Black Magick and BioTech

Came across these interesting articles equating bio-technology with black magick and alchemy.

One could say that the current food crisis resulting from biotechnology applied to mass production of foods as well as their commodification into bio-fuels is an act of black magick.

Fulfilling the prediction made by Shulamith Firestone back in the seventies when she did her feminist critique of reproductive biotechnology warning of its return to the creation of the alchemists homonuclus; the creation of life without the mother.

Black Magic, Biotech & Dark Markets


“On some islands mana [magic] is the word for money”
Marcel Mauss

The characterisation of biotech as black magic is primarily meant to indicate the
ambivalence of instrumentality in biotech, an ambivalence which actually enables the connection between biological life and economic value. Traditionally, black magic refers to the use of magical actions for maleficent purposes (spells, witchcraft, demonology). The idea of black magic took a particularly strong hold in Renaissance Europe, where it coincided with trends in Jewish and Christian mysticism.

The infamous black magicians of the period and after – from Cornelius Agrippa to Eliphas Levi – were often seen as instrumentalists, manipulating the forces of the natural world (in the Hermetic tradition) or of the traditions of ‘white magic’ (occultism, cabala, alchemy).14 At the root of black magic was the fear induced by an instrumentalisation of the natural world, in order to gain
‘unnatural’ control.
Curiously enough, the tropes of black magic specifically, and magic generally, are not uncommon in popular accounts of the biotech industry. For instance, Cynthia Robbins-Roth’s book From Alchemy to IPO provides a hero-narrative of the biotech industry, recounting the development of recombinant DNA techniques and the formation of Genentech, the first biotech start-up.15 For Robbins-Roth, the biotech industry realises the dream of alchemy, not only through its ability to control matter, but in its ability to generate value through this transformation of matter. Robbins-Roth does not mention black magic, because this alchemical biotech activity is seen as the ultimate in humanistic endeavor. But neither does she explore
in depth the controversies genetic engineering experiments prompted in the 1970s.

But what if we take this trope of biotech as magic seriously? We would, first of all, have to point to a definition of ‘magic’ that would warrant the connection to biotech.

A number of historians of religion, including James Frasier, have positioned magic as incommensurate with technology (for Frasier magic is situated between religion and technology, for it has a logic, but that logic is not rational or ‘scientific’). Indeed the division persists to this day, along the lines of the rational/irrational.

In this context, Marcel Mauss’ famous study, A General Theory of Magic, is useful, for it attempts to conceive of magic as deeply connected to both the social and the technological.

Mauss’ study, though not without its problematics (including an exclusive focus on
‘primitive’ cultures), is noteworthy in that it redefines magic according to social and technological criteria. It suggests that magic is not transcendental (above and beyond social reality), but immanent to collective and individual practices in daily life. Mauss’ theory of magic also points to the implicitly pragmatic and instrumental character of magic in society; magic rites associated with healing and medicine are among his most common examples. To this we can add several more qualifiers, for we want to suggest that biotech is a form of black magic, and not just magic generally speaking. If magic is both immanent (social) and instrumental (technological), then black magic is an instrumental use of the immanent qualities of magic. That is, black magic folds the instrumental back upon the immanent, it folds technology back upon the social. When this happens, the object of the magical action becomes the social body itself. Instead of magical practice constituting orcontributing to the social (as in Mauss’ theory), in black magic it practices on the social.
(This is biopolitics with smoke and mirrors.) In this folding back of the instrumental upon the immanent, the social body is ‘shaped’ according to the hermetic dictates of the technological (the technological becomes synonymous with its efficaciousness). This can be said to constitute the maleficent character of black magic. It results less from a desire for world domination and more from a confusion specific to black magic, a confusion of the interrelation of the immanent (social) and the instrumental (technological).
What does this have to do with biotechnology? On one level all of this is perhaps too
abstract. But, if we keep in mind our notion of black magic (aided by Mauss’ theory), then it is hard to deny certain analogies in the biotech industry. For instance, consider the pharmaceutical industry. The manufacture of drugs has long been the single most lucrative output for bioscience research. Even when discussions of ‘post-genomic complexity’ abound, the output for such research is first and foremost in drug discovery. Drugs operate not only by sympathy (vaccines), antipathy (anti-virals) and contiguity (GM foods), but the integration of the pharmaceutical industry with health care systems means that a network for regulating
“biovalue” operates in the long term (health insurance, drug prescriptions and subscriptions).
Likewise, any computer based laboratory technology achieves a magical
transfer of properties, simply by encoding and decoding DNA into a computer. Finally, the biological database can be seen as a means of ‘capturing’ or possessing biological life via the various property and patenting structures and health care systems.
Recall our initial question: how does biotech create a link between biological life and economic value? And how does it do this as a network which displays control-without-control?

In short, biotech as a form of black magic mediates between ‘life’ and ‘property’ via
the use of information technologies. Information is the ‘medium’ – in both senses of the term. The space in which black magic biotech operates is the space which separates and connects biological life and economic value, matter and property. ‘Information’ has become the equivalent of mana in the biotech industry. The notion of information – genetic codes, computer data, stock quotes – covers a wide range of meanings, and in doing so it functions as the means by which biotech establishes and regulates the interactions and transactionsbetween life and property. For contemporary biotech, ‘information’ is mana.


Notes on Alchemy, Metonymy and Engendering Simulacra
Growing Things: Banff New Media Institute, 2 – 4 June, 2000 and Australia, 1 July – August, 2000

The representational imaginary of Nature “disappears with simulation – whose operation is nuclear and genetic …genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation” according to Jean Baudrillard. From this situation forward many scenarios are possible. Many proximate universes and combinations could evolve. It is possible that a benign biotechnology will take place in controlled environments such as isolated fields and greenhouses and will be economically viable in these special regulated areas. Nanoscience and nanoengineering could develop new and improved material properties including ones with enhanced electrical conductivity, optical properties and mechanical strength that will lead to breakthroughs in classical electronics, architecture, pharmacology and artificial life forms. Materials that are actually intelligent surfaces and films could perform everything from photosynthesis and camouflage to building materials that last longer and sense weather conditions, modifying their structures in order to be more or less permeable to humidity, air and light. Intelligent antibodies could find and destroy malignant cells in the body. Nanochemists and engineers are also designing nanometer-scale machines and molecular motors that are capable of interacting with the environment as well as within the human body. In all of these instances nanotechnology is characterized by a kind of organicism that imitates nature at the atomic and molecular level and is exemplified by a non-linear, distributed, redundant, parallel and overlapping intelligence. Nanoengineering aspires to transform inexpensive, abundant and inanimate constituents into self-generating, self-perpetuating, self-repairing, self-aware entities that are capable of communicating with each other and responding to the environment. These new technologies represent formal ways of organizing architectures of all kinds from cities to computers and telecommunication systems and seemingly provide humanity with unprecedented control over the material world. This research is in its earliest stages, and as is often noted, it is similar to the transistor technology and silicon-based research of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Early experiments indicate that at least at a certain scale these goals are attainable.

At the risk of presenting a classical binary critique, much of nanoscience and nanotechnology is not the result of multidisciplinary research, and is following more formal rather than content-based developments typical of the early stages of research. Although much of this breakthrough science is a positive result of pure research, it is now time for more multidisciplinary work by artists and scientists in order that new applications, forms of content and visualizations can evolve simultaneously with technological advances. In this sense, as artists, we are moving further away from mimesis and representation that have typically positioned us across a critical gulf (distance) between art and life and moving further into the integration of life-like art. These developments are occurring at the same time that many scientists are becoming more involved with mimesis and representation (at least on the nanoscale) even though they are of course modifying the world. It is essential that these new technological developments incorporate a cultural component that includes re-thinking humanism or what it means to be human in these changing terms. We need to explore ways of using these new tools to access our past and future within the present in order to maintain our cultural diversity while creating rich new hybrid forms of art, entertainment and life. The decisions of what it means to exist within this world that science fiction has been charting during the past several decades should not be left to scientists, engineers, politicians and the military – industrial complex. Issues that address what can be built and accomplished in the nanoscale universe need to be explored by the public in ways that are experimental and critical while communicating the implications of future developments.

In another scenario of refictionalization, one could see that escaped and mutant versions of modified plants would begin to spread and a situation similar to the Borges story where the map becomes the territory actually takes place. Only it is the territory that finally remains in tattered shreds in various regions of the profuse desert of prolific and disease resistant plants that aren’t plants. In the case of nanomaterials replacing organic surfaces with ones that are impervious to decay and erosion, but not to mutation and change, we could end up with a new world built on the premise that it would require little maintenance, while actually needing constant reading and interpretation. In fact this simulation could require more maintenance to control mutations and the catalytic changes of positive feedback that could result in out of control rapid, accelerated growth, rather than slow evolutionary change. At this point where information and material properties would be intelligent and self-propagating, we would also change. Through molecular and quantum computing we would co-inhabit the world with intelligent artificial life forms who perhaps initially become the farmers of this extensive simulation whose purpose is to control and maintain the simulation within certain boundaries. It is possible that massively parallel quantum computers and devices would be ideal for maintaining this simulation. This is a scenario of the near future and it may be that we never create quantum and molecular computers that are capable of these phenomena, or that the applications development will be slowed by competing technologies. However I believe that it will be possible to create quantum devices and quantum algorithms surprisingly quickly.

SEE:

Mad Science-Flourescent Pigs

GMO News Roundup

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Big Oil Rips Off Ethanol Subsidies

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Big Oil is using Ethanol subsidies, corporate welfare, to fight Ethanol blending. The U.S. taxpayer is subsidizing big oils fight against Ethanol another good reason NOT to have corporate welfare for Ethanol.

For some industries, the prospect of $3.5 billion in federal subsidies now, and double that in three years, might be a powerful incentive. But not, apparently, for the oil industry, which is seeing crude oil prices soar to record highs. Despite collecting billions for blending small amounts of ethanol with gas, oil companies seem determined to fight the spread of E85, a fuel that is 85% ethanol and 15% gas. Congress has set a target of displacing 15% of projected annual gasoline use with alternative fuels by 2017. Right now, wider availability of E85 is the likeliest way to get there.

At the same time the industry is collecting a 51 cents-per-gallon federal subsidy for each gallon of ethanol it mixes with gas and sells as E10 (10% ethanol and 90% gas), it's working against the E85 blend with tactics both overt and stealthy. Efforts range from funding studies that bash the spread of ethanol for driving up the price of corn, and therefore some food, to not supporting E85 pumps at gas stations. The tactics infuriate a growing chorus of critics, from the usual suspects—pro-ethanol consumer groups—to the unexpected: the oil industry's oft-time ally, the auto industry.

The industry collects the subsidies, but didn't lobby for them—Congress created them to encourage a larger ethanol market. While oil reps say they aren't anti-ethanol, they are candid about disliking E85. Says Al Mannato of the American Petroleum Institute (API), the chief trade group for oil and natural-gas companies: "We think [ethanol] makes an effective additive to gasoline but that it doesn't work well as an alternative fuel. And we don't think the marketplace wants E85."

One prong in the oil industry's strategy is an anti-ethanol information campaign. In June the API released a study it commissioned from research firm Global Insight Inc. The report concludes that consumers will be "losers" in the runup to Congress' target of 35 billion gallons of biofuel by 2017 because, it forecasts, they'll pay $12 billion-plus a year more for food as corn prices rise to meet ethanol demand. The conclusions are far from universally accepted, but they have been picked up and promoted by anti-ethanol groups like the Coalition for Balanced Food & Fuel Policy, made up of the major beef, dairy, and poultry lobbies. Global Insight spokesman Jim Dorsey says the funding didn't influence the findings: "We don't have a dog in this hunt."

SEE:

Bio-Fuel B.S.

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Industrial Ecology

Another conservative climate change denier attempts to paint left wing ideas and environmentalism as reactionary.

The concept of "nature" is a romantic invention. It was spun by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century as a confabulated utopian contrast to the dystopia of urbanization and materialism. The traces of this dewy-eyed conception of the "savage" and his unmolested, unadulterated surroundings can be found in the more malignant forms of fundamentalist environmentalism.

At the other extreme are religious literalists who regard Man as the crown of creation with complete dominion over nature and the right to exploit its resources unreservedly. Similar, veiled, sentiments can be found among scientists. The Anthropic Principle, for instance, promoted by many outstanding physicists, claims that the nature of the Universe is preordained to accommodate sentient beings - namely, us humans.

Industrialists, politicians and economists have only recently begun paying lip service to sustainable development and to the environmental costs of their policies. Thus, in a way, they bridge the abyss - at least verbally - between these two diametrically opposed forms of fundamentalism. Still, essential dissimilarities between the schools notwithstanding, the dualism of Man vs. Nature is universally acknowledged.


Quoted by The Economist, Daniel Esty of Yale, the leader of an environmental project sponsored by World Economic Forum, exclaimed:

"Why hasn't anyone done careful environmental measurement before? Businessmen always say, 'what matters gets measured'. Social scientists started quantitative measurement 30 years ago, and even political science turned to hard numbers 15 years ago. Yet look at environmental policy, and the data are lousy."

However we do know how to measure environmental impacts of capitalism, and we can reduce them through Industrial Ecology. In fact that was how industrial capitalism boomed during WWII, it reduced, reused and recycled. The fact is that capitalism needs to adapt, or die. Thus IE is a closed loop system based on biology and ecology. While technology continues to adapt itself in an organic fashion as well. But in order to overcome these contradictions we need to move beyond Green Industrialism to social ecology.

Industrial ecology is the shifting of industrial process from linear (open loop) systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes.

Industrial ecology proposes not to see industrial systems (for example a factory, an ecoregion, or national or global economy) as being separate from the biosphere, but to consider it as a particular case of an ecosystem - but based on infrastructural capital rather than on natural capital. It is the idea that if natural systems do not have waste in them, we should model our systems after natural ones if we want them to be sustainable.

Along with more general energy conservation and material conservation goals, and redefining commodity markets and product stewardship relations strictly as a service economy, industrial ecology is one of the four objectives of Natural Capitalism. This strategy discourages forms of amoral purchasing arising from ignorance of what goes on at a distance and implies a political economy that values natural capital highly and relies on more instructional capital to design and maintain each unique industrial ecology.

How does an industrial facility measure its impact on the surrounding community?

And with a voluntary commitment to sustainable practices, can it improve its environmental, economic and social "footprint" over time?

These are the questions the Washington Department of Ecology and Simpson Tacoma Kraft Company, LLC will explore under a new partnership called the "Industrial Footprint Project." The Tacoma pulp and paper mill has volunteered, along with three other pulp and paper mills in the state, to provide baseline data to Ecology on a range of environmental, economic and social indicators.

Working with a consultant, stakeholders and the participating mills, Ecology will use the data to create a scoring system to establish a "footprint" measurement for each facility. The footprint will serve as a baseline to help companies set targets for improving over time.

Environmental data to be collected includes waste streams, recycling, emissions, water consumption and purchase of raw materials. One part of the project will be an energy challenge-asking each facility to voluntarily reduce their energy usage. On the economic side, some data analyzed will include jobs provided and the costs of good and services. Social indicators may include community involvement, health and safety records or good neighbor efforts.

Simpson Tacoma Kraft Company is an integrated pulp and paper manufacturing mill located on the Commencement Bay waterfront in Tacoma, Washington. It produces upwards of 1300 tons per day of bleached and unbleached packaging-grade paper and unbleached kraft pulp. About one-third of the fiber used comes from recycling old corrugated containers.

SEE:

Capitalism Is Not Sustainable

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Bio-Fuel B.S.

Another excellent post on the real story behind bio-fuels.

Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition

The agro-fuel transition closes a 200-year chapter in the relation between agriculture and industry that began with the Industrial Revolution. Then, the invention of the steam engine promised an end to drudgery. However, industry’s take-off lagged until governments privatized common lands, driving the poorest peasants out of agriculture and into urban factories. Peasant agriculture effectively subsidized industry with both cheap food and cheap labor. Over the next 100 years, as industry grew, so did the urban percentage of the world’s population: from 3% to 13%. Cheap oil and petroleum-based fertilizers opened up agriculture itself to industrial capital. Mechanization intensified production, keeping food prices low and industry booming. The next hundred years saw a three-fold global shift to urban living. Today, the world has as many people living in cities as in the countryside. [10] The massive transfer of wealth from agriculture to industry, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rural-urban shift are all part of the “Agrarian Transition,” the lesser-known twin of the Industrial Revolution. The Agrarian/Industrial twins transformed most of the world’s fuel and food systems and established non-renewable petroleum as the foundation of today’s multi-trillion dollar agri-foods complex.

The pillars of the agri-foods industry are the great grain corporations, e.g., ADM, Cargill and Bunge. They are surrounded by an equally formidable phalanx of food processors, distributors, and supermarket chains on one hand, and agro-chemical, seed, and machinery companies on the other. Together, these industries consume four of every five food dollars. For some time, the production side of the agri-foods complex has suffered from agricultural “involution” in which increasing rates of investment (chemical inputs, genetic engineering, and machinery) have not increased the rates of agricultural productivity—the agri-foods complex is paying more and reaping less.

Agro-fuels are the perfect answer to involution because they’re subsidized, grow as oil shrinks, and facilitate the concentration of market power in the hands of the most powerful players in the food and fuel industries. Like the original Agrarian Transition, the present Agro-fuels Transition will “enclose the commons” by industrializing the remaining forests and prairies of the world. It will drive the planet’s remaining smallholders, family farmers, and indigenous peoples to the cities. It will funnel rural resources to urban centers in the form of fuel, and will generate massive amounts of industrial wealth.

See

Real Costs of Bio-Fuels

Conrad Black and ADM

Bio Fuels = Eco Disaster

GMO News Roundup

Lost and Found

Boreno is Burning

Agribusiness

Desertification

BioFuel and The Wheat Board

The Ethanol Scam: ADM and Brian Mulroney

ADM

Wheat Board

Farmers


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The Carbon Market Myth

Once again capitalism tries to make a buck off the environmental crisis it created. In this case it is carbon markets.

In Canada the dispute over a domestic carbon exchange, linked to the stock exchange, is between Quebec which supports Kyoto in order to get the carbon exchange to locate in Montreal, while the Conservatives refuse to play in the carbon market, disadvantaging the TSX.

While the Tories talk about Carbon credits going to Russia, the reality is that the carbon market is housed in the Chicago commodity exchange. It is a non starter when it comes to actually reducing green house gases. Instead of being some futuristic market it is a return to the state monopoly mercantilism of the 17th Century.

The carbon market is unique in that the commodity traded derives its value primarily from its ability to meet the requirements set by an environmental regulator. There is also a market for voluntary offsets to emissions, but this market is small and unlikely to ever represent a significant piece of the total carbon trading pie (the World Bank estimates (PDF document) that the EU ETS, the only regulations-based emissions trading market in the world, accounted for 99% of total market value in 2006).

The problem with this is that governments have a long history of messing things up when they get involved in any industry. For instance, in Europe, the market for phase one emission allowances took a massive hit after it became clear that EU governments had over-allocated emissions to shield their national industries from the full effects of strict emissions caps. Besides effectively neutralizing the economic incentive to innovate and reduce emissions, this seriously shook the market's confidence in the ability of governments to uphold the necessary conditions for an effective and efficient carbon market to develop.

See:

Corporate America Greener Than Harper

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More Critics of Bio Fuels

The truth about bio-fuels is spreading.

Biofuels and the destruction of the rain forest

Murray Dobbin's Last Stage Of Denial: ethanol will save us!

A H/T to Driving the Porcelain Bus.

See

Bio Fuel

Bio-Fuels

ADM

Ethanol


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Global Farmers Fight Back

My comrades who are Free Market Libertarians and mutualists who oppose capitalism in favour of a cooperative marketplace, will find much to praise in this new farmers movement. It poses a real alternative to capitalist globalization and corporatist free trade. None other than creation of a new movement for a cooperative commonwealth.

The latest attempt to destroy the Wheat Board in Canada is an example of the attack by the State on small farmers in favour of the Agribusiness cartels in the developed world. The Green Revolution, the push for GMO crops and patents on crops as well as using arable land for production for export; palm oil, are examples of non sustainable agribusiness versus the sustainable production of local farmers.

The recent Fraser Institute report by Preston Manning and Mike Harris calling for the end of supply management, the Wheat Board , and subsidies in the market place for farmers, does nothing but open up the farm marketplace to the agribusiness oligopolies. Ironic since Manning's daddy ran a party; Social Credit, made up of farmers that saw these same oligopolies as enemies of a producer run economy.


The fact is that the majority of farmers in the world are family farmers, not far removed from their peasant roots. It is the peasantry that provides the basis for the survival of the food economy. But with the advent of capitalist globalization the peasantry has become a new force in the world economy as Warren Bellow points out.

It is agricultural reform, the privatization of the inherent collectivism of peasant farming, the enclosure of common lands that led to the creation of capitalism in Britain. Forced off the land the peasants move to the cities to look for work becoming the proletariat.

But not all have done so, since it is the farmers who support the cities with their food production. And forced by globalization to collectivize farmers are reforming cooperatives to deal with the new demands of the marketplace.

Thai pig farmers protest at CPF headquarters

S. Korea may allow farmers to export locally grown rice: gov't source

Farmers Cooperative Extends Rollout Of SOA Tool

Connecting Coffee Growers and Drinkers

Cameroon: Coffee - Reasons Behind Poor Performance

Phoenixville Farmer's Market returns to town for sixth season

Innovations in rural financial system inPunjab

What began in England over 400 hundred years ago is now writ wide across the globe. It is not Free Trade nor Free Markets but the concentration of capital and its power to monopolize the market. It is the transformation of agriculture from sustainable economics to the economics of unrestrained growth. Thus the land, people and environment suffer as we see in Indonesia as the islands there burn for the sake of the agribusiness palm oil industry.

Whereas export crops like organic and fair trade coffee have become a basis for sustainable export farming, which can support sustainable agriculture as well as meet the farmers need to be part of a global market place.


Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Farmers hungry for change

At this week's intergovernmental meeting in Rome to assess progress towards the pledge to halve hunger by 2015, the mood was sombre. Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show not a reduction but an increase of more than 25 million chronically undernourished people since 1996. The figure, now at more than 850 million, is testament to how current global policies are consigning the hungry to stay hungry.

So what is going wrong? In 2002, when the UN World Food Summit pledge was last reviewed, the parallel Forum for Food Sovereignty, organised by non-governmental groups representing small farmers and those who feel the sharp end of hunger directly, concluded that the problem was not a lack of political will, as the FAO asserted, but the opposite. Trade liberalisation, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and military dominance, it said, were now the main causes of hunger.

The farmers, from 30 countries, who participated in the conference were eloquent about how farming for small producers is more than just a food production system. Edgar Gonzales Castro, from Peru, said his vision of the future was "traditional" agriculture aimed at satisfying the needs of farmers, rather than generating profit. "What matters is that, on the family plot of land, farmers and their families have a range of crops to fill the cooking pot," he said.

"When governments decide to hold public consultations to help guide their decisions, policy experts as well as representatives of large farmers and agrifood corporations are usually centre stage, not small-scale producers, consumers and their organisations," says Pimbert.

The message of the report is that small-scale farmers - the majority of growers in the world - want radically different policies from those being promoted by their governments. The call is for policies to start from the perspectives of food producers and consumers rather than the demand for profit.

If "one-planet farming" means that western governments will only support farming practices that provide healthy, local food, maintain livelihoods for local producers and conserve resilient landscapes, then there is common ground with small-scale farmers. But if it means a uniform system for all, this will accelerate the hunt to source food globally and as cheaply as possible.

This will result in a continuing decline in food quality, with ever higher social and environmental costs, and be lorded over by fewer and fewer transnational agribusinesses. It would lead both to greater obesity and greater starvation, and see the eradication of more farmers and further loss of farmland.

Farmers' Views on the Future of Food and Small Scale Producers is at http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/14503IIED.pdf

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen is a Non Profit local community organisation formed by local women and men who are farmers and fishermen. Due to increasing poverty in the area, the local people formed this organisation of Volunteers to help themselves. Due to lack of money and machinery for farming and fishing, wish to appeal for donations of Farm Machinery ie, tractors, irrigation equipment etc. Donations for our Agricultural and development projects in Volta Region of Ghana. To help women and children to have food to eat.Train the young women and youth to acquire the needed skills. To also help farmers with farming machinery and fishing equipment. This would generate income for the local people.Non Profit Organisation.

SEE:

Free Trade Not Aid

Free Trade and Africa

The War For Chocolate

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Development Versus Population Growth

WTO: Privatization of Water

Is There a Silver Lining to the WTO Talks? No




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CPC Bright Idea

Before the Conservative Party of Canada declared incandescent light bulbs illegal in Canada the Communist Party of Cuba beat them to it. And Castro like the Harper Government is promoting Bio-Fuels, though not the way they are.....

Under the headline "It is time for an energy revolution right now," Castro, 80, addressed US-Brazilian cooperation on biofuels, and urged that the issue be discussed on International Workers' Day.

"Insatiable in its demand, the empire has called on the world to produce biofuels to free the United States from dependence on imported oil," Castro wrote in the Communist Party newspaper Granma.

"Nothing is stopping US and European capital from financing biofuels. They could even give the funds to Brazil and Latin America.

"And the United States, Europe and other industrialized countries would save more than 140 billion dollars every year, with no concern whatsoever for the fallout in terms of climate change and hunger, which will affect developing countries the most.

"They will always have enough money left over for biofuels and buying at any price whatever food is available in the global market."

Among other things, Castro called for a wholesale replacement of incandescent lights with fluorescent bulbs, and massive replacement of domestic and commercial systems using older technologies that require two to three times more energy than new systems.

SEE:

The New Cuban Revolution

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Waiting For Dion

In response to the Conservatives Made In Alberta Green Plan the Liberal Leader was nowhere to be found.

Not on Don Newman's show on CBC or Mike Duffy's on CTV, heck not even on CPAC.

Stephane Dion was absent from the debate.

MIA.

Oh Dion, Dion, where art though Dion?

Why hast thou blown this opportunity?

Because it's like waiting for Godot.

Neither the Tories or Liberals want to deal with the reality of Kyoto being a carbon tax system.



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