Paul Driessen
It’s easy to farm organically in the wealthy, advanced EU
and USA, where consumers can afford much more expensive organic meats, eggs,
fruits and vegetables. It’s much harder if you have to deal with the insects
and crop diseases that plague African farmers on constant massive levels and locusts that
bring true catastrophes every few decades – and then sell your
meager crop yields to impoverished families.
That modern pesticides might save billions of dollars of
crops every year and stop locusts before they can swarm by the tens of billions
– or that bioengineered crops might feed more people, from less land, with less
water, with greater resistance to insects, with less need for chemical
pesticides (natural or manmade) – never seems to occur, or matter, to those who
demand nothing but organic for Africa.
Many African farmers are women, who today have almost no
“right to choose” when it comes to which crops they will plant. They labor
sunup to sundown on mostly 2 to 5-acre plats, yet rarely have enough produce to
feed their own families, much less sell for extra money. Millions live on a few
dollars a day.
A 2005 Congress of Racial Equality biotechnology conference
in the United Nations General Assembly hall and a related video documentary,
“Voices from Africa: Biotechnology and the subsistence farmer,” dramatically
highlighted the difficulties facing the continent’s farmers – and the ways
GM/biotech crops can improve their lives, especially crops enhanced with
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes that enable plants to kill insects that feed
on the crops, while leaving beneficial insects unharmed.
Maize (corn) is much of Africa’s most important crop. But
because of drought, poor soil, multiple plant diseases, voracious insects, and
lack of modern fertilizers, irrigation and mechanized equipment, average yields
per acre in Sub-Saharan Africa are about the lowest in the world. Other crops
suffer similar fates.
“I grow maize on a half hectare” (1.25 acres), South
Africa’s Elizabeth Ajele explained in the video. “The old plants would be
destroyed by insects, but not the new biotech plants. With the profits I get
from the new Bt maize, I can grow onions, spinach and tomatoes, and sell them
for extra money to buy fertilizer. We were struggling to keep hunger out of our
house. Now the future looks good. If someone came and said we should stop using
the new maize, I would cry.”
Countryman Richard Sithole shared her excitement. “Now I
don’t have to buy chemical pesticides. With the old maize, I got 100 bags from
my 15 hectares. With Bt maize I get 1,000 bags. Now I have money to buy better
food and send my children and grandchildren to school and even university.”
It was the same story with cotton. “With the new Bt
cotton, I only spray pesticides two times, instead of six. At the end of the
day, we know the crop won’t be destroyed and we will have a harvest and money,”
South African widow, school principal and mother of five Thandi Myeni
explained.
“I sprayed five times a season with pesticides, but
sometimes the insects still destroyed my entire crop,” Kenyan Alice Wambuii
said. “We would get pesticides all over our bodies. Last year, I got 3,000
shillings for my cotton, but I had to spend 5,000 shillings for sprays.” Bt
cotton changed that for her, too.
Biotech maize and cotton enabled these South African
farmers to triple their profits, cut their pesticide use up to 75% and save
35-49 days per season working in fields – mostly spraying pesticides by hand.
That was just 15 years ago. Life looked much better. But
then the cabal of anti-biotech, anti-pesticide, agro-ecology pressure groups
launched new attacks, aided by the growing network of ideologically like-minded
donors that helped magnify anti-technology programs and messages – often while
insulating the big financiers from direct connections to the radical, callous, eco-imperialist pressure
groups. The hopes and dreams, livelihoods and farming preferences of
these African farmers mean nothing to the cabal.
The Swift Foundation was founded by an heir to a major
stockholder in United Parcel Service, from monies created by UPS going public. Endowed
with over $60 million, it awards grants of over $2 million a year
and has been a major supporter of pro-organic, anti-agricultural technology
organizations in the USA and abroad. They include: Greenpeace, the Pesticide
Action Network, the Center for Food Safety (long a promoter of radical anti-GMO
activist Vandana Shiva), and AgroEcology Fund (AEF).
The
Christensen Fund was created in 1957 by heirs of a wealthy
industrial engineer. Its $300 million in assets support “biocultural diversity”
and fund projects like its Rift Valley Program, which funds “stewards”
(subsistence farmers) who want to “maintain culture-based livelihoods on their
ancestral lands and adapt their resource management systems in innovative ways
that advance food sovereignty and resilience.” (Resilience until they are
confronted by droughts, locusts and other insects.)
The New Field
Foundation (NFF) was founded in 2002 with money from San Francisco
based real estate developers Barbara and D. Thomson Sargent. It claims to support
the efforts of rural women to overcome poverty, violence and injustice in their
communities. But it opposes biotech crops and other modern agricultural
technologies, and gives hefty sums to La Via
Campesina and other activists in Africa.
The NFF supports and works with the AEF and is a grantor
to the Tides Center/Foundation. With
assets of nearly $200 million, Tides helps philanthropies “manage and direct”
their giving, but has been described as behaving “less like a philanthropy and
more like a money
laundering enterprise.” The Center also receives funding and support
from major US foundations, including the NFF, Wallace Global Fund, Charles
Stewart Mott Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and David and Lucille Packard
Foundation.
The Schmidt
Family Foundation (SFF) was established in 2006 by Wendy and Eric
Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google. Its estimated assets of $178 million,
including Google stock primarily help finance advancing “the wiser
use of energy and natural resources to support efforts worldwide that empower
communities to build resilient systems for food, water and human resources.” (Resilience
again.) The SFF has donated directly to radical domestic and global agro-ecology
groups like the Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety,
Environmental Working Group, Friends of the Earth, Pesticide Action Network –
and Greenpeace, an implacable opponent of Golden Rice.
This miracle rice could prevent some 500,000 children
from going blind and save 250,000 lives every year from Vitamin A deficiency
and malnutrition. But opposition to Golden Rice caused the loss of at least 1,424,680
life years in India alone just between 2003 and 2013. Greenpeace
couldn’t care less.
To date, the AgroEcology
Fund (discussed in Part 1)
has provided more than $6 million dollars to organizations that promote subsistence
farming as a supposed alternative to far more productive modern farming
technologies and methods. This includes over $500,000 over the years to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in
Africa, as well as $200,000 to
La Via Campesina and GroundSwell International.
In the USA, AEF and NFF donors and advisors have included
the Packard Foundation, Ben & Jerry Foundation, Swift Foundation, Wallace
Global Fund and many others around the world. A representative of the radical anti-technology
Pesticide Action Network Asia sits on AEF’s advisory board, and the global
network of financiers finds ways to support PANA and many other ultra-radical
groups.
Other callous foundations supporting Friends of the Earth
(a core member of AFSA, along with La Via Campesina) has come from the Packard
Foundation ($600,000), Foundation for the Carolinas ($5,000,000), Charles
Stewart Mott Foundation ($500,000), Ford Foundation ($328,500), Rockefeller
Brothers Fund ($300,000) and Schmidt Foundation ($125,000).
These financiers and the radical organizations they
support perpetuate what many would justifiably call crimes
against humanity. They use their tax-exempt
status and clever terminology (like agro-ecology, sustainability and food
sovereignty) to advance programs that deny people access to modern agricultural
technologies that would improve crop yields, increase family wealth, prevent
blindness and save lives.
They should be condemned and deprived of their tax-exempt
status, for eco-imperialism and making false and ultimately lethal claims about
the farming methods they promote and the modern methods they prevent African,
Asian and Latin American farmers from practicing.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee
For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ● Black death and other books and
articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
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