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| nCorporate interests keep world's poor hungry Sunday, June 29, 2003 By Alexander Cockburn They're savingthe world from hunger again.This time the bold crusaders have been mustered in Sacramento, California, to proclaim the glories of chemicalindustrial agriculture, biotechnology, genetically-modified crops and livestock, and kindred expressions of the modern age. The forum has been a federally-sponsored Ministerial Confe re n c e a nd E x p o of Agricultural Science and Technology. Under the approving eyes of bigwigs from biotech firms such as Monsanto, US officials such as agriculture secretary AnnVeneman pounded the drum for high-tech agriculture. "This conference is for those most in need," Veneman said last Monday. "It [hunger] has to become a global agenda . . . new approaches are needed." Was there ever a moment, in the long tradition of such overblown rhetoric, that "new approaches" weren't needed? Scour all the old speeches across the past century about starving billions around the planet or starving millions in the US, and it's always the same professions of noble purpose. "We can end hunger now," declared the sales folk for the Green Revolution that peaked in expectation in 1971 when Dr Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize for his invention of Mexican miracle wheat, heavily backed by the Rockefeller Foundation. And indeed miracle wheat paid off handsomely for rich farmers on expensively irrigated land in Sonora but, as always, intensive monoculture drove marginal, subsistence farmers off the land and the Mexican poor people hated Borlaug's low-gluten wheat.The peasants and poor urban dwellers of south and southeast Asia also hated the first `miracle' rice, IR-8, because it cooked up mushy and tasted bad. "History may well record that the Green Revolution was a greater disaster than ourVietnam intervention." So wrote John and Karen Hess in their funny, fiery book,TheTaste of America, published in 1977. They were probably right, if you add up all the `greater-thanexpected deaths' (as the statisticians put it) inThird World countries savaged by techno-fixers from the First World trying to make world agricultural production safe for capitalism. The techno-fixers moved in step with the counter-insurgency forces, who also acted to save world agricultural production, but more drastically. In the 1950s, when the peoples of Guatemala and Iran elected governments committed to land reform, the CIA paid for coups to kill the reformers and protect the old land barons. This sanction - exercised by the CIA, advisers, technicians from USAID, death squads and allied agents - extended across Latin America for the next 30 years, crowned by the butchering, under CIA supervision, of 200,000 Mayan Indians in Guatemala in the 1980s. On the other side of the world, when the land barons of Afghanistan were threatened by a revolution there in the late 1970s, supported by the Soviets, the CIA pumped in aid and fanatical Islamic advisers. The opiumgrowing land barons returned, and they flourish still, rich on opium harvests that are now the highest in the country's ghistory, amid the desperate hunger of most Afghans. It wouldn't be hard to feed all the people on the planet. The Malthusian thesis about population growth outstripping means of subsistence has long since been disproved.The imperatives of capital are always searingly obvious in agriculture, as is obvious if you fly south down California's Central Valley from Sacramento, ground zero for an agricultural system based on oil (oil-based pesticides, fertiliser, courtesy of natural gas), absentee ownership - mostly by banks - and water allocated by water boards controlled by the land barons via politicians in their pay. The latest techno-revolution merely underlines the obvious. `Advances' in agricultural technology are mostly ways to tie the farmer into a cycle of debt peonage, to restrict production in favour of the big growers and to send the little guy to the wall. (Witness the fate of strains of corn or wheat perfected by peasants over centuries, as with Indians and hard wheat, later appropriated by Canadian farmers.) All the major US food programmes suffer from the same vice of hypocrisy. Food for Peace in the 1950s, touted as the US's gift to the world's starving, was a sophisticated dumping scheme, and a way of supporting US military allies with food. Franklin D Roosevelt's farm programmes in the New Deal favoured big agricultural concerns and pushed thousands of subsistence farmers off the land. At least we can thank FDR and his agriculture secretary Henry Wallace for the Chicago bluesmen who wended their way north after New Deal subsidies - given to land barons to take their acres out of production - de-stroyed all prospects for the sharecroppers. Thirty years ago in the US, politicians felt it necessary to make stirring speeches in support of the small family farmer. You don't hear much talk like that now, after the latest holocaust of corporate integration. US agriculture is controlled by about five monstrous corporations, such as Tysons and Archer Daniels Midland, and this trend is spreading across the planet. The way to ensure that there aren't hungry people in the world is to give peasants land, unencumbered by debt peonage. The US has spent the last 150 years ensuring that precisely the opposite conditions prevail, to which the corporate carnival in Sacramento attests. Alexander Cockburn has worked in the US as a journalist for the past 30 years and is the author of two books. He is coeditor of the newsletter and website, Counterpunch, and writes for the Nation. His column appears fortnightly in Agenda | ||||||||
Monday, November 3, 2025
Norman Borlaug & Over-population
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