its green measures.

    Now, the European Parliament is pushing forward with a vote on these reforms.

    As Euractiv reported:

    the EU executive proposed two regulations laying down changes to six of the nine Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAECs) standards on which CAP payments hinge upon, and giving member states more flexibility to implement the policy.

    Groups have said MEPs did so despite this jeopardising the EU’s ability to tackle the biodiversity and climate crises and the threat it poses to the future of farming.

    A network of over 180 environmental organisations, the European Environment Bureau (EEB) spoke out against the move. In a press release, it said:

    The unlawful and antidemocratic proposal lacks the scientific evidence, proper argument and public consultation and fails to justify why or how the removal of environmental requirements will support farmers in the short term. In the long term, if adopted, it will leave farmers even more vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

    EEB’s director for nature, health and environment Faustine Bas-Defossez said:

    It is shameful that such a large majority of MEPs voted in support of muzzling democratic debate on a proposal that lacks any scientific evidence. If passed the proposed simplification of the CAP will do nothing to support farmers and will in fact make them even more vulnerable to the impact of the climate and biodiversity crises which are the real threats to food security

    The Parliament’s decision to fast-track the vote on a proposal that affects 1/3 of the EU budget in incredibly irresponsible. Citizens expect better and will remember this vote when electing their representatives June.

    Meanwhile, lawyers from environmental law group ClientEarth argued that the process that led to the reform proposal was unprecedented and undemocratic. Specifically, they said that this was the case since it failed to respect basic EU standards of transparency, public participation and evidence-based decision-making.

    It also argued that the Commission had breached its legal duty under the EU Climate Law by failing to assess the consistency of the CAP reform proposal with the EU’s 2050 climate-neutrality objective and its 2030 target.

    As such, ClientEarth lawyer Sarah Martin said:

    Weakening the basic environmental requirements in the CAP in attempt to ‘fix’ systemic issues to the EU’s agri-food sector, will only aggravate the situation further, like rubbing salt in a wound. Undermining the elements of the CAP that are meant to preserve soils and biodiversity, will do nothing to improve the situation for farmers who are already feeling first-hand the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Pitting nature against farmers is a false dichotomy because there is no farming without nature.

    The undemocratic way this reform has been pushed through is equally shocking. The Commission has justified deviating from its own governance guidelines by claiming a “political urgency”, despite several farming unions having opposed the changes. This type of urgent procedure has only been used to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Taking a crisis approach to adopt measures that require thoughtful consideration will expose farmers and people to major environmental and climate risks. These decisions should not be prepared and voted on in a matter of weeks, when doing so will have devastating repercussions.

    The European Parliament has refused to see the urgency to address the climate and biodiversity crises to safeguard farmers’ future and in the process has set an extremely worrying precedent for the future of EU decision-making.”

    The European Parliament vote on the legislative proposal will take place during the last plenary session between 22 to 25 April.

    Feature image via NightThree/Wikimedia, resized to 1200 by 900, licensed under CC BY 2.0

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Government accused of now breaking environmental law TWO YEARS in a row

    The UK government is alleged to have bulldozed through environmental law to greenlight the use of a bee-killing pesticide. It’s more bad news in the midst of the rapidly worsening biodiversity crisis.

    Breaching environmental law

    Lawyers from environmental law firm ClientEarth have warned that the UK’s environmental watchdog that the 2024 ‘emergency authorisation’ of a pesticide poses a serious risk to nature. Crucially, they have suggested that this may be yet another instance of the government breaching environmental law.

    As the name suggests, the government is supposed to use ‘emergency authorisations’  to approve the use of unauthorised chemicals in exceptional or emergency situations. However, ClientEarth is arguing that the government has failed to correctly apply the test for these according to the law.

    As the Canary’s Tracy Keeling previously explained:

    The UK’s underlying ban on neonicotinoids comes from its time as an EU member. There’s a bloc-wide ban on outdoor use of neonicotinoids. Until recently, this ban also had a mechanism for emergency authorisations.

    Moreover, she detailed that a European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued a ruling in January 2023 that will prohibit the EU from using these authorisations. As a result, the EU bans neonicotinoids for outdoor use in the bloc.

    Meanwhile however, the UK continues to grant approval for neonicotinoids, having revoked the ban on these substances in 2019. According to recent research by Pesticide Action Network (PAN) UK, there are now up to 36 pesticides approved in the UK which are no longer permitted for use in the EU.

    Moreover, ClientEarth lawyers highlighted that the UK government has made clear promises to minimise the risks and impacts of pesticides. It did so in both its 25 Year Environment Plan of 2018 and the Environmental Improvement Plan of 2023. Vitally, the Environmental Improvement Plan acknowledged that:

    there is growing evidence that pesticides have the potential to impact non-target species such as pollinators and soil-dwelling invertebrates, which provide essential services to farmers and growers and are crucial for a thriving natural environment.

    A risk to bees

    Alongside this, a key government body and an independent committee both advised against the government’s use of these recent authorisations.

    First, the government’s own health body, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) refuted that there was a compelling basis for the emergency authorisation. In particular, it stated that it was:

    unable to conclude that the benefit of use outweighs the risks.

    Then, the government’s independent panel of pesticide experts concurred with HSE’s evaluation. It also concluded that the emergency authorisation lacked justification.

    Primarily, HSE and the panel’s verdict came from the significant risks the pesticide could pose to pollinators.

    Bees and other pollinators are vital to biodiversity and the ecosystems that underpin it. This is because they play a huge role in the health of our environment and food systems. For instance, animals pollinate 87 of the world’s major crops, which collectively account for 35% of global food production. What’s more, 80% of wild plants depend on insects for pollination.

    Yet experts have warned that neonicotinoids put their survival at risk. According to HSE’s report, even at non-lethal doses, exposure to thiamethoxam may compromise pollinators’ ability to forage and navigate and potentially cause “a reduction in survival of honeybees”.

    What’s more, studies have shown that neonicotinoid pesticides can stay active in affected soil for years. To make matters worse, separate research has shown that they are also appearing in rivers.

    For instance, recent analysis of data gathered by the Environment Agency shows that more than one in 10 English rivers now contain neonicotinoid pesticides. Alarmingly, it found that many of these were at levels which it considered unsafe for aquatic life.

    Given this, ClientEarth’s complaint also argued that the government was threatening key biodiversity sites. It said that the government had failed to comply with its legal duty to consider the potential impact of the authorisation on protected nature sites.

    Making emergency use “meaningless”

    Naturally, it also isn’t the first time the government has gone against advice to appease agricultural interests either. Nor is it the first time that ClientEarth has taken action in response.

    Notably, the government has approved the harmful pesticide for use for four years running.

    Previously, ClientEarth had challenged the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on its 2023 approval decision.

    Specifically, in November 2023, ClientEarth lawyers filed a complaint to the Office for Environmental Protection. In this, they argued that by granting an emergency authorisation to use a neonicotinoid pesticide on sugar beet crops in East Anglia in January 2023, Defra may have failed to comply with environmental law.

    As a result, ClientEarth’s UK head Kyle Lischak said:

    For a fourth year in a row, the UK government has now authorised a potent pesticide for what it sees as an ‘emergency use’ – which goes well-beyond the scope of an emergency authorisation in our opinion and runs the risk of making the process meaningless if this kind of approval continues.

    We believe this and last year’s approval are breaches of environmental law and have the potential to undermine the important role played by pollinators in food production and the pollination of wild plants.

    The risks this pesticide poses to these vital systems could be compounded in coming years if the government continues to grant emergency authorisations like this one, on what is, in our view, an unlawful basis.

    Feature image via Louise Docker/Wikimedia, cropped and resized to 1200 by 900, licensed under CC BY 2.0

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Rural women are bearing the socioeconomic brunt of the patriarchy-led climate crisis

    On Tuesday 5 March, the United Nations’ (UN) food and farming agency published a report highlighting the gendered impacts of the climate crisis in poor agrarian communities. The UN Food and Agriculture Agency’s (FAO) “The Unjust Climate” study detailed the financial disparity between men and women in rural households in light of climate-fueled extreme weather.

    Specifically, it expressed how the climate crisis intensifies existing gender inequalities. As a result, heatwaves and floods inflict greater economic pain on rural women than men.

    Climate crisis harming poorest households most

    Scientists say the effects of rising temperatures are already harming the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet most acutely. The UN FAO analysed data from 109,341 households in 24 low and middle-income countries. It cross-referenced these with rain, snow, and temperature data over a 70 year period.

    In rural areas, poorer households have limited access to resources, services and jobs. Given this, they can find it harder to cope with climate crisis impacts. Notably, on average, they lose 5% more income than wealthier households due to heatwaves and 4% more due to floods.

    What’s more, the UN FAO report found that women-led households are even harder hit. Compared to men-led households, they lose around 8% more of their income due to excessive heat. During floods they would lose 3% more relative to men.

    This amounts to an average drop in income per person of $83 due to heat stress, and $35 due to floods. Extrapolating this across all developing countries, these losses totalled $37bn and $16bn respectively.

    UN FAO: it’s worse for women

    The UN FAO report said that:

    Failure to address the unequal impacts of climate change on rural people will intensify the already large gap between the haves and have-nots, and between men and women

    Crucially, it explained that rural, women-led households in low and middle income nations already face more financial burdens than men when disaster strikes. The UN FAO attributed this to deep rooted “social structures, and discriminatory norms and institutions”.

    For instance, the report highlighted that women are bearing a much larger domestic and childcare burden than men, limiting their opportunities to study and find a job. Additionally, this also makes it harder for them to migrate or make money from non-farming activities when the climate crisis affects their crops.

    On top of this, the UN FAO report suggested that if these “significant existing differences” in wages are not addressed, the gap will worsen. Notably, it calculated that if average temperatures increase by just 1°c, women would face a 34% greater loss in total income compared to men.

    The perfect storm of patriarchy and climate crisis

    Already, scientists have estimated that current global temperatures are around 1.3°c hotter overall than they were in the late 19th century. Moreover, multiple studies have linked the climate crisis with the relentless increase in destructive extreme weather such as floods, storms and heatwaves.

    Ultimately, the study illustrated that a perfect storm of patriarchy and the climate crisis are pushing women in land-based communities into further poverty. Importantly, it shows that gender justice must be front and centre of efforts to tackle the climate crisis and the work to mitigate its impacts.

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse.

    Feature image via Lomoraronald/Wikimedia, cropped and resized to 1200 by 900, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Farmers’ Protest in India Reignites: A Struggle for the Future of Food and Agriculture

    In 2021, after a year-long protest, India’s farmers brought about the repeal of three farm laws that were intended to ‘liberalise’ the agriculture sector. Now, in 2024, farmers are again protesting. The underlying issues and the facilitation of the neoliberal corporatisation of farming that sparked the previous protest remain and have not been resolved.

    The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, global agribusiness and financial capital are working to corporatise India’s agriculture sector. This plan goes back to the early 1990s and India’s foreign exchange crisis, which was used (and manipulated) to set this plan in motion. This ‘structural adjustment’ policy and process involves displacing the current food production system with contract farming and an industrial model of agriculture and food retail that serves the above interests.

    The aim is to reduce the role of the public sector in agriculture to a facilitator of private capital, which requires industrial commodity-crop farming. The beneficiaries will include Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and India’s retail and agribusiness giants as well as the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations and the big tech companies with their ‘data-driven agriculture’.

    The plan is to displace the peasantry, create a land market and amalgamate landholdings to form larger farms that are more suited to international land investors and industrial farming. As a result, there has been an ongoing strategy to make farming non-viable for many of India’s smallholder farmers and drive hundreds of millions out of farming and into urban centres that have already sprawled to form peri-urban areas, which often tend to contain the most agriculturally fertile land. The loss of such land should be a concern in itself.

    And what will those hundreds of millions do? Driven to the cities because of deliberate impoverishment, they will serve as cheap labour or, more likely, an unemployed or underemployed reserve army of labour for global capital — labour which is being replaced with automation. They will be in search of jobs that are increasingly hard to come by the (World Bank reports that there is more than 23% youth unemployment in India).

    The impoverishment of farmers results from rising input costs, the withdrawal of government assistance, debt and debt repayments and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports, which depress farmers’ incomes.

    While corporations in India receive massive handouts and have loans written off, the lack of a secure income, exposure to volatile and manipulated international market prices and cheap imports contribute to farmers’ misery of not being able to cover the costs of production and secure a decent standard of living.

    The pressure from the richer nations for the Indian government to further reduce support given to farmers and open up to imports and export-oriented ‘free market’ trade is based on nothing but hypocrisy. For instance, according to policy analyst Devinder Sharma, subsidies provided to US wheat and rice farmers are more than the market worth of these two crops. He also notes that, per day, each cow in Europe receives a subsidy worth more than an Indian farmer’s daily income.

    The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, global institutional investors and transnational agribusiness giants require corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce. They demand that India sacrifice its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.

    Farmers are merely regarded as producers of raw materials (crops) to be fleeced by suppliers of chemical and biotech inputs and the food processing and retail conglomerates. The more farmers can be squeezed, the greater the profits these corporations can extract. This entails creating farmer dependency on costly external inputs and corporate-dominated markets and supply chains. Global agrifood corporations have cleverly and cynically weaved a narrative that equates eradicating food sovereignty and creating dependency with ‘food security’.

    Farmers’ demands

    In 2018, a charter was released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of around 250 farmers’ organisations). The farmers were concerned about the deepening penetration of predatory corporations and the unbearable burden of indebtedness and the widening disparities between farmers and other sectors.

    They wanted the government to take measures to bring down the input costs of farming, while making purchases of farm produce below the minimum support price (MSP) both illegal and punishable.

    The charter also called for a special discussion on the universalisation of the public distribution system, the withdrawal of pesticides that have been banned elsewhere and the non-approval of genetically engineered seeds without a comprehensive need and impact assessment.

    Other demands included no foreign direct investment in agriculture and food processing, the protection of farmers from corporate plunder in the name of contract farming, investment in farmers’ collectives to create farmer producer organisations and peasant cooperatives and the promotion of agroecology based on suitable cropping patterns and local seed diversity revival.

    These demands remain relevant today due to government inaction. In fact, the three farm laws that were repealed after a year-long protest by farmers in 2021 aimed to do precisely the opposite. They were intended to expose Indian agriculture to a massive dose of neoliberal marketisation and shock therapy. Although the laws were struck down, the corporate interests behind them never went away and are adamant that the Indian government implements the policies they require.

    This would mean India reducing the state procurement and distribution of essential foodstuffs and eradicating its food buffer stocks — so vital to national food security — and purchasing the nation’s needs with its foreign exchange reserves on manipulated global commodity markets. This would make the country wholly dependent on attracting foreign investment and international finance.

    To ensure food sovereignty and national food security, the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) says that MSPs, through government procurement of essential crops and commodities, should be extended to many major cops such as maize, cotton, oilseed and pulses. At the moment, only farmers in certain states who produce rice and wheat are the main beneficiaries of government procurement at the MSP.

    Since per capita protein consumption in India is abysmally low and has fallen further during the liberalisation era, the provision of pulses in the public distribution system (PDS) is long overdue and desperately needed. The PDS works with central government, via the Food Corporation of India, being responsible for buying food grains from farmers at MSPs at state-run market yards or mandis. It then allocates the grains to each state. State governments then deliver to ‘ration shops’.

    Today, in 2024, farm union leaders are (among other demands) seeking guarantees for a minimum purchase price for crops. Although the government announces support prices for more than 20 crops each year, government agencies buy only rice and wheat at the support level and, even then, in only some states.

    State agencies buy the two staples at government-fixed minimum support prices to build reserves to run the world’s biggest food welfare programme that entitles more than 800 million Indians to free rice and wheat. Currently, that’s more than half the population who per household will receive five kilos per month of these essential foodstuffs for at least the next four years, which would be denied to them by the ‘free market’. As we have seen throughout the world, corporate plunder under the guise of neoliberal marketisation is no friend of the poor and those in need who rely on state support to exist.

    If public procurement of a wider range of crops at the MSP were to occur — and MSPs were guaranteed for rice and wheat across all states — it would help address hunger and malnutrition, encourage crop diversification and ease farmer distress. Indeed, as various commentators have stated, by helping hundreds of millions involved in farming this way, it would give a massive boost to rural spending power and the economy in general.

    Instead of rolling back the role of the public sector and surrendering the system to what constitutes a transnational billionaire class and its corporations, there is a need to further expand official procurement and public distribution.

    The RUPE notes, it would cost around 20% of the current handouts (‘incentives’) received by corporations and their super-rich owners, which do not benefit the bulk of the wider population in any way. It is also worth considering that the loans provided to just five large corporations in India were in 2016 equal to the entire farm debt.

    However, it is clear that the existence of the MSP, the public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks are an impediment to global agribusiness interests.

    Farmers’ other demands include a complete debt waiver, a pension scheme for farmers and farm labourers, the reintroduction of subsidies scrapped by the Electricity (Amendment) Bill 2020 and the right to fair compensation and transparency concerning land acquisitions.

    In the meantime, the current administration is keen to demonstrate to international finance capital and agricapital that it is being tough on farmers and remains steadfast in its willingness to facilitate the pro-corporate agenda.

    After the recent breakdown in talks between government and farmers’ representatives, the farmers decided to peacefully march to and demonstrate in Delhi. But at the Delhi border, farmers were met with barricades, tear gas and state violence.

    Farmers produce humanities’ most essential need and are not the ‘enemy within’. The spotlight should fall on the ‘enemy beyond’. Instead of depicting farmers as ‘anti-national’, as sections of the media and prominent commentators in India try to, the focus needs to be on challenging those interests that seek to gain from undermining India’s food security and sovereignty and the impoverishment of farmers.

    Note: The issues discussed in the above article are set out in the author’s free-to-read book (2022), which can be accessed at Academia.edu and Global Research

    The post Farmers’ Protest in India Reignites: A Struggle for the Future of Food and Agriculture first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth 

    The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, farmers and ordinary people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.

    It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. Institutional investors and wealthy individuals park their funds and wealth in these firms and depend on the financial system a toxic food system to deliver.

    Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.

    They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.

    The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.

    This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations’ needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.

    In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-COVID world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.

    There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.

    All of this is set out in Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth (December 2023), published as an open-access (free) e-book by Global Research and is a follow up to the author’s book Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order (2022).

    That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues — prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation currently being heard in the Supreme Court of India — stated the following about the book:

    This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.

    ‘Sickening Profits’ continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?

    Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, an influential US-based think tank, says:

    It takes a book to break down the dynamics that are pushing agro-chemical agriculture to farmers and consumers around the world and to reveal the strength of the diverse movement of people and organizations who stand in the way of these destructive and predatory forces.

    Colin Todhunter takes readers on a world tour that makes a compelling case against the fallacy of the food scarcity and Green Revolution arguments advanced by the mainstream media and international institutions on behalf of powerful financial interests such as Blackrock, Vanguard, or Gates. Todhunter makes it obvious that a key factor of world hunger and of the environmental crisis we are facing is a capitalist system that ‘requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand.’

    Uplifting rather than depressing, after this lucid diagnosis, he highlights some of the countless people-led initiatives and movements, from Cuba, Ethiopia to India, that fight back against destruction and predation with agroecology and farmers-led practices, respectful of the people and the planet. By debunking the “artificial scarcity” myth that is constantly fed to us, Todhunter demonstrates that it is actually not complicated to change course. Readers will just have to join the movement.

    The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) is “an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists” and believes in “open access to truthful information and nuanced reporting”. It is committed to publishing e-books that are free of charge. Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth can be read directly on the GRG site here and can also be accessed and downloaded as a fully formatted pdf (numbered contents/pages etc) on the academia.edu website here.

    The post Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bananas for Socialism

    In any socialist future worth living in, an abundance of diverse foods would replace the tyranny of monoculture.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • War on Food:  Science and Public Interest Halt the Push for GM Crops in India

    Between 1991 and 2016, the population of Delhi and its suburbs increased from 9.4 million to 25 million. In 2023, the World Population Review website estimates Delhi’s population to be 32.9 million. 

    In the December 2016 paper Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems.

    Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities. The paper states that this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe. 

    Africa and Asia will together bear 80% of the projected cropland loss due to rising urbanisation. The disappearance of this productive land will impact staple crops such as maize, rice, soya beans and wheat, which are cornerstones of global food security.   

    In South Asia, farmland can’t simply spread elsewhere because fertile land is already running out.  

    One of the paper’s authors, Felix Creutzig (currently, Professor of Sustainability Economics at the Technical University of Berlin), said at the time that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers will be displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security.  

    However, what Creutzig says is not inevitable. Far from it. Urbanisation is being encouraged and facilitated by design. 

    According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the early 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture: India was to embark on a massive rural depopulation/urbanisation project.  

    In addition, in return for up to more than $120 billion (accounting for inflation, this would be $269 billion in 2023) in loans, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions, facilitate the entry of global players and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange. 

    The details of this plan appear in a January 2021 article by the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE). In effect, it constitutes a massive urbanisation project and the opening of India’s agriculture sector to foreign agribusiness corporations.  

    Unsurprisingly, therefore, Felix Creutzig predicted the following:  

    As peri-urban land is converted, smallholders will lose their land. The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.

    The RUPE says that the opening of India’s agriculture and food economy to foreign investors and global agribusinesses has been a longstanding project of the imperialist countries. 

    Industrial-scale agriculture is key to the plan. And integral to this model of farming is genetically engineered food crops – whether first generation genetically modified (GM) crops based on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or newer techniques involving the likes of gene editing.   

    Glyphosate/GM crop approval  

    According to a recent report in the Chennai-based New Indian Express (NIE), the Indian government is likely to allow the cultivation of herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops. These crops have not been legalised but have been growing in India for some years. 

    The government is creating a pool of more than 4,000 ‘progressive farmers’ and ‘rural educated youths’ who can help farmers spray glyphosate on GM crops that have been genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide. These pest control officers are to spray glyphosate on behalf of farmers. 

    Glyphosate is carcinogenic and, in India, its use is officially restricted to tea crops and non-cropping areas like barren land and roadsides. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.   

    The NIE quotes a source who implies that the drive to spray glyphosate on agricultural land seems like a precursor of legalising HT GM cotton (I would add – and HT GM food crops eventually).  

    At this time, only one GM crop – Bt (insecticidal) cotton – is legalised in India.  

    The legalisation of HT GM cotton would be a key step towards opening a multi-billion-dollar market for global agritech-agrochemicals firms which have a range of HT GM food crops waiting in the pipeline.   

    Much has been written on the devastating effects that glyphosate has on health and the environment. Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH)s 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. 

    These toxic chemicals have entered the food chain and human bodies at harmful levels and are even in a range of popular children’s cereals. 

    An April 2023 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that high levels of the pesticide were associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA and a cancer biomarker.  

    The study findings appeared after the US Centers for Disease Control reported in 2022 that more than 80% of urine samples drawn from children and adults contained glyphosate. Similar figures are found in the EU. GBHs are the world’s most widely used agricultural weedkiller. 

    There are dozens of academic studies that indicate the deleterious and disturbing effects of GBHs on human health. Rather than presenting them here, for the sake of brevity, many are listed in the online article Bathed In Pesticides: The Narrative Of Deception (2022). 

    Attorney Robert F Kennedy Jr and current presidential candidate has been involved with some of the ongoing court cases in the US that have been brought against Bayer regarding the human health damage of Monsanto’s Roundup GBH (Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018).  

    Kennedy concludes that there is cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts. 

    He adds that strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10. 

    Researchers peg glyphosate as a potent endocrine disruptor, which interferes with sexual development in children. It is also a chelator that removes important minerals from the body and disrupts the microbiome, destroying beneficial bacteria in the human gut and triggering brain inflammation and other ill effects. 

    So, why do GBHs remain on the market? It’s because of the power of the agritech/agrochemical sector and the don’t look, don’t see approach of compromised regulatory bodies: see Glyphosate: EU assessment report excludes most of the scientific literature from its analysis (2021) by GMWatch and Glyphosate in the EU: product promoters masquerading as regulators in a ‘cesspool of corruption’? (2016) in The Ecologist. 

    Consider what veteran journalist Carey Gillam says: 

    US Roundup litigation began in 2015 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Internal Monsanto documents dating back decades show that the company was aware of scientific research linking its weed killer to cancer but instead of warning consumers, the company worked to suppress the information and manipulate scientific literature.

    Over the years, Monsanto mounted a deceitful defence of its health- and environment-damaging Roundup and its GM crops and orchestrated toxic smear campaigns against anyone – scientist or campaigner – who threatened its interests. 

    In 2016, campaigner Rosemary Mason wrote an open letter to European Chemicals Agency Executive Director Geert Dancet. It can be accessed on the academia.edu site.

    In it, she sets out how current EU legislation was originally set up to protect the pesticides industry and how Monsanto and other agrochemical corporations helped the EU design the regulatory systems for their own products.

    There is much at stake for the industry. 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.

    GBHs are a multi-billion-dollar money-spinning venture for the manufacturers. But this latest development in India is as much about the legalisation of a wide range of proprietary HT GM seeds and crops as it is about glyphosate because both are joined at the hip.

    Regulatory delinquency

    In India, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops: the Jairam Ramesh Report (2010); the Sopory Committee Report (2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee Report (2012); the Technical Expert Committee Final Report (2013); and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests (2017).

    Given the health and environmental issues surrounding GM crops, as well as the now well-documented failure of Bt cotton in the country, it comes as little surprise that these reports advise against their adoption.

    This high-level advice also derives, in part, from GM ‘regulation’ in India being dogged by blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight. 

    The ‘Technical Expert Committee Final Report’ was scathing about India’s prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. As we have seen with the push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems described by the TEC persist.  

    The drive to get GM crops commercialised has been relentless, not least GM mustard. The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), the country’s apex regulatory body for GMOs, has pushed ahead by giving this crop the nod. However, the case of GM mustard remains stuck in the Supreme Court due to a public interest litigation lodged by environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues. 

    Rodrigues argues that GM mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests (or no testing) and a lack of public scrutiny: in other words, unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency. 

    This crop is also HT, which is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse farms that could be affected by its application on nearby fields. 

    However, despite the ban on GM crops, in 2005, biologist Pushpa Bhargava noted that unapproved varieties of several GM crops were being sold to farmers. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant “special seed” of all sorts of vegetables. 

    In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in India against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. In 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh. 

    In 2017, the illegal cultivation of an HT GM soybean was reported in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), a national farmers organisation, claimed that Gujarat farmers had been cultivating the HT crop. 

    As mentioned above, HT cotton is illegally growing in India.  

    In the 2017 paper – The ox fall down: path-breaking and technology treadmills in Indian cotton agriculture – Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs note the tactic of encouraging farmers to abandon traditional on-farm practices, which coincides with the appearance of an increasing supply of HT GM cotton seeds.

    This is a cynical attempt to place farmers on corporate seed and chemical (glyphosate) treadmills. 

    The authors write: 

    Although India’s cotton sector has been penetrated by various input- and capital-intensive methods, penetration by herbicide has been largely stymied. In Telangana State, the main obstacle has been the practice of ‘double-lining’, in which cotton plants are spaced widely to allow weeding by ox-plow… double-lining is an example of an advantageous path for cash-poor farmers. However, it is being actively undermined by parties intent on expanding herbicide markets and opening a niche for next-generation genetically modified cotton.

    Stone and Flachs note the potential market for herbicide growth alone in India is huge. Writing in 2017, the authors note that sales could soon reach USD 800 million with scope for even greater expansion. Indeed, enormous expansion if HT GM crops become legal. 

    Friends in high places 

    Global agritech firms are salivating at the prospect of India being prised open for the introduction of GM crops. The industry has always had high-level supporters in India and abroad. And this leads back to what was stated earlier in the article – the plan to industrialise Indian agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and foreign agribusiness and the manoeuvring into position of compliant officials. 

    PM Modi proclaimed in 2014 that GM represents a good business-investment opportunity. Renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva has highlighted the arm twisting that has gone on in an attempt to force through GMOs into India, with various politicians having been pushed aside until the dotted line for GMO open field-testing approval was signed on.  

    Back in late 2015, I co-authored a piece with then editor of The Ecologist Oliver Tickell – Rice, wheat, mustard… India drives forward first GMO crops under veil of secrecy.  

    Seventeen or more secret applications had been made to India’s GMO regulators for trials and release of GM crops, including rice, wheat, chickpeas, brinjal and mustard. In a violation of the law, regulators had released no information about the applications, raising fears that India’s first GMOs will be released with no health, safety or environmental testing. 

    It is not surprising then that calls have been made for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies, who seem to have been asleep at the wheel or deliberately looking the other way as illegal GM crop cultivation has taken place.  

    India’s first GM crop cultivation – Bt cotton – was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat, spread surreptitiously and illegally. Campaigner Kavitha Kuruganti said the GEAC was caught off-guard when news about large-scale illegal cultivation of Bt cotton emerged, even as field trials that were to decide whether India would opt for this GM crop were still underway. 

    In March 2002, the GEAC ended up approving Bt cotton for commercial cultivation in India. To this day, no liability has been fixed for the illegal spread. We could well be witnessing a rerun of this scenario for HT cotton and HT food crops.  

    The tactic of contaminate first then legalise has benefited industry players before. Aside from Bt cotton in India, in 2016, the US Department of Agriculture granted marketing approval of GM Liberty Link 601 (Bayer CropScience) rice variety following its illegal contamination of the food supply and rice exports. The USDA effectively sanctioned an ‘approval-by-contamination’ policy. 

    The writing could be on the wall for India. 

    Does India need GM?  

    A common claim is that GMOs are essential to agriculture if we are to feed an ever-growing global population. Supporters of GM crops argue that by increasing productivity and yields, this technology will also help boost farmers’ incomes and lift many out of poverty.  

    In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, eminent scientists P C Kesavan and M S Swaminathan (regarded as the ‘father of the Green Revolution’ in India) questioned the efficacy of and the need for GMOs in agriculture.

    The performance of GM crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in Kesavan and Swaminathan’s piece and by many others, there is sufficient evidence to question their efficacy, especially that of HT crops and their shocking, devastating impact in places like Argentina.

    Kesavan and Swaminathan argue that GM is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they say that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient. Too often, however, conventional options and innovations that outperform GM are sidelined in a rush by powerful interests to facilitate the introduction of GM crops. 

    Although India fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food 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 and fruit. 

    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 that 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 financial hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling from the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace most of them at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations. 

    But pro-GMO supporters, both outside of India and within, along with the neoliberal think tanks many of them are associated with, have 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 their promotional strategy.  

    The knowledge and many of the traditional practices of India’s small farmers are now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate for high-productive, sustainable agriculture. It is no surprise therefore that a 2019 FAO high-level report has called for agroecology and smallholder farmers to be prioritised and invested in to achieve global sustainable food security. It argues that scaling up agroecology offers potential solutions to many of the world’s most pressing problems, whether, for instance, climate resilience, carbon storage, soil degradation, water shortages, unemployment or food security. 

    Available evidence suggests that (non-GMO) smallholder farming using low-input methods is more productive in total output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable.  

    It is for good reason that the FAO high-level report referred to earlier along with the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Professor Hilal Elver and numerous other papers and reports advocate agroecology 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. 

    In the introduction to a recent article, I wrote that the prevailing globalised agrifood model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness, the undermining and destruction of local communities and the eradication of biodiversity.   

    Do Indian citizens want a GM/glyphosate-drenched, industrial food system that brings with it all of the above?   

    I also wrote that the model relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency.   

    The solution lies in a paradigm shift that abandons the notion that urbanisation equates with ‘progress’. A shift that prioritises rural communities, small independent retail enterprises (instead of global giants like Walmart-Flipkart and Amazon) and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient-dense diets and food sovereignty. 

    A shift that rejects the ecomodernist techno-dystopia of hyper-urbanisation, genetically engineered crops, biosynthetic food and farmerless farms and a ‘food transition’ all under the control of a big data-agritech cartel that wraps all of the above in a veneer of fake green.   

    There are alternative visions, potential outcomes and resistance that can challenge the ecomodernist agenda.   

    Instead of their eradication, creating land markets to amalgamate their land for industrial-scale mono-cropping or using vital cropland to build on, smallholder farmers and rural communities should be placed at the centre of development policies. Moreover, inspiration can be taken from the worldviews of indigenous peoples and, as anthropology professor Arturo Escobar says, the concept of Buen Viver: promoting ways of living that stress the collective well being of humans and nature and recognising the inseparability and interdependence of both. 

    For instance, India’s indigenous peoples’ low-energy, low-consumption tribal cultures are the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation, and their knowledge and value systems promote genuine sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature.  

    This entails a fundamental transformation in values, priorities and outlooks and a shift away from predation, imperialism, domination, anthropocentrism and plunder.  

    That’s what a genuine ‘food transition’ and Buen Viver would really mean.

    • Many of the issues mentioned in the article above are discussed in the author’s free-to-read e-book. 

    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

  • The Great Arizona Water Grab

    A Saudi-owned farm in the middle of the Arizona desert has attracted national attention and criticism since Reveal’s Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke this story eight years ago. The farm is using massive amounts of water to grow hay and export it to Saudi Arabia in the midst of a water crisis in the American West. 

    Since then, megafarms have taken hold here. And the trend isn’t fueled just by foreign companies. Many people have no idea that their retirement funds are backing massive land deals that result in draining precious groundwater. Halverson uncovers that pension fund managers in Arizona knew they were investing in a local land deal, which resulted in draining down the aquifer of nearby communities. So even as local and state politicians have fought to stop these deals, their retirement fund has been fueling them.

    And it’s not just happening in Arizona. Halverson takes us to Southern California, where retirement money also was invested in a megafarm deal. This time, the farm was tapping into the Colorado River to grow hay and ship it overseas. And it was happening as the federal and state governments have been trying to conserve river water.

    Halverson’s investigation into water use in the West is just one slice of his reporting into a global scramble for food and water, which is featured in an upcoming documentary, “The Grab” by director Gabriela Cowperthwaite. “The Grab” will be coming soon to a theater or screen near you.  

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The power of regenerative farming #shorts #newstoday


    This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Regenerative farming & justice for Black farmers. #shorts #newstoday


    This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Apocalypse Chow

    Introducing a new food column by Arun Gupta.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Regenerative Farming: Tackling Racism with Rice [The Jubilee Justice Story]


    This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Following apology to Hun Sen, farming activist is freed on bail

    A farming activist and two of his associates were freed on bail Tuesday after they made a public apology to Prime Minister Hun Sen for seeking to “topple the government.” 

    The case involving Theng Savoeun, president of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community, has drawn the attention of rights groups who say it undermines the work of civil society and is part of a “crackdown” on the opposition in Cambodia ahead of the July 23 general election.

    On May 17, authorities in Kratie province arrested Savoeun and 16 of his colleagues for “inciting social unrest” and “conspiracy to commit treason.”

    The local rights group ADHOC said they were simply advising farmers on their constitutional rights.

    The detentions of the activists had prompted some 200 farmers – mostly women – from various provinces to travel to the Ministry of Interior in Phnom Penh to demand their release, claiming that they had provided assistance and done nothing illegal.

    ENG_KHM_FarmerActivist_05302023_02.JPG
    Undated photo of Theng Savoeun, President of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community. The case involving Theng Savoeun, president of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community, has drawn the attention of rights groups who say it undermines the work of civil society and is part of a ‘crackdown’ on the opposition in Cambodia ahead of the July 23 general election. Credit: Theng Savoeun via FaceBook

    On Tuesday, the Ratanakiri Provincial Court released all three men after they apologized to Hun Sen for seeking to “overthrow the government” in a video later published by pro-government media outlet Fresh News.

    “I, Theng Savoeun, would like to acknowledge the kindness of Samdech, Minister of Interior Sar Kheng and the court in forgiving the three of us and releasing us on bail so we can rejoin our families after we mistakenly listened to foreigners and opposition party extremists, leading us to gather and incite people to stand up and topple the government,” he says in the video, using an honorific term to refer to Hun Sen.

    Savoeun’s colleagues Hach and Pheap, as well as his wife and mother, appear in the video praising Hun Sen for the release.

    ‘Not from the heart’

    The Cambodian Farmers’ Community Association has vehemently denied allegations that its members were sowing the seeds of revolution, saying it only instructed farmers on agricultural laws and techniques. 

    The group, which claims to have a membership of around 20,000 people across Cambodia, was founded in 2011 to assist farmers from 10 communities who say their land was encroached on.

    Farmers and group officials welcomed the release, but said they believe Savoeun and his colleagues were “forced to confess” and make statements blaming Hun Sen’s political opposition.

    “His confession didn’t come from the heart,” said farmer activist Det Hour. “If he committed a crime he would have confessed on Day One of his arrest.”

    ENG_KHM_FarmerActivist_05302023_03.JPG
    A Cambodian land rights protester lays on the ground in front of police during a protest in Phnom Penh Oct. 17, 2013. Credit: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

    But Sok Ey San, spokesman for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, denied that Savoeun was pressured to apologize.

    “If the individuals made the confessions, it means they were true,” he said.

    Another activist named Ma Chetra called Savoeun “a victim of the justice system” in Cambodia, adding that his confession “can’t be regarded as real.”

    “He chose to apologize so he can take care of his elderly parents,” he said.

    The trio’s release comes three days after Hun Sen accused unnamed officials from the opposition Candlelight Party of “wanting to kill” him and “seize power through undemocratic ways” during a meeting with workers in Phnom Penh.

    Illegal land grabs by developers or individuals are not uncommon in Cambodia, where officials and bureaucrats can be bribed to provide bogus land titles. Disputes over land are one of the major causes of social disturbances throughout Southeast Asia.

    Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Following apology to Hun Sen, farming activist is freed on bail

    A farming activist and two of his associates were freed on bail Tuesday after they made a public apology to Prime Minister Hun Sen for seeking to “topple the government.” 

    The case involving Theng Savoeun, president of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community, has drawn the attention of rights groups who say it undermines the work of civil society and is part of a “crackdown” on the opposition in Cambodia ahead of the July 23 general election.

    On May 17, authorities in Kratie province arrested Savoeun and 16 of his colleagues for “inciting social unrest” and “conspiracy to commit treason.”

    The local rights group ADHOC said they were simply advising farmers on their constitutional rights.

    The detentions of the activists had prompted some 200 farmers – mostly women – from various provinces to travel to the Ministry of Interior in Phnom Penh to demand their release, claiming that they had provided assistance and done nothing illegal.

    ENG_KHM_FarmerActivist_05302023_02.JPG
    Undated photo of Theng Savoeun, President of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community. The case involving Theng Savoeun, president of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community, has drawn the attention of rights groups who say it undermines the work of civil society and is part of a ‘crackdown’ on the opposition in Cambodia ahead of the July 23 general election. Credit: Theng Savoeun via FaceBook

    On Tuesday, the Ratanakiri Provincial Court released all three men after they apologized to Hun Sen for seeking to “overthrow the government” in a video later published by pro-government media outlet Fresh News.

    “I, Theng Savoeun, would like to acknowledge the kindness of Samdech, Minister of Interior Sar Kheng and the court in forgiving the three of us and releasing us on bail so we can rejoin our families after we mistakenly listened to foreigners and opposition party extremists, leading us to gather and incite people to stand up and topple the government,” he says in the video, using an honorific term to refer to Hun Sen.

    Savoeun’s colleagues Hach and Pheap, as well as his wife and mother, appear in the video praising Hun Sen for the release.

    ‘Not from the heart’

    The Cambodian Farmers’ Community Association has vehemently denied allegations that its members were sowing the seeds of revolution, saying it only instructed farmers on agricultural laws and techniques. 

    The group, which claims to have a membership of around 20,000 people across Cambodia, was founded in 2011 to assist farmers from 10 communities who say their land was encroached on.

    Farmers and group officials welcomed the release, but said they believe Savoeun and his colleagues were “forced to confess” and make statements blaming Hun Sen’s political opposition.

    “His confession didn’t come from the heart,” said farmer activist Det Hour. “If he committed a crime he would have confessed on Day One of his arrest.”

    ENG_KHM_FarmerActivist_05302023_03.JPG
    A Cambodian land rights protester lays on the ground in front of police during a protest in Phnom Penh Oct. 17, 2013. Credit: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

    But Sok Ey San, spokesman for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, denied that Savoeun was pressured to apologize.

    “If the individuals made the confessions, it means they were true,” he said.

    Another activist named Ma Chetra called Savoeun “a victim of the justice system” in Cambodia, adding that his confession “can’t be regarded as real.”

    “He chose to apologize so he can take care of his elderly parents,” he said.

    The trio’s release comes three days after Hun Sen accused unnamed officials from the opposition Candlelight Party of “wanting to kill” him and “seize power through undemocratic ways” during a meeting with workers in Phnom Penh.

    Illegal land grabs by developers or individuals are not uncommon in Cambodia, where officials and bureaucrats can be bribed to provide bogus land titles. Disputes over land are one of the major causes of social disturbances throughout Southeast Asia.

    Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.