African governments have resisted attempts to undermine their food security
 For the last 20 years, the US has, with varying degrees of success, bullied, bribed and threatened governments on six continents to enforce its skull-and-crossbones patent laws through bilateral trade agreements
|
Man-made famines occurred. People starved or became dependent on imported foreign grain. Millions of farmers were forced to sell their land (or sometimes their children) to pay off their debts, and move to the cities.
In the tradition of the European explorers unleashed on the rest of humanity with letters from their kings entitling them to claim and seize the lands, treasure and inhabitants of all places not under the rule of white Christian princes, the US patent office began in the 1990s, granting American corporations exclusive "patents" for varieties of rice produced in Asia for thousands of years, for beans grown in Mexico centuries before Columbus, and for all the products which were or might be made from trees, plants, roots and moulds growing in the rain forests of Africa and Asia.
Indian courts, under pressure from their citizens, rebuffed for now American attempts to collect royalties for the production of basmati rice, which farmers in India and Pakistan have cultivated for centuries. But every developing country can't bring to the table against the U.S. the power that India, with a fifth of the world's population can. In the US media this privatization of nature is called "the biotech industry.” Most of humanity outside the U.S. call it biopiracy. In the last decade, corporate "life scientists" in the biotech industry have invented, and the US Department of Agriculture has patented a perverse but profitable technology which prevents a current year's crop from producing usable seed for next year's planting. These "terminator seeds" will force farmers to return to corporate seed suppliers every year.
For the last 20 years, the US has, with varying degrees of success, bullied, bribed and threatened governments on six continents to enforce its skull-and-crossbones patent laws through bilateral trade agreements --- think NAFTA and CAFTA - through World Bank and International Monetary Fund dictates, and the World Trade Organization. Today UN bodies and dozens of individual countries are under pressure to allow the introduction of genetically modified crops and terminator seed technologies into their food chains.
Despite their poverty and need for development aid, African countries, informed by the world media (outside the US) have been forced by their own citizens, scientists and farmers to stoutly resist Western efforts to undermine their food security. But the slick and shiny PR campaign around the Gates and Rockerfeller initiatives, supposedly addressed at alleviating world hunger seem to mark a new stage in the continuing scramble for African resources.
Last year, the Gates Foundation hired former Monsanto VP Robert Robert Horsch as senior program officer for Africa. Monsanto is the company that invented "biotechnology" and the patenting of life forms by corporations. This is the context for the "philanthropy" of the Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations, and their expressed concern for foisting a "Green Revolution" upon Africa. Will African farmers and their governments be forced to pay American corporations to cultivate the crops they have for centuries?
Global capital and competition to control the world's remaining energy have put Africa's oil resources in the sights of America's strategic planners. If the Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations, along with Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and other agribusiness and biotech and "life science" players have anything to say about it, Africa's food supply is up for grabs too.
Bruce Dixon is the managing editor of Black Agenda Report. This article is reprinted with kind permisison of www.blackagendareport.com
|