Roger Burbach, whose 1980 book Agribusiness in the Americas blew open the story of corporate power and food on this continent, has sent his latest thoughts on agribusiness and Bolivia.

The Rise of Food Fascism:
Allied to Global Agribusiness, Agrarian Elite Foments Coup in Bolivia

By Roger Burbach

Like many third world countries Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations. With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta--including wheat, rice, corn, soy oil and potatoes, as well as meat—has risen twenty-five percent over the past year with prices gyrating wildly in the local markets. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 30 June, 2008 - 16:58

The excellent ETC Group has just come up with a fine bit of social science that cuts through the guff of the recent FAO Food Summit in Rome.

As part of their 'translator' series, in which they parse the meaning of UN documents for the general public, they've come out with their latest report, Another "Failure-as-usual" Food Summit.

Alongside the fine analysis of the substance of the summit document, they've compared and contrasted the final declarations of the Food Summits in 1996, 2002, and 2008. The findings are striking:

... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page | 1 attachment

Posted on 30 June, 2008 - 15:57

The Financial Times is doing what it usually does - providing concise and honest insight into how the elite bosses think, this time around genetically modified crops. The recent op-ed by John Gapper follows a logic that I've been bumping into increasingly.

1. We need to increase food production to feed the world.
2. Yield-increasing science has worked before.
3. The nay-sayers want to reduce output through organic agriculture.
4. Monsanto, on the other hand, is investing in science.
5. Therefore we ought to embrace GM technology to fight the food crisis.

Almost everything about this argument is wrong. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 3 comments | email this page

Posted on 13 June, 2008 - 17:36

My friend Patrick Wilkinson has put together a fine video about the upcoming spraying of large parts of California in the ongoing war on the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM, pronounced el-bam).

As Patrick's film suggests, there'd better be something mighty scary about this moth to warrant monthly aerial spraying over most of Northern California over the next five years.

So what's the danger? Will the moth summon forth the apocalypse? No. Is it the harbinger of some strange Africanized disease? Not even. Will it ravage California's agriculture? Kinda. But not actually by eating anything or laying anything or causing anything to be damaged.

The reason LBAM is a menace is, er, NAFTA. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment | email this page

Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:03

Two important bits of news from the world of agricultural technology. First, we've a report that genetically modified soy beans yield less than ordinary ones. The study was motivated by a professor who heard soybean farmers asking "how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?". A good question indeed. One answer - it wasn't designed to yield more, it was designed to withstand a herbicide sold by the same company that sells the seed.

But there's a bigger answer to the question of the future of agricultural technology. It comes with a report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). Snappy title? No. Bed-time reading? Hardly. It's hundreds of dense pages long (and I'll be reading it over the next week, so you won't have to).

But already, the IAASTD is an acronym to remember. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 21 April, 2008 - 03:11

I'll be writing about troubles in Kenya more fully in the future. But this press release from Food and Water Watch caught my eye. It shows how profoundly callous agribusiness can be in the run up to Valentine's day. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment | email this page

Posted on 4 February, 2008 - 20:14

Source: Coalition of Immokalee Workers

It has taken a considerable biting of tongue to hold back on commenting on the US presidential election. I'm a very frustrated immigrant, wanting to vote but unable to. Not that I'd find anyone to vote for particularly.

My partner and I went to the Green Presidential debate a couple of weeks back - and while pleased that there are folk who think that electoral politics should be about more than the Coke or Pepsi? model, we were a little appalled at how loopy some of the candidates were (though Cynthia McKinney probably deserves a vote). ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment | email this page

Posted on 4 February, 2008 - 19:42

Al Krebs, the one-man powerhouse behind the Agribusiness Examiner and tireless campaigner against the corporate concentration of power in agriculture, died last week. There's a fine obituary at Counterpunch, where Al himself wrote a great deal, on how Bill and Melinda Gates Do Agriculture, on Corporate Welfare and Mad Cow Disease. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 16 October, 2007 - 04:48

The World Bank is in the news of late. Its president, Paul Wolfowitz (pictured), has been pilloried for making confetti out of the Bank's ethical rulebook, and showering his sweetheart with it. While this is generally unremarkable behaviour in Washington, he has attracted more attention than his peers because of his institution's crusade against corruption, and his saying things like “to make poverty history, we need to make corruption history”.

The real muck, however, doesn’t come from annals of hypocrisy. The bigger story is one that the media are ill-suited to find. It’s about what happens when the limelight is off the Bank, when the Bank goes about its normal business, and enforces policies that impoverish millions, while saying things like “Our Dream is a World Free of Poverty”, (the World Bank’s slogan). And although it’s tempting to blame the fourth estate and their habits of sensationalism, part of the reason there's no scandal is because the World Bank is in the business of hiding the evidence.

Over the past two weeks, for example, at the very same time that Wolfowitz has been pilloried, the Bank has been quietly airing a draft of its World Development Report which, for 2008, covers agriculture. Few outside a small circle of policy junkies got a chance to look at it (and even they were rushed – pointing out what’s good and bad with a dense 500 page report takes more than two weeks). Yet the report will do far deeper, and more lasting, damage than any Beltway bedroom farce.

To see how it all happens, here's a review of some recent salary-related scandals, which rehearse some of the techniques of scandal and subterfuge that are to be found, on a deeper and more covert scale, in the Bank's latest thoughts on agriculture. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 17 April, 2007 - 18:14

[Photo credit:tjgiordano]

I have an appalling memory. Birthdays, anniversaries, appointments, I've forgotten them all. The only poem I've ever been able to commit to memory (the only one that's fit to print, at any rate) is this one by William Blake. It's beautiful, haunting, a little too chilling for a candlelit dinner, but entirely appropriate for today's February 14th posting:

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

This Valentines, stay off the roses.

Not only are they pumped full of some of the nastiest agricultural chemicals, the people who grow and pick them likely have a fairly raw deal. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 14 February, 2007 - 05:15