Why do you bring your mistakes here?

Kofi Annan has joined with President Obama, Monsanto, AGRA, and the Gates foundation to promote and execute food aid that replaces bags of wheat, rice and corn (agricultural dumping) with bags of pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers and genetically engineered seeds. The end result will be to starve people in Africa and feed corporations in the US and Europe.

Kofi Annan and farmers
"Under the guise of “sustainability” the [Gates] Foundation has been spearheading a multi-billion dollar effort to transform Africa into a GMO-friendly continent. The public relations flagship for this effort is the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a massive Green Revolution project. Up to now AGRA spokespeople have been slippery, and frankly, contradictory about their stance on GMOs.

…
If you had any doubts about where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is really placing its bets, AGRA Watch's recent announcement of the Foundation's investment of $23.1 million in 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock should put them to rest. Genetic engineering: full speed ahead." (Eric Holt-Gimenez)

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If you have questions about Monsanto's agenda, here it is in brief:

"At a biotech industry conference in January 1999, a representative from Arthur Anderson, LLP explained how they had helped Monsanto design their strategic plan. First, his team asked Monsanto executives what their ideal future looked like in 15 to 20 years. The executives described a world with 100 percent of all commercial seeds genetically modified and patented. Anderson consultants then worked backwards from that goal, and developed the strategy and tactics to achieve it. They presented Monsantowith the steps and procedures needed to obtain a place of industry dominance in a world in which natural seeds were virtually extinct." (Jeffrey M. Smith)

Kofi Annan is Chairman of the Board of Directors for AGRA. He is convening a conference in Ghana in the first week of September. As detailed in this blog, and by others, both AGRA and USAID top positions are filled with people that come from Monsanto and Dupont.

Kofi Annan Calls For United Effort To Accelerate African Green Revolution

"African heads of state, industry representatives, the international donor community and farmers will meet in Ghana at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) in the first week of September. Delegates will create an action plan on the acceleration of a Green Revolution in Africa."

Samuel Amoako has reported on this as well: Kofi Annan Hosts Forum On Africa's Food Security in the Ghanaian Times on August 11.

It is worrisome that Kofi Annan is connected with AGRA. Maybe he believes that US mechanized and chemical agriculture work well. Most people in the US do, aside from family farmers who see the effects first hand. I have a good friend who works for the US Dept. of Agriculture and thinks this kind of big agriculture really is the best and that Monsanto is a boon to mankind. We have had several heated discussions. In fact Monsanto is destroying land, causing chemically induced human diseases, creating super weeds, super insect pests, and economic havoc in many parts of the US farming areas, particularly in the midwest and the south. There have been countless protests all over India and Brazil. I've read many heartbreaking stories, including this comment from Pearl on this blog:

"The farmers of southern Kentucky have been enslaved by Monsanto. The previous generation fell for an ad campaign called “Hi-bred” or “High-Bred”, and the current generation is stuck with fulfilling the contracts their fathers signed. The chemicals that Monsanto has contractually required be applied to those fields have so damaged the soil that the only way to get anything to grow in the fields now is to keep applying more of those blasted chemicals. So even if a person who inherited a contract WANTS to discontinue the agreement with Monsanto when the contract expires, they are unable to do so unless they want to leave the land fallow for many, many, many years. Most farmers cannot afford to do this, as this would mean little to no income for their families for somewhere between 5 to 20 years, depending on how long it would take for the soil to renew itself."

I've always had enormous respect for Kofi Annan, I do not understand his participation in this and it bothers me a great deal. Even though I admire and respect him there are no free passes with a subject like this.

Genetically modified crops produce less, not more, than conventional crops.

Alexis Baden-Mayer points out in Dupont, Monsanto, and Obama Versus the World's Family Farmers that AGRA is basing its programs on myth:

"Most of the world's food is not produced on industrial mega-farms. 1.5 billion family farmers produce 75 percent of the world's food.

The hunger problem is not caused by low yields. The world has 6 billion people and produces enough food for 9 billion people."

And as I've discussed before, the smaller the farm the greater the yield.

"There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares(3). Sen's observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Phillippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere." (Monbiot)

The key to true food security is food sovereignty, and the key to food sovereignty lies in who controls the land. The problems of both starvation and obesity stem from injustice in the way farmland and food are distributed. AGRA policies will poison the land and water, destroy local seeds and seed gene pools that provide the true hope for food sustainability. Local agriculture in most parts of the world has developed seeds that are tough and resistant to local pests, weeds, and local environmental dangers such as droughts or floods. AGRA wishes to replace these seeds with ones that need expensive, continuous, and ever expanding chemical coddling. These chemicals will poison the land, the water, and the people.

Additionally the Gates Foundation, Monsanto, and other corporate interests are investing in a doomsday seed bank, in which they will own the world's agricultural gene pool. They are storing seeds from all over the world. In the event of genetic disaster, they will own the surviving gene pool.

Jonathan Weiner, in The Beak of the Finch describes how chemicals drive the destruction of land and the creation of super weeds and super insect pests:

"Some of the greatest opposition to evolution comes from the farmers of the Cotton Belt, and that is where Taylor is seeing one of the most dramatic cases of evolution in action on this planet.

… in the year 1940, cotton farmers began spraying their fields with the chemical compound dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT. These first insecticidal sprays killed so many insects, and killed so many of the birds that ate the insects, that in biological terms the cotton fields were left standing virtually vacant, like an archipelago of newborn islands – and out of the woods and hedgerows fluttered [the cotton destroying moth] Heliothis virescens.

In the next few optimistic years, pesticide manufacturers assaulted Heliothis with bigger and bigger doses of DDT. They also brought out more poisons from the same chemical family: aldrin, chlordane. The aim was nothing less than the control of nature, and pesticide manufacturers believed that control was within their grasp. The annual introduction of new pesticides rose from the very first product, DDT, in 1940, to great waves of chemical invention in the 1960s and 1970s. In those decades, dozens of new herbicides and insecticides were brought to market each year. Heliothis became on of the most heavily sprayed species in what amounted to a biological world war. Through it all, the moths clung to the cotton.

… The moths have become almost absolutely resistant to all pesticides, from your cyclodienes to your organophosphates to your carbamates, and most of your pyrethroids. …

“Its an extraordinarily potent example of evolution going on under our eyes,” Taylor says. “Visible evolution.”

A pesticide applies selection pressure as surely as a drought or a flood. The poison selects againsttraits that make a species vulnerable to it, because the individuals that are most vulnerable are the ones that die first. The poison selects for any trait that makes the species less vulnerable, because the least vulnerable are the ones that survive longest and leave the most offspring. In this way the invention of pesticides in the twentieth century has driven waves of evolution in insects all over the planet. Heliothis is only one case in hundreds." (from pp 251-255)

In short, pesticides and herbicides destroy most of the insects, plants, and often other animals in those fields where they are used. But nature fights back. Those insects and weeds that can resist the chemicals initially, breed and grow stronger. They have no competition except from the chemicals, and they quickly evolve immunity, even as the chemicals become stronger and more toxic. Stronger and more toxic chemicals are neededto fight the new insects and weeds, and the destructive cycle continues. The chemicals wind up in the food, and run off into the land and the water, creating an ever increasingly toxic environment for humans and many other plants and animals.

For the growth of super weeds world wide, see the following charts:


The vertical axis shows the number of species of weeds that have become chemical resistant, the horizontal axis shows the years. You can see the exponential increase starting about 1970 when Monsanto introduced Roundup, and continuing into 2010.


You can see the distribution, North America, Western Europe, and Australia have already been severely impacted. Africa is a huge new market that has not yet been ruined. You can see why it is so desirable, it is a huge wide open opportunity to Monsanto and other greedy chemical corporations. Most countries in Africa have not yet been touched or biologically recolonized by GMOs and agricultural chemicals. South Africa, which has allowed GMOs, is the most severely impacted to date. (click to enlarge)

Genetically modified seeds, GMOs, are designed to be used as part of a program involving chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Their effect on farmers is usually to lock them into a cycle of debt, as described by Pearl above, and as experienced and protested in many countries including India and Brazil, as mentioned above. Terminator seeds, also known as suicide seeds or homicide seeds, will not regenerate, so instead of saving seeds, farmers have to buy new seeds each year, as well as investing in more, and more toxic chemicals each year that are necessary to make the GMO seeds grow. This cycle has created death and destruction in many places, including hundreds of farmer suicides in India.

I've heard that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and that is certainly the case for the insects and weeds targeted by chemical pesticides and herbicides. Those that don't die become very much stronger. We have already have super bugs and super weeds, thanks to the efforts of companies such as Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta. Evolution can move very fast, not just fast enough to observe, but fast enough to leave us humans struggling in its wake. Monsanto and the other agricultural chemical companies market each new product as though it is the end of some pest, that evolution stops at this point, and we can just relax. In fact each new chemical is the creator and the beginning of many more powerful threats. And the more powerful the chemical tools we use against these threats, the more those chemicals poison us and strengthen the insects and weeds we are fighting.

Although they have stopped talking much overtly about this, AGRA and the Gates Foundation speak about “land mobility” which means moving farmers off their farms so the land can be used for large scale mechanized agriculture. But there is no mention of where these people will go and live, and how they will be reemployed. What this means is thousands of displaced people moving to slums around the cities, which will grow and will be filled with unemployed people. This is politically and socially destabilizing. It breeds crime and political violence. This kind of policy also hits women particularly hard, because in western models such as corporate agriculture, their traditional rights to land are ignored. Women are the majority of agricultural workers, and will become even more impoverished and disenfranchised, not that it will bother AGRA or Gates or Monsanto, as they say:

"Over time, this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production."

Family farmers, who produce 75% of the worlds food, will gradually be displaced, driven off their land, and the land will be poisoned and ruined. There will be less food, less healthy food. More people will starve, while more corporations will get fat.

As Joan Baxter writes:
"Back in the early 1990s when I was reporting from northern Ghana, an elderly woman farmer decided I would benefit from a bit of enlightenment. In a rather long lecture, she detailed for me the devastating effects that the Green Revolution – the first one that outside experts and donors launched in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s – had had on farmers' crops, soils, trees and their lives. She said that the imported seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and tractors, the instructions to plant row after row of imported hybrid maize and cut down precious trees that protected the soils and nourished the people – even the invaluable sheanut trees – had ruined the diverse and productive farming systems that had always sustained her people. When she finished, she cocked an eye at me and asked, with a cagey grin, 'Why do you bring your mistakes here?'"

For more African farmers perspectives on this subject, see:

Africa: African Farmers and Environmentalists Speak Out Against A New Green Revolution In Africa PDF oaklandinstitute.org/voicesfromafrica/pdfs/voicesfromafrica_full.pdf

Nice Post

Thank you OP for bringing this issue to public awareness. Monsanto is not mankind-friendly. Their history is littered with controversies and questionable trade practice and deadly experimentations with weapons of mass destruction.

Monsanto is instrumental in the creation of an apocalyptic seed vault in the Norwegian ice frontiers. This is a plant gene bank reserved for rescue in case humankind is biologically or socially devastated by saturated effects of the genetically modified food chain.

My attention is drawn to this statement below, I aptly corrected it! : [size=14pt]The key to true food security is food sovereignty, and the key to food sovereignty lies in who controls the land patented seed[/size]

Monsanto has planted its sovereign power firmly to a point that even the huge and broadly powerful farmers union is no longer a match for them in courts.

Allow me to dramatize for you how powerful monsanto has become.

Seeds and flowers and plants are typically cross planted and cross pollinated by the natural actions of wind, rain and insects. Whipped up winds can tear corn cobs from the stalk and carry them far away from their plants; runoff from rain can wash away crops, uprooting them from one place and supplanting them elsewhere; seasonal bees can also contribute to the gene redistribution effect.

If farmer A purchases and plants one of monsanto's patented genetic corn seed during planting season, he is doing so under a license contract. The contract covers many rights and privileges belonging to monsanto. One of them states to the effect that unless farmer B, farmer C, farmer D and so on..have also been licensed to reproduce this genetic corn seed, then if found on their farm or their harvest, they are liable to compensate monsanto for the yield from those cross planted/cross pollinated seeds and plants and flowers. In effect, farmers B, C, D have infringed on proprietary rights of monsanto to the exclusive ownership of the corn gene, even though its presence on their farm is involuntary and due only to acts of nature.

Very absurd isn't it?

Imagine that I lay claim to the color red and lobbied for its regulation to take all natural red color out of circulation. Only way anybody can use red is to buy my red dye. So that if you do a painting using my red dye, then you are the only one licensed for its use and if someone made a photocopy or printed copy of your artwork then they have in their posession a color reproduced from my red dye and they owe me money. ooh-laa-laa !

The age of moral reflection is past, we are in the age of global competition and recognition, Mr Annan is now a global player and even if he kicks against monsanto in Africa, they will sidestep him and find other willing accomplices to do just their bid. Africans dont worship heroes of political conscience, we worship thieves and greedy leaders who are easy puppets for corporate America. Dont blame Annan but continue to raise awareness. You've done a good job!

Even companies like unilever are using gmos in their foods

Monsanto's Roundup And Roundup-Resistant Corn Found To Be Toxic In Rats Michael Kelley | Sep. 19, 2012, 6:52 PM The first animal feeding trial studying the lifetime effects of exposure to Monsanto Roundup weedkiller and Monsanto's NK603 Roundup-resistant genetically modified corn found that exposure levels currently considered safe can cause tumors, multiple organ damage and premature death in rats.
The study, published Sept 19 in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicity, raises serious concerns not just about the pesticide Roundup, but about the Roundup-ready corn, which comprises 70 percent of the corn grown in the U.S.
“The rat has long been used as a surrogate for human toxicity. All new pharmaceutical, agricultural and household substances are, prior to their approval, tested on rats. This is as good an indicator as we can expect that the consumption of [NK603] GM maize and the herbicide Roundup, impacts seriously on human health,” Dr. Antoniou, molecular biologist at King’s College in London, said in a press release.
Monsanto maintains that its Roundup-resistant corn "is as safe as conventional (non-GM-derived) food" and that its 90-day trial prove that, but other studies have challenged the 90-day feeding trials.
Three months is the equivalent of late adolescence in rats, which can live for about two years.
The new research fed 10 groups of 10 rats a diet containing either NK603 Roundup-resistant GM corn or water containing Roundup at levels permitted in drinking water over a two-year period.
The researchers found that the treated rats died significantly earlier than rats fed on a standard diet.
Specifically, up to 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group, and treated rats developed 2 to 3 times more large cancers than the control group.
This type of rat is cancer-prone, so all of the animals developed tumors. This is one of the reasons that the study has been controversial. But it is being taken seriously.
"This is the most thorough research ever published into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats," Antoniou said. "It shows an extraordinary number of tumors developing earlier and more aggressively — particularly in female animals. I am shocked by the extreme negative health impacts."
Roundup is the world’s best-selling weedkiller. Monsanto introduced this genetically modified corn in 1998.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/monsantos-roundup-and-resistant-corn-found-to-be-toxic-2012-9#ixzz29j8OPOAC