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

Save the bees from corporate greed

Two crucial scientific studies have confirmed that pesticides and insecticides at even low, undetectable levels are linked to the massive collapse of honey bee colonies.

Chemical firm Bayer, which produces the nicotine-based imidacloprid, has always dismissed any connection between the use of its insecticide and the disappearance of bee colonies in the United States and Europe.

But from the University of Maryland, we learn that sub-lethal doses of imidacloprid weaken bees, so that they lose their immunity to a common parasite Nosema.

Though the doses were not high enough to affect longevity or the ability to forage, the increase in the Nosema parasite infestation shows that even undetectable levels of the pesticide affect the immune system of bees.

The researchers conclude that interactions between pesticides and pathogens like Nosema, "could be a major contributor to increased mortality of honey bee colonies, including colony collapse disorder, and other pollinator declines worldwide."

Scientists at the University of Purdue, Indiana, analysed bees found dead in and around hives from several apiaries over two years and discovered the presence of neonicotinoid insecticides in all of them. These products are used to coat corn and soybean seeds before planting.

They were present on nearby dandelion flowers up to two years after treated seed was planted and in corn pollen gathered by bees.

"We know that these insecticides are highly toxic to bees; we found them in each sample of dead and dying bees," said Christian Krupke, associate professor of entomology and a co-author of the findings.

Other bees at the affected hives exhibited tremors, uncoordinated movement and convulsions, all signs of insecticide poisoning.

All corn seed and about half of all soybean seed planted in the US is coated with the sticky insecticide, and to keep the seed flowing freely in the planters, it is mixed with talc.

"Given the rates of corn planting and talc usage, we are blowing large amounts of contaminated talc into the environment," Krupke said. "This material is so concentrated that even small amounts landing on flowering plants around a field can kill foragers or be transported to the hive in contaminated pollen."

Bees that do not die directly as a result of the insecticide suffer other effects, such as loss of homing ability or lowered resistance to disease or mites. In other words, bee colony collapse is due to multiple problems, but it is likely that the loss of resistance to viruses, mites and parasites is itself connected to the use of these deadly chemicals.

(And while we are on the subject - what is the cumulative effect on human beings eating food grown in this way? It can't possibly have no effect. Perhaps we should be told.)

Late last year, Monsanto (inventor of the neonicotinoids and many other deadly agro-industrial weapons) bought up one of the key companies looking at genetic modification of honey bees to survive colony collapse.

Beeologics, based in Florida and Israel, has developed a product called Remembee, an anti-viral agent that works by interfering with the bees' DNA, its genetic make-up.

Kelly Powers, a Monsanto PR person, said at the time, without a trace of irony: "I don't need to tell you how important bees are to farmers who rely on pollination, and Remembee has great promise, pending approvals."

First they create the chemicals that harm the bees - then they manipulate their genes to resist some effects of the poison. And at every point - big fat profits!

If anything requires genetic modification, it’s corporations like Monsanto and Bayer, for the sake of the eco-system as a whole. The consequences of a world without pollinating bees are too shocking to contemplate.

Penny Cole
Environment editor