Would You Buy a Second Hand Story From These People?

For some reason, the British TV station 'Channel 4' appears to see itself as a kind of defender of the rich, powerful multinationals who would do anything it takes to impose genetically modified organisms (GMO) on the world. I wonder how much it was worth to the channel and the stooges who contributed, unwittingly or otherwise.

I haven't been able to see the documentary. People in Africa are no more considered to have anything worth saying about their future now than they ever have been. Nor do mainstream media feel the need to let them know what decisions others are making on their behalf. But one thing is for sure, it is people in African and other highly impoverished countries that have the most to lose if GMOs take over.

And they will take over, if the multinationals succeed. GM is a case of either/or. Not only is it impossible for GMO and non-GMO crops to co-exist without the non-GMO crops becoming contaminated but the biggest seed companies in the world want to reduce supplies of non-GMO seeds until GMO becomes completely dominant. There will be no way to reverse this once it has been achieved.

The documentary, apparently, accepted the multinational's accusations of the green movement 'causing starvation' by opposing GMOs. Which GMOs would have been made available to Africans over the last ten years or so during which the seeds would have been available? There are no GMO foods available that produce higher yields or grow in sub-optimal conditions, except in the publicity of various interested parties.

On the contrary, to date, the only known crops with such traits are conventionally bred ones. Not only are conventionally bred and organic crops and methods safer and cheaper, they are also very successful. And this is exactly the problem for the multinationals. They don't want people in poor countries buying something without a patent, something that is not their 'intellectual property'. Such things are far too affordable.

So far, GMOs have only sold well in a few countries, all of which are regretting it now. The US has bought into GM more than any country and they are reaping the 'benefits' of dwindling yields, increased use of pesticides, contaminated land and superweeds. These are all things the multinationals have denied exist but you only need to read up on what's happening in what used to be the most productive places in the US.

The documentary was discussed online for some time before it was aired and one (former) environmentalist defended his stance by saying he was in favour of the work the Gates Foundation was doing in relation to the 'Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa' (AGRA). Perhaps the poor fool thinks that Gates and his stacks of money is in some way different from the bunch of multinationals in question. But he is behind their work and always has been. Intellectual property is his specialty.

So the green movement, far from being behind mass starvation, has always, as far as I know, been opposed to the further impoverishment of Africa. Hopefully they have also been opposed to the antics of the great pseudo-philanthropist as well. But perhaps channel 4 wanted to pay the green movement a back-handed compliment by suggesting that they could prevent some of the most powerful and most ruthless institutions in the world from achieving the global monopoly on food production that they crave. Sadly, I don't believe the green movement is quite that powerful!

It's interesting what big, monopolistic technologies have got wrong over the years. Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the first Green Revolution, probably thought that increasing technology, bigger farms, factory farming practices, massive reductions in labor, etc, would be all fine and dandy, that there would be no poverty or starvation any more. But it has long been clear that any benefits that might have come from the revolution are now a distant memory, that there is still an awful lot of poverty and starvation, even in India, where it was said to have been a success.

It's also interesting that articles about GMO, especially when they deal with opposition to the technology, always feel the need to use the term 'frankenstein foods'. This has never been anything other than a tabloid term, a straw man argument. Most environmentalists would not use the term and their objections are more based on the lack of evidence for the safety of GMOs and the lack of evidence that they will have any of the advantages claimed for them.

On the other hand, proponents of GMOs have been using the same claims about increased yields and numerous other 'advantages', even though none of them have materialized yet. It reminds me of the overused claim one used to hear about nuclear power, that it was 'too cheap to meter'. We know that was a lie, but many are now trying to increase dependence on nuclear power on the back of the claim that it is 'green'. Next they'll be telling us that it is clean, cheap, safe and whatever else.

If people are concerned to separate the claims and counterclaims reported by what is a heavily biased media, they need to do a very small bit of research while at the same time bearing in mind that many sources will lie. They need to ask why a person or institution would make certain claims, what the evidence supporting those claims are and what they think might be right or wrong from the point of view of those likely to be most affected, and perhaps most vulnerable, to the effects of something like GMOs.

I recommend a perusal of La Via Campesina's website and Wikipedia's article on food sovereignty as a good summary. The majority of working people in the world are either rural peasants or dependent on the work of rural peasants. Does a technology entirely controlled by a few rich multinationals really sound like something that contributes to food sovereignty?

Stealing People’s Land Can Only Impoverish Them Further

The World Bank, an institution devised to divert aid money on its way to developing countries back to the rich and powerful, seems to have woken up to the sort of negative impact that its policies have been having on developing countries. I wouldn’t get too excited, though, because the negative impacts they are concerned about follow from their policies, which they haven’t changed in any way. And no matter how they appear to equivocate, it’s always worth bearing in mind who ‘international’ financial (and other) institutions are intended to benefit.

Grabbing land goes back a long way, hundreds of years, as does using people and resources in developing countries for the enrichment of people in developed countries. The monumental disaster, the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, which started in the late 1940s and was abandoned in the early 1950s, is just one out of many examples.  Like all of today’s land grabs, the grabbers were quick to claim numerous advantages for those who were being dispossessed of their land; employment, food security, development, mechanization, efficiency, modernization, etc. Such terminologies have changed little since the 1950s!

The flaws of the Tanzanian scheme were many and obvious from very early on, but there were those who thought they would make a lot of money from it. So vast tracts of land were destroyed and lots of equipment and other resources were wasted. Someone did make a lot of money out of the scheme, though it’s not certain who. But the losers were Tanzanians, the Tanzanian economy and the Tanzanian environment.

Land grabbing schemes of the last few years have already appropriated tens of millions of hectares, at very low cost. It is difficult to estimate how many people have been displaced and dispossessed but the number affected by the process will be enormous. ‘Investors’ will not be counting those costs, that’s for sure. They are anxious that we think of ‘feeding the starving’, even though 80% of the land hasn’t yet been used for anything. Ultimately, much of it is destined for non-food crops and for export to rich countries, though. What else would it be used for?

The World Bank has been talking about how to protect people in developing countries and their land. But they have been talking about a lot of things throughout their history. International agreements about accountability and transparency are a great idea, even better if there is some guarantee that they are upheld. But we know that all sorts of agreements are discussed, fewer are made and hardly any are ever upheld.

Land grabbing on a scale that is taking place presently is not happening despite the existence of institutions like the World Bank. On the contrary, such institutions were set up by rich and powerful countries so that they could stay rich and powerful. So we need different institutions, not the same ones saying the right thing while continuing the policies that have brought developing countries to their knees. The institutions are doing what they were intended to do, that’s why the World Bank needs to be abolished and replaced by something that genuinely represents the interests of the world.

The kind of land grabbing that is occurring at the moment will further devastate the most vulnerable communities, economies and environments in the world. People in rich countries may not be able to witness these phenomena as they occur, and the corporations currently enriching themselves are certainly not going to record them or make them publicly available. But by the time a handful of sound bites and photo opportunities are considered to be newsworthy by the world’s media, it will already be too late to reverse the damage.

Mining, Biofuels and Other Forms of Abuse

I'd like to follow on from yesterday's theme about developing countries being used to provide wealthy countries with cheap raw materials and labour. These developing countries are never helped to or even allowed to produce their own higher value goods so that they can improve their economies. On the contrary, wealthy countries go out of their way to ensure that poor countries stay that way. Several recent articles discuss other ways in which developing countries are held back from developing.

The European Community (EC) has set a target to source 10% of its energy from renewable sources. Rather than look for genuinely renewable source, the EC has latched on to biofuels as a means of achieving this target. Warnings were raised about the dangers of biofuels as long ago as 2004 but no one was listening then and few are listening now. Biofuel prospecting has gone on, as predicted, to destroy vast tracts of land, increase the prices of fuel, dispossess people of their land and livelihood and cause numerous other social and economic problems.

Like the US, the EC preaches against the use of subsidies. Yet they subsidize biofuel production (and anything else that suits them). Growing biofuels cannot be sustainable, there just isn't enough land, even if everyone in Tanzania and other developing countries are thrown off their land to grow the crops. Growing, processing, transporting and using biofuels does not reduce carbon emissions, they increase it. So even the rich countries are not gaining much by their quest for biofuels. Somebody must be making money out of it but Tanzanians and people in other poor countries will suffer increased poverty and hunger as a result. And there will be global level losses too.

In addition to having a lot of land, which rich countries are busy grabbing right now, Tanzania also has a lot of minerals, especially gold. But various murky deals mean that the country makes very little money out of these resources. Most of the money is made by foreign owned companies, especially companies from Canada, South Africa and the UK. The royalties Tanzania gets are tiny whereas the profits the foreign companies make are huge and are amply enhanced by the privileges and tax incentives they receive at the expense of poor Tanzanians and even indigenous Tanzanian companies, who are unable to compete with the foreigners.

Despite mining companies having a deplorable human rights and corporate responsibility record, laws, neither Tanzanian nor international, do not adequately protect those who have to work for the industry. In particular, laws do not protect those who lose their land, those whose environment and water supply are contaminated and those who formerly made a living as artisanal miners. Tanzania has enough valuable resources to improve the living conditions for all Tanzanians but the revenue from these resources always seems to leave the country. All that ordinary Tanzanians get is the pollution, the industrial problems and the social problems, the majority remaining very poor.

In Kenya, similar things are happening. Land is being grabbed to be used to produce food and biofuels for rich countries. This viable land is currently occupied by Kenyans but is being sold as 'unoccupied' and 'marginal'. Whole ecologies are being destroyed to produce unsustainable crops for the benefit of non Kenyans, but at the expense of Kenyans. The Kenyan government appears to be doing little to protect its citizens and seems to be keen to promote the interests of this land grabbing. As if things were not bad enough in the worst affected area, the Tana River basin, Tiomin are going to do some kind of mining there, a Canadian company with a disgraceful record of wanton destruction.

The only good news is that a few hundred families in the Tana River basin have been awarded 2.55 million Kenyan shillings each as compensation for their land. Unfortunately, the people involved were displaced for environmental protection reasons. It seems unlikely that there will be any compensation for people displaced to make way for the miners and land grabbers. WTO rules tend to defend such land grabbing and resource exploitation, protecting only the interests of the very rich. Condemning vast populations to generations of poverty, disease, dependency and degradation is all in a day's work. It's been going on for a long time and it's not going to stop now, not as long as there is money to be made.

Oxfam Abandons Development, Goes for Corporate Lobbying

It is easy and sometimes even right to criticize NGOs, especially big, well funded ones, for spending a lot of money on dubious programmes, such as technical aid that may only benefit a handful of rich Western 'experts'. But when it turns out they are using their money to support one of the most destructive agricultural processes to date, genetically modified organisms (GMO), it's hard not to be very angry. Yet Oxfam America seems to have been nobbled by the biotechnology industry and its supporters, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Of course, Oxfam have pulled out the poverty and food security cards to make it look as if GMOs are just the solution they need. But production of GMOs requires industrial scale farming practices. Although these are found in developing countries, those involved are not poor farmers. Most farmers in developing countries are subsistence farmers. They cannot afford the sort of inputs required by GMO farming and where they have fallen for the lies and taken on GMOs, they have ended up in debt. In addition to the inputs being very expensive compared to non-GM inputs, yields at the subsistence level have not been higher, indeed, they have often been lower. So GMOs, despite claims to the contrary, do not scale down.

This is not to suggest that large scale GMO farming has been successful either. In the handful of countries where this has been practiced, the US, India, Australia, Canada, Argentina and a few others, yields may have increased for the first few years. But input costs have also risen, especially pesticides and fertilizer costs, and yields flatlined or decreased after that. US GMO farmers, especially, are finding out what it's like when superweeds take over, weeds that develop resistance to even huge applications of herbicide. And Indian farmers have found what it's like when pests develop resistance to the GMO industry's noxious sprays. Even Canada is realising what it's like to face blacklisting by many of the countries who have been buying their agricultural outputs because of contamination by an organism that has been banned there for years.

So what does Oxfam think they are doing, trying to trick the very people they are supposed to be helping? This may be related to funding they have received from Rockerfeller and Gates, who are wedded to the GMO industry till death do us part. Frankly, I think if Oxfam is willing to take funding from organisations that only have the interests of multinationals at heart, they should not be receiving public funding. They have, effectively, jumped ship. They should be treated accordingly. They should no more be considered to be independent or to be benefiting poor people in developing countries that they would be if they had decided to accept funding from the armaments industry. Of course, I don't know whether they already receive money from the armaments industry or not.

Farmers, especially those working small and medium sized farms in developing countries, need ecologically and economically sustainable farming practices. They certainly don't need expensive and highly damaging technologies that render the farmers slaves on land whose quality is fast diminishing. GMOs will increase food insecurity, dependency, poverty and low health. Ultimately, people will die as a result of embracing GMOs. And Oxfam, along with their friends in the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, will be responsible for the resulting poverty, death and destruction. The latter two were set up to wreak destruction, despite their stated ambitions. But I don't believe Oxfam was set up for this, I believe they have more recently been injudicious in their choice of funders. Perhaps there is time to rethink this and, if necessary, send back the blood money they have received. Alternatively, they can admit that they are no longer involved in development and concentrate on promoting and lobbying for the systematic destruction of whole societies, economies and ecosystems. And then they may as well accept money from the armaments industry, while they are at it. It could make the job quicker.

Incidentally, the experience of African countries so far with GM crops is not good. Millions have been spent over a long period in Kenya to produce a GM sweet potato but nothing has been delivered yet that can outperform conventionally bred versions. South Africa found that Monsanto had blundered somewhat by supplying them with 'free' genetically modified maize that didn't produce any grain. But the industry is still doing everything it can to force more GMOs on South African farmers. Attempts to introduce GM cotton in West Africa have met with the same problems as GM cotton everywhere and Monsanto has even admitted that it has failed in India. However, their solution to this problem is that farmers buy a new and more expensive version of the failed crop. I assume West African cotton growing countries will receive the same privilege.

None of the arguments that Monsanto and the rest of the GMO bunch use to defend the technology work. The evidence has always shown that conventional crops and farming practices are the only ones that work and that are sustainable. This is especially true for small farmers, those who are most likely to suffer from poverty, food security and environmental degradation problems. It is to be expected that Monsanto and other interested multinationals will lie, cheat and pay through the nose (also known as lobbying) to make us think otherwise. And why wouldn't they when they receive so much public money to do this. But we also have to be aware of the influence of the rich privately owned institutions, such as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, who are supporting GMO. And sadly, we have to add Oxfam into the equation, unless they suddenly remember who it is they are supposed to be working for.

Food Security Means Non-GM Food

Not content with contaminating their own country with genetically modified organisms (GMO), American GMO patent holders are busy getting politicians and other powerful people to help them in their quest to contaminate whole continents, such as Africa. African countries haven't proved to be the pushover that these GMO multinationals would like, but there are powerful people willing to give them a helping hand, such as Bills Clinton and Gates.

Despite spewing out the mantras about free markets and lowering barriers to trade, patenting is the ultimate form of protectionism. Owners of American GMO patents don't even need to grow their contaminants in America to reap vast profits. They can simply palm them off on poor farmers in far away developing countries, for whom GMOs are entirely inappropriate, and rake in the cash royalties.

The two Bills are supporting what is known as the Global Food Security Bill. Despite the name, this bill aims to foist GMOs on people in developing countries by dressing them up as aid. The idea is not a new one; public money is used to open up new markets for these thugs and they pocket the profits. Only the very rich and powerful will benefit from all this. But isn't that what aid is for?

For many years now, millions of dollars of 'aid' money has gone into developing a genetically modified sweet potato in Kenya. Strings have also been pulled to get some laws adjusted so that such crops can be commercialized. The problem is, this potato hasn't really taken off. Local varieties have performed far better in trials. To add insult to injury, breeders in Uganda have developed a virus resistant sweet potato using traditional methods while working on a shoestring.

GMOs of any kind would be a disaster for Kenya and for any other country. Just look at the problems the US, Canada, India, Argentina and Australia are having with their contaminants. But the organisms are particularly dangerous for developing countries. The last thing small farmers need is crops that cost a lot to grow (GM seeds are far more expensive than conventional ones), that develop serious yield and pest problems and that systematically destroy the ecosystem. But that pretty much sums up GMOs.

Anyone interested in reducing hunger should encourage sustainable agricultural practices that are appropriate for small farmers, because most farmers in developing countries are smallholders. They should steer clear of expensive and inappropriate technologies, such as GMOs. These were developed for rich, large scale farms, although they don't even seem to be benefiting them. For every advantage claimed for GMOs so far, conventional breeding practices have surpassed those claims. GMOs are not just unnecessary, they are highly undesirable.

The Gates/GM Progeny

Some of the most deceitful and unscrupulous people in the business world want to exploit Africa and one of the richest people in the world is spending huge amounts of money trying to help them. This person, Bill Gates, considers himself to be a philanthropist. Yet he is party to efforts to tie farmers into agreements that will commit them to expensive farm inputs, such as seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, will probably reduce yields, will have significant health consequences, will increase dependence and food insecurity and will generally make things worse than they already are.

Someone who really wanted to benefit people in developing countries with a lot of money at their disposal could do many things. In agriculture, they could develop indigenous crops that are selectively bred to resist drought, flooding, increased salinity and other adverse conditions. In infrastructure, they could provide people with clean water and give them access to better and more sustainable forms of energy and fuel. This would also confer great health benefits. There are numerous things that could be done to improve people's economic conditions, their education and their skills.

But Gates prefers technical solutions, mostly ones that will make his foundation, along with some people connected with it, rich. Never mind that these 'solutions' will worsen the situation in developing countries, that doesn't seem to be a worry for this 'philantrocapitalist'. Perhaps he's just an old style capitalist in disguise. Genetically modified (GM) crops have been a disaster in developed and developing countries alike. His efforts to tackle a handful of diseases while ignoring the conditions that allow those diseases to spread will have few long term benefits. Just because he is rich, he shouldn't have the right to interfere with the welfare of so many vulnerable people, especially at the same time as claiming to be doing good.

Another article sees Gates as propping up a form of neo-colonialism. GM crops are an inappropriate, imported technology, designed for large scale industrial farming like that predominant in the US. Most African farmers are small farmers and they are the ones likely to suffer if they are pushed out of farming by GM. It's not the big farmers and landowners who can afford industrial scale farming that are suffering from food shortages. And those who are suffering from food shortages will quickly find that GM will not feed them, either. They are short of food because they are poor, GM foods will only increase the prices and reduce access further.

It's time that people realised that GM does not have any advantages for poor people, or even for relatively well off people. It is designed to make money for the handful of multinationals that develop the technology. And anyone who claims to be doing good by imposing GM on poor farmers in developing countries is a liar and an opportunist.

Predicting the Predictable

Often in natural disasters, it's not the disaster itself that causes widespread injury, loss of life and damage to property. Where people are well off enough to protect themselves and their property against whatever disasters may occur, far fewer people suffer. Therefore, the magnitude of natural disasters in developing countries is often measured in people killed, injured or displaced. But in developed countries, the magnitude is usually measured by insurance claims for damage to property.

There are exceptions, of course, but generally where people are vulnerable, natural disasters have a high human cost. Where people are less vulnerable, property is more likely to be the main loss. Developed countries, such as Japan and the US, experience natural disasters without anything like the human costs experienced by developing countries, such as Haiti. The hurricane that devastated New Orleans is not an exception just because it happened in the US. A lot of the people most affected were poor, vulnerable and marginalised.

When a natural disaster hits a vulnerable country, the disaster itself may not have been entirely predictable, at least, not by people in that country who were able to do anything about it. But it is pretty predictable that, when a country has little infrastructure (especially water and sanitation), minimal health services, low levels of food security and the rest, most disasters will have a huge human cost. Insurance claims may well be negligible for people who have very little to insure and no money to insure with.

Kenya and most other Sub-Saharan African countries are like Haiti in many ways. They have been treated as pawns in the political and commercial games of various Western countries; they have few social services of any kind and little or no resilience to any kind of disaster; they have huge debts and widespread poverty, poor health and malnutrition. We don't know what disasters await them, we just know that there will be disasters and that the consequences will be severe. Perhaps when some disaster strikes, there will be massive press attention, pledges of money, influxes of aid agencies driving white four wheel drives and resolutions to cancel debts.

But all these pledges and other post disaster phenomena won't reduce the immediate impact of the disaster. The human cost will be high. The press will bemoan the fact that the country is so poor and infrastructure is so bad and debts are so high and politicians are so corrupt and whatever else they tend to bemoan in developing countries when it's too late. The amounts of money that are pledged, and even the amounts that actually reach the country, may be far higher than the amounts that were previously needed to strengthen the country's capacity. But that doesn't result in money being spent on increasing the capacity of developing countries to increase their resilience.

Kenya has what could turn out to be a pathological attachment to maize, a non-indigenous crop introduced by the colonials because it's cheap and it's easy to grow large amounts on small areas of land, it fills you up, although it has little nutritional value. This pathological attachment could be compared to Ireland's staple food in the decades before the Great Famine, though I suspect the potato may be a bit more nourishing (or perhaps I'm biased). The potato is not indigenous to Ireland and eventually the inevitable happened. The ideal conditions came together for potato blight that wiped out most of the country's crop.

Much of the currently used agricultural land in Kenya is covered with crops that can not be used for sustenance, such as tea, sugar or coffee. Much is used for non-food crops, such as sisal or flowers. And much of the food that is grown is maize. For many years, maize crops have been threatened or have even failed because of the dependence on rain fed crop growing. But the country still plants mostly maize and it's still mainly rain fed.

The question is not whether disaster will strike in Kenya, it is when and how bad it will be. If the crops just fail in places where there is not much rain, several million people will be affected. If places that usually get a lot of rain have problems, several million more will be affected. Some countries around Kenya, even many areas in Kenya, have recently seen army worms attack, and they can obliterate entire fields. And there are other pests and factors that can take a large area by surprise. Maybe this year most people will survive, maybe not.

But one thing is certain: millions of people are vulnerable. And they are vulnerable in more than one way. If a crop fails, they risk starvation. If the aid agencies come in, the food may not get to people in time because of the infrastructure problems or because of widespread corruption. Or people may die of whatever diseases start spreading, unchecked because of the terrible health service. There's a hair's breadth between Haiti's circumstances and Kenya's circumstances.

It's now that the press should be clamoring for education, health, infrastructure and other social services to be improved, now that pressure needs to be put on the government to deal with corruption, now that individual people need to stop depending on rain fed agriculture, now that they should grow (and consume) things other than maize. And now is the best time to cancel the huge debts that developing countries have been arm-twisted into amassing for decades. Recognition that these circumstances make people vulnerable to inevitable disasters doesn't need to wait until it's too late.

Do Wealth and Power Exclude Wisdom?

To quote the late comedian Linda Smith, "I don't mean to sound racist, but rich people are weird." The very good climate change blog, climateprogress.org has an article about Bill Gates and his maunderings on climate change and related issues. The guy seems to know very little about climate change and all his information seems to come from corporate funded mouthpieces like Bjorn Lomborg.

Gates seems to think most of the current worries about climate change are pointless and that none of the proposals made by activists and experts should be considered. But he thinks that there will be a technological solution or two to the problems of clean energy, energy efficiency, etc (one of those solutions being nuclear, which he thinks is 'as good as' renewable).

This would sound very familiar to Gates-watchers. He advocates technical solutions to health problems, diseases such as HIV, TB, malaria, cholera and rotavirus. He also advocates technical solutions to problems like food shortages, food insecurity and low levels of food production (in the form of biotechnology). And for climate change, he advocates bioengineering. He's certainly consistent, so far.

Despite all his money and his rich and influential friends, Gates seems to be very misinformed and is falling behind on his knowledge of current research, but read the climateprogress.org article for the full details. He's into 'altering the stratosphere to reflect solar energy', filtering 'carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere' and 'brightening ocean clouds'. Do we really want this lunatic to be let loose on the only life supporting planet we know of?

There's also a very strange article on allafrica.com purporting to be about poverty eradication that is really about a deal between the richest man in the world (Gates) and one of the richest and most rapacious corporations in the world (Coca-cola). The Gates Foundation is providing most of the capital, over 10 million dollars, to allow 50,000 Kenyan and Ugandan farmers to sell fruit to Coca-cola for 'fruit-juice' production.

The article is very short on detail and I don't see why Coca-cola can't get these farmers to sell fruit to them without the help of Gates. But is it really a good thing that these farmers are going to sell their healthy food products for what will be a very low price to an organisation that will convert them into an unhealthy and very expensive beverage?

Coca-cola is better known for covering otherwise beautiful areas with their revolting logos and other excrescences, for marketing harmful products to people who are starving and in need of fresh water, for polluting water supplies and using up water supplies in areas where water is scarce and for maintaining a very poor record of corporate social responsibility (see corpwatch.org for further details).

Rich people and organisations are weird, but they can also be sinister, completely undemocratic and downright inhumane. I'm not calling for a law against being rich or even curbs on how rich people can be. But I think rich people and organisations should be subject to the same laws as other people and organisations. And poor people should be protected from the excesses of the rich and powerful. Why should a handful of very rich people and organisations be able to dictate the future of the planet and the futures of all its inhabitants?

Deciding Who Gets to Eat and Who Gets to Starve

A curious feature of some of the big famines in history is that the countries experiencing the famine were not necessarily short of food. Likely as not, the majority of people were very poor and did not have the money to buy food, but food was being produced and exported.

Many millions of people in a number of developing countries currently face food shortages, malnutrition and probably famine at a time when the world is producing record crops. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that 2008 saw the highest recorded cereal crop production figure ever. It is predicted that 2009 will see the second highest figure.

Wikipedia is a great source of information but their bald statement that "[f]amine is caused by a human overpopulation relative to the available food supply" is in need of qualification. It is estimated that as many as 10 million Kenyans face serious food shortages, but this is not clearly because the country is overpopulated. There are several other significant pressures on food production and access to food.

For example, many people are extremely poor, have always been poor and have little prospect of ever becoming less poor. Food prices have been driven up over the past few years by market speculation and by the use of productive land for growing biofuels. So poorer people, who could barely afford enough food before these trends began, are now facing starvation.

Other pressures include droughts, often followed by serious floods, which result in poor harvests and destroy large tracts of arable land. There was also widespread unrest in Kenya in 2008 and people abandoned their land. A number of these internally displaced persons (IDP; the Kenyan government is not keen on releasing figures for just how many are still displaced) now have little means to feed themselves and no chance of returning to where they came from. And the majority of people have only a tenuous hold on land, renting it from unscrupulous landlords, who can treat tenants as they wish and sell their land at the drop of a hat.

In addition to growing biofuels in Kenya, there are other trends that result in less land being used for affordable food. Land is bought up by natural resource prospectors, such as those in search of oil around Isiolo and those in search of gold in the Mara. This land will not be used to benefit any Kenyans and certainly won't be used to grow food. And much of Kenya's land is used for non food crops or for food products intended for export, such as coffee, tea, flowers, fruit and vegetables. Controversially, a lot of land comprises national parklands, preserved for use by those who can afford to visit it. Most can't.

Despite all these pressures, there is a lot of food being produced in Kenya for export and a lot of arable land available for food production. The reasons people face food shortages and poor nutrition are the same as they have always been: widespread poverty and increasing levels of impoverishment along with rising food prices that mean the poorest will lose out.

When things get really bad and people are dying of starvation, maybe other countries will start shipping in relief food, but this will not improve food security in Kenya. Food security refers to access to food, as well as its production. As with other countries that experienced famines throughout history, resilience will continue to be low, there will be widespread disease, many people will have abandoned rural areas and moved to cities; there will be no remaining seed to grow the next season's crops, no fertilizer, no chance of resisting whatever new pressures arise.

The more I read about famine, the more it seems like a process whereby the rich systematically deny food to the poor in order to increase their profits. But that couldn't be correct, could it?

Lomborg Preaching to the Converted, Again

As we (Ribbon of Hope) go about, visiting our various clients in and around Nakuru, we see the many and fast changing problems that people here face. Some people get through these problems well enough, others don't. It's always hard to figure out if some make it through because they are better off than others or if they are better off because they are good at getting through problems or if there is a mixture of factors.

The rains have come in some areas. This means that it is time to plant crops. If the right preparations have been made, the crops should grow and if the rains continue, there will be a good harvest. But now the rains are here, are people preparing to harvest rainwater in order to ensure they get through the next drought? Sadly, not many people harvest rainwater. This doesn't appear to be a government priority either. The government even talked about distributing cheap or free seeds and fertilizer but now, there appears to be a shortage of both seeds and fertilizer because, well, er, the government has bought up so much of them. They must have just forgotten to distribute them.

In other areas, the rains have brought too much, too quickly, and have washed away fields, crops, roads, bridges, houses and anything else in their path. Were provisions made for flooding? It appears not. Roads that have been swept away in Coast Province were not flood proof. Floods occur with amazing regularity but flood proofing is an optional extra.

There have been power cuts again recently, despite promises that these would become a thing of the past. The government, it has been claimed, have now got the extra oil they need to make up for the shortfalls in power. Perhaps they will sort it out before the next fuel shortage. But fuel shortages, like floods, droughts, famines and other disasters keep occurring and will continue to occur. They need to be planned for. Last year, politicians were talking knowingly about planning for such disasters but there is little evidence that they have achieved anything yet.

The antics of the 'environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg are well known to those who are interested in environmental issues but Nairobi appears to have the dubious pleasure of hosting a conference organised by Lomborg's 'think tank', the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.

Strangely enough, Lomborg appears to make a valid point about the need to concentrate on some very cheap, efficient and vital development programmes, such as micro-nutrient deficiencies and intestinal parasite infestations, which affect billions of people. However, there is a need to ensure that these billions of people have access to a balanced diet. The cheapest and most sustainable solution to these problems is not to enhance foods with various supplements and to produce things like vitamin A enriched chewing gum and other headline grabbing stories. There are already plenty of foods rich in vitamin A and other micro-nutrients. It's just that many people are too poor to afford them.

Lomborg also uses the opportunity given by this smokescreen to plug his tired old argument that climate change is not caused by human activities and that we need to adapt to it rather than trying to fight it. If the money and effort spent on denying that climate change is caused by human activities were to be spent on worthwhile causes, such as the ones Lomborg mentions, a lot of good work could have been achieved by now.

Kenya can't afford to risk accepting Lomborg's puny argument. Whether climate change is caused by human activities or not, the government has to put money into sustainable sources of energy for two reasons: first, these sources of energy will still be available for the foreseeable future, unlike fossil fuels; second, the country is not able to afford these expensive and unsustainable sources of energy and they are not able to afford the costs that go with high usage of unsustainable energy sources.

On the other hand, Kenya can afford to invest in wind power (as long as they produce their own generators, rather than buying the ridiculously expensive British ones that the UK government seems hell bent on selling them); they can afford hydrothermal power, solar power, biogas and probably all sorts of other ways of reducing the country's energy bill and the bill for the pollution and environmental damage that has taken place and that continues to take place.

But what is the government doing? Boasting about the possibility of finding oil in the Eastern Province. Billions have been sunk in drilling for oil in Kenya but the point is not that they have diddly squat to show for it. The point is that they don't need to spend all this money on fossil fuels when there are so many alternatives available here.

And the politicians will continue talking about flood proofing now the rains have come and they will surely talk about rainwater harvesting when the rains have gone away. If oil is discovered, they will rake in the money and when the oil has gone they will talk about how long term thinking is required. But I guess you can't blame Lomborg for talking the Kenyan government into stupid energy policies and development agenda. Because people who listen to such arguments seem to want to believe them.

And the bit that Lomborg gets right, that we could achieve a lot by working on micro-nutrient deficiencies and intestinal parasites, has long been recognised. But these are issues that the Kenyan government has little to say about.

Will We Prevent the Next Genocide?

The land grabbing orgy currently taking place in developing countries is a lot more serious than I thought. There are some countries buying up or leasing land but the biggest buyers are actually corporations. Corporations have amply demonstrated in the past that they don't care anything for the lives or livelihoods of people, they only care about maximizing profits for their shareholders and other interested parties.

In addition to grabbing land and denying millions of subsistence farmers their only means of survival, this trend is part of what has been driving up the price of food, especially staple foods. These corporations can also indulge in some practices that would be more difficult or expensive or perhaps even totally illegal in other countries. For example, land in developing countries is seen as ideal for biofuel crops. It's also seen as a good place to grow genetically modified crops that have not been given the go ahead in other countries.

Everyone feels the effects of rising food prices, of course. But for people who were barely able to afford enough food to eat a couple of years ago, the rush to buy up or otherwise occupy land in developing countries will push many people well below the threshold of having enough food, however lacking in nutritional value, just to survive.

Developing countries are also presently experiencing severe water shortages. Rich countries growing their food in developing countries means that they are effectively exporting huge quantities of water from those who have least to those who have most.

Corporate nobs may talk of 'win-win' situations, or even 'solving world hunger' but it is only people who are now rich who have any chance of winning anything and those who are now poor who face starvation. There is nothing in this for development, it is purely motivated by the need to make big profits. In addition, land and water supplies will be contaminated by the large scale agricultural practices which are absolutely necessary for this sort of investment to be really profitable.

I realise that those driven purely by profit are not going to be interested in these questions: but what will people now on the brink of starvation do once they have been thrown off their land? And what will those now barely able to afford basic foods do when the price has gone just that little bit too high? What will the rest of the world do when most of the land and water that have been supplying them with food are contaminated to the extent that they are no longer productive?

Another Country Falls For Lies About Genetically Modified Crops

Kenya has just become the fourth African country to give in to the pressure to produce and use genetically modified (GM) crops. If the GM evangelists are right, in a few short years Kenya will be entirely self-sufficient and food secure and will no longer need the vast quantities of food and aid money for food that they currently receive.

This decision follows the signing of the long discussed biosafety legislation. A National Biosafety Authority will be formed to oversee the implementation of the legislation. So everything should be fine because if there is safety legislation, nothing can go wrong, everyone will behave as they should and Kenyans will all live happily ever after, right?

GM evangelists have been using food shortages and famine to leverage their arguments for the need for GM. It's a bit like producers of a well known brand of baby milk formula distributing their produce free of charge in hospitals. The recipients return home to find that they have to pay for the product and infants subsequently die of water born diseases. Some die later because they haven't acquired resistance that they would have acquired from being breast fed.

It could be objected that the baby milk formula producers don't do that any longer. However, their tricks continue, albeit more subtly. And they can afford to spend a lot on publicity to convince people that they are really nice companies. Besides, people get tired of particular issues, so they have probably tired of that one by now.

Well, GM evangelists also pay out a lot for publicity, lobbying and downright lies. There is no evidence that GM crops produce greater yields, reduce the need for pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, grow well in poor conditions or are in some way better for the environment. They have no advantages that cannot also be found in non-GM agricultural techniques.

There are also serious disadvantages associated with accepting GM. GM increases dependency. The last thing Kenya needs now is to increase its dependency on donors to whom they are already in debt for the foreseeable future. When farmers buy GM seeds, they also need to buy GM fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. These are very expensive and need to be bought every year. So do the seeds. It is not possible to put by seeds for the following year, they must be purchased every year.

GM also poses a serious risk to the environment. At present, much of Kenya's arable land is committed to some form of monoculture, such as tea, sugar, sisal, cashews, rice, etc. This has been the situation for many decades, so biodiversity is already very low in many areas. But GM has a trick to reduce biodiversity even further.

If Kenya buys a particular 'variety' of GM maize, for example, that will become the only variety in many areas, if not throughout the whole country. Coupled with that, GM pesticides and herbicides kill everything except the GM crop. That's what they are designed to do. Everything in a GM field except the GM crop dies. This is not even counting the flora and fauna that are affected by run-off from the field.

Even the oldest of the GM evangalists must have learned about ecological balance when they were at school. They must have learned about how the smallestand seemingly insignificant organisms are part of the same system as human beings, how wiping out everything in an area leads to total and probably irreversible destruction.

GM evangelists even have the cheek to claim that there are substantial economic, environmental and welfare benefits offered by GM and this is why use of the technology has increased. They claim that "biotech crops can contribute to some of the major challenges facing global society, including: food security, high price of food, sustainability, alleviation of poverty and hunger, and help mitigate some of the challenges associated with climate change." What they don't say is that GM will increase these problems.

Using the current food shortages in Kenya and other developing countries to push the argument for GM is cynical beyond belief. GM multinationals are deliberately rolling out a technology that they know will make poor countries poorer and will also destroy the environment. They are doing it, not just because it makes them very rich, but because it also puts them in control of food producers. And the dependency associated with GM is far more serious than that associated with baby milk formulas. It will affect everyone, for their whole lives.

In addition, most Kenyan farmers are small farmers. They produce for their own needs and sell their surplus locally. GM is designed for mass production. Mass producers in Kenya do not, on the whole, benefit the majority of people. They employ few labourers, mainly on a casual basis and pay them very little.

What makes the Kenyan government think that this would be good for the country? Is it sheer desperation because of the food shortage and the global food price explosion? Or have they been nobbled by the GM evangalists? Well, the consequenses will be the same, whatever the reasons for the decision.

The government, it seems, has seen enough evidence to be convinced that GM crops are safe for human consumption. Well, that evidence took many years and a lot of money to manufacture. However, there is absolutely no evidence that GM will solve any of the countries problems and plenty of evidence that it will cause immense social, economic, environmental and other problems.

Kenyan Politicians Hold Key to HIV Prevention

After the civil unrest in Kenya early last year, many Kenyans ended up in camps for internally displaced people (IDP). They went to these camps for immediate security but many have stayed because their security is still not guaranteed and, in many cases, they have nothing to go back to. There are hundreds of thousands of Kenyans in IDP camps, although not all of them are there as a result of last year's post election violence.

Whatever about the conditions in IDP camps, people leaving these camps face acute hardships. They need to find a safe place to live and a way of making money, for a start. For some, cities are considered the best place to find work. If work cannot be found or if the pay is not adequate, some resort to various forms of transactional sex for survival, at least for a while.

Unemployment is very high in Kenya, people are facing high prices for basic goods such as water, food, fuel and accommodation. Therefore, finding work is not always enough. When employers know they can get cheaper, they pay less. The same applies to the clients of those depending on sex for survival. For some time, it has been a buyers' market. Certain bars in Nairobi have noticeably more females than males. The men can find what they want and negotiate a low price and even refuse to pay. There is no one to protect those engaging in survival sex.

This scenario can increase the pressure to have more clients per night and to take more risks, such as agreeing not to use a condom, agreeing to anal sex, group sex, anything that will attract more money. This increases the probability of contracting and transmitting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STI). It also increases other dangers that sex workers face because of their increased vulnerability, the increased amount of time spent on the street and numerous other considerations.

To make matters worse, there are extreme food shortages in many parts of the country right now. More and more people are moving to urban areas, especially Nairobi and Mombasa, but also other towns and cities. They are looking for work and access to basic goods. This is adding to the existing flow of people and creating a very dangerous situation.

Something curious happened in the mid 1980s in Nairobi. At this time, there were far more men than women in the city (and there probably still are). But in 1986, rates of HIV (and gonorrhoea) peaked among commercial sex workers (CSW). HIV peaked at 81%, one of the highest rates experienced anywhere. But the reasons why HIV peaked at this time, nearly a decade before HIV incidence (the rate of new infections) peaked in Nairobi, are not clear.

I have yet to hear a plausible explanation of why HIV peaked among CSWs, especially as the figures are for those who were new to sex work. There was very little prevention work being carried out at the time and what work had been done would hardly have had much time to produce results. Is it possible that there was a reduction in the number of CSWs, possibly because of an improving economic climate, and a consequent sellers’ market?

Well, rather than speculate further on that phenomenon, after all, I could just research it, I would like to speculate on what is happening right now in Nairobi and other parts of the country, especially urban areas.

If an increasing number of people are currently depending on survival sex, this could give rise to a huge increase in transmission of HIV and other STIs. Current crises, such as the water, food, fuel and economic crises, all increase vulnerability. An estimated 10 million people face starvation. A huge percentage of the population is extremely vulnerable.

HIV can take ten or eleven years to kill you. But you can die of thirst in a few days. Starvation is pretty quick too. Add to this the fact that you may have children and other dependents and survival sex doesn't seem nearly as dangerous.

Whatever politicians may say and whatever newspapers may publish about biofuels, world economic crises, global food shortages, global warming or any other reasons for current food shortages, around 70% of recently acquired maize has disappeared. Those to whom the maize was entrusted are known to those distributing it, but no one has yet been held accountable. Somewhere in the country, there is either a large amount of maize or a large amount of money.

Kenyan politicians are asking international donors for help, yet help may be closer at hand than they think. Their colleagues may have the maize or the money or they may know where it went to. Politicians raise a lot of questions but they should be closer to the answers than anyone. Ultimately, large stocks of food are under their care. If anyone can answer the questions, it is politicians or their friends and associates, people close to the top.

A survey in 2007 found that HIV prevalence in Nairobi had fallen slightly since 2003 (although it has been increasing in most provinces). In years to come, if HIV transmission is rising right now, it will probably be said that there was a food crisis, a fuel crisis, an economic crisis or any other crisis that has yet to come. But poor people in Kenya have been poor and vulnerable for a long time.

True, these crises make things a lot worse, but HIV is increasing because vulnerabilities are still not being addressed, more than 25 years after HIV was identified. Many social indicators have been disimproving since the 1980s but these issues continue to be ignored. Perhaps politicians can continue to hide behind multiple crises but when has there been a time that there wasn't some crisis, ostensibly beyond their control, that they could blame?

We may have the opportunity, right now, to intervene and prevent a significant number of new HIV infections that are about to occur under our noses. The technology to prevent these infections is well known and widely available. It's called food.

Will the Kenyan government do what it can to reduce the vulnerabilities faced by so many Kenyan people? Or will they just allow them to die and later attribute their deaths to circumstances beyond their control? Not all circumstances are beyond their control.