Nationals betray the bush — again

Among the death and destruction left in their wake, one can observe some positives that have come from the devastating bushfires that ripped through New South Wales and Queensland.

One is that the conservative taboo on linking bushfire intensity and frequency to the climate crisis has been broken. The other is that the National Party has well and truly revealed itself to be no friend of regional Australia.

The desperate attempt by Nationals leader Michael McCormack to dismiss any reference to climate science as the preserve of "woke capital-city greenies" — in stark contradiction to the clearly expressed views of firefighting experts and people in the bush — marked a genuine turning point.

The frantic insistence by former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce that the Greens bear some responsibility for the fires, even though the Coalition has been in power for several years, both federally and in NSW, was truly unhinged.

Once upon a time, the National Party was characterised by its "rural socialism", a mixture of rural pork-barrelling and support for farmers. Those days have long since gone.

It now functions as a simple sidekick for the extension of the Liberals’ ruthless neoliberal agenda into the bush. The Nationals’ unconditional support for coal mining and billionaire cotton producers, at the expense of the Darling River ecosystem and downstream agricultural industries, is brutal proof that they represent agribusiness and fossil fuel capitalists, not family farmers.

Read more...>

How did Murray Goulburn, once Australia’s biggest milk processor and a successful dairy cooperative since 1950, end up sold to its international competitor, Canadian dairy giant Saputo? In this  multi-part series, Elena Garcia provides some answers.

---

After nearly 70 years as a cooperative that was wholly owned by the farmers who supply the milk, on April 5 Victorian dairy farmers voted to sell Murray Goulburn, once Australia’s biggest dairy processing business, to foreign owners.

The $1.31 billion deal, unanimously supported by the Murray Goulburn board, includes the cooperative’s operating assets and liabilities, including the 10-year contract to supply Coles with $1 a litre milk. Saputo officially took over Murray Goulburn on May 1.

After a campaign, begun by Murray Goulburn directors at the annual general meeting on October 27, to present the sale as the only way to protect the cooperative from the banks, nearly 96% of farmer shareholders voted in favour of the takeover deal by Canadian dairy giant Saputo.

But the farmers were furious.

• Death of a dairy cooperative — Part 1 
• Death of a dairy cooperative — Part 2 
• Death of a dairy cooperative — Part 3 
• Death of a dairy cooperative — Part 4

The Green Revolution: Effects in Asia and implications for Africa

by Alan Broughton 

Introduction

The term Green Revolution refers to the introduction of high-yielding varieties of staple food crops, particularly wheat and rice, into Third World countries, starting in the 1960s. Initially Mexico, India and the Philippines were targeted. The stated aim was to increase food production to end hunger and prevent uprisings. 

The Green Revolution did increase agricultural production, and no more successful revolutionary uprisings occurred, but it failed to reduce hunger and poverty, improve nutrition, or protect the environment. While some of these failures are now acknowledged by the proponents, the answer is that “there was no alternative”, and that for untouched areas of the world, particularly Africa, there is still no alternative. However, that alternative does exist: it is called agroecology. Science takes credit for successes but takes no responsibility for failures (Shiva 2001). 

The Green Revolution was promoted by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Bank and the US government. The most immediate aim was to prevent revolution in the Third World. The Western world had lost China and Cuba and was in the process of losing Vietnam; there were insurgencies in Malaya and the Philippines and uncertainty about President Soekarno in Indonesia. It was decided to fight revolution with food (Cleaver 1972). “The only way to prevent a Red Revolution is to promote a Green Revolution” – Peer Maurin of Catholic Worker, and “Where hunger goes, Communism follows” – Rieff (Patel 2013). President Macapagal in the Philippines said: “We consider this institute [the International Rice Research Institute which developed the new rice varieties] as a potent weapon in the struggle against poverty and communism in Asia” (Patel 2013). 

An unstated secondary aim was to increase the penetration of agribusiness into the Third World. Profits could be made by selling the new varieties of seed and the fertilisers, pesticides and equipment (tractors, pumps) that were indispensable to their success. American fertiliser companies were looking for new markets after the Second World War when nitrate was less needed for bomb making; Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder who developed the first new high-yielding crop varieties, emphasised the importance of fertilisers to Indian politicians, and both the World Bank and US Aid for International Development (USAID) strongly pushed for increased fertiliser use (Shiva 2001). Part of the strategy of US AID funding was to increase chemical fertiliser use; this is now the strategy used in Africa, where in many countries the majority of department of agriculture spending is allocated to fertiliser subsidies (African Centre for Biodiversity 2016).

A people's food policy for England

Stepping away from market imperatives frees our minds and thinking about food and farm production. Agriculture and food systems, the resources needed for producing food and the landscapes where this takes place are a kind of commons or a public good. The more food is viewed as a public good, the less appropri­ate it is that the productive factors needed to produce foods, seeds, land, water etc., are private property and provided by the market. ...Rethinking food as a right, farming as a management system of the planet and the food system as a commons is what I would call a real shift in paradigm (a most overused word!). It doesn’t rule out markets as one of several mechanisms for food distribu­tion, but does it reject market hegemony over our food supplies, and rejects the view that market forces are the best way of allocating food producing resources.

Read more...

Saving Britain’s food supply: a manifesto to keep food on the table

By Jay Rayner

 
During the early 1990s Britain’s self-sufficiency in food reached its highest in modern times. We were producing just over 70% of all the food we were eating. Since then the story has been one only of decline. We now produce 60%, but because of exports only about 50% of the food we eat is actually produced here. There are a number of reasons for this, but key among them is the dominance of the supermarkets.

In the late 80s and early 90s a series of changes to the planning laws allowed for the building of large out-of-town hypermarkets on greenfield sites, which in turn encouraged the boom in the supermarket sector. That created the food retail landscape we have today in which fewer than a dozen companies control more than 90% of the food retail market.

The supermarkets used that dominance to drive prices ever lower, and with drastic results. This is no knee-jerk negative response to the concept of supermarkets. They have their positives. They have kept pace with social change, shortening the length of time it takes people to get the shopping done, thus enabling the two-job households now required to keep pace with the cost of living. They have been a prime driver of food culture in the UK, providing a ready source of the ingredients consumers have been introduced to via the media. They have enabled huge economies of scale.

Read more...

Indonesian cattle cruelty exhibited at class action trial

DAY three of the Indonesian live cattle ban class action trial was dominated by the defence presenting extensive and intimate details of animal cruelty practices that underpinned the government’s sudden decision to cut off trade.

Lights in the court room were dimmed as Defence Senior Counsel Neil Williams showed selected extracts from the controversial ABC Four Corners episode of May 30, 2011 “A Bloody Business” which was also introduced into trial evidence.

Graphic images of cattle mistreatment ignited the public uproar that applied intense pressure on the former Labor government and a few days after the ABC broadcast the then Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig eventually suspended the entire market for up to six months.

The Federal Court case is being held in Sydney and seeking to prove misfeasance by the commonwealth - claiming about $600 million in damages - in Mr Ludwig’s signing of the second control order that shut trade, to try and address animal welfare standards in Indonesian abattoirs.

On day three, the plaintiff’s Senior Counsel Noel Hutley spent the day presenting his argument and allowed several Four Corners extracts to be shown to the court room.

Read more....

Growing food in the post-truth era

The global food system has been operating in post-truth mode for decades. Having constructed food scarcity as a justification for a second Green Revolution, Big Agriculture now employs its unethical marketing tactics to selling farmers “climate-smart” agriculture in the form of soils, seeds and chemicals.

The cover of Monsanto’s 2016 annual report, A Limitless Perspective, presents a vista of galaxies worthy of a George Lucas production. The brightest star is an A$88 billion merger with German chemical company Bayer, to be finalised this year.

Critics have described this as a “marriage made in hell”. They fear the new mega-corporation will impose even more pesticides and genetically modified seeds on the world’s farmers.

Monsanto’s oft-stated aim is to “consolidate the entire food chain”. That means a corporatised food regime that concentrates knowledge and power in the hands of a few.

This cedes control of food security to profit-making companies. The democratic governance of food and agriculture policy is under threat.

Read more...

Book Review : Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

DEAD ZONE:Where the Wild Things Were
by Philip Lymbery
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017
Reviewed by Martin Empson

Philip Lymbery’s Dead Zone is a highly readable, if frightening, examination of the impact of industrial agriculture on the environment, and particularly biodiversity. Lymbery’s style is part travel-book, part autobiography and part ecological critique. There’s a lot in it, and this review cannot hope to highlight all of the fascinating content—my copy is covered in pencil markings just from a single read.But I want to try and explore what Lymbery rightly highlights as a major ecological crisis, and add a few additional thoughts.

The first thing to note is the breadth of Lymbery’s coverage. From the impact of palm plantations on elephants in Asia, to the decline of Barn Owls, Nightingales and other birds in the UK, to the dead zones in the Mexican Gulf and the way that the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy has decimated Eastern European farming, this is a bleak picture.

Read more...>

Solutions to Australia’s rural crisis

By Elena Garcia

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Australia is the most urbanised country on earth. Almost 90% of Australians live in urban areas, while rural Australia, as of 2010–11, had only 134,000 farm businesses employing 307,000 people to manage 52% of Australia — 417.3 million hectares of land, including the 46.3% of Australia that is marginal land.

In rural areas plagues of feral animals destroy land management infrastructure, drive native plants and animals into extinction and strip vegetation from the soil and creek banks, allowing the topsoil to be flushed down the rivers by the increasingly intensive rain events or blown away in dust storms because rain is less frequent.

Meanwhile, a concentrated attack has been launched on land owners by corporations. Aboriginal communities have been moved from their traditional lands into townships on various pretexts, including by cutting the water supply to remote communities, so the mining industry can have free access to their lands.

The abolition of marketing boards and the fair minimum pricing regulations they set has allowed the supermarket corporate duopoly to drive farmers into poverty. The managers of our prime farmland — dairy, fruit and vegetable growers — are pushed out of the industry as farm gate prices remain below costs and food processing industries are moved offshore or run for investor profit rather than farm returns.

Both foreign and domestic corporate interests work with banks to buy up the best agricultural land by whatever dirty trick they can manage, so they can directly export our best produce for premium prices, leaving cheap and toxic imports, produced with polluted water and slave labour, for domestic consumption.

Once they own the land, there is nothing to stop these Big Agriculture corporations from establishing the toxic industrial agriculture that has destroyed American farmland and small farmers.

Read more...>

New book looks at how corporate power is destroying agriculture — and how it can be changed

By Lalitha Chelliah  
Sustainable Agriculture vs Corporate Greed: Small farmers, food security &

big business
By Alan Broughton & Elena Garcia
Resistance Books
104pp, pb
$15.00

This new book is vital to understand the desperate state of farming in Australia and the world. The foolish thinking behind the way world leaders propose to manage sustainable food production is clearly exposed.

In Sustainable Agriculture vs Corporate Greed, published by Resistance Books, farmers and socialist activists Alan Broughton and Elena Garcia explore the world of survival.

Broughton has enormous experience and knowledge about sustainable farming. He has worked in or studied experiences in Venezuela, Thailand, Tanzania, Uganda, Cuba, South Korea and Italy. He also designed and taught the first organic farming diploma course in Australia.

Read more >>> 

Are cows eating the Amazon?

By Gunnar Rundgren
Garden Earth - Beyond sustainability

Land clearing in tropical countries for production of export crops gets a lot of attention, and rightly so. However, the understanding of the mechanisms involved and how to allocate the effects of deforestation in terms of environmental damage or carbon emissions, is still very low. While it is true that exports are important for this, most deforestation are driven by domestic factors.  A study by Henders et al (2015) show that in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea one third of deforestation was embodied in exports in 2011, up from a fifth in 2000. This means that two thirds of the deforestation is driven by domestic factors.

In the study beef was identified as the main driver of forest loss in the seven countries, accounting for nearly 60 percent of embodied deforestation and just over half of embodied emissions. Soybean production was the second largest source of embodied deforestation area whereas oil palm was the second largest source of embodied emissions.

But one can argue against how to allocate emissions and land use changes. For instance, pasture areas in Brazil have been stable in the last decade, while grazing has moved towards the forested areas because it is more profitable to plow and farm crops in the pasturelands than to graze them. It might be more correct to allocate impacts of land use changes based on the relative expansion of agriculture area for different crops or production in a country. In the case of Brazil, it would mean that soy production would still be a major cause of deforestation, but sugar cane cultivation would carry 20 % of the burden of deforestation and associated carbon emissions while beef from pasture would carry almost none of this, This would be the case despite that there is very little sugar grown in the recently deforested zones and a there are a lot of animals grazing there.

Read more >>

Monsanto Losing Millions as Farmers in India Plant Indigenous Seed

 By Christina Sarichand  of  UndergroundReporter.org. 

(UR) India — Monsanto is losing millions on failed GM cotton. The company illegally pushed a form of Bt cotton into India and Africa more than a decade ago, but farmers are now pushing back by planting their own indigenous seed.

Monsanto is accused of writing laws and then breaking them to enter the market in India, but after more than 300,000 farmer deaths between 1995 and 2013, many of them attributed to Monsanto, the company is finally paying for their misdeeds. The corporation’s greed is linked to farmer suicides throughout Maharashtra, considered the ‘Cotton Belt’ in India.

The Indian government is now actively promoting the use of indigenous seed, and has called Monsanto out for profiteering illegally on Bt cotton seed.

Fix farming by junking the corporate model

By Elena Garcia

Australian farming is in crisis.

Family farmers are being taken over by corporate agribusinesses, their land is being polluted by mining companies and they are powerless to stop and the supermarket duopoly of Coles and Woolworths which keeps prices low for consumers by paying producers prices so low they barely cover costs.

At the same time there is increasing speculation in buying water rights. Farming cannot survive without clean water. The most reliable source of water is artesian, which the mining industry can draw from unregulated and pollute at will.

Meanwhile banks are foreclosing on drought-struck farmers so they can sell the still viable farms to corporations, both domestic and foreign.

Farmers cannot win this battle against the corporations without allies. Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. Almost 90% of Australians live in urban areas. We have some of the cleanest, most regulated food production in the world. If you want to protect that quality, it is time to support and protect our farmers.

Read more >>

Organic Farmers Are Not Anti-Science, but Genetic Engineers Often Are

By Elizabeth Henderson, Independent Science News | News Analysis
Scientific evidence shows that the widespread adoption of genetically engineered crops in the US has led to an increase in pesticides used in agriculture -- and an increase in the residues of pesticides left in foods, among other disturbing trends.

At one of the public brainstorming sessions for the New York Organic Action Plan, an organic farmer made an impassioned plea for support for "independent science" and told us that with 8.5 billion mouths to feed by 2050, we will need genetic engineering to prevent starvation.

I would like to examine these words carefully to decipher what they mean, how those words are used by this farmer and by others, and suggest how the movement for locally grown organic food in this country should respond.

What is the meaning of 'independent science'? As co-chair of the Policy Committee for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), I have been an active participant in the coalition that is campaigning to pass GMO labeling legislation in NY State. In this capacity, I have spoken at public meetings, to the press and on radio interviews. A question that I have heard from proponents of biotechnology is "why do you organic farmers oppose science, like the climate deniers?"

Read more >>

Behind the corporate takeover of Australian agricultural land and farms

By Elena Garcia

As the demand for Australian farm products skyrockets in Asia, corporate Australia is buying up drought-crippled but viable rural properties at bargain prices.

Conservative federal MP Bob Katter proposed legislation late last year that would force banks to allow farmers two years to sell foreclosed properties instead of forcing 6-week fire sales. Katter cited sources in the agricultural industry on forced bank sales, saying that with only two months to sell, a farmer would be lucky to get 40% of market value for their property, but with two years to sell a farmer could expect to obtain 80% of market value.

The legislation would also stop banks imposing confidentiality agreements that allow them to bully their victims with a range of dirty tricks, now being investigated by a Senate banking inquiry.

Action is being mounted in the Federal Court alleging that ANZ forced farmers into “engineered defaults” and entrapped them into signing changed loan contracts when it bought out the loan book of the Landmark group in 2009.

This corporate bullying has a terrible social cost. Lifeline figures show that when a severe drought hits a rural community and financial and emotional stress levels climb, suicide rates increase sixfold.

A new Rural Bank

A record 86% of Queensland is now drought-declared, following three failed wet seasons. Many farmers are without the funds to re-stock their properties when the drought breaks. It is in this context that the banks are forcing foreclosures of properties that have not defaulted on mortgage payments and selling them at only 40% of market value.

There is a dire need for a government with vision to re-establish a Rural Bank to offer long-term loans at 2% interest and cheap farm insurance to viable, sustainable rural businesses, so that farmers and their communities can continue to produce clean affordable food, manage the Australian landscape to minimise bushfires and keep our water catchments clean.

Read more »

Sustainable Australian agriculture under corporate attack from mining, banks and agribusinesses

By Elena Garcia

A new wave of land grabbing is turning farmland into industrial monocultures.

In the past few years, private investors backed by corporate interests such as global banks, financial firms, hedge funds and food giants have bought a huge amount of farmland across the global South.

Oxfam's 2012 Our Land, Our Lives report on land grabbing said foreign investors had bought enough land in the past decade to feed 1 billion people. Oxfam singled out the World Bank, which has boosted its finance of intensive, large-scale agriculture in the global South from $2.5 billion a year in 2008 to $9.5 billion in November 2012.

The World Bank refused Oxfam's call to put a freeze on its loans to land grabbers, saying its investments were not adding to the food crisis, but providing “major new investment in agriculture to improve the productivity of large and small farmers while protecting the environment”.

However these investments are being used by corporations to buy up prime food-producing land, just as free trade treaties come into play that will allow them to sue governments that affect their profits by attempting to regulate their use of that land.

As at least two-thirds of the land grabbers intend to “export everything they produce”, Oxfam said these business plans “will come into direct conflict with the need for more land to feed a growing global population”. Most firms that take the World Bank's money use the land to produce biofuels to feed cars, or commodities to sell on overseas markets.

Researchers Shepard Daniel and Anuradha Mittall said in a 2009 study: “Not only does land grabbing mean that farmers will lose their land, but these lands will be transformed from smallholdings or communal lands into large industrial estates connected to far-off markets.”

The new wave of land grabbing is also turning the farmland into industrial monocultures, which rely heavily on chemical inputs and produce huge greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more »