When the pesticide industry takes its gloves off, people get hurt. Below is a press release from Via Campesina about a recent killing by men with guns hired by Syngenta in response to a protest against genetically modified food.
Without wanting to fall into the traps of victimising workers for something they have little genuine control over, there is news from the BBC about how the rest of the world is catching up to the US, where over two thirds of people are either overweight or obese. You can find the original study, in the journal Circulation, here.
Photocredit Cluster Bomb Unit
So, the World Bank has finally released its World Development Report on Agriculture. It’s a how-to manual on exploitation, and a manifesto for emptying the countryside. I’ll be writing about it more at Stuffed and Starved in the next couple of weeks, but if you’re interested in how one of the world’s most powerful organisations is looking to transform agriculture in the Global South, you’re in luck. Together with the good folk at ActionAid I’ve written a critical response to the Bank, which you
can download here.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the New Zealand police have gotten abusive with activists, under the guise of ‘preventing terrorism’. My friend Aziz Choudry, a Kiwi expat, has written this fantastic piece on the criminalisation of dissent, and its ignominious history in Aotearoa.
Interesting how the financial press thinks about the new IMF report: World Economic Outlook. The Financial Times looks at how the IMF may have got its facts wrong, and that its bullish optimism about the world economy is unwarranted.
I’ve been very distressed to hear about how the war on terror has been extended to cover pretty much any dissent at all. The latest instance is in Aotearoa/New Zealand. You can find out the latest by visiting Indymedia Aotearoa. Below is an urgent appeal for support.
I’d forgotten. Today’s World Food Day. Appropriate that it should happen in World Debt Week, since the World Bank’s designs on agriculture will be coming out later this week. But there are deep differences between the Bank’s manifesto, and the vision put forward by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization which, this year, has chosen ‘the Right to Food’ as its theme. This is the same right to food that the rest of the world was prepared to embrace, but didn’t because the US opposed it, at the World Food Summit in 2002. The US-driven World Bank has little time for rights or, rather, the rights that excite them most are those concerning property, rather than humans. The right to food is to be found in the increasingly forgotten Universal Declaration of Human Rights – article 25 if you’re looking. You can read more on the right to food at FIAN, the German NGO that has done more than anyone else to get, and keep, this right on the international agenda.
Al Krebs, the one-man powerhouse behind the Agribusiness Examiner and tireless campaigner against the corporate concentration of power in agriculture, died last week. There’s a fine obituary at Counterpunch, where Al himself wrote a great deal, on how Bill and Melinda Gates Do Agriculture, on Corporate Welfare and Mad Cow Disease. Rather than repost the CounterPunch piece, I’ll let you jump to it – the books for sale at CounterPunch are well worth looking at.
An fine story this morning from the New York Times, which observes that the World Bank (about which more on this site soon) has according to its own internal review process ‘neglected’ African agriculture.
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