Why is Kofi Annan Fronting For Monsanto?

The GMO Assault On Africa

Feature Article

By Crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/

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.

"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."

(See: Monsanto in Gates' Clothing? The Emperor's New GMOs, By Eric

Holt-Gimenez, The Huffington Post, Aug 26, 2010).

…

"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)

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 Monsanto with the steps and procedures needed to obtain a

place of industry dominance in a world in which natural seeds were

virtually extinct." (See Monsanto: The world's poster child for

corporate manipulation and deceit

Friday, July 30, 2010 by: 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 andUSAID 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 adoomsday 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 against traits 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 needed to 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. (click to enlarge)

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

www.oaklandinstitute.org/voicesfromafrica/pdfs/voicesfromafrica_full.pdf

(NB: There are very important links available in the original of this

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