July 22, 2005
In June 2005 I attended the National
Media Reform Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. While there I
visited the historic St. Louis courthouse and the huge Gateway
Arch by the Mississippi River that symbolizes St. Louis as the
gateway to the west. It was here that US corporate agribusiness,
the US occupation of Iraq and the Dred Scott decision intersected
in reality as well as symbolically.
The St. Louis courthouse is
famous for the deliberations of Dred Scott in the mid-1800's
and displays in the courthouse feature the historic documents
of this renowned court case. Scott was a slave and sued for his
freedom, which was denied by the Missouri Supreme Court. The
U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1857. The court ruled
that Scott was not a citizen and therefore could not bring a
case to a federal court. In the same case, the court also ruled
that the Missouri Compromise that forbade slavery in new territories
was unconstitutional as it denied the rights of slave property
owners. The decision had sweeping consequences, not the least
of which being yet another catalyst for the initiation of the
Civil War. Interestingly, two months after Supreme Court decision,
Scott's present owner freed him anyway.
Standing under the Gateway
Arch, and looking west, one sees the old St. Louis courthouse,
and to the east, the Mississippi River. As I looked across the
river there was, to my amazement, a warehouse-like building with
a huge rather crass sign reading "Cargill". It was
obviously a decadent marketing ploy by the agribusiness giant,
the Cargill Corporation, that is the largest grain trader in
the world. The Cargill sign was, therefore, in a direct path,
underneath the arch, to the courthouse. I mentioned this disturbing
image across the river to one of the park stewards. She said,
"Yes, there are times I would like to bomb East St. Louis."
I thought that was a rather interesting comment.
As is now well known, oil is
but one of the major interests the US has in Iraq. Because wars
are invariably a pretext for economic expansion and opportunities
for corporate greed, I knew that US corporate agribusiness was
not about to be left out of the picture. My concerns were realized
when, in April of 2003, Bush's Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman
appointed Daniel Amstutz, formerly an executive of the Cargill
Corporation, to oversee the "rehabilitation" of agriculture
in Iraq. With Cargill having the reputation of being one the
worst violators of the rights and independence of family farmers
throughout the world, I knew Iraqi farmers were doomed.
Cargill is massive. This corporate
agribusiness grain trader has 800 locations in 60 countries and
more than 15 lines of business. It is the largest private company
in the US and the 11th largest public or private company in terms
of sales.
Cargill is renowned for receiving
huge subsidies from the US government to then dump vast amounts
of grains in poorer countries where Cargill is trading. This
process, in effect, undermines small farmers, helps to destroy
the local food production systems and forces dependence of small
farmers and local rural economies on corporate agribusiness.
Amstutz, however, brought additional
corporate and international trade qualifications to the table.
He was undersecretary for international affairs and commodity
programs from 1983 to 1987 for the Reagan administration; ambassador
and chief negotiator for agriculture during the Uruguay Round
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks 1987-1989;
and past president of the North American Grain Export Association.
None of these qualifications were encouraging for the well being
of the small family farmers in Iraq.
Oxfam's policy director Kevin
Watkins said "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agriculture
reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the
chair of a human rights commission. This guy is uniquely well
placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain
companies and bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill
equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country."
I also knew that, as the US
was poised to invade Iraq, US corporate agribusiness companies
engaged in producing and promoting genetically modified organisms
(GMO's) throughout the world would be salivating.
Why would corporate agribusiness
be salivating??? Some history here. It is thought that agriculture
started 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent - in the area
now called Iraq - where the Tigress and the Euphrates rivers
intersect. The Iraqi ancestral farmers and this fertile land
brought us major crops such as wheat, barley, dates and pulses
(see Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of
Human Societies"). The area is hugely important in world
history. Given they are considered the initiators, for thousands
of years the contributions of the Iraqi farmers to the world's
agriculture production system have been unquestionably profound.
It is also likely that women
were the initiators of agriculture. Women were the gatherers
in hunting and gathering pre-agricultural societies. As women
were the ones gathering nuts and roots for their communities,
they would have been the observers of seeds and their growth
patterns. This is likely why the majority of the African farmers
today are women and throughout our human history the world's
farmers have largely been women.
Now comes the corporate connection.
Food is something everyone needs. There is no question about
this and no need for a survey - the market is a given. Huge profits
are in the offing. Controlling all aspects of food its
production, packaging, distribution and commodity markets - is
the dream world of corporate agribusiness.
The major impediment to corporate
agribusiness controlling all aspects of food and then reaping
all of the profits, however, is competition from the independent
family farmer in the US and throughout the world.
Throughout our history, the
family farmer's controlling interest has been protected by two
of the most important components of agriculture the two
"s'" soil and seeds.
Soil is not monolithic. It
is amazingly and thankfully diverse. It's components and minerals
differ everywhere and farmers historically have always adjusted
to this through crop rotations that will add or remove certain
nutrients to the soil, and/or farmers will let the soil rest
and lay fallow for a specified time. Traditional farmers will
also use natural nutrients like compost and manure to replenish
the soil. In this way the soil remains "alive" with
organic nutrients, earthworms and the like. Seeds and plants
are also selected for the type of soil and farmers themselves
have performed, and still perform, this selection since the beginning
of agriculture.
Seeds are also not monolithic, of course, even within the same
plant family. They are amazingly diverse and the diversity of
seeds is our lifeblood. Like humans, plants are vulnerable to
disease. The more diverse our plants, the safer we humans are.
The more diverse our plants, the less vulnerable they will be
to an all-encompassing disease that could and has wiped out some
crops within days or less. Without diversity there is virtually
no resistance to disease. The great Irish potato famine in 1845,
for example, resulted from a uniform potato production that had
no resistance to the potato blight.
How have farmers maintained
this diversity and therefore protected our food supply? As mentioned,
they have always adjusted seeds to the type of soil in their
area by selecting and saving the seeds of successful plants.
This is a very "local" process. By doing so, for thousands
of years, farmers have thankfully maintained the diversity of
our food chain. As Martin Teitel and Kimberly Wilson note in
their excellent book "Genetically Engineered Food: Changing
the Nature of Nature" (1999):
"Appreciation of the importance
of biodiversity dates back a hundred centuries to the beginning
of the agriculture process.Farmers remained powerless, however,
when it came to the interaction between crops and their environments.
No one could predict whether a season would be wet or dry. Consequently,
farmers quickly learned the importance of diversity: maintenance
of various crops that thrived under a variety of conditions to
avoid entire crop failures and starvation."
Also, farmers have always historically
saved seeds for next year's crop. Most farmers in the world don't
go to the store and supply warehouse to buy seeds. The seeds
are their on their farm and their grandparents, great-grandparents
and great-great grandparents likely grew versions of the same
seed stock.
The mission of farmers historically
and around the world has always been to grow food for family
and community sustenance, and not competition against each other
- a mission that is much to the ire of western capitalists. Invariably,
farmers will also share their seeds with their neighboring farmers.
This collective and cooperative spirit of the farming community
is legendary.
Vandana Shiva refers to the
importance of local agriculture production in a sustainable environment
and the threat of removing it from local control in her book
"Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development " (1989)
where she writes:
"The existence of the
feminine principle is linked with diversity and sharing. Its
destruction through homogenization and privatization leads to
the destruction of diversity and the commons. The sustenance
economy is based on a creative and organic nature, on local knowledge,
on locally recycled inputs that maintain the integrity of nature,
on local consumption for local needs, and on marketing of surplus
beyond the imperatives of equity and ecology.."
It is well known and documented
that small farmers everywhere are the best stewards and sustainers
of the land. They are closer to itthey know what it takes to
feed it and care for it. I've seen farmers lift soil in their
hands and know exactly what is needed in the soil. In this sense,
small family farmers are also the most efficient farmers in terms
of crop yields, as virtually every foot on that farm is known
to them. To be sure, millions of farm families women, men
and children - throughout the world from the Philippines to the
US are sophisticated homegrown agronomists who work the fields.
I can easily be accused of
romanticizing the farming profession, but I've seen farmers with
a glow in their eye when talking about being involved in one
of the most sacred of all professions the practice of nurturing
and witnessing the flowering of crops from small seeds and, consequently,
sustaining all of us through the production of food.
The world's family farmers
now and historically are our unsung heroes!
So what has corporate agribusiness
done to disrupt the powerful soil-seed mantra and erode the independence
of family farmers? Chemicals were employed that neutralize and
invariably have polluted and poisoned our soil, which destroys
its diversity. Seed patents have been intensified, coupled with
the development of genetically modified organisms (GMO's). Corporations
have attempted to make farmers dependent on all of these interventions.
After WWII there were vast
amounts of nitrogen left over from making bombs. Dow, Shell and
Dupont decided they could sell the nitrogen to farmers for profit
and thus began the now infamous "green revolution"
leading to huge amounts of chemical poisons in agriculture. The
complicity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the green
revolution is also a major factor. The result has been a devastating
farmer dependency on chemical poisons along with the destruction
of our soil and leading to us humans ingesting more chemicals
(read Al Krebs' excellent "The Corporate Reapers: the Book
of Agribusiness" - 1992). The chemical and poison additives
in soil make it easier for seed business' to disregard the diversity
of our fertile soil which then paves the way for less diverse
and genetically altered seed stocks.
Farmers who have used these
poisons, and are now attempting to veer away from this dependency,
describe their soil as "dead". It can become alive
again, but it takes a few years.
GMO's are seeds composed of
DNA from an altogether different species. Historically when we
have bred our plants we have done so with the same plant family.
The long- term health consequences of the GMO produced crops
that we now ingest are unknown at this point, yet we do know
that this science leads to an irreversible erosion of genetics
and encourages monoculture. As Teitel and Wilson explain:
"The genetic engineering
of our food is the most radical transformation in our diet since
the invention of agriculture (thousands of years ago). Genetic
engineering has allowed scientists to splice fish genes into
tomatoes, to put virus genes in squash, bacterium genes in corn,
and human genes in tobacco (to"grow" pharmaceuticals).Normally
the boundaries between species are set by nature. Until recently,
those biological barriers have never been crossed. Genetic engineering
allows these limits to be exceeded with results that no
one can predict."
Companies will then patent
the GMO seeds and encourage farmers to grow them. Once seeds
are purchased farmers are required to sign contracts specifying
they what cannot do with these seeds such as save them or share
them. To further complicate matters, companies, citing legal
priorities due to patent rights, will prosecute farmers who save
seeds rather than purchase the seeds from the seed company the
next year. The major GMO crops grown since GMO soy was first
commercialized in 1996 are corn, soy, cotton and canola. According
to the Center for Food Safety, the Monsanto corporation, headquartered
in St. Louis, "provides the seed technology for 90 percent
of the world's genetically engineered crops."
There's a vicious war against
family farmers right now that is relentless. Companies will even
sue if farmer's non-GMO crops have been polluted by GMO pollen
and are planted without permission (see the 2005 report by the
Center for Food Safety entitled "Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers").
What corporate agribusiness
is attempting to do to independent family farmers is not quite
slavery but becoming close. It is attempting to take away the
independence of farmers through basically contract farming. This
harkens back to the oppressive sharecropping or tenant farmer
relationships set up by southern plantation owners for freed
slaves and poor white farmers in the South. Plantation owners
wanted to keep freed slaves under their yoke and make use of
their labor. So they set up a sharecropping and tenant systems
of farming with various types of contractual arrangements that
invariably benefited the plantation owners rather than the aspiring
freed slaves. So, too, it's the consolidated corporate agribusiness
companies that benefit in today's scenario rather than the farmers.
Throughout southeast Asia,
destabilization of traditional farming practices from corporate
agribusiness intervention has been rampant. In the late 1980's,
for example, I spent time with rice farmers in the Philippines.
They told me that they were encouraged to grow a new higher yielding
rice plant developed by the International Rice Institute, and
it's affiliated corporate agribusiness companies. They were excited
about growing and potentially exporting more rice. It made no
sense to them that they could not set the seed aside for next
year's crop, as Filipino farmers have done for hundreds of years.
It also made no sense that the only way the crop would be fertile
was through use of fertilizers supplied by agribusiness companies.
Such chemical use was also an unknown practice for these farmers.
The next year, hundreds of
the small rice farmers went out of business because they couldn't
afford to purchase the seed or fertilizer. I asked them why they
didn't go back to planting their old rice crops. They told me
they couldn't because they didn't have the seeds anymore as the
seed had always been set aside for the next year's crop. As a
result they were dependent on agribusiness for their seeds
there was no option. Most of the traditional Filipino rice seeds
are now in U.S. seed banks.
In the late 1990's there were
reports of some 4,000 Filipino rice farmers who died due to pesticide
(chemical poison) use. The speculation, I was told by Food First
in California, was that the higher yielding rice plant attracted
a pest the farmers had never before encountered and they were
then told to use chemical poisons that they also had never used.
It's thought that either they didn't know how to use the poisons
or they used it to commit suicide.
Most of the world has resisted,
in some way, the wholesale invasion of GMO crops. No country
in their right mind would turn over their food sovereignty to
US corporate agribusiness. Not to be defeated, corporate agribusiness
has sought loopholes in vulnerable areas in the world. They seek
regions where the implementation of their insidious schemes is
virtually a given and from which they can force the world to
accept their devastating and destabilizing agricultural model.
Currently, the US military occupied Iraq is a prime area and
the continent of Africa is another.
Corporate agribusiness is enormously
dangerous and the increased, sometimes forced, dependency of
the world's farmers on corporate agribusiness is a threat of
major proportions. Think of it virtually all of our ancestors
were farmers and for 13,000 years we humans have fed ourselves
quite well without the likes of Cargill and Monsanto that evolved
just decades ago. We don't need them! To further exacerbate the
problem, they make us all vulnerable for their short-term corporate
greed. As Jim Hightower, the populist and former Agriculture
Commissioner of Texas, once said, "We need to place our
nation's growth not on the Rockefellers but on the little fellers
because is we do it will be based on genius and not greed."
This should be the message for every nation!
Of necessity, most agriculture
advocates would agree that agriculture should remain primarily
local and not global. This is the essence of food security -
locally controlled and produced food.
The symbolism, much less the
reality, of making Iraq's fertile crescent into one of the major
areas for GMO production would be altogether too tantalizing
for corporate agribusiness companies like Cargill and Monsanto.
Dan Amstutz obviously had input into the disastrous "transfer
of sovereignty" policies developed by the former Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator L. Paul Bremer III
in Iraq. Of the 100 orders left by Bremer, one is Order 81 on
"Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated
Circuits and Plant Variety". Most are saying that this order,
if implemented, is a declaration of war against the Iraqi farmers.
As the Grain and Focus on the
Global South (www.grain.org)
reported in October 2004
"For generations, small
farmers in Iraq operated in an essentially unregulated, informal
seed supply system.This is now history. The CPA has made it illegal
for Iraqi farmers to re-use seeds harvested from new varieties
registered under the law. Iraqis may continue to use and save
from their traditional seed stocks or what's left of them after
the years of war and drought, but that is not the agenda for
reconstruction embedded in the ruling. The purpose of the law
is to facilitate the establishment of a new seed market in Iraq,
modified or not, which farmers would have to purchase afresh
every single cropping season.Eliminating competition from farmers
is a prerequisite for these companies (i.e. major international
corporate seed traders such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and
Dow Chemical).The new patent law also explicitly promotes the
commercialization of genetically modified seeds in Iraq."
Upon reflection, I decided
this lineup of US corporate agribusiness and the Dred Scott decision
is appropriate. It is appropriate that they face each other as
they are obviously in league. To combine this with the US military
occupation of Iraq and the attempts at corporate agribusiness
abuse and control of Iraqi agriculture is mind-boggling. All
three represent a combination of greed, unjust ownership (humans,
seeds etc.) and violations of immense dimensions that impact
the integrity and safety of the planet and its inhabitants.
We managed to legally end slavery
in the United States but it took a war to do so. Today, the world's
independent farmers also need to be freed from the oppressive
yoke of corporate agribusiness and the on-going efforts to intensify
and expand this control.
Regarding our food system overall,
it is too important to be handed over to unfettered capitalists
and food should not be treated like any other commodity. Agriculture
and small farmers are just too important to us. Let the corporate
capitalists perhaps make shoes or combs or computers, although
they are probably making a mess of that as well by destroying
competition. But by all means we need to keep their slimy hands
off the substance of life - the world's agriculture production
system.
Heather Gray produces "Just Peace" on WRFG-Atlanta
89.3 FM covering local, regional, national and international
news. She has been a part of the food security movement for 16
years in Africa, Asia and the United States. She lives in Atlanta,
Georgia and can be reached at hmcgray@earthlink.net.