Is Vegan Enough? Food that oppresses people

Since 8 May is both World Fair Trade Day and International Boycott Proctor & Gamble Day, I thought I would take a quick look at an issue that combines both those topics.

Thinking about the people who produce the food we consume, can change the way we look at it. It is not just a one more consumer product, it can be someone’s life.

Taking a look at one product, Coffee, which is vegan, but is it good for people, Third World (* ) communities or the environment. And if it is bad for the environment, it isn’t good for animals.

How does Fair Trade coffee relate to P&G, one of the largest producers of consumer products, cleaning products, personal care products, and pseudo-chip-in-a-can products….?

Four companies – Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Kraft and Sara Lee purchase over 40% of the world’s coffee beans, which gives them a large control of the industry. Dictating terms and conditions. These companies are also involved in animal experimentation and cruelty to animals via their dairy and meat products. These four big multinationals get to set the prices paid for the raw coffee beans to over 20 million sellers, forcing the prices down, and paying as little as possible.

And when farmers and communities are not getting a living wage from their crops, this leads to an increasing vicious cycle of local poverty, deforestation to grow more crops, habitat and biodiversity destruction and national debt.

Third World poverty – forced by the World Bank to grow crops for exports to pay back exorbitant debts, often racked up by despots but paid back by peasants. Coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa, when many poor countries are producing these “staples” the price for these commodities drops. These countries are making less and less, but growing these crops is often a condition of their loans. For whose benefit is this? These are not crops the local people can live on. Yes they might be vegan, but the human suffering is huge. The environmental devastation via massive land clearing and monoculture crops is also huge.

The leading coffee producers and exporters in order

Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia ,Indonesia, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Honduras, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Ecuador, Thailand, Tanzania, Dominican Republic, Kenya, Venezuela, Cameroon, Philippines, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Burundi, Madagascar, Haiti, Rwanda, Guinea, Cuba, Togo, Bolivia, Zambia, Angola, Panama, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Malawi

With some exceptions, such as Brazil and India, these countries are among the poorest in the world. The local populations often live in intense poverty.

Absent from the list are first world countries.

Zimbabwe is the number one poorest country in the world, yet it is one of the worlds largest exporters of coffee. Also in the top 10 poorest countries of the world and the top coffee producers/exports are Democratic Republic of the Congo (2nd), Burundi (3rd), Central African Republic (7th).

Kinder Gentler Nation

51 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty. 15 percent live in extreme poverty, meaning they don’t have enough money to put food on their tables on a daily basis.

The World Bank, does not represent the world, is it dominated by the UK and USA, represents the interests of the richest countries in the world. Third world nations become the farm and quarry of the First world.

This informative article from the conservative think-tank the Cato Institute, point out how the world bank is crushing their world countries – The World Bank Vs. the World Poorby James Bovard

The World Bank is helping Third World governments cripple their economies, maul their environments, and oppress their people. … The bank’s handouts to governments for agricultural projects often work out badly. One of the bank’s West African projects to promote coffee and cacao production failed partly because of “soil unsuitability.” The bank encouraged farmers to grow crops that were unsuited for their soil. With friends like the World Bank, African farmers don’t need enemies.

The pursuit of profits in coffee cultivation is causing catastrophes for local farmers and communities, deforestation, and land degradation. None of which are good for animals.

Then comes the addition of milk and sugar….

* or the more common term today being “developing” countries, but I question whether countries like Zimbabwe are developing or if they are going backwards. the other term favoured is ‘Global South’, meaning the poorest countries of the world – ha! take that Australia and New Zealand

Agri-colonisation is an issue covered here: Sugar Shortage – Marion Nestle and G20 countries practice ‘agri-colonialism’ in developing countries from a different perspective.

Some great articles that touch on these issues:

Futile Democracy: The guinea-pig Nation

According to Waldon Bello, a senior analyst at “Focus on the Global South”, a program of Chulalongkorn University’s Social Research Institute:

“At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.

Wat-er Mess (or, Why Society is Once Again Seriously Screwed)The amount of water required to make a single cup of coffee, 140 litres is required.

WORLD FAIR TRADE DAY on 8th May 2010 we will be at Union Square’s Greenmarket! Come & meet us there! Volunteers needed! (Event Website)

Feedback welcome.

Sugar Shortage – Marion Nestle

Sugar Shortage – Marion Nestle

Marion Nestle, food activist, of FOOD POLITICS, talks here on The Colbert Report, about the fake ‘sugar shortage’ in order for manufacturers to import more sugar.

Often from farmers in much poorer countries than the United States, who grow sugar instead of crops to feed their own people.

An issue covered here: G20 countries practice ‘agri-colonialism’ in developing countries in more detail.

Feedback welcome.

G20 countries practice ‘agricolonialism’ in developing countries (via Workers World)

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. … Dwight D. Eisenhower

World’s Rich in Massive Land Grab

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G20 countries practice ‘agricolonialism’ in developing countries

A new attack
By Betsey Piette
Published Aug 3, 2009 8:24 PM

Collectively the countries which participate in the Group of Twenty comprise 85 percent of the global gross national product, 80 percent of world trade and two-thirds of the world’s population. What many G-20 countries lack, however, is sufficient arable land to meet the needs of growing urban populations.

In recent years, many G-20 nations have engaged in agricolonialism, taking over arable land in developing countries.

One billion people worldwide face starvation, according to United Nations reports. The global recession is expected to drive 103 million more into hunger.

However, the land grabs, concentrated in Africa, Asia and Latin America where hundreds of millions lack sufficient food, are intended to grow food and biofuel crops for export, not for use by at-risk populations.

While the U.S., Britain and European Union nations have a long history of colonial control over land in developing countries, other G-20 countries, including China, south Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia, have recently bought up global farmland.

After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, even Russia and other former Soviet states became targets of land grabs.

Global “AgInvesting”

Last year, as the global economic crisis deepened, food “riots” destabilized many countries. In December, spiking grain prices that had led to food shortages fell by 50 percent. Today, grain prices remain above their 20-year average, and global food stocks continue at 40-year lows.

Over the next 40 years the world’s population is projected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion, doubling demand, while arable land and water become scarcer. As a result, the cost of farmland keeps rising.

Food now rivals oil as a basis of power and economic security. Arable land has become the latest target for international investors, with more than 90 funds invested directly in farmland.

With the current credit crunch, large companies are investing in farmland as a means of control over future food supplies when food security could become a major concern.

In June a Global AgInvesting 2009 Conference, held in New York, aimed at investors eager for opportunities to invest in agricultural lands, commodities and infrastructure. It brought together top players from the global agricultural and investing industries, including Soyatech, Altima Partners, Bayer CropScience, Brazil AgroLogic, DuPont, Rabobank and the World Bank. The participating firms own and/or manage over 11 million acres of productive farmland worldwide.

The International Food Policy Research Institute reports that 37 million to 49 million acres of land in poor countries, valued at $20 to $30 billion, were sold or under negotiation for sale to foreign buyers since 2006.

Foreign investments in agriculture are not new, but today they are more strategic than commercial, with many transactions intended to insulate the foreign investor’s home country from future global food and energy crises.

Another significant difference is the scale of these purchases. A “big land deal” used to be 240,000 acres. Now the largest ones are many times that size.

The investment firm Blackrock has set up a $200 million hedge fund to invest in land. Dow Chemical has invested its pension funds in farmland futures. Morgan Stanley bought nearly 100,000 acres of Brazilian farmland.

Multibillionaire George Soros is getting into the global land-buying business. Jim Rogers Jr., Soros’ partner at the Quantum Fund, is involved with two farmland investment funds–Agrifirm and Agcaptia Farmland Investment Partnership. “I’m convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time,” Rogers told ContrarianProfits. (July 27)

Land in Africa targeted

Africa imports 25 percent of its food, and the continent has become a prime target of land grabbers. Although sub-Saharan Africa is rich in minerals and natural resources, more than 450 million people live there on less than $2 a day. More than one-third of the population suffers from malnutrition.

A recent Food and Agricultural Organization study of five African countries found that 6.2 million acres of farmland valued at $920 million were bought or leased by foreign investors since 2004.

Most of the nearly 1 million acres taken over in Ghana were for biofuel production. Philippe Heilberg, chairman of New York-based Jarch Capital, controls nearly 2 million acres of land in south Sudan.

Saudi Arabian investors spent $100 million to raise grain on land leased to them by the Ethiopian government; the entire crop is for export back to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, millions of Ethiopians face hunger and malnutrition and require emergency food assistance.

A proposed 99-year land lease deal with the south Korean company Daewoo would have included nearly half of Madagascar’s arable land, with almost no benefits to the host country. Public protest over this deal contributed to the overthrow of President Marc Ravalomanana earlier this year.

Genetically modified sugar cane in Latin America

Since 1994, U.S. farm policies through the so-called “North American Free Trade Agreement” have devastated farmers who produced corn throughout Mexico. NAFTA opened Mexican markets to corn imports from the U.S. and to the introduction of genetically modified seeds.

Now other countries are getting into the act. A French investment firm is buying up cattle ranches in Argentina and Uruguay to convert the acreage to the production of barley, corn and soy.

Within a 10-year span, nearly the entire Argentine pampas and large areas of forest and farmland in Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay have been converted to produce soy as a solo crop. Agribusiness giants Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge made billions selling chemical fertilizers, while Monsanto and Syngenta raked in record profits from modified seeds and chemical pesticides.

Corporations that led the boom in soy production in Latin America are now aggressively moving into genetically modified sugar cane production. GM and Monsanto have been working on “Roundup Ready” sugar cane and sugar beets. Production of genetically modified sugar cane crops would devastate cane growers in Colombia, where panela, a sugar cane byproduct, is a source of nutrition.

Protests erupt in Southeast Asia

Many of the anti-agricolonialism protests have taken place in Asia. The 15-million-member Asian Peasant Coalition recently began a five-month Asia-wide Peasants’ Caravan for Land and Livelihood. The group is acting against global land grabbing in 10 Asian countries, including Sri Lanka, Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. In India and Thailand, the theme is “Stop Global Land Grabbing! Struggle for Genuine Agrarian Reform and Peoples’ Food Sovereignty.”

An estimated 365 million people in Asia make their living off the land. Globalization has increasingly integrated Asian countries into the global market and intensified landlessness among Asian peasants. In Pakistan and the Philippines, almost 75 percent of peasants are now landless.

In the Philippines, Fil-Japan is using 1.49 million acres of land for biofuel production. South Korea has leased 232,000 acres of farmland for 25 years to grow 10,000 tons of corn annually. Protests halted plans to allow China to use 3 million acres of farmland.

Wagar Ahmad Khan, the Pakistani federal minister for investment, assures legal cover and tax breaks for investors and says his government “has decided to raise a special security force, which will help create an investment-friendly atmosphere.” (IslamOnline.net, April 21)

Impact on Indigenous populations

Since the 1970s, more than half of the farmland expansion has come at the expense of natural forests, including large tracts of land in Brazil’s Amazon region. While biofuels are promoted as a means to reduce climate change, expanding cropland for biofuel production has devastated rainforests and savannas.

Conversion of natural ecosystems for production of corn and sugar cane for ethanol, and soy and palm oil for biodiesel, causes substantial greenhouse gas emissions since these crops absorb far less carbon dioxide than the forests and wetlands they replace.

Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, Deere & Co. and the Renewable Fuels Association have formed the Alliance for Abundant Food and Energy, which spends billions of dollars to lobby U.S. lawmakers to support subsidies for biofuel production and to promote genetically modified crops.

The social consequences of these land grabs are significant. Indigenous groups who have lived off the land for generations are being driven off their lands. Even when local peasant farmers are able to retain the land, larger land tracts draw off most of the water supply.

G-8 code of conduct

Faced with growing pressure from developing countries, the recent G-8 Summit issued a code of conduct in international agricultural investments that reflects the debate over foreign land purchases in poor countries. It is not clear, however, how the code might work.

“The G-8 statement is pretty weak,” said Sarah Gillam of ActionAid, an anti-poverty group which is calling for an independent U.N. commission to establish an enforceable code of conduct for foreign land purchases. It would include adequate compensation for affected communities and an assessment of the impact on local food security and rural livelihoods.

Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, an international nonprofit organization that supports struggles for community-controlled, biodiversity-based food systems, compared the danger of land investments to the subprime mortgage crisis. “It’s not just that they want to produce food. It’s that they want to produce it in a way that makes profit. … Nothing is being done to address speculation or the amount of profits taken by the corporations in control of the food system.

“Land is fundamental to life particularly in many countries of the South,” stated Kuyek. “Governments are playing with fire, and better watch out what they are doing.” (See www.farmlandgrab.org.)

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A new attack

Chickens Revenge (Moby: Disco Lies)

The following Moby essay was taken from the Vegetarian Network Victoria (http://www.vnv.org.au) website. And is in no way intended to usurp Moby’s copyright. Several sites that I looked for this essay were dead links.It is an important essay, that I think deserves to be read widely by as many people as possible.

“Fundamentalism (of any kind) troubles me. The world is too big and too intricate to conform to our ideas of what it should be like. In my experience I’ve found that most fundamentalists aren’t so much attached to their professed ideologies as they are to the way in which these ideologies try to make sense of a confusing world. But the world is confusing, and just because we invent myths and theories to explain away the chaos we’re still going to live in a world that’s older and more complicated than we’ll ever understand. So many religious and political and scientific and social systems fail in that they try to impose a rigid structure onto what is an inherently ambiguous world. I’m not suggesting that we stop trying to understand things. Trying to understand the world can be fun and, at times, helpful. But if we base our belief systems on the humble assumption that the complexities of the world are ontologically beyond our belief systems it will make more sense and end up causing less suffering.”

One way to solve the worlds, hunger, worker, environmental, cruelty, resources situations is to go VEGAN

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Biopiracy or Bioprivateering?

In honour of International Earth Day, a look at the Environment

Biopiracy or Bioprivateering?
Richard Stallman

For decades, new drugs have been found in exotic animals and plants. Genes from rare species and subspecies are also useful in producing new breeds, whether by genetic engineering or ordinary cross-breeding. The drugs, and nowadays the new breeds as well, are typically patented. This causes trouble for developing countries that could use them.

Patent monopolies on plant and animal varieties, on genes, and on new medicines, threaten to harm developing countries in three ways. First, by raising prices so far that most citizens have no access to these new developments; second, by blocking local production when the patent owner so chooses; third, for agricultural varieties, by forbidding farmers to continue breeding them as has been done for thousands of years.

Just as the United States, a developing country in the 1800s, refused to recognize patents from advanced Britain, today’s developing countries need to protect their citizens’ interest by shielding them from such patents. To prevent the problems of monopolies, don’t establish monopolies. What could be simpler?

But developing countries need support from world opinion in order to do this. It means going against a view that companies strongly advocate: that biotech company investors are entitled to monopolies, regardless of how they affect anyone else. It means going against treaties that these companies have prevailed on the US to force through threats of economic warfare on most of the world.

To challenge an idea which is backed by so much money is not easy. So some have proposed the concept of “biopiracy” as an alternative approach. Instead of opposing the existence of biological monopolies, this approach aims to give the rest of the world a share in the profits from them. The claim is that biotechnology companies are committing “biopiracy” when they base their work on natural varieties, or human genes, found in developing countries or among indigenous peoples–and therefore they ought to be required to pay “royalties” for this.

“Biopiracy” is appealing at first glance, because it takes advantage of the current trend towards more and bigger monopoly powers. It goes with the flow, not against. But it will not solve the problem, because the problem stems from the trend that this concept legitimizes and fails to criticize.

Useful varieties and genes are not found everywhere or with even distribution. Some developing countries and indigenous peoples will be lucky, and receive substantial funds from such a system, at least for the twenty years that a patent lasts; a few may become so rich as to cause cultural dislocation, with a second episode to follow when the riches run out. Meanwhile, most of these countries and peoples will get little or nothing from this system. “Biopiracy” royalties, like the patent system itself, will amount to a kind of lottery.

The “biopiracy” concept presupposes that natural plant and animal varieties, and human genes, have an owner as a matter of natural right. Once that assumption is granted, it is hard to question the idea that an artificial variety, gene or drug is property of the biotechnology company by natural right, and thus hard to deny the investors’ demand for total and world-wide power over the use of it.

The idea of “biopiracy” offers the multinationals, and the governments that work for them, an easy way to cement forever their regime of monopolies. With a show of magnanimity, they can concede a small part of their income to a few lucky indigenous peoples; from then on, when anyone questions whether biological patents are a good idea, they can cite these indigenous peoples along with the fabled “starving genius inventor” to paint such questioning as plundering the downtrodden. (This behavior pattern is widespread among business today. For instance, the “music industry” lobbies for increased copyright powers in the name of musicians, who they like to call the “creators”, while paying musicians only 4% of the companies’ total income.)

What people outside the developed world really need, for their agriculture and medicine, is to be exempt from all such monopolies. They need to be free to manufacture medicine without paying royalties to multinationals. They need to be free to grow and breed all sorts of plants and animals for agriculture; and if they decide to use genetic engineering, they should be free to commission the genetic modifications that suit their needs. A lottery ticket for a share of royalties from a few varieties and genes is no compensation for losing these freedoms.

It is indeed wrong for biotech companies to convert the world’s natural genetic resources into private monopolies–but the wrong is not a matter of taking someone else’s rightful property, it is a matter of privatizing what ought to be public. These companies are not biopirates. They are bioprivateers.

Copyright (C) 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
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