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UN Guidelines Use Corporations in African “Land Grab”
Whoever controls the land controls the nation.
Corporations and foreign governments have been “ land-grabbing” from third world nations to control agriculture.
“What is missing the most in terms of land grabbing is a clear condemnation of this practice. That was one of the baseline demands of civil society,” Stephane Parmentier from aid agency Oxfam. “It was impossible to include it, because it was too sensitive and too controversial for quite a lot of member states.”
Nations like Ethiopia, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, in Africa have “voluntarily” signed agreements with multi-national corporations and foreign investors, allowing them to control agricultural land. The nation’s leaders believe that giving access to their resources will benefit their people; however this is just another manipulative ploy to coercively acquire control over land, food production and securitization.
The world’s governments have agreed to follow UN dictated guidelines over land, and who controls the fate of land.
The United Nations (UN) has enacted global guidelines on purchasing agricultural land from developing nations like Africa and Asia.
The UN claims that to secure equality for the poor and disadvantaged, this international body must control their lands through the allowance of mutli-national corporations and governments who will develop the land for agriculture and securitize the crop yields; thereby giving the UN control over the global food supply.
The document entitled “ The UN Global Compact and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises” outlines through “voluntary” means, the UN will implement their international guidelines with respect to corporate conduct, standards and abilities.
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Monsanto’s GMO Seeds Contributing to Farmer Suicides Every 30 Minutes
In what has been called the single largest wave of recorded suicides in human history, Indian farmers are now killing themselves in record numbers. It has been extensively reported, even in mainstream news, but nothing has been done about the issue. The cause? Monsanto’s cost-inflated and ineffective seeds have been driving farmers to suicide, and is considered to be one of the largest — if not the largest — cause of the quarter of a million farmer suicides over the past 16 years.
According to the most recent figures (provided by the New York University School of Law), 17,638 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2009 — about one death every 30 minutes. In 2008, the Daily Mail labeled the continual and disturbing suicide spree as ‘The GM (genetically modified) Genocide’. Due to failing harvests and inflated prices that bankrupt the poor farmers, struggling Indian farmers began to kill themselves. Oftentimes, they would commit the act by drinking the very same insecticide that Monsanto supplied them with — a gruesome testament to the extent in which Monsanto has wrecked the lives of independent and traditional farmers.
To further add backing to the tragedy, the rate of Indian farmer suicides massively increased since the introduction of Monsanto’s Bt cotton in 2002. It is no wonder that a large percentage of farmers who take their own lives are cotton farmers, the demographic that is thought to be among the most impacted. Dr. Mercola, an osteopathic doctor that has been educating the world about natural health for many years, recently saw the destruction of traditional Indian farmers first hand. Dr. Mercola found out about the notorious ‘suicide belt’ of India, where 4,238 farmer suicides took place in 2007 alone.
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Analysis: Land grab or development opportunity?
With land central to the livelihoods of millions of people in Africa, Lorenzo Cotula of the International Institute for Environment and Development examines the impact of large-scale land acquisitions on the continent’s farmers.
“Land grabs” are now one of the biggest issues in Africa.
Over the past few years, companies and foreign governments have been leasing large areas of land in some of Africa’s poorest countries.
Many commentators have raised concerns that poor villagers will be forced off their land and agribusiness will marginalise family farming.
Others say that foreign investment can help African countries create jobs, increase export earnings and use more advanced technologies.
Three years since media reports started raising public awareness on this issue, evidence has been growing on the scale, geography, players, features and impacts of the land rush. The emerging picture provides ground for concern.
Last year the World Bank documented media reports of land deals over the period between 2008 and 2009.
The deals were for nearly 60 million hectares worldwide, roughly the size of a country like Ukraine – and two-thirds of the land acquired was in Africa.
While new figures continue to emerge, all evidence points to a phenomenon of unprecedented scale.
Also, some individual deals are for very large areas. For example, Liberia recently signed a concession for 220,000 hectares.
Money to be made
Media attention has focused on investments by Middle Eastern and Asian government-backed operators but Western companies have also been heavily involved.
Companies acquire land because they expect world food and commodity prices to increase – so there is money to be made in agriculture.
Some governments have also promoted land acquisitions abroad as a way to secure affordable food for their people.
In many African countries, agriculture has suffered from years of neglect – and investment is needed to improve productivity and market access.
But not all investment is good – and growing evidence strongly indicates that large land deals are not the way to go.
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John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hitman
John Perkins — Bio
As Chief Economist at a major international consulting firm, John Perkins advised the World Bank, United Nations, IMF, U.S. Treasury Department, Fortune 500 corporations, and countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. He worked directly with heads of state and CEOs of major companies. His books on economics and geo-politics have sold more than 1 million copies, spent many months on the New York Times and other bestseller lists, and are published in over 30 languages.
John’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list) is a startling exposé of international corruption. His The Secret History of the American Empire, also a New York Times bestseller, details the clandestine operations that created the world’s first truly global empire. His Hoodwinked is a blueprint for a new form of global economics. The solutions are not “return to normal” ones. Instead, John challenges us to soar to new heights, away from predatory capitalism and into an era more transformative than the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. His writings detail specific steps each of us can take to create a sustainable, just, and peaceful world.
John is a… Continue reading
The Shock Doctrine
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.
Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.
The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
Big Shift Coming
The Fall of American Empire | The decline of the West or the Rise of the Rest?
Marwan Bishara is a political analyst. Marwan Bishara was born in Nazareth and is a Palestinian Christian Israeli Arab. He is the younger brother of Azmi Bishara. Bishara’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, The Guardian, Le Monde and The Nation, among other outlets. He is also the chairman of The Galilee Foundation, a UK based charity that provides over 100 students annually with university scholarships. Marwan Bishara has engaged in high-profile public speaking on Middle East and global affairs, in addition to international journalism. He was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris and a fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales. An author who writes and speaks extensively on global politics, Bishara is an authority on many of today’s most relevant global issues, US foreign policy and the greater Middle East.
