RK ARCHIVE - GM Food + The World Bank + Free Trade = Food Riots

Over the last 17 years over 150,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. This can be blamed primarily on free trade agreements which were instituted in 1998. This forced the Indian market open to highly subsidized American grain and grain companies. Monsanto, the maker of BT corn (not fit for human consumption, but used for Ethanol) and BT Cotton (kills 1/3 of all bees which eat its pollen) convinced thousands of Indian farmers to buy their seed. The BT Cotton is not well adapted to the Indian climate, and the seeds cannot be saved for use the next year.
Monsanto has invented crops which are sterile after one planting. This forces farmers to buy seed from Monsanto every year instead of using saved seed. If one crop fails the farmers have no money to buy seed. In India the suicide seeds are causing human suicides as well since most farmers find suicide the best alternative to humiliation and starvation.

The practices of companies like Monsanto in combination with the new free (but not fair) trade policies is largely responsible to the migration of large numbers South Americans to the US and for many of the food shortages we are witnessing today.

The documentary "The Future of Food" is showing at 7:30 pm at Fairfax City Library on tomorrow, April 23. Come learn more about what could be in store for your food.

Comments

The importance of food security (Hugo Estrada - 4/22/2008 12:53:51 PM)

Food security is probably one of the most important concepts that are barely known in mainstream society. It is very simple to grasp, though: making sure that a country or community has enough food to feed its population.

The U.S. and Europe's subsidized agricultural programs are fueled by this concept. This is the same reason why China and Japan went out of their way to protect their internal production of rice.

Neoliberal(free-trade) fundamentalists at the IMF and World Bank ignored this concept and forced developing countries to open its borders to agricultural products. Internal production sinks since there is no way for them to compete with heavily subsidized crops from the developing world.

The result is that the population of these countries are at the mercy of the market.

We must establish food security as a right for every country.

Very true (Rebecca - 4/22/2008 1:54:56 PM)

And when prices go up here they have a much greater impact in other countries since the population in many of the countries is much poorer than we are.

Since they cannot grow their own food as cheaply as we can deliver it (because we subsidize our farmers), they are no longer self-suffient with regard to food. They are forced to buy our food even if they would rather not. What we see then is many farmers who are unemployed and the emergence of a sort of global imperialism centered on food.

In essense our free trade policies are designed to subjugate other countries economically and imprison them in a dependence on American products.