Agriculture and Capitalism

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Sun Dec 22, 2019 3:49 pm

Food imperialism: Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution

When Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, died last Monday at the age of 95, I could not help but wonder if special issues of the Nation Magazine and the Monthly Review, the authoritative voices of American liberalism and radicalism respectively, might have caused the old buzzard to croak. The September 21 issue of the Nation was titled “Food for All” and took on the myths of the Green Revolution, just as does the July-August issue of Monthly Review. The MR has the added distinction of being co-edited by Fred Magdoff, Harry’s son, who is one of the leading Marxist experts on sustainable agriculture.

Borlaug was very clear about his political goals, as were his acolytes in the bourgeois press. Take, for example, the moniker Green Revolution. The term was a conscious alternative to the Red Revolutions that were driven by a desire for Bread in the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese countryside. The imperialists thought they had discovered a philosopher’s stone in Borlaug’s wheat and rice hybrids. Now every poor person could enjoy three square meals a day and forsake the need to take up arms.

The bourgeoisie rewarded Borlaug with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, a choice that recognized the obvious connection between an adequate diet and social peace. Given the turmoil of the Vietnam War, Borlaug’s research seemed like an exit ramp from the colonial revolution that was now in full bore across the world. Although the Oct. 22nd New York Times concurred with majority opinion that Borlaug was some kind of saint, it did worry a bit. “Through increased productivity, the green revolution may mean less employment in Asia—and scores of millions are already living in tragic misery. So far there has been no outcry to stop the insistence on birth control as a means of dealing with overpopulation.”

Indeed, Borlaug had come to the neo-Malthusian conclusion that birth control was a necessary handmaiden to his agricultural breakthroughs. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he warned: “There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.” This position has been embraced by Lester Brown, a founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, both nominally “environmentalist” organizations. This is just a sign of how difficult it is to lump all environmentalists together without a class analysis. The approach of radical environmentalists like Fred Magdoff has been to both attack the intellectual and scientific foundations of the Green Revolution as well as defend the right of poor people not to have birth control rammed down their throat. It is just a reminder that you cannot figure out the environmental movement without an ideological road map.

Borlaug got started in the 1940s under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, which despite its philanthropic pretensions, was worried about threats to its holdings both in Mexico and in the rest of Latin America. It should be mentioned that the Rockefellers also provided the initial funding for Lester Brown’s Worldwatch Institute. The Rockefellers have consistently been in favor of “preserving” natural resources as well as preventing poor people from having too many babies.

Today, Bill Gates has taken up the same mission as the Rockefellers, hoping to deploy Borlaug’s technologies to Africa—a continent held hostage to missionary incursions of one sort or another going back to the Victorian epoch. Apparently, he is just as sold on population reduction as Borlaug, Brown and the Rockefellers based on this report from the London Times on May 24th of this year:

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.

They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

George Soros’s participation in this global cabal (sorry, that’s the way I see it) makes perfect sense because he can give good advice to Gates about how to bribe academics in the Third World to become spokesmen for this sordid venture. With his billions, Soros was able to wine and dine Eastern European dissidents and convert them to the dubious wisdom of Karl Popper’s Open Society, a socio-economic framework most amenable to Soros’s forced penetration of closed markets.

In an earlier generation, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations spent millions on putting Third World agronomists in training programs at American universities where they would become converts to the Green Revolution. They certainly understood that becoming converts for corporate farming was almost a guarantee for continued success in an academic world that was awash in money from the Monsantos of the world.

In an article titled “The United States Intervention in Third World Policies” that appeared in the April 1986 Social Scientist, Jagannath Pathy drew attention to the massive seduction of academics by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. This involved sending our “experts” overseas to help the benighted peasants as well as recruiting theirs for special training at places like Cornell and MIT.

Indo-U.S. co-operation in agricultural research dates back to the efforts of the U.S. government to help India increase food production. In 1953, F.W. Parker of the Technical Co-operative Mission arranged a number of studies determining the fertility status of soils. This laid the basis for the establishment of a chain of soil testing laboratories aided by USAID which subsequently paved the way for the introduction of chemical fertilisers in India. In 1955, Rockefeller Foundation and five U.S. land grant universities assisted Indian agricultural universities and research institutions and suggested a curricula appropriate to reorienting scholars to meet the challenge of introducing HYVs of maize, sorghum and millets. The U.S. gave $ 35 million for laboratory equipment and libraries. Every year 35 fellowships were instituted for training Indian students at U.S. institutions. Rockefellers provided $ 21.3 million up to 1973 and arranged for several visiting professors to visit India. It also provided travel grants for Indian government officials and university administrators to go to the U.S. In 1982, Ralph W. Cummings, the Director of Rockefeller Foundation’s Indian agricultural research programme laid down guidelines for the establishment and development of agricultural universities. These guidelines focussed on higher agricultural productivity through diffusion of fertiliser responsive varieties. The narrow genetic base of HYVs, disease and pest suspectibility of some of the parent varieties and the existence of vast monoculture soon exposed the crops to attacks by pests and diseases. As noted earlier, in the mid-1960s, USAID provided large loans to import much needed fertilisers. The U.S. and World Bank put pressure on the Indian government to encourage MNCs investment in local fertiliser production. Such a strategy could not have been pursued smoothly without the support of Indian agricultural scientists trained in the service of American interests (Abrol, 1983).

From 1952-72, the Ford Foundation spent $ 16 million providing generous grants to persons, institutions and government on a wide variety of nation building activities. It established and/or funded the Institute of Economic Growth, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, National Council of Applied Economic Research, Indian Statistical Institute and Institutes of Management at Calcutta and Ahmedabad. The Foundation trained about 50,000 extension workers. The National Institute of Community Development was established with the help of USAID and Michigan State University. The whole pattern of education and research was thus modelled on the philosophy and value system of the donor country. U.S. experts provided advice on how to organise and develop science and technology, decided the priorities of research, recommended developmental models. Performance of major research and educational institutes like UGC. CSIR, ICAR, etc. is reviewed by experts from the U.S. and Western Europe. This delinking of science and technology from the concrete socio-political contexts has proved to be stultifying.

The Nation Magazine was particularly insightful in identifying Bill Gates’s affinity for genetically modified crops, the leading edge today of the Green Revolution. Just as Monsanto’s seeds are intellectual property, so are Microsoft products. And both are bad for you. In a superb dissection of the Gates Foundation’s ambitions in Africa, authors Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck draw the parallels between GM and software patents:

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation’s funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly–Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto’s domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there’s some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates’s agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that “AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another.” And, English says, “so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto.”

This isn’t surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge–in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies–including those that substitute for farmers’ knowledge–are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.

Besides the special issues of the Nation and Monthly Review, I can also strongly recommend the Food First website (http://www.foodfirst.org), which has been one of the most consistent and powerful critics of agribusiness going back to the mid 1970s. Francis Moore Lappé launched the think-tank not long after her “Diet for a Small Planet” was published, a book that serves as effective anti-venom for Borlaug’s Green Revolution. Although the entire website consists of information that debunks the claims of people like Borlaug, there is one in particular that is must-reading if you are trying to understand the issues. I am speaking of Peter Rosset’s article “Lessons from the Green Revolution” published in April 2000. (It may be of some interest that Peter is the son of Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, and has obviously inherited his willingness to take on the powers that be.)

Rosset is particularly cogent on the reliance of Green Revolution farming on petrochemicals, a dependency that obviously is fraught with peril in a period of rising prices (whether a product of “peak oil” or speculation is pretty much besides the point.) He points out:

With the Green Revolution, farming becomes petro-dependent. Some of the more recently developed seeds may produce higher yields even without manufactured inputs, but the best results require the right amounts of chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and water. So as the new seeds spread, petrochemicals become part of farming. In India, adoption of the new seeds has been accompanied by a sixfold rise in fertilizer use per acre. Yet the quantity of agricultural production per ton of fertilizer used in India dropped by two-thirds during the Green Revolution years. In fact, over the past thirty years the annual growth of fertilizer use on Asian rice has been from three to forty times faster than the growth of rice yields.

Because farming methods that depend heavily on chemical fertilizers do not maintain the soil’s natural fertility and because pesticides generate resistant pests, farmers need ever more fertilizers and pesticides just to achieve the same results. At the same time, those who profit from the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides fear labor organizing and use their new wealth to buy tractors and other machines, even though they are not required by the new seeds. This incremental shift leads to the industrialization of farming.

Once on the path of industrial agriculture, farming costs more. It can be more profitable, of course, but only if the prices farmers get for their crops stay ahead of the costs of petrochemicals and machinery. Green Revolution proponents claim increases in net incomes from farms of all sizes once farmers adopt the more responsive seeds. But recent studies also show another trend: outlays for fertilizers and pesticides may be going up faster than yields, suggesting that Green Revolution farmers are now facing what U.S. farmers have experienced for decades-a cost-price squeeze.

In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yield increased 13 percent during the 1980s, but came at the cost of a 21 percent increase in fertilizer use. In the Central Plains, yields went up only 6.5 percent, while fertilizer use rose 24 percent and pesticides jumped by 53 percent. In West Java, a 23 percent yield increase was virtually canceled by 65 and 69 percent increases in fertilizers and pesticides respectively.

Also of interest is Harry Cleaver’s “The Contradictions of the Green Revolution“, which despite my differences with his autonomist brand of Marxism I can recommend as one of the more penetrating critiques of Borlaug’s techniques that is rooted in political economy. As such it is a good complement to Rosset’s article that is much more focused on the ecological dimensions. For Cleaver, the key to understanding the impact of Borlaug’s “revolution” is how it has transformed class relations as well as the mode of production. He writes:

But if increased food production has been the principal thrust of the new strategy it has not been the only one. Closely tied to the effort to increase output has been the transformation of agrarian social and economic relations by integrating once isolated areas or farmers into the capitalist market system. This “modernization” of the countryside, which has been an important part of so-called nation-building throughout the postwar period, has been facilitated by the dependency of the new technology on manufactured inputs. The peasant who adopts the new seeds must buy the necessary complementary inputs on the market. In order to buy these inputs he must sell part of his crop for cash. Thus the international team widens the proportion of peasant producers tied into the national (and sometimes international) market as it succeeds in pushing the new technology into the hands of subsistence farmers. Obviously in the case of commercial producers, adoption only reinforces existing ties to the market.

These development experts, however, apparently feel that widening the market by pushing new inputs is not always enough. Along with their recent admiration for the “progressive” peasant who jumps at any opportunity to grow more, they have been making an effort to teach personal gain and consumerism. In his widely read handbook, Getting Agriculture Moving, ADC president Arthur T. Mosher insists on the theme of teaching peasants to want more for themselves, to abandon collective habits, and to get on with the “business” of farming. Mosher goes so far as to advocate extension educational programs for women and youth clubs to create more demand for store-bought goods. The “affection of husbands and fathers for their families” will make them responsive to these desires and drive them to work harder.

A new study by another elite group, Resources for the Future (RFF), done for the World Bank on agricultural development in the Mekong Basin, also recommends substantial efforts to change the rural social structure and personal attitudes of peasants in such a way that new capitalist institutions can function more efficiently. The RFF, like others before it, suggests massive doses of international capital and more Western social scientists to help bring about the necessary changes. These tactics of the ADC and RFF are more than efforts to bring development to rural areas. They are attempts to replace traditional social systems by capitalism, complete with all its business-based social relations.

For those whose reading of Karl Marx does not extend much beyond the Communist Manifesto, a question might pop into their head. What’s so bad about replacing “traditional systems by capitalism”? After all, doesn’t Karl Marx write:

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

I mean, who wants to be a village idiot or a barbarian? Wouldn’t it be better to effect a bourgeois revolution in the countryside and release agrarian labor into the cities for industrial jobs? Furthermore, if the Green Revolution is more productive than traditional agriculture, at least measured in terms of sheer output, who would want to stand in its way? Indeed, in Walden Bello and Mara Baviera’s article in the Monthly Review special issue, they call attention to Eric Hobsbawm’s observation in The Age of Extremes that “the death of the peasantry” was “the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of [the twentieth] century,” one that cut “us off forever from the world of the past.”

Their reply to Hobsbawm should remind us that facile comparisons between the industrial revolution and agriculture are unwarranted. If the introduction of more and more machinery is the key to the productivity of labor and hence the creation of conditions amenable to a socialist society, agriculture is a partial exception to this rule as Bello and Baviera point out:

The food price crisis, according to proponents of peasant and smallholder agriculture, is not due to the failure of peasant agriculture but to that of corporate agriculture. They say that, despite the claims of its representatives that corporate agriculture is best at feeding the world, the creation of global production chains and global supermarkets, driven by the search for monopoly profits, has been accompanied by greater hunger, worse food, and greater agriculture-related environmental destabilization all around than at any other time in history.

Moreover, they assert that the superiority in terms of production of industrial capitalist agriculture is not sustained empirically. Miguel Altieri and Clara Nicholls, for instance, point out, that although the conventional wisdom is that small farms are backward and unproductive, in fact, “research shows that small farms are much more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop. Small integrated farming systems that produce grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products outproduce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms.”

When one factors in the ecological destabilization that has accompanied the generalization of capitalist industrial agriculture, the balance of costs and benefits lurches sharply towards the negative. For instance, in the United States, notes Daniel Imhoff,

the average food item journeys some 1300 miles before becoming part of a meal. Fruits and vegetables are refrigerated, waxed, colored, irradiated, fumigated, packaged, and shipped. None of these processes enhances food quality but merely enables distribution over great distances and helps increase shelf life.

Industrial agriculture has created the absurd situation whereby “between production, processing, distribution, and preparation, 10 calories of energy are required to create just one calorie of food energy.” Conversely, it is the ability to combine productivity and ecological sustainability that constitutes a key dimension of superiority of peasant or small-scale agriculture over industrial agriculture.

Contrary to assertions that peasant and small-farm agriculture is hostile to technological innovation, partisans of small-scale or peasant-based farming assert that technology is “path dependent,” that is, its development is conditioned by the mode of production in which it is embedded, so that technological innovation under peasant and small-scale farming would take different paths than innovation under capitalist industrial agriculture.

But partisans of the peasantry have not only engaged in a defense of the peasant or smallholder agriculture. Vía Campesina and its allies have actually formulated an alternative to industrial capitalist agriculture, and one that looks to the future rather than to the past. This is the paradigm of food sovereignty, the key propositions of which are discussed elsewhere in this collection.

Although there is not much point speculating on what a future world socialist system would look like, there is little doubt that the technologies introduced by Borlaug would begin to recede into the background, or at least be used in a way that is not destructive to the environment and to labor.

Ironically, despite Marx’s comments about the idiocy of rural life, he eventually came to an understanding that the city and countryside would have to be re-integrated in order to resolve the environmental crisis of his day, namely the decline of soil fertility. To put it succinctly, the byproducts of human and animal excretion would replenish the soil rather go to waste as it did in the streets of London in the 19th century. This “metabolic rift” was in fact apparent to Marx even when he was writing the CM with its seeming hostility to peasant life. Marx wrote a set of demands to be raised by Communists that included: “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.”

This demand reflected his awareness that the current arrangements would not suffice. In volume three of Capital, he elaborated on the problems of capitalist farming that would only increase in the 20th century despite all the technical fixes recommended by Borlaug and company:

All criticism of small-scale landownership is ultimately reducible to criticism of private property as a barrier and obstacle to agriculture. So too is all counter-criticism of large landed property. Secondary political considerations are of course left aside here in both cases. It is simply that this barrier and obstacle which all private property in land places to agricultural production and the rational treatment, maintenance and improvement of the land itself, develops in various forms, and in quarreling over these specific forms of the evil its ultimate root is forgotten.

Small-scale landownership presupposes that the overwhelming majority of the population is agricultural and that isolated labour predominates over social; wealth and the development of reproduction, therefore, both in its material and intellectual aspects, is ruled out under these circumstances, and with this also the conditions for a rational agriculture. On the other hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an every growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.

It should of course be emphasized that Marx’s reference to small-scale landownership is linked to the conditions that obtained in the Europe of his day. It was nothing like the case made by Walden Bello, which would have to be part of a general program of social emancipation. It might look much more like the rural cooperatives that Lenin hailed toward the end of his life that would have been a far cry not only from the monstrous schemas promoted by Borlaug but ironically emulated by Stalin through his forced collectivizations that reduced agricultural labor to a cog in a machine. Lenin wrote:

Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch—to reorganize our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, in which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganize it. Our second task is educational work among the peasants. And the economic object of this educational work among the peasants is to organize the latter in cooperative societies. If the whole of the peasantry had been organized in cooperatives, we would by now have been standing with both feet on the soil of socialism. But the organization of the entire peasantry in cooperative societies presupposes a standard of culture, and the peasants (precisely among the peasants as the overwhelming mass) that cannot, in fact, be achieved without a cultural revolution.

The failure of the USSR to adopt such an approach had tragic consequences as forced collectivization created the backlash that would lead to Stalin’s merciless repression of the kulaks and a weakening of the Soviet infrastructure. Fortunately, a new approach to socialism being adopted in Cuba is more in line with Lenin’s hopes in 1923, as well as consistent with the concerns Marx had about the metabolic rift:

Cuba has developed one of the most efficient organic agriculture systems in the world, and organic farmers from other countries are visiting the island to learn the methods.

Due to the U.S. embargo, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was unable to import chemicals or modern farming machines to uphold a high-tech corporate farming culture. Cuba needed to find another way to feed its people. The lost buying power for agricultural imports led to a general diversification within farming on the island. Organic agriculture has become key to feeding the nation’s growing urban populations.

Cuba’s new revolution is founded upon the development of an organic agricultural system. Peter Rosset of the Institute for Food and Development Policy states that this is “the largest conversion from conventional agriculture to organic or semi-organic farming that the world has ever known.”

Not only has organic farming been prosperous, but the migration of small farms and gardens into densely populated urban areas has also played a crucial role in feeding citizens. State food rations were not enough for Cuban families, so farms began to spring up all over the country. Havana, home to nearly 20 percent of Cuba’s population, is now also home to more than 8,000 officially recognized gardens, which are in turn cultivated by more than 30,000 people and cover nearly 30 percent of the available land. The growing number of gardens might seem to bring up the problem of space and price of land. However, “the local governments allocate land, which is handed over at no cost as long as it is used for cultivation,” says S. Chaplowe in the Newsletter of the World Sustainable Agriculture Association.

The removal of the “chemical crutch” has been the most important factor to come out of the Soviet collapse, trade embargo, and subsequent organic revolution. Though Cuba is organic by default because it has no means of acquiring pesticides and herbicides, the quality and quantity of crop yields have increased. This increase is occurring at a lower cost and with fewer health and environmental side effects than ever. There are 173 established ‘vermicompost’ centers across Cuba, which produce 93,000 tons of natural compost a year. The agricultural abundance that Cuba is beginning to experience is disproving the myth that organic farming on a grand scale is inefficient or impractical.

https://louisproyect.org/2009/09/20/foo ... evolution/

This might be my worst transgression against the site- posting a Proyect article- just the info now- apologies wherever you are Anax.

chlamor
Posts: 520
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Sun Dec 22, 2019 3:51 pm

The Contradictions of the Green Revolution*

Will the Green Revolution turn red? That is the big question about the recent and highly publicized upsurge in
Third-World food production. Food output is rising, but so is the number of unemployed in countryside and city. Is
this growing class of dispossessed going to rise up in socialist revolution? Such is the specter invoked in an
increasing number of mass-media news stories.

Scholarly studies echo the same fear, and concern is growing among officials at the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). All of these organizations
are anxiously trying to buy the answers to these questions. As more and more research money flows out, reams of
reports from eager university and field-staff researchers are piling up.

Yet for all the vast literature, radical researchers and strategists have paid little heed to the Green Revolution or to its
revolutionary potential.1 This is a strange oversight in a generation of radicals more impressed by peasant revolution
than by Marx’s vision of revolution by an industrial proletariat. How important is this new development to U.S.
foreign policy, that such mighty institutions should be stirred into action? What is the real impact of the Green
Revolution on the internal contradictions of modern capitalism? Will social tensions be abated or exacerbated? It is
my hope that this essay, which discusses these and related questions, will open a discussion among radicals and
move others to probe more deeply into the whole phenomenon.

1. The Green Revolution and Imperialism

The Growth of a Strategy

Most Americans discovered the Green Revolution only when plant-breeder Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize last year for his work on new high-yielding varieties (HYV) of grain.2 The Green Revolution is usually
thought of narrowly as the current, accelerated growth in Third-World grain production which results from
combining the new seeds --mostly wheat and rice-- with heavy applications of fertilizer and carefully controlled
irrigation.3 Few have stopped to ponder why Borlaug’s prize was for peace and not biology. Yet such meditation is
called for because the story of the Green Revolution is far more than one of plant breeding and genetics. It is woven
into the fabric of American foreign policy and is an integral part of the postwar effort to contain social revolution
and make the world safe for profits. When understood in this broader perspective, the Green Revolution appears as
the latest chapter in the long history of increasing penetration of Third-World agriculture by the economic
institutions of Western capitalism. Thus the term Green Revolution encompasses not only the increased output
associated with a new technology but also the political, economic, and social changes which have produced and
accompanied it.

The story of the Green Revolution began in 1943 when the Rockefeller Foundation sent a team of agricultural
experts, which Borlaug joined a year later, to Mexico to set up a research program on local grains.4 The
Foundation’s interest in Mexico at the time was stimulated by at least two factors. First was the recent expropriation
of the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil interests by Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas in 1939. Second was the wartime
bid of the Nazis to expand their influence in the hemisphere. The friendly gesture of a development project would
not only help soften rising nationalism but might also help hang onto wartime friends.

The research program was not long in paying off with practical results. By 1951 rust-resistant wheat strains were
being widely distributed, and a new wheat/fertilizer package was developed that gave high yields in the newly
opened irrigation lands of Mexico’s northwestern deserts.5 This initiated a rapid growth in overall wheat yields,
which rose from some 770 pounds per acre in 1952 to some 2,280 in 1964.6 In the newly irrigated areas alone, using
all the necessary inputs, yields climbed to over 2,900 by 1964.7 This increase in yields, coupled with expansion of
acreage, caused dramatic jumps in total wheat production throughout the 1960s.8 Mexico, which had been a sizable
net importer of wheat at the time of the Rockefeller team’s arrival, was able to achieve “self-sufficiency” by the
early 1960s and began to export a portion of her crop.9

More here:

http://libcom.org/files/cleavercontradictions_0.pdf

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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 20, 2021 3:59 pm

“Four Meals from Anarchy”: Rising Food Prices Could Spark Famine, War, and Revolution in 2022
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 18, 2021
Alan Macleod

Image

WASHINGTON – Already dealing with the economic fallout from a protracted pandemic, the rapidly rising prices of food and other key commodities have many fearing that unprecedented political and social instability could be just around the corner next year.

With the clock ticking on student loan and rent debts, the price of a standard cart of food has jumped 6.4% in the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the cost of eating out in a restaurant similarly spiking, by 5.8% since November 2020.

The most notable change has been in the price of meat, with beef costing 26.2% more than it did last year, pork 19.2% more and chicken 14.8% more. Bacon prices have reached historic levels, and are now 36% higher than in 1980, even after adjusting for inflation. And with new animal welfare laws coming into effect soon regarding the minimum space required for pigs, some have predicted widespread shortages of bacon and a further price increase of up to 60%.

Eggs, sugar, and fresh fruit and vegetables have also hit consumers’ wallets, putting the average cost of hosting a Thanksgiving dinner at $53.31 this year, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual survey. This is up from $46.90 in 2020 – a 14% increase and the most expensive it has ever been since the organization began tracking costs in 1985.

Facing unprecedented rises in costs, McDonalds announced that its prices were increasing by around 6%, while Dollar Tree has taken the decision to ditch its branding of over 30 years and roll out a 25% price increase on many of its products, meaning they will cost $1.25.

An unmerry Christmas

Food price rises are merely one aspect of a worrying overall trend, which has seen the consumer price index – a general measure of how much it costs to live an ordinary life in the U.S. – increase by 6.8%, the largest year-on-year spike since 1982. Gasoline costs 58% more than it did last year, while gas heating has increased by over 25% and home electricity costs by 6.8%.

Rising costs disproportionately impact working-class Americans. The poorest fifth of households spend far more of their income on food and groceries than the richest fifth, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 42 million Americans rely on the SNAP program to buy food. Seeing the urgency required, the USDA increased monthly payments in October by an average of $36.

Still, the majority of Americans are already flat broke. Nearly two-thirds of the country currently lives paycheck to paycheck, and just 39% of Americans believe that they could cover a $1,000 emergency. Thus, with rising heating, transport and food costs, Christmas is likely to be particularly lean this year for hundreds of millions of people.

Before the pandemic, one in eight Americans, including one in six children, regularly went hungry. Some 30 million children rely on schools for meals, but with COVID-related closures, that source of nourishment has sporadically been lost. Facing this pressure, many Americans simply have not been able to cope. Feeding America, the nation’s largest chain of food banks, told MintPress that they have been forced to purchase 58% more food than last year to meet ever-rising demand. Katie Fitzgerald, the company’s president and COO, stated:

There are more than 38 million people, including nearly 12 million children, facing hunger in the U.S. Our food banks and partners are resilient and are doing everything they can to continue to provide food to our neighbors in need, but we cannot sustain this level of response without the continued support from the public and private sector.”

The effects have been felt across the country, but not equally. Save The Children identifies East Carroll Parish, Louisiana as the county with the highest food insecurity rate in the nation. In the far northeast of Louisiana, among the bayous and fields just west of the Mississippi River, 40% of children do not get enough food to eat; a rate comparable with Bangladesh and Peru, and higher than in sub-Saharan nations such as Mali. Those on the front lines against hunger told MintPress that rising prices have dramatically affected the amount of groceries they could purchase and distribute. Jen Toth, Executive Director of the Food Bank of Northeast Louisiana, noted:

The higher cost of food has definitely been felt by those living on very low fixed incomes or low hourly wages. Their dollars simply don’t stretch as far, and they aren’t able to buy the same amount of food compared to a year ago. Unlike rent and utilities, food is one expense that a person can control, but unfortunately that can mean in order to be able to pay other bills, a senior or a family won’t have enough money left to buy food.”

A bread-and-butter wave?

The political consequences of hunger are profound and unpredictable but could be the spark that lights a powder keg of anger and resentment that would make the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests look tame by comparison. President Joe Biden’s approval ratings are sinking, with some polls showing he is backed by only 39% of Americans. Even fewer – 31% – think the country is on the right track. Already, Republicans appear to be making the greatly increased cost of food and gasoline a major focus of their attacks against the 46th president. The hashtag “#ThanksgivingTax” trended on social media last month, as conservatives pinned the blame for the costly festivities on their political opponents.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 34 Senate seats, and many governorships and state legislative majorities will be decided in the 2022 midterm elections. Preliminary polling suggests a huge red wave of anger sweeping across the United States. As CNN recently wrote, “Pretty much every single indicator that pointed to a Democratic wave in the 2018 midterms now points to a Republican one in the 2022 midterms.”

Biden has backtracked on debt cancellation promises, while the Democrats, stymied by the stubborn recalcitrance of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), appear to have shelved the Build Back Better agenda until at least the new year. Build Back Better includes a great deal of poverty relief that food banks and other charities have been imploring the government to pass. While the general public often pays little attention to political scandals on the hill, food and gas prices are things that tangibly affect every one of us. These bread-and-butter issues could translate into a wave of public resentment and a slump in support among the Democrats’ voter base.

Food Prices

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Utahns line up at a food drive in Sandy, Utah, March 20, 2021. Rick Bowmer | AP

However, an electoral defeat turning him into a lame duck president might be the least of Biden’s woes. Around the world, rising food prices pushing people to the brink have frequently been the catalyst for mass actions, rebellions and revolutions.

Marion Nestle, professor emerita at New York University and author of the seminal work “Food Politics,” warned:

Rising food prices are not popular and [are] viewed as a sign of poor government. They are already having political consequences in that they are viewed as a criticism of Biden administration policies, whether or not those policies are actually responsible. Hungry people, harking back to Shakespeare, are dangerous. Hunger induces desperation.”

Nestle suggested that the political ramifications of rising prices depend upon how desperate people become. “I don’t have a crystal ball. If people can’t afford to feed their families, and the shortfalls are not made up by food assistance policies, it’s hard to predict what will happen,” she observed. “But it seems to me that a basic function of government is to ensure the welfare of its citizens and that means food, among other necessities.”

Food corps bring home the bacon

Facing increased criticism, the Biden administration has placed the blame for inflated prices on “the greed of the meat conglomerates.” “When people go to the grocery store and they’re trying to buy a pound of meat, two pounds of meat, ten pounds of meat, the prices are higher,” said White House Spokesperson Jen Psaki on Tuesday. “You could call it corporate greed, sure,” she added.

While Republicans have cast this off as shifting responsibility, there is certainly some truth to Psaki’s claims. While working-class Americans have been feeling the strain, food giants have been reveling in profits. The share price of Tyson Foods (the country’s largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef and pork) has moved from $63.05 last Christmas to $86.63 today – a 37% jump. Meanwhile, PepsiCo stock has risen from $145.06 to $171.82 and Nestlé’s from $109.56 to $137.13 over the same period. (Marion Nestle is not related to the food conglomerate).

Also to blame is a worldwide shortage of nitrogen fertilizer, meaning that prices are at least 80% higher than last year. Farmers held off purchasing it in the hopes that costs would drop, but instead were left with the options of paying the greatly increased price or going without and accepting far worse crop yields for 2021– both of which translate into higher prices for the consumer.

The hot and dry summer of 2021, which caused fires across the western part of the continent and parched fields across the midwest, is also a serious factor. The USDA recently announced that the 2021 wheat harvest was America’s worst in 20 years. The record temperatures also destroyed Canada’s agricultural output, with wheat production dropping by 35% and canola by 24%. Higher fuel prices also greatly affected the agricultural sector.

These costs have been passed down to stores, food banks, and, ultimately, the consumer. “Supply chain disruptions, lower inventories at the retail and manufacturer level, costs for fuel, transportation and labor shortages, along with other disruptions, are affecting food banks throughout the country. Freight costs to move donated food have increased over 20%,” Fitzgerald said.

There is little good news on the horizon, as food prices are set to rise again in the near future. The USDA predicts at-home expenses will increase by 1.5% to 2.5% and restaurant prices by between 3% and 4%. It should be noted, however, that the USDA underestimated the 2021 rise considerably.

A global powder keg

If the situation is bad in the United States, it is perilous around the globe. Fully 811 million people, around one tenth of the world’s population, already regularly go hungry, according to the United Nations. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization notes that food prices globally are as high as they have been in living memory, with the cost of nourishment spiking by 37% in the past 12 months.

Much of the world is at risk of famine. The UN is warning that 28 million people in western and central Africa are at risk of starvation if nothing is done. Madagascar is also facing its worst drought in 40 years, and is in need of urgent food aid. Yet with the pandemic interfering with both harvests and global supply lines, this is no easy task.

Meanwhile, Lebanon is facing a range of crises, from an economic collapse to the massive destruction in Beirut caused by the 2020 port explosion. Currency depreciation has seen the Lebanese pound lose 90% of its value and food prices increase by 628% in the previous two years. Across the border in Syria, 12.4 million people – more than half the population – are struggling to find food. Since 2000, the Arab world has witnessed a 91% increase in hunger, to the point where one-third of the region does not get enough food, according to a new UN report. The World Food Program has estimated it needs to find nearly half a billion dollars by February to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.The best predictor of political instability – be it wars, coups, revolutions or revolts – is not GDP or unemployment; it is the price of staple foods. “If I were to pick a single indicator – economic, political, social – that I think will tell us more than any other, it would be the price of grain,” said Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute.

Bread not Bombs

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A fake life-sized tank covered by bread as part of a “Bread not Bombs” protest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 19, 2012. Silvia Izquierdo | AP

Few remember it today, but 11 years ago, the Arab Spring was sparked by rising food insecurity. Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, set himself on fire in the town of Sidi Bouzid, protesting the government of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This prompted a wave of public anger, fueled by empty stomachs. By January, 2011, the country was ablaze with revolution. Ben Ali well understood what was driving the revolt, and announced the price of basic foodstuffs would be lowered. However, it was too little, too late, and he was soon forced to flee to Saudi Arabia.

The protest quickly spread to Egypt, which had seen food prices double between 2007 and 2011. Under President Gamel Abdel Nasser (1956-1970), Egypt had been the world’s largest wheat exporter. However, then-President Mubarak embraced neoliberal globalization, allowing the country to be flooded with subsidized American grain, which caused a crash in the agricultural sector to the point where the country became the planet’s top importer of wheat. This new food insecurity was the major driver of popular anger, with Mubarak being forced out to chants of “bread, freedom and social justice,” a phrase that became the slogan of the movement. Egyptians famously attached loaves to their heads to make “bread helmets” – a symbolic gesture showing the world what the protest was about. Rising food prices also played a major factor in protests in Syria and across the Middle East.

Going further back, the Russian Revolution, one of the most momentous events of the 20th century, began as a Women’s Day protest against bread shortages. However, things soon escalated, as hundreds of thousands in St. Petersburg came out to show their anger. Barely a week later, Czar Nicholas II abdicated. This took political leaders completely by surprise. As late as January 1917, Vladimir Lenin gave a speech to other political exiles in Switzerland, where he claimed that their generation would never see revolution in their lifetimes. Only a few months later, he would become the head of state.

The short-lived provisional government that took power after the czar’s fall enjoyed widespread support at first. Yet their steadfast failure to improve the desperate situation in Russia led to their demise. By the time the provisional government fell, the crisis was so profound that cannibalism was rife in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg. With the slogan “peace, land and bread,” Lenin and the Bolsheviks rose to power and changed history forever.


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Data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization shows a sharp rise in the Food Price Index over the past 20 years

The current spike in global food prices is sharper than it was in 2011. Today, food is even more expensive than it was at the beginning of the Arab Spring, and most signs point towards continued increases in 2022.

The British government has historically maintained that the United Kingdom is only ever “four meals from anarchy” – meaning that the country would descend into widespread disorder, rioting and protest if stores were to run out of food for more than a day. While there is little to no indication of that happening in the U.S., hunger is on the rise, and with it political disenchantment. What form that will take remains to be seen. Globally, however, the situation is as grave as it has been in living memory, and it seems inconceivable that there will be no political ramifications to the shortages. If so, it could make the Arab Spring look mild by comparison.

Feature photo | A protester holds bread during a demonstration in Tunis, Jan. 26, 2021. Hedi Ayari | AP

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/12/ ... n-in-2022/
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 22, 2022 2:09 pm

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Brazilian Landless Movement | MR Online

“When I Have the Land”: 200 years in search of Agrarian Reform
Posted Apr 22, 2022 by João Pedro Stedile

Originally published: Resumen Latinoamericano and the Third World on April 17, 2022 (more by Resumen Latinoamericano and the Third World)

On April 17, 1996, 19 peasants of the Brazilian Landless Movement were assassinated in the municipality of Eldorado Dos Carajás, in the south of the state of Pará. The event took place during a peaceful mobilization organized to demand the expropriation of idle land from local landowners. To this day, the secular peasant struggle for agrarian reform continues to be persecuted and criminalized in one of the regions with the highest rates of land concentration in the world.

Twenty-six years after that tragic day, and on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the founding of La Via Campesina International, ALAI shares a text by João Pedro Stedile–historical leader of the MST, economist and specialist in the field–which systematizes some of the main historical experiences of agrarian reform; from anti-colonial to radical, from popular to moderate, from those linked to national liberation processes to those of a more clearly socialist character. The article in question is part of the book “Experiencias de reforma agraria en el mundo”, first volume of a unique research program of its kind, published in Portuguese by Expressão Popular and in Spanish by Batalla de Ideas.

Agrarian Reform can be characterized as a government program that seeks to democratize land ownership in society in order to guarantee access to land, distributing it to those who want to produce on it or use it.

To achieve this objective, the main legal instrument used in practically all existing experiences is the expropriation by the State of large estates and large estates and their redistribution among landless peasants, small farmers with little land and rural wage earners in general.

There are, however, various ways for the State to obtain land in order to eliminate large-scale concentration. Among these, the first -and most widely used- is the instrument of expropriation. Once the criteria for the classification of large estates and/or large properties to be distributed have been established, the government issues a decree expropriating, that is, transferring the private ownership of that area from the estanciero/capitalist landowner to the State. For this transfer of ownership to occur, the government compensates the former owner by means of value criteria defined by the laws of each country.

These values may be symbolic or may be the same prices practiced in the market. Once the ownership of the land has been transferred to the State, the State organizes a project to distribute the land to the landless farming families in the region who claim it.

The second instrument is expropriation or confiscation. This is when the ownership of the property of the large landowners is transferred to the State without any compensation or payment of values. This situation depends on the existing legislation in each country and is a punishment for irregularities practiced by the owner.

There are intermediate cases in which the government does not pay for the land, but compensates the owner for the assets contained in the property, such as houses, sheds, fences. In Brazil, there are cases of this type when the estancieros enter public land, without having the legal right to it; the government then removes them from the public land but indemnifies them for the existing assets.

In the Brazilian case, the expropriation takes place by means of a decree that compulsorily transfers the ownership of the land to the State, by means of compensation. There is even the modality of negotiated purchase with the owner (Decree No. 433, January 24, 1992), in which compensation values are negotiated without the need for a decree of expropriation. The possibility of confiscation, which does not provide for payments, occurs in Brazil in the case of farms used for smuggling, activities related to drug trafficking or cultivation of psychoactive substances such as marijuana, for example.

For ten years, the Constitutional Amendment Proposal No. 438/2001, already approved in the Senate, which would impose the expropriation or confiscation of all lands where labor regimes analogous to slavery are found, has been waiting for a vote in the Chamber of Deputies. The parliamentary bench linked to the latifundia has prevented the vote on this bill.

After obtaining the land from the latifundia, the State, in the name of society, carries out the distribution of the land. In the historical experiences, as we will see throughout the texts, there were multiple forms of organization of these production units. In most cases the distribution to peasant families in family units was maintained, in others this form was coupled with the location of houses in agrovillages, villages, communities, with a small plot of land for vegetable gardens and raising domestic animals. There are organizations of collective association, production cooperatives or cooperatives for the commercialization of production and individual organization of work, social enterprises, state enterprises, etc. These different forms could complement each other in the same country’s agrarian reform process, or some were predominant, depending on the country. The forms of land production and the organization of production do not depend on laws, but on the correlation of forces of the classes in society, on the development of the productive forces in the countryside and also on the agricultural-territorial vocation of each region.

In the same way, the legal status of post-agrarian reform land varies from one country to another. There are cases of distribution to peasants and transformation into private land owners, who after a certain historical period could even buy and sell plots of land. There are cases of concession of use by the State, with the right of inheritance but without the right to buy and sell. There are cases of collective ownership by families. And cases in which the land remains the property of the whole Nation and the State merely administers the concession of use for cooperatives, families, etc.

Types of Agrarian Reform

The term “agrarian reform” was adopted during the 20th century as a synthesis of programs or proposals for the democratization of access to land in each country. In the past, even in earlier modes of production (such as Asia or even in the mercantile stage of capitalism) there have been historical experiences of democratization of access to land in various societies, but without using the term “agrarian reform”. These experiences were more connected to the notion of the right to work on the land. There are references in biblical texts to the laws in force in those peoples regarding the periodic redistribution of land, and there are also references in the literature to similar processes applied in the Persian civilization.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, in the so-called modern history, but especially since the development of industrial capitalism, many countries and governments implemented land reform programs. These programs, which emerged in the 19th century, were intended to guarantee the right to land and to build more democratic societies by proceeding to a fairer distribution of a good of nature that, strictly speaking, should be for the entire population living in that territory.

The characteristics and nature of the processes of land distribution and expropriation vary greatly from one country to another, depending on the historical circumstances of each country and the geographic and edaphoclimatic conditions1. Therefore, on the basis of the various experiences of agrarian reform that have taken place around the world, we can put them together and classify them into different types of agrarian reform: a) classical; b) anti-colonial; c) radical; d) popular; e) partial or moderate; f) national liberation; g) socialist. In addition to these, the debate also includes rural settlement policies and colonization projects.

Classical agrarian reform

This refers to those government programs for the expropriation and massive distribution of land that occurred during the process considered as “classic” industrialization. This type of agrarian reform was the first carried out by the bourgeois state. Its main characteristic is that these reforms were made with legislation applied by the governments of the industrial bourgeoisie. The main objective of these governments was to apply republican and democratic law to guarantee all citizens access to land and also to develop the internal market for industry, with the distribution of land and income to peasants who had been deprived of property until then.

In general, all classical agrarian reform experiences were massive and broad. That is, they established a maximum size limit for rural property and expropriated all land above that limit. On the other hand, they sought to distribute and serve peasant families who wanted to work on the land. This type of agrarian reform is also characterized by its rapid implementation over a certain period of time, generally three to five years. From the political point of view, its implementation represented an alliance between the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie and the peasants against the interests of the rural oligarchy, which concentrated land ownership.

Classical land reforms began in the industrialized countries of Western Europe in the middle of the 19th century and lasted until after World War II. The Land Act of Abraham Lincoln’s administration, enacted in the midst of the Civil War in 1862, can also be considered a classic land reform. This law guaranteed every citizen living in the United States the right to access 100 acres of land (the equivalent of about 80 hectares). No more and no less. And that was enforced by the citizens themselves. The aim was to break the economic power of the southern slaveholding estates and to seek an equitable distribution of land in the western agricultural frontier, expropriated from indigenous peoples through their removal or confinement to reservations. Despite its origin, this law benefited more than 6 million farm families from 1862 to 1910. It distributed more than 300 million hectares of land.

Agrarian reform book

Between World War I and World War II, some twenty Eastern European countries enforced land reform laws through local bourgeois governments that distributed land to peasants. In this case, it is suspected that the main motivation was not the development of the domestic market, as these were countries with low industrialization, but the fear that the Russian Revolution of 1917 would spread to neighboring countries.

After World War II, the U.S. interventionist military forces promoted land reform laws in some Asian countries that they invaded and controlled during the war. And so, under manu militari, extensive land reforms were carried out in Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan Province of China, which being an island was protected by the U.S. military from the Maoist People’s Revolution. After 1956, land reform also took place in South Korea.

Anti-colonial land reform
During the processes of political independence of the Latin American colonies there were also some experiences of agrarian reform. They were promoted in the context of a new political order of nationalist vocation that tried to expropriate the lands of the subaltern landowners to the metropolis, distributing them among the local landless peasants. The largest of all such experiences was Haiti, which began in 1804. It was very important for the Haitian population, as it combined the liberation of slavery from the French political yoke with the establishment of the republic and the massive distribution of land to the people to peasants and former slaves.

In Paraguay, during the republican government of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, there was also an attempt at Agrarian Reform, with the distribution of land to peasants of Guaraní origin, but in a limited way.

In Uruguay, during the government of José Artigas, since 1815, there was also an attempt, even more limited, to distribute land to Creole peasants on the lands of Spanish ranchers.

Radical Agrarian Reforms

Characterized by the attempt to eradicate the large estates and distribute the land by the peasants themselves. These processes have excluded the need for the bourgeois state to create agrarian reform laws, which take place in the midst of broader popular revolts.

The first historical example of radical land reform is that of the Mexican Revolution, which took place from 1910 to 1920, when the peasants, led by “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south, armed themselves and under the slogan “Land for those who work it” distributed the land among themselves, expelling or shooting the landowners. Even with the Mexican Revolution defeated and its leaders assassinated, the national bourgeoisie that finally took power had to respect the distribution of land that had been made without the law and without the government of the State.

The second experience is the Popular Revolution in Bolivia, between 1952 and 1954, when, repeating the Mexican case, the peasants took up arms and marched on the capital, La Paz, imposed a revolutionary government and in the process expropriated all the large properties and distributed them among themselves, without law and without the power of the State. In this case, history repeated itself. The revolution was defeated, the peasants returned to their communities, but the new power respected the land distribution made during the process.

Popular Agrarian Reform
It consists of the massive distribution of land to the peasants in the context of the processes of change of power in which an alliance was formed between popular, nationalist and peasant governments. These processes resulted in progressive and popular agrarian reform laws, implemented by combining state action with the collaboration of peasant movements.

Where this type of agrarian reform took place, it did not necessarily affect the capitalist system and its extension was related to the processes of social, economic and political change in each country. Some of these reforms have had results that continue to this day, others have been defeated and the expropriated large landowners have recovered their lands.

There are many examples of this type of agrarian reform. Here we cite only the most notorious or influential cases in other countries and governments. The most important experience of popular land reform was that which occurred during the process of the Chinese Revolution from 1930 to 1950. As the Red Army and the Communist Party liberated territories, land distribution processes were also applied, which united the power of the people’s revolutionary government with the peasants, who were also involved in the Red Army. The main objective was to secure land for all peasants living in rural villages, the basis of the social organization of the Chinese hinterland, and through it to eliminate the rent paid to landowners and create conditions for food production for all.

In the 1950s there were experiences of popular land reform on the banks of the Nile, during the Nasser government in Egypt; and in northern Vietnam, in the areas liberated from the French. There was also an attempt at agrarian reform in Guatemala during the short term government of Jacobo Arbenz (1951-1954).

Then, in the 1960s, we had the best known experiences of Cuba, which throughout its history made three Agrarian Reforms of different nature and extent but the first one, shortly after the 1959 Revolution, was essentially of a popular nature. The other more recent experience was that of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua between 1979 and 1989, which also developed a popular agrarian reform process.

Partial or moderate agrarian reform
Immediately after World War II, with the effervescence of the class struggle and the resurgence of revolutionary movements in several countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, local governments of a bourgeois nature and imperialist allies were forced to implement land reform policies. However, these were generally not of a massive and comprehensive character, since these governments were also composed of rural oligarchies.

The Kennedy administration in the United States, during the 1960s, even pressured its conservative allies to implement land reform policies as a way of containing the momentum for change in the continent. His administration proposed the need for classical land reform at a famous conference held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 1961, believing that, with the majority of the population being rural, land reform could produce reforms that would prevent more radical changes, as had recently occurred in Cuba.

At this conference, the Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences (IICA), based in Costa Rica, was created to support these processes. Thus, there were some attempts at agrarian reform in some countries, but they were partial, without reaching the majority of landowners, and few peasant families benefited.

These experiences include several cases of agrarian reform that occurred in Latin America in the period 1964-1970, such as in Chile during the government of Eduardo Frei (1964-1970), in Peru during the military government of Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) and in Ecuador (1963-1966) and Honduras (1963-1980), governed by the military junta. The Mexican agrarian reform carried out during the government of General Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) had a certain breadth; it was administered by the progressive government, but it was not able to attend to all landless peasant families.

Agrarian Reform of National Liberation

Experiences that took place basically in African countries, since the 1960s, during the process of struggle for independence and decolonization. In the context of these victories, most governments seized used land, “owned” by European settlers, usually white capitalist farmers. These lands were distributed in various ways to communities and tribal leaders. In some cases, more democratic criteria were followed, which sought to satisfy all the peasants who wanted land.

The most significant cases were the national liberation and land distribution processes in Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Libya and Algeria. However, there were also national liberation processes in which, after independence, the new rulers made deals with white capitalist farmers and did not distribute land to the peasants, as happened in Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Socialist Agrarian Reform

Carried out in several countries in the context of revolutionary processes that also sought the overcoming of capitalism and the construction of the socialist mode of production.

Socialist agrarian reforms are based on the principle that land belongs to the whole nation. Therefore, there can be no private ownership of land, no buying and selling of land. And the State organizes the various forms of land use and social ownership. The most widely adopted social forms of use and ownership were grassroots associations in small groups of families, self-managed social enterprises, production cooperatives and state enterprises. Each country, according to its objective and subjective conditions, had the predominance of one or another form of social ownership.

In the processes of socialist agrarian reform, production was planned by the State according to the needs of the whole society and induced to be applied by the different forms of production and land organization.

The best known cases of this type of agrarian reform were the experiences in Russia, especially under the government of Josef Stalin (1924-1953), but there were also experiences in Yugoslavia, North Korea, East Germany, Ukraine and other countries of the so-called “Soviet bloc”.

China attempted socialist land reform during the Cultural Revolution period of the 1960s, but was unsuccessful; then, in the 1980s, the country returned to its origins with the people’s land reform. Cuba also attempted to move toward socialist agrarian reform since 1975, stimulating new collective forces of production and increasing the weight of state enterprises in the countryside, especially in sugar cane production; however, after the 1989 crisis, it returned to the previous processes of popular agrarian reform.

Rural settlement policy

These are those government programs that seek to distribute land to peasant families, using the expropriation or purchase of land from farmers. However, they are limited in scope and do not affect the structure of land ownership. They are partial policies that serve peasants but are not massive, so they work more to solve localized social problems or to meet the demands of mobilized populations that put political pressure on the government.

The U.S. government, in particular, has encouraged this policy in many countries through World Bank actions and resources, which help finance the purchase of land by farmers. The World Bank programs became known as land credit, Land Bank, and so on, and have been applied in the countries with the highest tension in land disputes, such as Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, Guatemala, Colombia, and Indonesia.

Colonization projects

In several sparsely populated countries and where there are large areas available that are still in the public domain or state ownership, programs have been established to distribute these lands for the use of farmers. The lands are public, there is still no private ownership, they are uninhabited or governments often appropriate them from native populations, indigenous peoples who lived there since time immemorial. This is what happened, for example, in the distribution of land in the western United States between 1862 and 1910, and what happens in Brazil to this day, with the distribution of public lands in the Legal Amazon, in colonization projects.

Many governments established programs to distribute these still unproductive areas of land to farmers, turning them into private owners and settlers of frontier agricultural regions. The distribution of this land constitutes colonization projects, which do not affect the latifundia and land ownership structure. Agrarian reform programs involve the democratization of access to land and the elimination of latifundia.

Source: alai

https://mronline.org/2022/04/22/when-i-have-the-land/
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 04, 2022 3:01 pm

THE GLOBAL SOUTH ON THE BRINK OF FAMINE: A CRISIS IN THE MAKING

Ernest Cazal

Jun 3, 2022 , 4:05 p.m.

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The global food industry is controlled and owned by a few multinational food producers and distributors (Photo: File)

While the war in Ukraine has highlighted the global food supply disaster, this was brewing long before the current phase of the conflict. The investigations of different authors, such as the Venezuelan Clara Sánchez, give an account of this , taking into account the operation of the current agro-industrial model on a global scale.

The food supply chain has a global form that has been suffering a deep crisis since the economic-financial crisis broke out in the United States in 2008, since it was interrupted by the loss of profits and the reduction of investment in that sector due to part of multinational food companies, increasing pressure on food producers in the Global South.

Before the pandemic dealt a serious blow to this global food supply chain, the capitalist system that supported it was already cracking with rising oil prices, exploding demand for corn-based biofuels, high shipping, speculation in financial markets, low grain stocks, severe weather disruptions in some major grain producers, and a rise in protectionist trade policies.

Under this systemic framework, the stability of prices and production in the sector had its ups and downs. Rather, the instability caused by the pandemic collapsed the model, triggering costs at all levels of the supply chain, including stopping the shipment of fertilizers to all latitudes.

Added to the consequences of covid on the planet is the conflict caused by NATO in Ukraine against Russia, which puts a terrible famine at risk in the poorest countries on the planet.

For example, North Africa is one of the largest importers of wheat produced in these Eurasian countries; Specifically, the sub-Saharan part is facing an acute food crisis, especially in urban areas. The fertilizer factor can also erode the amounts, due to the short circuit in the supply chain mentioned, in addition to the low investment due to the high production costs and the low profits for large and medium-sized farmers.

Other countries in conflict have also been hit by critical famine:

*Yemen, which has been mired in a war imposed by the Saudi-Emirati coalition, backed by the United States. This country has been de facto blocked by sea, which prevents grain imports, specifically from Russia and Ukraine.
*Northern Ethiopia is one of the poorest regions in the world, facing ongoing conflict and a humanitarian crisis.
*In Afghanistan, infant mortality rates are skyrocketing due to the collapse of the economy and basic health services. Recall that, after the humiliating withdrawal of the US military, the Treasury Department seized billions of dollar reserves so that the Taliban in government would not access their own vaults.
*Myanmar's GDP contracted by 18% after the military coup in February 2021.

But there is more. According to the United Nations (UN) World Food Program , millions of people are at risk of starvation. The "undernourished" increased by 118 million people in 2020, after remaining virtually unchanged for several years. Current estimates now put that number at about 100 million more.

Although war has always been the main driver of extreme hunger, the Western offensive against Russia with Ukraine as a proxy actor increases the risk of starvation and famine for many millions more.

THE NATO WAR FACTOR AGAINST RUSSIA

Recall that Russia and Ukraine account for more than 30% of world grain exports , that Russia alone provides 13% of world fertilizers and 11% of global oil exports, and Ukraine supplies half of the world's sunflower oil. .

With the total war that the West is carrying out against Russia, canceling it on all economic, financial and commercial fronts, plus the conflict itself on the ground in Ukraine, the planet could face a scenario in which the prices of food, fuel and fertilizers would stay high for years.

This last factor, we repeat, is essential for a globalized economy like the current one, today in crisis. David Laborde, a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, noted that "the biggest threat facing the food system is the disruption of the fertilizer trade."

He said this is because "wheat will affect some countries. The fertilizer problem can affect all farmers around the world and cause a decline in the production of all foods, not just wheat."

The threat to the world's fertilizer supply illustrates how energy products are an essential input in virtually every economic sector. Since Russia is one of the world's largest exporters of not only food but also energy, the Global North's "sanctions" against the country have a knock-on inflationary effect throughout the world economy.

It is not for nothing that almost all the countries of the Global South refused to support the unilateral sanctions of the United States against Russia. This denial must be extended to the entire world to prevent further devastation.


IT'S CAPITALISM, STUPID

Economist Michael Roberts makes a "call for 'major grain producers' to solve logistical bottlenecks, free up stocks and resist the temptation to impose food export restrictions. Oil-producing nations should increase fuel supplies to help reduce fuel, fertilizer and shipping costs. And governments, international institutions and even the private sector must offer social protection through food or financial aid."

But, says Roberts, "none of these proposals are being carried out. The big capitalist powers are doing very little to help these poor countries with millions of hungry and malnourished people. Late last month, the European Commission announced a package aid of €1.5 billion , along with additional measures, to support EU farmers and protect the bloc's food security Leaders of the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations World Food Program The United Nations and the World Trade Organization called for urgent and coordinated action to address food security. Good words, but no action."

He mentions that "a real help would be to cancel the debts of poor countries. But all that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the great powers have offered is a suspension of debt service: the debts remain, but the payments can be delayed. . Even this 'relief' is pathetic."

*In total, in the last two years, the G20 governments have suspended only 10.3 billion dollars in debt. In the first year of the pandemic alone, low-income countries racked up a debt load totaling $860 billion, according to the World Bank .

Another of the IMF's infamous solutions was to increase the size of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), injecting $650 billion in aid. But because of the "quota" system for the distribution of SDRs, they are disproportionately skewed toward rich countries. A fact that illustrates it very well: the entire African continent received less SDRs than the German Bundesbank .

The restrictions due to the total war of the United States against Russia (causing shortages) and the debts (converging with inflation) of the poor countries and rising emerging economies will cause the Global South, sooner rather than later, to receive a punishment systemic in the department of hunger.

In a recent interview, another economist, Michael Hudson, drew attention to the existing dependence of the Global South (Latin America, Africa, and many Asian countries) on the orbit of the United States and NATO:

"Sanctions against Russia have the effect of damaging these countries' balance of trade by dramatically increasing the prices of oil, gas, and food (as well as the prices of many metals) that they must import. Meanwhile, rising rates interest rate from the United States is attracting financial savings and bank credits into securities denominated in US dollars.This has raised the exchange rate of the dollar, making it much more difficult for the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Global South to pay the service of the dollarized debt that expires this year.

"This forces these countries to choose: either run out of energy and food to pay foreign creditors, thus putting international financial interests before their domestic economic survival, or default on their debts, as happened in the 1980s after that Mexico announced in 1982 that it could not pay foreign bondholders.


The choice, in the latter case, seems easy, but it is not, if one takes into account the fact that default would disgrace certain countries in Western credit markets, dollarized to the core.

That is why we must understand that the problem does not lie there, but in the capitalist production of food (and in the capital system itself), since it drastically increased the productivity of food and turned food production into a global company, with a globalized supply chain highly dependent on corporate producers, to the detriment of other modes of production.

This now neoliberalized model brought periodic and recurring production and investment crises that created a new form of food insecurity. Hunger is no longer attributable to nature and climate but to the result of inequalities in capitalist production and social organization on a global scale. The poorest are the ones who bear the brunt.

Roberts has no hesitation in concluding that "this is a global crisis and it requires global action in the same way that the pandemic should have been addressed and the climate crisis needs to. But such global coordination is impossible while the global food industry is controlled and owned by a few multinational food producers and distributors and the world economy is headed for another recession.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/el ... en-ciernes

Google Translator

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Putin Says the West Is Blaming Russia for Its Mistakes

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On Friday the Russian President said during a televised interview that the West is trying to blame the country for the current. Jun. 3, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@_AfricanSoil

Published 3 June 2022 (14 hours 50 minutes ago)

On Friday, the Russian President said that the West has been trying to blame Russia for its several mistakes.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, said on Friday during a televised interview with Rossiya-24 channel that the West tries to make Moscow liable for the numerous mistakes that they have made.

Since the beginning of the Russian special operation in Ukrainian territory, most of the European community and the U.S. has taken some retaliatory measures that have resulted in the worsening of the crisis in the food and fertilizer sectors, as Russia accounts for about 25 percent of the world's fertilizer production market.

"Our partners have made a bunch of mistakes themselves, and now they are looking for someone to blame. And of course, the most convenient candidate in this regard is Russia," said the Russian President referring to the actual crisis in the food and fertilizers sectors.

"And say, as for potash fertilizers, as [Belarusian President] Alexander Griroryevich Lukashenko told me - it should be checked, of course, but I believe it is true - Russia and Belarus [have] 45% of the global market in potash fertilizers. It's a huge amount," added Putin.


The Russian head of state "as soon as it became clear that there will be no fertilizers of ours on the world market, the prices for both fertilizers and food immediately climbed, as there are no fertilizers, there will be no needed amounts of agricultural products."

Putin concluded by saying that "one thing triggers another, but Russia has nothing to do with it."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Put ... -0011.html

No Access to East European Fertilizers Poses Risk to the World

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The chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Maximo Torero, warned that the world could face hardship due to the lack of access to fertilizers from Eastern Europe. Jun. 6, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@visegrad24

Published 3 June 2022 (12 hours 36 minutes ago)

Without fertilizers from Russia and Belarus, the world could be hit hard, the chief economist of the UN's FAO warned.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) chief economist Maximo Torero said that countries worldwide might run into trouble due to a lack of access to fertilizers from Eastern Europe.

"If in the next month or two we are not able to get all the fertilizers that key exporting countries need, then we will face a significant challenge. And that's for the next harvest, for 2023, so the main concern for us is 2023," the official said.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Rebeca Grynspan, met with Russian officials in Moscow earlier this week to address the issue of unblocking access to world markets for Russian fertilizers and wheat.

Amid allegations that Russia is blocking grain shipments from Ukrainian ports, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the country is ready to help provide a free-flowing export of Ukrainian grain across the ports under its control.



Putin has also said that it is necessary to lift sanctions against Moscow to boost supplies to the world market, noting that Western countries have used a short-sighted, stupid, and wrong policy by sanctioning Russian fertilizers.

According to an article released Thursday by the British newspaper The Guardian, most Western countries, whose economies are reliant on gas imports from Russia, have experienced low economic growth and high inflation, coupled with rising unemployment, due to the energy sanctions imposed on Russia.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/No- ... -0015.html

African Union Head Calls for Lifting of Sanctions on Russia

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In a special TV interview on Friday evening following a meeting with African Union head Macky Sall in Sochi, Putin accused Western leaders of trying "to shift the responsibility for what is happening in the world food market". | Photo: Twitter @ferozwala

Published 4 June 2022 (6 hours 41 minutes ago)

Senegalese President Macky Sall highlighted the relationship that exists between Russia and African countries, recalling that the Eurasian nation “played a tremendous role in the independence of the African continent and this will never be forgotten”.


The President of Senegal and of the African Union, Macky Sall, held a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Friday and called for the lifting of sanctions imposed on Moscow, specifically those affecting the export of wheat and fertilizers.

During the meeting, held in the city of Sochi, the Senegalese president declared that "there are two main problems: the (food) crisis and the sanctions. We must work together to solve these problems so that sanctions on food products are lifted."

"The sanctions against Russia have worsened this situation and now we have no access to grain from Russia, mainly wheat. And, most importantly, we have no access to fertilizers. The situation was bad and now it has worsened, creating a threat to food security in Africa," he warned.


Sall highlighted the relationship that exists between Russia and African countries, recalling that the Eurasian nation "played a tremendous role in the independence of the African continent and this will never be forgotten."

For his part, President Putin stressed that his country has always supported Africa and backed it in its struggle against colonialism.

"Africa's role on the international stage and in the political arena in general is growing. We believe that Africa as a whole and its countries, with which we traditionally share friendly relations, have enormous potential and we will continue to develop our relations," he emphasized.

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After the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, Western countries imposed several packages of sanctions against Moscow. According to the Russian president, these measures aggravated the food crisis in the world, affirming that this problem began to be generated during the pandemic.

Russia and Ukraine together account for 29 percent of the world's wheat exports, which is why African nations depend on this grain.

Especially now that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have warned of a high risk of starvation in countries such as Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, due to the extreme drought they are experiencing.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Afr ... -0001.html

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Sanctions Now Weapons of Mass Starvation

US and allied sanctions against Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine have not achieved their objectives. Instead, they are worsening economic stagnation, inflation and hunger worldwide.

May 31
Sanctions Now Weapons of Mass Starvation

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, May 31 2022 (IPS) - US and allied economic sanctions against Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine have not achieved their declared objectives. Instead, they are worsening economic stagnation and inflation worldwide. Worse, they are exacerbating hunger, especially in Africa.

Sanctions cut both ways

Unless approved by the UN Security Council (UNSC), sanctions are not authorized by international law. With Russia’s veto in the UNSC, unilateral sanctions by the US and its allies have surged following the Ukraine invasion.

During 1950-2016, ‘comprehensive’ trade sanctions have cut bilateral trade between sanctioning countries and their victims by 77% on average. The US has imposed more sanctions regimes, and for longer periods, than any other country.

Unilateral imposition of sanctions has accelerated over the past 15 years. During 1990-2005, the US imposed about a third of sanctions regimes around the world, with the European Union (EU) also significant.

The US has increased using sanctions since 2016, imposing them on more than 1,000 entities or individuals yearly, on average, from 2016 to 2020 – nearly 80% more than in 2008-2015. The one-term Trump administration raised the US share of all new sanctions to almost half from a third before.

During January-May 2022, 75 countries implemented 19,268 restrictive trade measures. Such measures on food and fertilizers (85%) greatly exceed those on raw materials and fuels (15%). Unsurprisingly, the world now faces less supplies and higher prices for fuel and food.

Monetary authorities have been raising interest rates to curb inflation, but such efforts do not address the main causes of higher prices now. Worse, they are likely to deepen and prolong stagnation, increasing the likelihood of ‘stagflation’.

Sanctions were supposed to bring Russia to its knees. But less than three months after the rouble plunged, its exchange rate is back to pre-war levels, rising from the ‘rouble rubble’ promised by Western economic warmongers. With enough public support, the Russian regime is in no hurry to submit to sanctions.

Sanctions pushing up food prices

War and sanctions are now the main drivers of increased food insecurity. Russia and Ukraine produce almost a third of world wheat exports, nearly 20% of corn (maize) exports and close to 80% of sunflower seed products, including oil. Related Black Sea shipping blockades have helped keep Russian exports down.

All these have driven up world prices for grain and oilseeds, raising food costs for all. As of 19 May, the Agricultural Price Index was up 42% from January 2021, with wheat prices 91% higher and corn up 55%.

The World Bank’s April 2022 Commodity Markets Outlook notes the war has changed world production, trade and consumption. It expects prices to be historically high, at least through 2024, worsening food insecurity and inflation.

Western bans on Russian oil have sharply increased energy prices. Both Russia and its ally, Belarus – also hit by economic sanctions – are major suppliers of agricultural fertilizers – including 38% of potassic fertilizers, 17% of compound fertilizers, and 15% of nitrogenous fertilizers.

Fertilizer prices surged in March, up nearly 20% from two months before, and almost three times higher than in March 2021! Less supplies at higher prices will set back agricultural production for years.

With food agriculture less sustainable, e.g., due to global warming, sanctions are further reducing output and incomes, besides raising food prices in the short and longer term.

Sanctions hurt poor most

Even when supposedly targeted, sanctions are blunt instruments, often generating unintended consequences, sometimes contrary to those intended. Hence, sanctions typically fail to achieve their stated objectives.

Many poor and food insecure countries are major wheat importers from Russia and Ukraine. The duo provided 90% of Somalia’s imports, 80% of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s, and about 40% of both Yemen’s and Ethiopia’s.

It appears the financial blockade on Russia has hurt its smaller and more vulnerable Central Asian neighbours more: 4.5 million from Uzbekistan, 2.4 million from Tajikistan, and almost a million from Kyrgyzstan work in Russia. Difficulties sending remittances cause much hardship to their families at home.

Although not their declared intent, US measures during 1982–2011 hurt the poor more. Poverty levels in sanctioned countries have been 3.8 percentage points higher than in similar countries.

Sanctions also hurt children and other disadvantaged groups much more. Research in 69 countries found sanctions lowered infant weight and increased the likelihood of death before age three. Unsurprisingly, economic sanctions violate the UN Convention on the Rights of Children.

A study of 98 less developed and newly industrialized countries found life expectancy in affected countries reduced by about 3.5 months for every additional year under UNSC sanctions. Thus, an average five-year episode of UNSC approved sanctions reduced life expectancy by 1.2–1.4 years.

World hunger rising
As polemical recriminations between Russia and the US-led coalition intensify over rising food and fuel prices, the world is racing to an “apocalyptic” human “catastrophe”. Higher prices, prolonged shortages and recessions may trigger political upheavals, or worse.

The UN Secretary-General has emphasized, “We need to ensure a steady flow in food and energies through open markets by lifting all unnecessary export restrictions, directing surpluses and reserves to those in need and keeping a lead on food prices to curb market volatility”.

Despite declining World Bank poverty numbers, the number of undernourished has risen from 643 million in 2013 to 768 million in 2020. Up to 811 million people are chronically hungry, while those facing ‘acute food insecurity’ have more than doubled since 2019 from 135 million to 276 million.

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, OXFAM warned, the “hunger virus” could prove even more deadly. The pandemic has since pushed tens of millions into food insecurity.

In 2021, before the Ukraine war, 193 million people in 53 countries were deemed to be facing ‘food crisis or worse’. With the war and sanctions, 83 million – or 43% – more are expected to be victims by the end of 2022.

Economic sanctions are the modern equivalent of ancient sieges, trying to starve populations into submission. The devastating impacts of sieges on access to food, health and other basic services are well-known.

Sieges are illegal under international humanitarian law. The UNSC has unanimously adopted resolutions demanding the immediate lifting of sieges, e.g., its 2014 Resolution 2139 against civilian populations in Syria.

But veto-wielding permanent Council members are responsible for invading Ukraine and unilaterally imposing sanctions. Hence, the UNSC will typically not act on the impact of sanctions on billions of innocent civilians. No one seems likely to protect them against sanctions, today’s weapons of mass starvation.

https://jomodevplus.substack.com/p/sanc ... vation?s=r

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NATO’s Mission Imperative: Break Russia Even If Millions Worldwide Perish
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 3, 2022
Phil Butler

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“There can be no peace in Europe without Russia” was once the mantra of European political philosophers. Now, the desperate liberal order is determined to smother out this logic with all or nothing propaganda and a proxy war NATO strategists say will weaken Russia. Unfortunately, their strategy will probably starve half the world to death.

The other day, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said “bystander countries” are suffering due to sanctions against Russia. The European Union’s aggressive support of the American sanction regime aimed at severing of economic ties try and force Moscow our of Ukraine is already causing serious collateral damage to far distant states. And while western analysts and leaders prefer to blame Russia for the situation, many dissenting nations understand Vladimir Putin’s hand was forced by the NATO cadre.

Not only have millions been forced to flee Ukraine, tens of thousands more have died needlessly because of the United States and NATO arming Ukraine’s military against neighboring Russia. Ramaphosa, and other African leaders see the situation for what it is, a desperate moment made more devastating because of the great game. Africa, which has already seen millions pushed into desperation by the COVID-19 pandemic, is now being devastated by rising food costs caused in part by disruptions linked to the Ukraine conflict.

Sadly, instead of trying to work a peace agreement in the Russia/Ukraine affair, the EU is using the situation to try and sway African nations back into the fold of former colonial powers. This is evidenced by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ‘visit to South Africa on the final leg of a trip to the continent that aimed at just this. Russia and Ukraine account for nearly a third of global wheat and barley, as well as two-thirds of the world’s supply of sunflower oil used for cooking. And despite the fact Russia is opening sea corridors to let out shipments from Ukraine, western propaganda channels continue to harp on how Russia is causing shortages.

Long lines of transfer trucks leaving Ukraine for Poland and Moldova are not in western news, but on social media via Tik Tok and other channels. And with Russian media broadcasts cut off in the west, the public in Europe, and the United States think Putin is trying to starve people. In Asia, most African nations, Latin America, and especially in the BRICS nations, it’s a different story.

At the end of the day the situation is unacceptable whether or not you agree or disagree with Russia’s position on Ukraine. The Joe Biden administration has thrown the kitchen sink at Russia to try and unseat Vladimir Putin, but grain shortages and other strife were inevitable even if Kyiv and Moscow had no beef. The United Nations Security Council has said the world has a 10-week supply of wheat, and Sara Menker, CEO of Gro Intelligence told the council Russia’s special operation in Ukraine “did not start a food security crisis.” She said the conflict has exacerbated the already serious problem, which she called “seismic.”

So, Germany and the NATO pack politicizing a desperate situation serves to spotlight the already unhinged economic and physical war against the Russians. This wolfpack led by Joe Biden and his handlers, will be responsible for the misery and death of millions even if World War III does not break out. I am not alone in suggesting that Biden and the others could have stopped all of this before Putin gave the order to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.

Now, not only is my country blaming the Russians for a war created by Washington in the first place, we are pointing the finger at a nation that essentially feeds the world saying, “Look, they are using food against us!” Ukraine mines its own harbors. American, British, French, and German missiles and cannons fling ordinance all over Ukraine to kill Russians, and it’s only Putin’s men blocking wheat shipments?

Russia has something like 10,000 sanctions leveled upon the country by NATO, essentially. These sanctions impeded shipments abroad even before the Ukraine crisis turned to open warfare. Fertilizer shipments played a role, as did banking restrictions leveraged against Russian entrepreneurs who operate logistics or supply businesses. And US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Putin is alone in “weaponizing” food shipments. Even if he is not lying, what this means is the Biden administration and NATO are just stupid not to have realized millions would starve if Russia got pushed too far.

The executive director of the World Food Program has warned that 49 million people in 43 countries will be facing starvation soon. Gro Intelligence’s Merker has synthesized the scope of this crisis the NATO boys and girls have turned into a political football:

“We cannot solve food insecurity on a national scale anywhere. While the next few years will likely be difficult, we can coordinate a global response.”

Climate change, recent drought, the aforementioned fertilizer shortages, infrastructure problems from the conflict and sanctions regimes, and the supply chain issues between nations will end in unprecedented suffering. The mantra the Europeans originally had concerning peace with Russia, they are expanded to validate something Vladimir Putin said not long ago:

“If there is no Russia, then there is no world.” This is what Russia’s president meant in an interview with RT not long ago.

Unfortunately, for Africans and the rest of the world, the liberal rulers in my country and in Europe have another plan. Bear in mind, 140 million people suffering acute hunger lived in just 10 countries, and those countries are not in Europe. Even António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nation chastised the Security Council over the failed detente happening now:

“When this Council debates conflict, you debate hunger. And when you fail to reach consensus, hungry people pay a high price.”

So there’s the NATO mission in a nutshell. No matter how many Ukrainians, Africans, or other people need to die, Russia must be done-in like Yugoslavia was. I think I said this many times before. Taking things a step further, it’s pointedly obvious now that the world cannot live a normal life at all, without Russia.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/06/ ... de-perish/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 07, 2022 5:38 pm

Is US/NATO (with WEF help) pushing for a Global South famine?

By Michael Monday, June 6, 2022 Articles, USA No tags Permalink

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Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries?

Many more people are likely to die of famine and economic disruption than on the Ukrainian battlefield. It thus is appropriate to ask whether what appeared to be the Ukraine proxy war is part of a larger strategy to lock in U.S. control over international trade and payments. We are seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe. Without dollar credit from the United States and its IMF subsidiary, how can countries stay afloat? How hard will the U.S. act to block them from de-dollarizing, opting out of the U.S. economic orbit?

U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated – at least with the “wrong kind” of people. As Microsoft philanthropist (the customary euphemism for rentier monopolist) Bill Gates has explained: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge.” His lobbying foundation’s 2018 “Goalkeepers” report warned: “According to U.N. data, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. Its population is projected to double by 2050,” with “more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people … in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.”

Gates advocates cutting this projected population increase by 30 percent by improving access to birth control and expanding education to “enable more girls and women to stay in school longer, have children later.” But how can that be afforded with this summer’s looming food and oil squeeze on government budgets?

South Americans and some Asian countries are subject to the same jump in import prices resulting from NATO’s demands to isolate Russia. JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon recently warned attendees at a Wall Street investor conference that the sanctions will cause a global “economic hurricane.” He echoed the warning by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in April that, “To put it simply: we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis.” Pointing out that the Covid pandemic has been capped by inflation as the war in Ukraine has made matters “much worse, and threatens to further increase inequality” she concluded that: “The economic consequences from the war spread fast and far, to neighbors and beyond, hitting hardest the world’s most vulnerable people. Hundreds of millions of families were already struggling with lower incomes and higher energy and food prices.”

The Biden administration blames Russia for “unprovoked aggression.” But it is his administration’s pressure on NATO and other Dollar Area satellites that has blocked Russian exports of grain, oil and gas. But many oil- and food-deficit countries see themselves as the primary victims of “collateral damage” caused by US/NATO pressure.

Is world famine and balance-of-payments crisis a deliberate US/NATO policy?
On June 3, African Union Chairperson Macky Sall, President of Senegal, went to Moscow to plan how to avoid a disruption in Africa’s food and oil trade by refusing to become pawns in the US/NATO sanctions. So far in 2022, President Putin noted: “Our trade is growing. In the first months of this year it grew by 34 percent.” But Senegal’s President Sall worried that: “Anti-Russia sanctions have made this situation worse and now we do not have access to grain from Russia, primarily to wheat. And, most importantly, we do not have access to fertilizer.”

U.S. diplomats are forcing countries to choose whether, in George W. Bush’s words, “you are either for us or against us.” The litmus test is whether they are willing to force their populations to starve and shut down their economies for lack of food and oil by stopping trade with the world’s Eurasian core of China, Russia, India, Iran and their neighbors.

Mainstream Western media describe the logic behind these sanctions as promoting a regime change in Russia. The hope was that blocking it from selling its oil and gas, food or other exports would drive down the ruble’s exchange rate and “make Russia scream” (as the U.S. tried to do to Allende’s Chile to set the stage for its backing of the Pinochet military coup). Exclusion from the SWIFT bank-clearing system was supposed to disrupt Russia’s payment system and sales, while seizing Russia’s $300 billion of foreign-currency reserves held in the West was expected to collapse the ruble, preventing Russian consumers from buying the Western goods to which they had become accustomed. The idea (and it seems so silly in retrospect) was that Russia’s population would rise in rebellion to protest against how much more Western luxury imports cost. But the ruble soared rather than sunk, and Russia quickly replaced SWIFT with its own system linked to that of China. And Russia’s population began to turn away from the West’s aggressive enmity.

Evidently some major dimensions are missing from the U.S. national-security think-tank models. But when it comes to global famine, was a more covert and even larger strategy at work? It is now looking like the major aim of the U.S. war in Ukraine all along was merely to serve as a catalyst, an excuse to impose sanctions that would disrupt the world’s food and energy trade. Additionally to manage this crisis in a way that would afford U.S. diplomats an opportunity to confront Global South countries with the choice “Your loyalty and neoliberal dependency or your life?” In the process, this would “thin out” the world’s non-white populations that so worried Mr. Dimon and the WEF.

There must have been the following calculation: Russia accounts for 40% of the world’s grain trade and 25 percent of the world fertilizer market (45 percent if Belarus is included). Any scenario would have included a calculation that if so large a volume of grain and fertilizer was withdrawn from the market, prices would soar, just as they have done for oil and gas.

Adding to the disruption in the balance-of-payments of countries having to import these commodities, the price is rising for buying dollars to pay their foreign bondholders and banks for debts falling due. The Federal Reserve’s tightening of interest rates has caused a rising premium for U.S. dollars over euros, sterling and Global South currencies.

It is inconceivable that the consequences of this on countries outside of Europe and the United States were not taken into account, because the global economy is an interconnected system. Most disruptions are in the 2 to 5 percent range, but today’s US/NATO sanctions are so far off the historical track that price increases will soar substantially above the historic range. Nothing like this has happened in recent times.

This suggests that what appeared in February to be a war between Ukrainians and Russia is really a trigger intended to restructure the world economy – and to do so in a way to lock U.S. control over the Global South. Geopolitically, the proxy war in Ukraine has been a handy excuse for America’s to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The choice confronting Global South countries: to starve by paying their foreign bondholders and bankers, or to announce, as a basic principle of international law: “As sovereign countries, we put our survival above the aim of enriching foreign creditors who have made loans that have gone bad as a result of their choice to wage a new Cold War. As for the destructive neoliberal advice that the IMF and World Bank have given us, their austerity plans were destructive instead of helpful. Therefore, their loans have gone bad. As such, they have become odious.”

NATO policy has given Global South countries no choice but to reject its attempt to establish a U.S. food stranglehold on the Global South by blocking any competition from Russia, thereby monopolizing the world’s grain and energy trade. The major grain exporter was the heavily subsidized U.S. farm sector, followed by Europe’s highly subsidized Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). These were the main grain exporters before Russia entered the picture. The US/NATO demand is to roll back the clock to restore dependency on the Dollar Area and its eurozone satellites.

The implicit Russian and Chinese counterplan
What is needed for the world’s non-US/NATO population to survive is a new world trade and financial system. The alternative is world famine for much of the world. More people will die of the sanctions than have died on the Ukrainian battlefield. Financial and trade sanctions are as destructive as military attack. So the Global South is morally justified in putting its sovereign interests above those of the wielders of international financial and trade weaponry.

First, reject the sanctions and reorient trade to Russia, China, India, Iran and their fellow members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The problem is how to pay for imports from these countries, especially if U.S. diplomats extend sanctions against such commerce.

There is no way that Global South countries can pay for oil, fertilizer and food from these countries and also pay the dollar debts that are the legacy of U.S.-sponsored neoliberal trade policy subject to U.S. and eurozone protectionism.

Therefore, the second need is to declare a debt moratorium – in effect, a repudiation – of the debts that represent loans gone bad. This act would be analogous to the 1931 suspension of German reparations and Inter-Ally debts owed to the United States. Quite simply, today’s Global South debts cannot be paid without subjecting debtor countries to famine and austerity.

A third corollary that follows from these economic imperatives is to replace the World Bank and its pro-U.S. policies of trade dependency and underdevelopment with a genuine Bank for Economic Acceleration. Along with this institution is a fourth corollary in the form of the new bank’s sibling: a replacement for the IMF free of austerity junk economics and subsidy of America’s client oligarchies coupled with currency raids on countries resisting U.S. privatization and financialization takeovers.

The fifth requirement is for countries to protect themselves by joining a military alliance as an alternative to NATO, to avoid being turned into another Afghanistan, another Libya, another Iraq or Syria or Ukraine.

The main deterrent to this strategy is not U.S. power, for it has shown itself to be a paper tiger. The problem is one of economic consciousness and will.

https://michael-hudson.com/2022/06/is-u ... th-famine/

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Food, famine and war
By Michael Roberts (Posted Jun 06, 2022)

Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on June 3, 2022 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

If anything proves that famine and food insecurity are man-made rather than due to vagaries of nature and the weather, it is the current food crisis that is putting millions globally close to starvation.

The Russia-Ukraine war has highlighted the global food supply disaster but this was brewing well before the war. The food supply chain has been increasingly global. The Great Recession of 2008-9 began to disrupt that chain, based as it was on multi-national food companies controlling the supply from farmers across the world. These companies directed demand, generated the fertiliser supply and dominated much of the arable land. When the Great Recession struck, they lost profits, and so cut back on investment and increased pressure on food producers in the ‘Global South’.

The cracks in these fundamentals of food supply were accompanied by rising oil prices, explosive demand for corn-based biofuels, high shipping costs, financial market speculation, low grain reserves, severe weather disruptions in some major grain producers, and an increased protectionist trade policies. This was the food ‘climate’ in the long depression up to 2019, before the pandemic struck.

Food, fuel and fertiliser prices versus GDP growth in low- and middle-income countries, 2000-2022. FAO/IMF/World Bank.

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The food crisis after the Great Recession was relatively short lived but was followed by another food price explosion in 2011-12. Finally, the ‘commodities boom’ ended and food prices were relatively stable for a while. But the pandemic slump provoked a new crisis as the global supply chain collapsed, shipping costs rocketed and fertiliser supply dried up. The cereal price index showed prices hit their 2008 level in 2021.

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The world has not recovered from the tailwinds of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst economic crisis since the second world war. And this is at a time when many economies face large debt burdens relative to national income. Africa is the most vulnerable region. North Africa is a huge net importer of wheat, most of which comes from Russia and Ukraine, so it faces a particularly acute food crisis. Sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly rural, but its growing urban populations are relatively poor and more likely to consume imported grains. Farmers in many parts of Africa are struggling to access fertilisers, even at inflated prices, due to shipping and foreign exchange problems. Exorbitantly high costs will erode farmers’ profits and could reduce incentives to increase production, dampening the poverty-reduction benefits of higher food prices.

Countries already affected by conflict and climate change are exceptionally vulnerable. War-ravaged Yemen is heavily dependent on imported grains. Northern Ethiopia is one of the poorest regions on Earth, facing ongoing conflict and a humanitarian crisis. And Madagascar was slammed by successive tropical storms and cyclones in January and February, leaving its food system broken. In Afghanistan, child mortality rates are soaring due to the collapse of the economy and basic health services. Myanmar’s GDP shrunk by 18% after the military coup in February 2021.

The Russia-Ukraine war only exacerbated this food security and price disaster. Russia and Ukraine account for more than 30% of global grain exports, Russia alone provides 13% of global fertiliser and 11% of oil exports, and Ukraine supplies half of the world’s sunflower oil. In combination, this is huge a supply shock to the global food system, and a protracted war in Ukraine and the growing isolation of Russia’s economy could keep food, fuel and fertiliser prices high for years.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent the global food price index to an all-time high. The invasion idled Ukraine’s once-busy Black Sea ports and left fields untended, while curbing Russia’s ability to export. The pandemic continues to snarl supply chains, while climate change threatens production across many of the world’s agricultural regions, with more drought, flooding, heat, and wildfires.

Millions are being driven towards starvation according to the World Food Program. Those considered ‘undernourished’ rose by 118 million people in 2020 after remaining largely unchanged for several years. Current estimates now put that number at about 100 million more.

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Acute hunger levels—the number of people who can’t meet short-term food consumption needs–rose by nearly 40 million last year. War has always been the main driver of extreme hunger and now the Russia-Ukraine war is adding to the risk of hunger and starvation for many millions more.

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IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva:

For several countries, this food crisis comes on top of a debt crisis. Since 2015 the share of low-income countries at or near debt distress has doubled, from 30 to 60%. For many, debt restructuring is a pressing priority… We know hunger is the world’s greatest solvable problem. A looming crisis is the time to act decisively—and solve it.

But the mainstream solutions to this disaster are either inadequate or utopian, or both. The call is for the ‘major grain producers’ to resolve logistical bottlenecks, release stocks and resist the urge to impose food export restrictions. The oil-producing nations should increase fuel supplies to help bring down fuel, fertiliser and shipping costs. And governments, international institutions and even the private sector must offer social protection via food or financial aid.

None of these proposals is happening. Very little is being done by the major capitalist powers to help those poor countries with the starving and malnourished millions. At the end of last month, the European Commission announced a €1.5 billion aid package, along with additional measures, to support farmers in the EU and protect the bloc’s food security. The leaders of the World Bank Group, International Monetary Fund, United Nations World Food Program, and World Trade Organization called for urgent, coordinated action to address food security. Fine words but no action.

A real help would be to cancel the debts of the poor countries. But all that the IMF and the major powers have offered is a debt service suspension–the debts remain but the repayments can be delayed. Even this ‘relief’ is pathetic. In total, over the last two years, the G20 governments have suspended just $10.3 billion. In the first year of the pandemic alone, low-income countries accumulated a debt burden totalling $860 billion, according to the World Bank.

The other IMF ‘solution’ was to increase the size of Special Drawing Rights, the international money, to be used for extra aid. The IMF injected $650 billion of aid through the SDR program. But because of the ‘quota’ system for the distribution of SDRs, SDR quotas are disproportionately tilted toward rich countries: Africa received less SDRs than the German Bundesbank!

The macroeconomic conditions are now sparking food riots. In a new report, titled “Tapering in a Time of Conflict”, UNCTAD spelt out the scenarios ahead. Sri Lanka, whose debt crisis is several years in the making, is a useful illustration of key dynamics. Remittances and exports collapsed during the pandemic, which also disrupted the crucial tourism sector. The growth slowdown strained the budget and depleted foreign-exchange reserves, leaving Colombo now struggling to import oil and food. The shortages are acute. Two men in their seventies died while waiting in line for fuel, Al Jazeera reported. Milk prices have increased, and school exams were cancelled due to shortages in paper and ink. As Sri Lanka struggles to service the $45 billion in long-term debt it owes, of which over $7 billion is due this year, it could join countries that have defaulted during the pandemic, including Argentina and Lebanon, the latter heavily dependent on wheat imports.

Instead of increasing supply, releasing food stocks and trying to end the war in Ukraine, governments and central banks are hiking interest rates which will increase the debt burden for the food-starved poor countries. As I have explained in previous posts and UNCTAD concurs, central bank interest-rate hikes do nothing to control inflation created by supply disruptions, except to provoke a global recession and an ‘emerging market’ debt crisis.

Increasing protests and political upheaval worries the major powers more that people starving. As U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said:

Inflation is reaching the highest levels seen in decades. Sharply higher prices for food and fertilizers put pressure on households worldwide—especially for the poorest. And we know that food crises can unleash social unrest.

Back in the 1840s as capitalism became the dominant mode of production globally, Marx talked of a “new regime” of industrial-capitalist food production, connected to the repeal of the Corn Laws and the triumph of free trade after 1846. He associated this “new regime” with the conversion of “large tracts of arable land in Britain,” driven by the “reorganization” of food production around developments in livestock breeding and management, and by crop rotation, coupled with related developments in the chemistry of manure-based fertilizers.

Capitalist food production dramatically increased food productivity and turned food production into a global enterprise. In the mid-1850s, these trends were already apparent: close to 25 percent of wheat consumed in Britain was imported, 60 percent of it from Germany, Russia, and the United States. But it also brought regular and recurring production and investment crises that created a new form of food insecurity. No longer could famine and hunger be blamed on nature and the weather–if it ever could. Now it was clearly the result of the inequities of capitalist production and social organisation on a global scale. And it is the poorest who suffer. Karl Marx once wrote that the famine ‘killed poor devils only’.

And with industrial farming came the cruel exploitation and treatment of animals just as much as humans. Marx wrote in an unpublished notebook, as “Disgusting!” Feeding in stables a “system of cell prison” for the animals.

In these prisons animals are born and remain there until they are killed off. The question is whether or not this system connected to the breeding system that grows animals in an abnormal way by aborting bones in order to transform them to mere meat and a bulk of fat—whereas earlier (before 1848) animals remained active by staying under free air as much as possible—will ultimately result in serious deterioration of life force?

This is a global crisis and requires global action in the same way that pandemic should have been dealt with and the climate crisis needs. But such global coordination is impossible while the global food industry is controlled and owned by a few multi-national food producers and distributors and the world economy heads towards another slump.

https://mronline.org/2022/06/06/food-famine-and-war/

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UN Works to Unblock Russia, Ukraine Food, Fertilizer Exports

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G7 Downplays US Sanctions’ Role in Food Shortage: "Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, accounting for almost three times as much of world exports as Ukraine, 18 % compared to 7%". | Photo: Twitter @TruthRuththe

Published 5 June 2022

Amin Awad, UN Crisis Coordinator for Ukraine, confirmed the Organization was making every effort to secure the release of grain stuck in Ukraine´s Black Sea ports.


The United Nations (UN) on Saturday issued a fresh alert to push to secure food and fertilizer exports from Ukraine and Russia, to the wider world, amid rising and alarming levels of food insecurity.

Amin Awad, UN Crisis Coordinator for Ukraine, confirmed the Organization was making every effort to secure the release of grain stuck in Ukraine´s Black Sea ports.

Equally important for the world’s farmers is a secure supply of fertilizers from Russia, a world’s major producer, as some 1.5 billion people are in need of that food and fertilizers, a supply that has been disrupted by the Ukrainian conflict.

Mr. Award assured that leading the discussions are top UN officials Martin Griffiths – the Organization’s Emergency relief Coordinator- and Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of the UN trade and development agency, UNCTAD.


Highlighting the difficulties closely linked to international trade with Russia even though there are no sanctions on food and fertilizer humanitarian exports from the country, Mr. Awad explained Ms. Grynspan was working with other financial institutions and the West in general to see how Russia can really, as far as transactions are concerned, resume.


“The five million tonnes a month, that’s 100 ships a month,” said Mr. Awad, adding that rail transportation or trucking, could not manage the same volume and were fraught with logistical problems. “So, is really has to be a maritime movement…to export 50 to 60 million tonnes of food out to the world.”

Around 1.5 billion people “are in need of that food and fertilizers” around the world, the UN official explained, adding that he hoped that the negotiations “really go smoothly and be concluded as soon as possible so that the blockade of ports and the resumption of export of fertilizer and food takes place, before we have another crisis in hand.”

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/UN- ... -0002.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 06, 2023 3:32 pm

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Queen Victoria and her Indian servant Abdul Karim, 1893.

Imperialism and the agrarian crisis
By Prabhat Patnaik (Posted Jan 05, 2023)

Originally published: Peoples Democracy on January 1, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy) |

THE hegemony of imperialism is invariably associated with an agrarian crisis in countries of the global south; in fact agrarian crisis is just the other side of the ascendancy of imperialism. This is evident from the case of Indian agriculture. The colonial period saw a more or less perpetual agrarian crisis, whose starkest manifestation was in the form of recurring famines. Colonial rule in India began with the East India Company acquiring the revenue-collecting rights over Bengal from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam in 1765. Within five years, in 1770, Bengal was devastated by famine, perhaps the worst famine ever in world history, in which according to Company officials themselves, 10 million people out of a total population in Bengal of 30 million, died. British rule ended once more with a massive famine in 1943-44, in which at least 3 million people in Bengal are estimated to have perished.

The famine at the beginning of British rule was because of exorbitant revenue demands; the famine at the end of British rule too was because of excessive exactions from the people of Bengal, in the form of inflation caused by an abnormally high level of deficit financing, in addition to tax collections, for financing the Allied war spending in South Asia. The victims of the famine were always predominantly the rural population, consisting of the peasantry and the agricultural labourers. But in addition to famines, debt, destitution, and dispossession of the peasantry were common features of colonial rule.

Such rapacity on the part of the colonial rulers was not just an arbitrary phenomenon; it was necessarily linked to the development of capitalism in Britain, and in the metropolis in general. Capitalism in the metropolis requires a number of primary commodities, consisting of raw materials and foodgrains which it cannot do without and at the same time cannot grow within its own boundaries, either at all, or in sufficient quantities, or all the year round. The case of oil, of which only 11 per cent of the total known reserves of the world are located in the temperate regions that constitute the home base of capital, is much discussed. But the same reliance on the rest of the world, especially the tropical and subtropical lands, for a variety of agricultural goods, is often lost sight of.

Capitalism for instance came into its own through the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and the industry at the very centre of it was cotton textiles. But, Britain, the country that witnessed this revolution, could grow no cotton at all; it had to obtain raw cotton supplies through imports from tropical and subtropical lands. To meet the demands of the metropolis for all these raw materials, first of all, commodity production had to be introduced in these lands, commodity production in the true sense where production decisions are taken exclusively on the basis of market signals, without any concern for food self-sufficiency either at the family or local or country level. And secondly, if sufficient supplies of such materials had to be obtained for the metropolis, then, given the limited land mass in the producing regions, local demand for these products (or for products grown on the same lands) had to be compressed there.

The colonial taxation system achieved both these objectives for the metropolis. The shift from taxation of produce as in Mughal India to a land tax in cash under colonialism, together with the enforcement of rigid tax payment times under the latter, forced the peasantry to take loans from merchants for making tax payments; and the merchants in turn insisted on peasants producing specific crops and selling to them at pre-contracted prices as the condition for advancing such loans. Commodity production was thus introduced into peasant agriculture, not directly but in a refracted manner, since the merchants themselves responded to market signals. At the same time, the very imposition of heavy taxes on the peasantry, together with the deindustrialisation that occurred in the wake of imports of machine-made goods from the metropolis, reduced the incomes of the working people, and hence imposed a demand compression on them that released the goods wanted by the metropolis. Thus both the objectives of imperialism were fulfilled by the colonial taxation system, which in addition had the “advantage” that it obtained these goods for the metropolis substantially free of cost.

With the end of colonialism this arrangement ended; in addition the dirigiste regime in the realm of the economy that was built up in independent India alleviated the perpetual agrarian crisis that had characterised colonialism. Of course, land concentration did not end; landlordism continued, with several of the landlords converting themselves into capitalist landlords in the manner of the Prussian junkers; exploitation of the peasantry remained. But agrarian crisis whether in the form of devastating famines or in the form of debilitating indebtedness, mass migration to towns, or mass suicides, ceased to characterise peasant agriculture.

With the adoption of neoliberal policies however, which meant subjecting the economy to the hegemony of globalised finance, with which the Indian big bourgeoisie became closely integrated, matters changed. Metropolitan hegemony in the realm of the economy was back, though now with the connivance of the domestic big bourgeoisie. And the agrarian crisis returned, this time not in the form of famines but in the form of growing peasant destitution, burdensome indebtedness leading to mass suicides, and migration to towns in search of jobs that were few and far between, all arising from the decline in the profitability of Indian agriculture. This decline was so sharp that it made peasant agriculture more or less unviable; and an additional squeeze was exerted on the peasantry through the privatisation of essential services like education and healthcare that made them much more expensive.

The reason for this shift in policy towards peasant agriculture, apart from the general desire of big capital to encroach on petty production and peasant agriculture, which now gets an opportunity to get realised, is the reassertion of the twin objectives mentioned earlier. These are: to draw the peasants into the ambit of authentic commodity production; and to impose a demand compression on our economy so that adequate supplies are made available to the metropolis. Such demand compression is now effected through fiscal austerity and tight monetary policy measures imposed through the IMF programmes. This does not of course give the metropolis its needed tropical and subtropical goods free as in the colonial times (though an element of “drain” on a limited scale continues even after decolonisation, through unequal exchange, payment for patents, and other such means); but it ensures that adequate supplies are made available to the metropolis without causing any inflation either in the metropolis or in the periphery.

The other objective of the metropolis, of enforcing commodity production, seeks production to be in accordance with what the market dictates. It requires inter alia the abandonment of all such considerations as food self-sufficiency (even at a low level of incomes and purchasing power). One important change from the colonial times that has occurred is that the metropolitan countries have become surplus producers of foodgrains, which from their point of view necessitates even more urgently that countries of the periphery like India abandon their self-sufficiency in foodgrains. India has already abandoned its policy of government price support for cash crops; but in the case of foodgrains the mechanism of support and procurement prices, and procurement operations to feed the public distribution system, still continue to remain despite pressures from the WTO, because no government has dared to accede to such pressures.

The Modi government thought that under the cover of the distracting discourse of Hindutva, and taking advantage of the pandemic, it could carry this metropolitan agenda to completion. Its three infamous farm laws had precisely this objective. They were meant to eliminate the system of support prices for foodgrains and pave the way for a corporatisation of agriculture, all in the name of improving the peasants’ lot! But the determined struggle of the peasantry thwarted this plan.

This retreat of the government however is only temporary. Committed to neoliberalism as the Modi government is, and hence to the agenda of removing all government intervention in markets including the foodgrain market, it will come back with the same measures once again when a suitable opportunity arises; behind its bombastic talk of “nationalism” is the most abject surrender to imperialist demands, the most craven kow-towing to imperialist diktat. The implementation of such measures however will not only reduce foodgrain production in the country but will also mean a winding up of the public distribution system, since no PDS can be run meaningfully on the basis of imported grains. What it will mean for India is demonstrated by the African example where the abandonment of foodgrain self-sufficiency has made several countries import-dependent and vulnerable to famines, including now in the wake of the Ukraine war that has disrupted global foodgrain supplies.

Hence, both the overcoming of the agrarian crisis and the preservation of food self-sufficiency demand that the peasantry must be defended against the demands of imperialism.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/05/imperia ... an-crisis/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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