World Food Shortage,
A British Policy Success
by Marcia Merry Baker
April 10—At this time of Spring planting in the Northern Hemisphere (and near-harvest in the Southern), a snapshot picture of world agriculture shows a fast-worsening loss of farm capacity, and increase in food scarcity. This is the result not of failed policies or "adverse nature," but is, in fact, a British policy success.
There are over 1.02 billion people going hungry. Farm capacity and production are declining. The 2010 prospective crop plantings and anticipated harvests are way below requirements, yet projects are underway that are known in advance to make the situation worse, e.g. 30% of the U.S. corn crop is going to biofuels; international neo-plantations, for export only, are spreading. Meantime, desperately needed water-supply projects and related infrastructure are blocked.
Why? Because scarcity and national breakdown are the goals behind the last 50 years of globalization of agriculture. Today's crises are not failures from wrongheadedness. They mark the successful imposition of deliberate British neo-imperial policies against nation-states, policies which have wiped out the most basic condition for national survival: food self-sufficiency. The mechanisms in this subversion are familiar: WTO (World Trade Organization) "free trade" and "global sourcing" of food; mega-commodity cartels; hoaxes about global warming, the environment, and consequent demand for biofuels; and the extension of so-called intellectual property rights to private patent-control over food seeds and improvement-technologies themselves.
A Depopulation Agenda
Behind all this stand the London-centered financial interests, backing destruction of national economies, and depopulation. Break with these policies, destroy their control, and all can be fed. Continue these policies, and biological holocaust is ensured. There is no leeway at this point for nicey appeals to "defeat hunger by 2050," or for scheming to produce food on the sidelines of the WTO world. The WTO itself, the thinking behind it, and all the practices associated with it, must end.
This is the import of Lyndon LaRouche drive for the four world powers—China, India, Russia, and the United States—to break with the failed world monetarist system, and implement a new credit system that will launch agro-industrial and infrastructure projects to rebuild national economies.
In direct opposition to this, a slew of policy statements has issued forth from London circles over the last 20 months, during the tumult of the financial blowout and food crisis. They are all demanding a continuation of the policies that created the world crisis. Typical is a review by ten British authors, including from the U.K. Office of Science, in Science magazine, "Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People" (Feb. 12, 2010). They conclude: "Any optimism [for "sustainably feeding 9 billion people"] must be tempered by the enormous challenges of making food production sustainable while controlling greenhouse gas emission and conserving dwindling water supplies, as well as meeting the Millennium Development Goal of ending hunger..." blah, blah.
In fact, such "tempering" ensures that the world population cannot be fed, because it rules out the very infrastructural and technological advances that human survival depends upon. The focus on feeding "9 billion people by 2050" has become the sick theme phrase for demanding still more globalization, and opposing moves to change the system now.
The following is a snapshot of the scope of the current crisis, and documentation of the British pedigree behind what constitutes a world famine policy.
2010 Food Shortages Worsen
A few crop updates, and associated patterns of agriculture degradation, give a picture of the food supply and farm capacity crisis generally.
The total world production of grains this current crop year of 2009-10, is projected to be 2.218 billion metric tons, which is below the 2007-08 output of 2.223 billion, and well below last year's 2.235 billion (2008-09). (Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimates, March 2010.)
This year's output of rice, the staple for billions, is projected to be 440 million metric tons, down 7.2 mmt from last year.
The rough estimate is that for today's 6.8 billion population, some 4 billion tons of annual grain output is the level required for adequate diets, in the form of direct cereals consumption, cultural preferences for animal protein, and for reserves.
Even worse than the underproduction of grains itself, more and more of the world's grain and oilseed crops are going into biofuels. In the United States, which alone accounts for 40% of world corn (maize) production, 34% of the entire 2009 corn crop went for fuel ethanol! This year is running at the same pace.
Less than 1% of the U.S. corn harvest went for fuel ethanol in the early 1980s. At that time, the shift to biofuels was not yet a "policy," but a subsidy to the processors—Cargill and ADM—for what was termed innovation in the "industrial, non-food uses" of corn, and a foot-in-the-door for the insane policy shift that was to come under the G.W. Bush Administration, when Federal mandates for fuel from food-biomass were decreed. Today, there are 12 billion gallons of blended biofuels (mostly corn ethanol) consumed yearly in the U.S., and President Obama's Biofuels Interagency Working Group is intent on upping this to 15 billion by 2015, and 36 billion gal/yr by 2022 (including visions of 16 billion of that to come from cellulosic ethanol), as mandated by the crazed 2007 renewable fuels law.
That's food out of people's mouths. By simple math, over 300 million people could have been fed for a year by the 2009 flow of 107 million tons of U.S. corn that went to ethanol. American corn farmers—who have gone along with the policy, in hopes of surviving a few more years—are quick to point out caveats. The corn in question is "field corn," i.e., livestock-grade, and would have to be intensively processed for meal for humans. And the corn ethanol by-product, dried distillers grains (DDG), is fed to cattle, and as of 2008, has even become a new U.S. export commodity. But these points only underscore the deeper principle involved.
The imposition of the system of biofuels, is undermining the capacity of the U.S. farmbelt, and agriculture everywhere. In the traditional U.S. cornbelt now, instead of high-tech farmers, populous towns, industry, and regional food production (milk, orchards, diversified crops, meat animals), the pattern is monoculture, imported food, ghost towns, and decay throughout Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, and the rest.
Besides grain crops, animal protein output is level or falling on a world scale. In the United States, the numbers of cattle, hogs, and chickens have fallen 3% below last year this time.
Worldwide, milk production for 2009-10 is projected, at best, to remain at the levels of the year before, around 700 million tons, whereas, rapid growth is needed.
Dominating and enforcing these patterns is an interlock of commodity cartels of mega-companies in fertilizers, agro-chemicals, seeds, processing and distribution, integrated in policy with the WTO, World Bank, and IMF, and private, London-centered financial networks.
The dairy cartel is especially emblematic of the pattern of the globalization of what, instead, should be nation- and region-serving farming and food processing, since milk is a perishable product, and tastes for processed dairy foods vary locally (butter, cheese, yogurt, etc). Nevertheless, a very few mega-firms, under the WTO system, now dominate dairy foods internationally: Nestlé (headquartered in Switzerland), Danone (France), Dean Foods (U.S.A.), Lactalis (France), Kraft Foods (U.S.A.), Unilever (U.K. and the Netherlands), Fonterra (New Zealand).
Lactalis operates in 150 countries, with 16,500 workers outside France, at 44 worksites. The British Commonwealth firm Fonterra, headquartered in Auckland, accounts for 30% of the world's dairy exports. Recently it established an electronic auction, globalDairyTrade, for dairy commodities, including anhydrous milk fat.
The world grain trade is dominated by Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Dreyfus, and very few others. In world meats, the mega-processor JBS, based in Brazil, has arisen to top rank..
There is tight control over seeds and high-yield traits. The top ten world seed companies account for over 60% of all world sales, with the top three—Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta—accounting for half of all sales of proprietary (patented) seeds. Monsanto alone accounts for 60% of the corn and soybean seed market in the U.S., through direct sales, and trait-licensing agreements. Monsanto's patented biotech traits are in 90% of U.S. soybeans, and 80% of U.S. corn.
U.S. farmers have seen a 64% rise in seed prices in the past three years, directly to this cartel.
Double Food Production
To reverse the food supply and agriculture collapse, the physical economic emergency measures are straightforward. Within a few years, production levels could be doubled, and then increased steadily for future generations. Consider the actions necessary, under three broad headings.
1. Build Infrastructure. On every continent, there are large-scale infrastructures—especially water, but also transportation, power, and storage facilities—that must proceed, to create the environment for raised and constantly intensifying levels of farming.
Depletion and salination of fresh water is now beyond the danger point in almost every farming region, not due to "natural" doom, but from the lack of infrastructure building and maintenance over the last 60 years. In many cases, detailed plans were already worked out, but shelved during the shift-period of the 1970s, into what became the WTO-era of cheap-labor, below-cost outsourcing.
The kinds of geo-engineering for increasing water supply are indicated by Mexico's PHLINO (Hydraulic Project for the Northwest) proposal, ready to go since the 1960s. It would divert surplus run-off from the southwestern slopes of the Sierra Madre, to the water-short Northwest, for a vast increase in farm output. Farther north, the NAWAPA (North American Water and Power Alliance) has long been proposed to divert southward part of the run-off from the Alaska and MacKenzie River run-off, through Canada, and into the U.S. Great American Desert.
In Africa, there are long-standing projects on the drawing boards, including to divert part of the tributary flow from the Congo Basin, northward to the arid Chad Basin, and dry Sahel.
In Asia, only last month, the proposal was made to develop the Central Brahmaputra River Basin. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina issued the call, especially to India and China, for flood control, agriculture, power, and other programs, to the mutual benefit of the five nations sharing the Basin.
The other source of enhancing the natural resource base by man-made intervention, is that of nuclear-powered desalination. Coastal nuplexes for water and power are in order as fast as possible in multiple sites, from North Africa and Southwestern Asia, to Australia, to the dry or water-short littorals in the Americas—California, the Florida peninsula, Chile, the Caribbean island nations, and many other locations.
But foremost of all infrastructure is nuclear power itself—necessary for transportation, energy inputs into advanced agriculture, and the advancement of science. Take just one obvious example of what plentiful power means: the reopening of the Arctic Frontier for agriculture, for the eight countries of the Far North. Besides special agronomy for new arable lands during the "24-hour daytime" of Summer, inexpensive, ample energy allows for soilless agriculture, whether night or day, in any challenging climate, anywhere.
The resurgence of nuclear energy for power generation in a large section of the world today—China, India, South Korea, Russia—provides an opportunity for these countries to use natural gas for fertilizer production, and not divert it for power generation. Power, water, fertilizer, and seeds, guided by dedicated agronomists, lay the foundation for food production. On this issue, the train is now arriving at the station. We all must get aboard now.
Resuming space exploration is essential. Pursuing the R&D to produce food in space, opens vast possibilities on Earth. Look ahead to hydroponic "family farms" in water-short northern China.
2. Restore Bio-Science for the Public Good. A vast potential exists for increasing yields in crop and livestock production through R&D in bio-science—not simply genetics, but investigation into basics of photosynthesis and photomorphogenesis. In recent decades, there have been bio-engineered genetic improvements in many crops, and gains in conventional hybridization; but the privatized controls, and reductionism in research that have come to dominate the entire field, must be replaced by science for the public good. There must be an anti-trust bust-up of the seed and agro-chemical control by the Big Agro-Pharma cartel, and restoration of research, education, and production facilities in separate and regional groups of nations, serving the public interest of all.
Today's cartels have no right—historically, morally, or economically—to hold power over the means to life. This was arrogated only over the last 40 years of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the WTO. A short recap of the history is useful.
The 1800s saw great advances in the understanding of micro-level plant genetics, bacteria, and related processes, by Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel (1822-84), and others. Even before that, there were key contributions by those of the Leibniz faction, including Carl Linnaeus, and in colonial Pennsylvania, James Logan (1674-1751) and others.
A marker of advance in the 20th Century, was the work by Henry Wallace in Iowa, to master producing and selling mass-scale hybridized seeds and poultry; in 1926, he established his commercial operation, Hi-Bred Corn Co., in Des Moines. By 1940, fully 90% of all corn seed in the U.S. was hybridized. Wallace backed the principle of R&D, as a three-term Agriculture Secretary (following on his father's term in the same office), putting out a landmark edition of the USDA Yearbook in 1936, featuring chemist Dmitri Mendelyev, and dedicated to, "the creative development of new forms of life through plant and animal breeding." In the U.S., for example, corn yields per acre rose from an average 29 bushels per acre in 1900, to 165 today.
Wallace, while Vice President under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also promoted agriculture development as foreign policy. He initiated what became the International Center for Wheat and Corn Research (CIMMYT) research in Mexico City, where the Green Revolution of new "miracle" corn and wheat seeds originated. By means of collaboration between the governments of Mexico and the new nation of India—always food short under British rule—India became grain self-sufficient as of 1974.
Thus, the advances in science, agriculture, and the public good, are directly associated with nation-states. All that changed with the 1970s shift to post-industrialism and globalization.
A series of U.S. law changes, court decisions, and non-enforcement of anti-trust law by the Justice Department overturned the standing principle in the United States, against using industrial patent law for food seeds and methods. This change allowed the wrongful takeover of genetically altered food seeds, bio-engineering methods, and the direction of research, by a financial network operating through agro-chemical and pharmaceutical multinational companies. They claimed patent rights, enforcement, and sweeping control. In brief:
- In 1970, the Plant Variety Protection Act (PCPA) was enacted in the U.S., which specifically counteracted the 1930 Plant Patent Act (PPA), which, though it gave some protection to the breeders of new flower and ornamental types of plants, specifically prohibited the patenting of any food crop plants, in recognition that these patents could threaten the food supply. The 1970 PVPA, for the first time, gave protection for 25 years to developers of specific varieties of crop seeds.
- In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision (Diamond v. Chakrabarty), that living organisms could be patented. The decision allowed the patenting of genetically engineered microbes, which opened the door to the patenting of any life form.
- In 1985, the U.S. Patent Office ruled that plants could be protected under the powerful industrial patent.
- In 1994, the PVPA of 1970 was amended in accordance with the GATT regulations, to make it illegal for U.S. farmers to resell or exchange seed of patent-protected crop, cotton, or any future varieties. The GATT agreement was further extended to force developing nations to to do likewise, and to pay stiff licence fees for the use of seeds patented by corporations in fellow GATT member-nations. This was further extended under the WTO.
All along, the consolidation of companies concentrated control over staple crop seeds and bio-technology in the hands of a very few cartel firms. True, many of the seed varieties perform excellently (to resist insects, survive drought, and other desirable traits), when grown for where they were custom-bred. But that is not the point.
The patent-holders have relentlessly sued and ruined farmers for claims of infringement of license-to-use the seeds, including just the presence of seed genetic material in farm fields, or charges of holding over seeds from one year to the next. In North America, Monsanto has a record of hundreds of lawsuits. Cargill, Monsanto, and others have laid siege to national governments, in an attempt to coerce them to force their farmers into compliance. In India now, for example, a Monsanto-related firm is demanding licensing rights to their bio-tech okra, no matter what the opposition by the government or population.
As a cynical counterpoint to this, the same financial circles backing cartel control over food, have also sponsored the "organic," chemical-free, and GMO-free foods movements, just to sow superstition and mis-blame among a confused public.
All this must be rolled back.
3. Restore Nations; Kill the WTO. Finally, the entire apparatus of globalism, beginning with the World Trade Organization, should be obliterated. This includes the range of globalist networks, from the IMF and so-called "independent" central banks (outside the control of national governments), such as the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, right on through to the upstart entities, such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), attempting to thwart development in the national interest.
One central tenet of the WTO-era must be singled out for elimination: the decree that no nation has the right to seek food self-sufficiency, but instead, must operate on the definition of "food security" as "access to world markets." This assertion was, from its inception in the GATT Uruguay Round (1984-94), just a sophistical cover for an attack on national sovereignty. The founding rules of the WTO rationalized its claim that member-nations have no right to support their own farmers, because that would be "depriving their citizenry" of the superior right to access world markets for potentially cheaper and better food. Behind this and other sophistries stand the same Anglo-imperial money crowd positioned in the globalist banking and commodities cartels.
The record of destruction is awful. Look at the case of Mexico. As of the 1960s, Mexico was a net food exporter, with water-management projects planned, a program for nuclear power development, and a growing industrial base. All this was undermined, under the 1980s onslaught for free trade, then the 1992 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Alliance), and finally the 1995 WTO. Mexico was ordered to become corn and beans import-dependent, all the while, serving as a cheap-labor outsourcing zone for cartel exports of frozen foods and fresh produce for the U.S. market. Now, hunger stalks Mexico. Millions fled looking for work. And drug-running and death are displacing the farming that remains.
This is the successful result of the British free-trade agriculture program.
There are two principal areas of required, immediate action: Restore national sovereignty over currencies, trade, debt, and the right to build and protect all aspects of national economy, especially farming and food supply. In tandem, exert the right of sovereignty against the anti-nation-state assault underway from supranational agencies peddling the global warming hoax.
The continuing failure of the WTO Doha Round (begun in 2001) for yet more agriculture free trade, is an indication of the repugnance felt for the concept. The WTO meets the definition of a true zombie—dead, but still walking. What remains is to kill it off once and for all.
Likewise, the IPCC. A stream of evidence is pouring forth to document, for those still needing proof, that the entire assertion of global warming was a geopolitical hoax, to further globalization, and depopulation.
Fraudulent Slogan: 'Feed 9 Billion'
In defense of globalization, London-centered financial operations are conducting an elaborate pseudo-support campaign in the name of feeding the hungry, which most commonly goes under a cynical banner of calling for food security for 9 billion people by 2050.
Besides crocodile tears—or even genuine sorrow from some of the unthinking advocates—the core demands are exactly the opposite of the three action categories outlined above. In other words, this hoax campaign opposes restoring nations and building agriculture. Namely:
- Don't build large-scale water, nuclear power, or any kind of modern infrastructure. Instead, assert that resources are fixed; scarce water can only be shared, conserved, and used in "smart" farming. This is rationalized as the only way to have "sustainable" agriculture.
Accept the global warming hoax. Go for only "green and alternative" power, such as windmills and biofuels, to reduce greenhouse gases. Engage in extended debates about the merits and demerits of food-biomass vs. non-food biofuels (jatropha, future cellulosic); but whatever you do, don't go for nuclear power, nor electrified transportation, nor modern infrastructure.
Finally, and most of all, don't expand population. Cut population down, under the ruse of downsizing to match dwindling natural resources.
- Don't seek to have public-interest science for crop genetics or medicine, and certainly not basic research. Leave it to the cartels, to own, control, and decide. There are two ways of remaining compliant: Either oppose the bio-tech science itself, and fall in line with the cartel-backed movements for "pure," organic, chemical-free, free-range livestock, etc. Or call for the extension of GMO high-yield seed stocks to more farmers in poor lands, but all the while leaving the patent-rights and controls intact with the genetics cartel now dominating the food chain. This latter is the favored choice of many who are now calling for a "Second Green Revolution," but, minus the nation-state system of the first!
- Expand free trade to the limit. End all national barriers to the cartels. Allow food from poor countries, especially from public/private projects run by the cartels, duty-free entry anywhere in the "developed" world. Serve the globalist cartels now dominating the food chain to the hilt. The watchword can be, "fair" trade under a new Doha Round. Retain floating currencies. Bring on the financial crash.
The kick-off for these policies, as a "feed the hungry" mobilization, came from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Spring 2008, in the midst of the worldwide food riots crisis, which began with the crack-up of the global monetary system beginning in the Summer of 2007. In April 2008, Ban established a High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security, headed by British foreign office careerist Sir John Holmes (later headed by another British diplomat, Dr. David Nabbaro). In June, FAO Director Jacques Diouf, at the Rome Food Summit, called for doubling world food production—but by 2050.
Ban and Diouf repeatedly struck the theme in follow-on meetings in New York, in July 2008, and Madrid, in January 2009. Diouf used the exact British imperial script in a letter of congratulations to Barack Obama, on winning the U.S. Presidential election in November 2008. Calling for a 2009 food summit, Diouf said, "The summit must find $30 billion per year to develop rural infrastructures and increase agricultural productivity in the developing world, particularly in low-income food-deficit countries, with a view to doubling production to ensure food security for a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050...." When the summit did occur in Rome, in November 2009, Diouf changed the goal to increasing food production by 70% by 2050. But it doesn't matter. The goal is a cover-story slogan for keeping the free trade/famine policy intact.
Made in London
In tandem with the UN, reports and articles have come from Britain directly, over the 2008-09 period, issuing commands on how the present system must be retained. For example, on Nov. 2-3, 2009 in London, this command was featured at a conference held by Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), titled, "Food Security 2009—Achieving Long-term Solutions." The panel topics illustrate the globalization focus: "What More Is Needed To Ensure ... the Proper Functioning of Global Food Markets?;" and "How Can the Benefits of International Investment in Land Be Maximized and the Risks Controlled?" The overseas "land" issue refers to the neo-plantation movement for establishing huge for-export farm operations in desperate, food-short nations in Africa and Asia, to provide food supplies to the Persian Gulf states, Britain, and elsewhere.
To help shop these views into the United States, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was enlisted to issue a report in 2009—funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—formulating London's approved themes for incorporation into legislation. A draft U.S. law was introduced by Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Robert Casey (D-Penn.). Titled, "Global Food Security Act of 2009" (S.B. 384), it now has 14 sponsors. The bill calls for more aid to agriculture around the world, but retains all the Made-in-London demands for free trade, private "intellectual property rights" for cartels, etc. The special humanitarian-sounding twist, is to speak of providing help to the 200 million "smallholder" farmers of the world.
In the front ranks of this fake fight-hunger mobilization of globalizers, is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and associates. In 2006, this foundation, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, had already set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), to promote selected policies in the name of addressing hunger, but in free-trade terms. This was a message Gates gave at the January 2009 Davos Forum. In May 2009, Bill Gates met in New York City with Warren Buffett, George Soros, and others, to discuss significant world depopulation as a goal.
In the Fall last year, Gates issued a book on agriculture success stories (Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Agriculture Development), from his depopulation vantage point of calling for a Second Green Revolution amidst the globalized world. Gates gave the keynote for the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa in October, on the same perspective.
By this time, new appointments in the Obama Administration were made in accordance with the London-serving outlook and networks. An eight-year Gates Foundation personage, Dr. Rajiv Shah, was made Chief Science Advisor to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in June 2009; then Shah was moved by Obama in October, to head the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Obama then announced that Dr. Roger Beachey, directly associated with Monsanto, would be the new Science Advisor to the USDA. Beachey, a plant geneticist, came from being director of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Mo., Monsanto's headquarters, which he founded in 1998 with Monsanto Foundation funding. Monsanto President and CEO Hugh Grant is on the board of trustees.
By the time of the Agriculture Department's 86th Annual Outlook Conference in late February this year, the engagement of the United States into the British scheme of talking "hunger," while serving the cartels, was in full operation. Earlier in February, the lobbying association of the seed cartels held a Washington, D.C.-based webcast event, under the title, "Now Serving 9 Billion: Global Dialogue on Meeting Food Needs for the Next Generation." The sponsor was CropLife America, a lobbying firm which counts among its 60 members, Monsanto Company, BayerCrop Science, Syngenta, Dow/Pioneer, and the other owners of 90% of the world's genetically modified seeds and techniques. One of the official questions addressed at the webcast was, "How will we feed 2.5 billion more people by 2050?" The answers included limiting the "water footprint" of agriculture, etc. The speakers included Dr. Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State and to the AID Administrator.
Fedoroff wrote an article for the Feb. 12, 2010 Science magazine, "Radically Rethinking Agriculture for the 21st Century," along with co-authors including Dr. Beachey, and another Monsanto scientist, D.A. Fischhoff. This was part of a Science feature on "Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People," co-authored by two officials of the British Government Office of Science.
Not surprisingly, at the Plenary Panel of the Feb. 18 USDA Annual Outlook Forum, this British stance was strongly affirmed, in a presentation by Dr. Fedoroff, titled "Rethinking Agriculture in a Warming Climate." To feed more people in the future, she said, under conditions of land and water and climate constraints, there must be a new worldwide "regulatory framework" to give even more power to the private GM seed patent-holders.
When this author challenged Fedoroff, on the point that patenting of food genetics—a hallmark of globalization—was always against the American System, explicitly opposed by the FDR Administration's Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, and should be rolled back now, Fedoroff replied with a defense of the cartels. She said that the issue is their "intellectual property protection." She said sternly that no roll-back of privatized patenting is going to happen. "The train has left the station."
The exchange included the further point, by this author, that in the midst of today's economic breakdown, there is potential for turnaround to rebuild national economies through the right emergency measures. Specifically, look at the surge of commitment to nuclear power in Asia—in Russia, China, India, and others. This "going nuclear" marks a policy shift potential, in which we must unleash real scientific research, promote vast agriculture expansion, and end the wrongful free-trade practices of the last 40 years, including private patenting of food genetics. There must be science for the public sector.
In reply, Fedoroff made reference to the infamous 1970 U.S. Plant Variety Protection Act, saying that, for the first time ever, this law allowed "patenting of life forms," in terms of modification of bacteria and food. She said that "we would lose more than we would gain," by returning to "public sector" rights. Fedoroff said that she was in India the week before, where "they are ambivalent" on the matter of GM seed rights, because of their history of public-sector involvement. (In fact, it was India's public-sector implementation of the Green Revolution that allowed the nation to become food self-sufficient in 1974.) But, Fedoroff insisted, there is no doubt that a nation should not revert to the "public sector," because, she declared, it is "inefficient."
Genocide
The definition of genocide, is action to exterminate a group of people deliberately. That applies equally to those who devise and implement policies with the stroke of a pen, as well as those who carry out bloody slaughter with their own hands.
British imperialists have always preferred the former method, wishing to let others get their hands dirty, while they sit back and reap the advantage. This has emphatically been the case with food policy, which has increasingly been administered by faceless bureaucrats and cartels, not the British in their own name. By this method, mankind has already reached the point where it is producing less than is required for its survival, and that of the next generations. Indeed, we are on the edge of collapse into a New Dark Age—genocide worse than mankind has ever experienced before.
If mankind wakes up and rejects British policy, and chief British puppet Obama, however, this horror can still be stopped.
