What in the world happened to Bono?
Last year, at the G8 Summit held at Camp David, President Obama met with private industry and African heads of state to launch the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit.
And Bono, of the rock group U2, is out shilling for Monsanto on this one.
It's phase 2 of the Green Revolution. Tanzania, Ghana, and Ethiopia are the first to fall for the deception, with Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso and other African nations lining up for the "Grow Africa Partnership," under Obama's "Global Agricultural Development" plan.
In Obama Pitches India Model of GM Genocide to Africa, Scott Creighton writes:
But African civil society wants no part of this latest Monsanto aligned 'public private partnership.' Whatever will the progressives do now that their flawless hero has teamed up with their most hated nemesis to exploit an entire continent like they did to India not that long ago?Of course, that's an outrageous lie. Private citizens have been building their own silos for centuries. But it's true that only the biowreck engineers will foist patented seeds and toxic chemicals on Africa.
With a commitment of $3 billion, Obama plans to 'partner up' with mega-multinationals like Monsanto, Diageo, Dupont, Cargill, Vodafone, Walmart, Pepsico, Prudential, Syngenta International, and Swiss Re because, as one USAID representative says 'There are things that only companies can do, like building silos for storage and developing seeds and fertilizers.'
Creighton continues:
Bono says that there has to be a 'public private partnership' in order to get this done and that they are going to be using the ideas of the African people and farmers. Really? This is what the African farmers say to that...
'We request that: – governments, FAO, the G8, the World Bank and the GAFSP reconsider their promotion of Public/Private Partnerships which, as they are now conceived, are not suitable instruments to support the family farms which are the very basis of African food security and sovereignty.' African Civil Society Organizations
I wonder if that could be any clearer. They don't WANT the public private partnerships involved in this process.... It's not enough that huge mega-corporations are bleeding the nations of Africa dry by sucking the valuable mineral resources out of their hills. No. As Bono says about the development in Africa:
'They're future consumers for the United States. The president is talking business. This is good. It's a whole new development paradigm today. The old donor/recipient relationship... it's over.'
Volatility chimed in:
The history of corporate agriculture and its 'Green Revolution' is a
perfect example of the unfulfilled promises, and therefore proven lies,
of corporatism. What was the Green Revolution? With a huge one-off
injection of fossil fuels, and building upon ten thousand years of
agronomy, corporate agriculture temporarily increased yields within the
monoculture framework.
[T]he Green Revolution was a scam to use cheap fossil fuels to
increase monocrop yield, drive tens of millions off the land, and use
the stolen land and food to render food temporarily artificially cheap
for Western consumerism.
Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt cotton.... In
fact cost of cotton cultivation has jumped...due to rising costs of
pesticides. Total Bt cotton production in the last five years has
reduced.
That's not all the harm wrought by the petrochemical synthetic ag industry, as this 2012 superweed map by the University of Wisconsin shows:
Over half of US states are now plagued by agrochemically-induced superweeds. An industry sponsored study of pesticide use predicts that by 2016, nearly a billion pounds of these toxic chemicals will be poured on US soils.
Insects have also developed resistance. As reported last August, “The Western rootworm beetle – one of the most serious threats to corn – has developed resistance to Monsanto’s Bt-corn, and entire crops are being lost.”
In March, two dozen corn entomologists warned regulators that the only way to defeat growing insect resistance to genetically modified corn is to plant non-GMO seed. “Increasing pesticide use or buffer zone size will not solve the growing problem of rootworm resistance to corn genetically modified.”
But if that doesn’t deter African farmers, these petrochemicals have also been linked to human birth defects. Where “Roundup Ready soy is being cultivated on a massive scale,” reports Dr. Mercola, “widespread reports exist of immediate illness defects from massive glyphosate spraying operations.”
In fact, “Monsanto, Philip Morris and other U.S. tobacco giants knowingly poisoned Argentinean tobacco farmers with pesticides,” reports Courthouse News Service, “causing ‘devastating birth defects’ in their children, dozens of workers claim in court.”
The Bt toxin used to engineer cotton and corn also kills human kidney cells, reports Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji, and the drift from aerial application of Roundup prompted the Mississippi Rice Council to sound a national alarm over genetic damage to natural rice, calling for severely restricted aerial application.
Newly emergent pathogens have appeared, reports Dr. Don M. Huber, a plant pathologist who coordinates the Emergent Diseases and Pathogens committee of the American Phytopathological Society, as part of the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System. Last year, his team discovered a “self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto’s RR corn.”
Huber’s warning to the USDA to halt GM crop approvals, and specifically, genetically modified alfalfa, was not only ignored, but two months ago, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack hastened the approval process for genetically engineered crops.
“The new rules will cut the time needed to approve biotech crops in half,” reports Dr. Mercola, “from an average of three years, to about 13 months for new versions of already existing crop technologies, and about 16 months for brand new technologies.”
Obama’s Global Agricultural Development plan conspires with multinational corporations to foist these ecological and human health costs onto the public while siphoning the profits. As Creighton says, “Socialized costs, privatized profits. All in the name doing good and saving the people of Africa.”
Let’s hope these “public/private partnerships” are met with firm resistance by African farmers, as supported by this Declaration from a group of African civil society organizations. The last thing Planet Earth and all its organisms need is more toxic industrial chemicals.
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By Rady Ananda via Activist Post
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