In my last few blogs, I have talked about the ills of GMOs on a world level and their effect on global food production and small farming. GMO seeds cannot be saved, and farmers in developing can’t afford to buy them year after, risking continual debt. Many scientists and governmental institutions encourage their use, but GMOs also degrade the soil quality, which is already a big problem in poor countries.
“Even though you know you are overusing your soil and that it will degrade if you do not rest it or plant less aggressively, the degradation happens at some point in the future. … And while fertilizers and other land improvements might be a good investment by conventional calculations, they are of no help if you cannot afford them or cannot even get a loan to finance them.” (Heifer International, World Ark: “Poverty traps, Why the Poor Stay Poor”) GMO crops will make this problem worse.
According to Heifer International, “social exclusion is a poverty problem in its own right; in addition, the more unequal the distribution of wealth, the larger the fraction of the population that is unable to put up collateral for a loan, so fewer children can attend school and fewer businesses and microenterprises can expand…Across countries, there is a danger that rich and poor will become two worlds, separate and unequal, sowing the seeds of future international conflict, terrorist groups [my prior post talks about the inverse relationship between women farmers and terrorism], global environmental destruction, spread of disease without regard to borders, and continued human misery among the poor…"
"People in low-income countries know full well that the rich countries could do much more to help, but have chosen not to. Debt bondage traps: While credit is needed, the wrong kind of debt from unscrupulous moneylenders can also be a trap. Colluding moneylenders can calibrate loan amounts and interest payments to ensure that a family can never get out of debt.”
This debt will become even worse if Monsanto begins to sue poor farmers in developing nations for patent violations, as is its policy in North America. Monsanto regularly sues small farmers in North America (and has a $10 million budget to do so) for patent violations due to inadvertent cross-pollination caused by Monsanto’s GMO crops from neighboring farms.
If government policy encourages use of GMOs in developing countries, inevitably issues arise about big business owning and controlling the seeds themselves. GM seeds are now being implemented in Iraq, and will most likely polute most farmers crops, destroying thier heirloom seeds that have been cultivated for thousands of years. Heirloom seed rights are important to poor farmers, and they cannot afford to buy the yearly patent on GM seeds. Powerful institutions controlling land availability in general, and distribution is not necessarily fair to poor farmers.
Oxfam explains, “In the USA, 4 per cent of farm owners account for nearly half of all farm land. In Guatemala less than 8 per cent of agricultural producers hold almost 80 per cent of land – a figure that is not atypical for Central America as a whole. In Brazil, one per cent of the population owns nearly half of all land. If governments fail to provide secure access to land for their populations, then powerful local elites and investors are able to ride roughshod over local communities..."
"In recent cases of large-scale land purchases, expropriations are the rule; the principle of free, prior, and informed consent is routinely ignored; and compensation is usually too low, if paid at all. Initial promises of development and jobs often evaporate: the land may remain idle, or the investment is highly mechanized, offering a few jobs to highly skilled males only. A major World Bank study found that investors were targeting precisely the countries in which institutions were weakest…”
In fact, issues arise in food distribution due to corporate domination of markets. Oxfam explains, “Only 40 cents of every taxpayer dollar spent on US food aid actually goes to buying food. A big chunk goes straight into the pockets of US agribusiness companies…Nearly 40 per cent of total food aid costs are paid to US shipping companies, where again, restricted bidding limits competition and pushes up prices. Such aid takes longer to reach those in need. During 2004–08, US food aid to Africa required an average of 147 days for delivery, compared with 35–41 days for food from the African continent.
And in situations where shipping food aid from the USA would be an appropriate response, Oxfam estimates that procuring transport on the open market would allow the American taxpayer to provide 15 per cent more food, enough to feed an additional 3.2 million people in emergency situations. Source: Barrett and Maxwell (2008) Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting its Role”
The website www.BillMoyers.com, features interviews done by Bill Moyers explaining the impact of the widening gap between rich and the poor in the world, the domination of corporations, and what adverse effects that is having. (Full Show: Winner-Take-All-Politics)
More about economics from Oxfam: “Despite more than doubling the size of its economy between 1990 and 2005, India failed to make even a tiny dent in the number of hungry people…In Brazil, however, where economic growth has been slower, hunger has been rolled back at an incredible pace… Sadly, India failed to prioritize hunger or develop a coherent strategy...In Brazil, the opposite was true. A national crosssectoral strategy launched in 2003, consisted of 50 linked initiatives ranging from cash transfers for poor mothers to extension services for small-scale food producers…
In a region [Ethiopia] recently plagued by drought, sacks of maize stuffed to bursting and piled to the ceiling of a warehouse in Shashemene, Ethiopia, are a welcome sight...This corn was grown right here. By small farmers in the West Arsi Zone...‘We have a stock in our bank and our members are not starving like other people,’ said the bank’s storekeeper at the time. ‘Our experience in the past three years has shown us we can make progress in our lives.’...Rejection of new technologies and trade have the potential to lock farmers into poverty...[But] it is certainly not the case that big [farming] is bad. Whether a farm is ‘bad’ or not depends upon the practices of the farmer or company running it…Nor is it a case of ‘big is beautiful’..., a single large-scale farm imported from Brazil into Tanzania could displace 12,500 smallholder farms.”
There are myths about smallholder farmers including that they have low productivity—but this depends on access to irrigation and fertilizer. Another myth is that small farmers in developing countries shy away from technology and innovation and that they are not very entrepreneurial. Another false assumption is that small farm holders aren’t savvy about markets.
Oxfam continues, “Moreover, today’s large farms tend to suffer from a heavy
ecological footprint – due to profligate water use, pollution of groundwater, and reliance on oil-based agro-chemicals and diesel-burning machinery – thusundermining the human and natural resources on which food production must depend. If we are to meet the three challenges set out in the previous section, then sustainable models of smallholder production must be where the lion’s share of effort goes. The powerful elites in poor countries that control land and block reform. …
Governments must renew their purpose as custodians of the public good rather than allowing elites to drag them by the nose. … The examples of Brazil and Viet Nam, among others, show that strong political leaders with a clear moral purpose can drive government success.”
A Votre Sante (Here's to Your Health), and to the world's small farmers, Alix
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