Free trade is not fair or honest.  Multi-national food and chemical monopolies and the finance flim flam artists that support them are dangerous to the health of people around the world.  And even though it is sad that the miscreants on Wall Street breed at all, I still do not wish their children to inherit a world filled with famine and disease.  (The miscreants' children should also not inherit much money, but that's another essay and another letter to my Senators).  So I was unhappy to learn there is yet another corporate welfare bill making its way through the U.S. Senate and yet another letter I had to write to Jon Tester.   

 U.S. SB 384 (Lugar-Casey) cynically named "The Global Food Security Act" aims to throw most of its weight towards genetically modified crops to the tune of 7.7 billion in research. Annie Shattuck of "Food First" reported on this and Raj Patel ("Stuffed and Starved") alerted me to her post.  http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2418
The Union of Concerned Scientists have weighed in on SB 384:

"Past government-funded GM crops have been a colossal failure in all but one regard - they have opened up markets to GM crops abroad. Agricultural development funding under Lugar-Casey is simply more corporate welfare. These funds will pry open markets for U.S. biotech firms, but will do little to help curb hunger."

The "research" comes from something called the "Chicago Council on Global Affairs." The Gates Foundation, according to the article on Food First by Shattuck, funded the "research" that led to this bill. The Food First article says this bill is "not an isolated piece of legislation, but a coordinated roll-out of the "new Green Revolution",-- a project that includes the Gates Foundation's Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)."  Sounds oh so nice, but the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) has different conclusions from a 4 year study involving over 400 scientists not some "hastily prepared report" says Shattuck. 

"The IAASTD found that reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy, and water crises. And it concluded that expensive, short-term technical fixes -- including GM crops -- don't adequately address the complex challenges of the agricultural sector and often exacerbate social and environmental harm. The IAASTD called for land reform, agro-ecological techniques (proven to enhance farmers' adaptive capacity and resilience to environmental stresses such as climate change and water scarcity), building local economies, local control of seeds, and farmer-led participatory breeding programs."

The new "Green Revolution" will make encourage farmers to buy genetically modified seed that cost 35% more than traditional varieties. Recently 1500 farmers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh committed suicide because they borrowed money to "improve" their land with GM cotton seeds.  When drought hit (another whole diary on dams and how they impact farmers) and they couldn't pay their debts, they killed themselves often using a herbicide they bought to go with their cool new genetically modified seeds.  In a recent article on Alternet, Tara Lohan reports on the tens of thousands of deaths of Indian farmers linked to borrowing money for crop improvements.  It is an eerily familiar story  to me.  When I first moved to Montana in 1992, I tried to understand my new husband's ranch operations.  We were always being invited to "steak feeds" where dreary salesmen hawked creepy chemicals to make our calves fatter and our crops bigger.  Lohan links to Nancy Scola's 2007 piece on "Why Iraqi Farmers Might Prefer Death..."    http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62273/why_iraqi_farmers_might_prefer_death_to_paul_bremer's_order_81/

"Here's the way it works in India. In the central region of Vidarbha, for example, Monsanto salesmen travel from village to village touting the tremendous, game-changing benefits of Bt cotton, Monsanto's genetically modified seed sold in India under the Bollgard® label. The salesmen tell farmers of the amazing yields other Vidarbha growers have enjoyed while using their products, plastering villages with posters detailing "True Stories of Farmers Who Have Sown Bt Cotton." Old-fashioned cotton seeds pale in comparison to Monsanto's patented wonder seeds, say the salesmen, as much as an average old steer is humbled by a fine Jersey cow."

Buying that Jersey Cow or that new John Deere to feed the world instead of just their families...  Sound familiar? To American farmers and ranchers, it should sound familiar.  We have been down this road before and so has the third world.  Shattuck again:

"The Lugar-Casey Act represents the biggest project in agriculture since the original Green Revolution industrialized farming in the 1950s and 1960s. The first Green Revolution increased global food production by 11% in a very short time, but per capita hunger also increased equally as much. How could this be? Green Revolution technologies are expensive. The fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, and machinery needed to cash in on productive gains put the technology out of reach of most small farmers, increasing the divide between rich and poor in the developing world. Poor farmers were driven out of business and into poverty-stricken urban slums."

For a time, the "green revolution" worked here in the U.S., but fewer than 2 million small farms and ranches (like ours here in Montana) are left. Rural males here in the U.S. are twice as likely to commit suicide as urban and suburban males.  Studies indicate that pesticides may reduce Serotonin levels and cause mood disorders and suicides (agriwellness.org).  So it looks like big agribusiness has worked its magic of the marketplace here as well.  

Shattuck emphasizes that local control of our food rather than being at the mercy of large multi-national food and chemical corporations is the way to go in every country.  Biotechnology will not solve hunger.  Smart sustainable farming and ranching policies will.  The Senate bill has a small provision that allows aid groups to buy food locally in developing countries (if they can find any).  That small provision is just a pat on the head while big agribusiness gets a big handout and continues to devestate the world.

Lohan towards the end of her piece quotes Vandana Shiva on "Democracy Now":

"I don't think we need to talk about free trade and fair trade. We need to talk about honest trade. Today's trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It's become a genocide."

Last week on our radio show we had on Gary Cozette to talk about the largest amount of displaced people in the world now overtaking Darfur.  That is the 4.4 million displaced small farmers in Colombia.  80% of our "aid" goes to the military instead of helping small farmers get perishable food to market.  Cozette said that Colombia sprays the coca plants (sacred to indigenous people) with super duper Roundup (made by...surprise...Monsanto) but coca production keeps increasing. (Another whole diary).   The war between the military and the guerillas traps these farmers forcing them into the cities and big agriculture farms.  The largest number of trade union organizers killed also occurs in Colombia.

It's all connected, people.  That's why we need a new farm/labor party. The two parties that we have now want to keep passing "free" trade agreements with places like Colombia, Peru, Panama.  The two parties have bipartisan bills like Lugar/Casey that continue to support Agribusiness with the perhaps unintended (hate to sound harsh, but I'm seeing an awful lot nasty brutish behavior emerging from D.C.....) consequences of the "genocide" Shiva talks about.    Any suggestions for a name?  In the meantime, chew your Congress critters ears off about this crap. 

Our outrage is "real and focused".