For a world without the WTO and 'free trade agreements'

From the supermarkets that dominate food sales, through distribution systems, to agriculture and its increasing dependence on chemicals and back down the chain to gene research, the story is one of the concentration of power in fewer and fewer corporations.

By 2011, as this report shows, the world’s top 10 seed companies controlled three quarters (75%) of the market for their products. The same six global corporations

control 75% of all private sector plant breeding research; 60% of the commercial seed market and 76% of global agrochemical sales. Some also have links to animal pharmaceuticals.

For the authors, the ETC Group, “this creates a vulnerability in the world food system” not seen since the founding of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1945.

No one is anyone any longer much surprised by the destructive impacts of the competitive pursuit of profits on people’s lives and on the ecological systems that we depend upon. As the ETC point out:

“The agro-industrial farming system has been spectacularly successful at encouraging uniformity, destroying diversity, polluting soil and water, corroding human health and impoverishing farm labour”

In its 2013  report, Cost of Inaction, the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that, for smallholder farmers in 37 sub-Saharan African countries, the costs of pesticide poisonings (lost work days, outpatient medical treatment, and inpatient hospitalisation) amounted to $4.4 billion in 2005 (not including the cost of lost lives and livelihoods, environmental health effects and effects of other chemicals).

UNEP projects the total cost of pesticide-related illness and injury in sub-Saharan Africa between 2005 and 2020 could reach a staggering $90 billion.

You might even laugh out loud in a kind of helpless desperation at the latest antics of the big pesticide producers Bayer and Monsanto whose products are designed to kill insects. Bayer produces neonicotinoid-based chemicals which scientific studies show to be implicated in the massive die-off of the bees which all of humanity depends on to pollinate the crops we eat.

In an attempt to fend off any extension - and even reverse - the new European Union ban on neonicotinoids, Bayer has embarked on a rebranding exercise, presenting itself as a promoter of bee-health. Monsanto, the world’s number one seed producer, and manufacturer of killer chemical Roundup, goes a step further. It has bought Beeologics, an R&D company providing targeted control of pests and diseases. Its mission is “to become the guardian of bee health worldwide.” LOL.

But it’s not all bad news. Corporate control of the food chain is very far from being a completed process. There’s still time to end it.

The vast majority of farmers - peasant farmers who continue to feed 70% of the world’s population –  are not tied to the corporate food chain. And the majority of the world’s meat and milk is still produced by small-scale farmers in mixed crop-and-livestock systems, rather than the new profit–led systems of industrialised intensive production.

La Via Campesina, representing the interests of small, peasant farmers worldwide, puts forward its proposals to coincide with the latest meeting of the World Trade Organisation now underway in Bali. 

“We are living a global emergency situation, greater than any that we have lived, and intellectual property rights for profit should not have precedence over nature and humanity. Trade is needed but a different kind of trade, one that is not based on the exploitation of people and nature and whose rules benefit the communities and not the corporations.

“The kind of trade we need is complementary and equitable trade not corporate free trade. To really address the climate crisis, a world without the WTO and the FTAs [free trade agreements], one that is not dominated by transnational corporations and the global free trade regimes, is necessary!

“We have to change the system, and we have to do this now.”

What more can you say?

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

World Bank policies help drive global hunger

The World Bank has issued a global hunger warning after food prices soared by 10% in a single month from June to July. But this is disingenuous to say the least since the agency’s own policies backing corporate greed, are major contributors to hunger.

Maize and soybeans reached all time peaks due to an unprecedented summer of droughts and high temperatures in the United States and Eastern Europe, according to the World Bank’s latest food price watch report.

From June to July, maize and wheat rose by 25% and soybeans by 17%. The lives of millions of people are threatened, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. For example maize prices rose 113% in Mozambique in July and sorghum by 220% in South Sudan.

Drought in the US damaged crops of maize and soybeans, for which it is the world’s largest exporter. The dry summer in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan reduced the productivity of wheat.

“We cannot allow these historic price hikes to turn into a lifetime of perils as families take their children out of school and eat less nutritious food to compensate for the high prices,” said World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim. “Countries must strengthen their targeted programmes to ease the pressure on the most vulnerable population, and implement the right policies.”

But this is hypocritical since the Bank’s own policies, supporting the requirements of the corporations and the rest of the global élite, are major contributors to hunger.

For example, the global land grab is entirely endorsed by the agency’s free market approach. Instead of bringing in rules to end this new brutal colonialism, the Bank and the UN developed a code of practice to facilitate it.

Governments are supported to treat traditional lands as state land with the right to sell it off to the highest bidder. Their own people are driven off to work for low wages from the new masters or to join the populations in the slums and barrios of the cities.

The mono-crops grown for export, using large quantities of water and fertilizer have negative effects on local markets. Water is being pumped to support the new large-scale agri-businesses, leaving family allotments, often planted by women, without adequate supply. And when the land is bled dry – literally – the land grabbers will move on, using investment funds from corporations like Goldman Sachs, to buy cheap somewhere else.

So far over 83 million hectares of land have been part of the global rush for land - 56.2 million hectares in Africa, 5% of the continent’s total agricultural land. Worldwide, 20 million hectares of land are growing crops to feed people who live a thousand miles away or more. And of course these intensive farming methods, clearing scrub land and pumping it full of fertiliser only serve to add to greenhouse gas emissions.

The World Bank’s much-vaunted focus on developing drought-resistant grains is all about profit – these will be grown on grabbed land and then exported to feed the beef that ends up in globo-burgers, or to burn up as bio-diesel.

La Via Campesina, the global movement of peasant farmers, sums it up by saying that the so-called agrarian reform supported by institutions like the World Bank, is all about sustaining capitalism:

“Because of the global crises, taking control of the earth’s remaining resources – land, water, forests, biodiversity – has become crucial to the survival of capitalism and the corporations. At the recently concluded Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this resource grab has been institutionalised under the label of ‘green economy’.”

Ending hunger means returning the land to the people to work in ways that mitigate the impacts of climate change that are now unavoidable. That would certainly involve abolishing capitalist agencies like the World Bank in favour of  democratic local, regional, national and international assemblies. Scientists could then help the majority develop ways to maintain themselves by sustaining the eco-systems they are a part of.

Penny Cole

Environment editor