Annual symposium on global agriculture and food security a front for Monsanto-biotech/pesticide industry

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81980

We Will Eat What We Want: Resistance to GMOs

PATENTING LIFE, AGRA AND OTHER MOVES
Major players in the biotech industry, such as Monsanto, maintain a battery of lawyers who snoop around and sue farmers for infringing their patent rights even when they (Monsanto) should actually be held liable for having their seeds contaminate the farms of farmers who choose not to cultivate GE crops.
Talking about this biotech industry giant brings to mind the specious philanthropic thrust that is seeking to open the African environment to GE crops and products. The Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA) sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has vigorously denied on various occasions that they intend to use modern biotech tools in their tackling of hunger in Africa. Their denials have met scepticism and the recent revelation that the Bill Gates Foundation was making investments in Monsanto should send clear signals to perceptive Africans and African governments that this Alliance is based on the platform of philanthropic capitalism. This is one sustained means of pushing GE crops and products into Africa.
WE WILL EAT WHAT WE WANT: RESISTING GMOS IN AFRICA
The other route through which GMOs are pushed into Africa has been through food aid as well as uncontrolled commercial imports. The food aid route became public in 2002 when Zambia exercised her right to choose what sort of foods to allow into her territory and rejected genetically engineered maize as food aid. Zambia was vilified and pressured but refused to buckle. Questions were asked as to why hungry people should choose to stay hungry rather than eat GE products. There were similar pressures on Angola and Sudan in 2004 when they experience food shortages. In some cases nations asked for milled maize as food aid as whole grains could find their way into the environment and contaminate local varieties. We note here that Zambia rejected GE food aid, weathered the storm and produced a bumper harvest the following year. In fact, while the debate raged in 2002 there were good harvests in other regions of Zambia and aid in cash could have assisted the nation to purchase and move such foods to needy areas. Truth is that food aid is big business. The type of aid given is not merely dictated by the fact of hunger.

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This article is very comprehensive regarding the myth that is GMO and the attempt to force them on Africa. Agricultural aid must be in the form of access to a biodiverse nutritious food source that farmers can then use to continue to grow and nourish people with.The US grows only those crops that make agribusiness money through technology fees, higher seed prices, higher imput prices and speculation along with subsidies. We do not subsidize biodiversity we subsidize monoculture for the sake of profit and it is hurting not only our biodiversity, soil health and water quality but the livelihoods of small scale family farmers in this country and globally. Fossil fuel driven industrial pesticide agriculture is not "feeding" people it is making them sick and killing them by making them obese, diabetic and allergic. Feeding someone is different than actually nurturing them with truly healthy acccessible food. Subsidies to grow only corn and soy for cash that bring us nothing but corn and soy saturated processed foods in the US filled with GMOs, pesticides and other additives are not making us healthier, they are making a new generation of heart patients, especially in inner cities and poor neighborhoods where access to farmer's markets and healthier foods is less likely to be reality. The day we subsidize broccoli, lettuce, cauliflower, etc is the day I will believe the USDA really cares about health and also spurring jobs in agriculture and not just doing the bidding of Monsanto, Cargill, et al.

And feeding the developing world does not count on employing GMOs or other cockamamie scams that keep farmers in poverty in perpetuity, but giving them access to actual land not landgrabbed by big conglomerates and governments just to use it to grow biofuel and animal feed or holding farmers hostage to growing "luxury crops" that are exported to Western countries that take away land that could be used to grow food to feed people in these countries that would also work to keep prices down. Agroecology is one way we can feed 9 billion people and it is not back breaking or caught up in the fossil fuel /pesticide treadmill that only really feeds the bank accounts of companies like Monsanto. Agroforestry as well as agroecology are already working well in developing nations to increase yields where small scale farmers can also have more control over what they plant by having the ability to save seeds. Conserving water, using cover crops, crop rotation to maintain soil health, CO2 sequestration in soil and working to maintain biodiversity are all essential in feeding a growing population in a world now strained by water scarcity and climate change impacts.