Vandana Shiva: Food and Water for All

Vandana Shiva: Why We Face Both Food and Water Crises
By Maria Armoudian and Ankine Aghassian, AlterNet.
Policy-makers are finally grappling with the growing global food and water crises that are upon us. While they grope for answers, Vandana Shiva reminds them that it was their wild economic schemes that created these crises in the first place.
The globalized economic structure is simply incompatible with the basic physics of the planet and the principles of democratic governance, she says. And until we align the economic system with those of the ecological system, the problems will only get worse. While many of Shiva's books address some aspect of this fundamental problem, one title captures it most succinctly, Earth Democracy, Justice, Sustainability and Peace.
Shiva is a physicist, author, director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology and Ecology and the founder of Navdanya.
AlterNet: Much of your writing and speaking has focused on our economic structure's incompatibility with the ecological functioning of the earth. Talk about that incompatibility.
Vandana Shiva: One aspect of the inconsistency is between the principles of Gaia, the principles of soil, the ecology, renewability, how the atmosphere cleans itself and the laws of the global marketplace. The global marketplace is driven by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the illogic of so-called "free trade," which is totally not free. [The result of this incompatibility] is the current food crisis: The more agriculture is "liberalized," the greater the food scarcity, the higher the food prices and the more people will go hungry.
Never has there been this rate of escalation in food prices worldwide as we witness now with the global integration of the food economies under the coercive and bullying force of the WTO.
AlterNet: You have said, in the past, that these activities are done in the name of improving human welfare. But instead, poverty and dispossession have increased. Where do we see this the most?
VS: We see the worst dispossession in the countries of the South -- tragically -- those countries that could feed themselves. India, for example, was food self-sufficient. We were able to feed our people with a universal distribution system, affordable food for all, and agriculture policies that put food first. Small farmers could make a living.
But a decade and a half of globalization's perverse rules have led to 200,000 farmers committing suicide because they can't make a living anymore -- all their money goes to make profit for Monsanto or Cargill. Meanwhile, with the economy's so-called growth, people are starving. Per capita entitlement to food has dropped in a decade and half from 177 kg to 152 kg per year.
This contradicts the false propaganda being spread about the reason prices are rising. They say it is because Indians are getting richer and Indians are eating more. Well, some Indians are getting richer, but they're not eating more. There's a limit to how much you can eat. And the handful of billionaires buys a few more private jet planes and builds a few more private mansions. [But in reality], the average Indian is eating less. The average child has a bigger chance today of dying of hunger. The Cargill's of the world have a stranglehold of the world's economy; they're harvesting super-profits while people die of hunger.
AlterNet: You talk about India being worse off, but many economists -- including those on the political left -- say that places like China and India are, overall, actually improving. But you say that is not true.
VS: It's not true. India, under the perverse growth of globalization, has beaten out Africa in the number of hungry people. While we have 9.2 percent growth measured by GNP and GDP, 50 percent of our children have very severe malnutrition. Fifty percent of deaths for children under five are due to lack of food. That's about a million kids per year.
AlterNet: That is a considerable change that I don't think the world is seeing.
VS: That's because the media orchestrates every analysis and interpretation. They would like this crisis to look like a success of globalization, and they would like to offer more globalization as a solution. In fact, the World Bank has said there should be more liberalized trade. Before the WTO was formed, we had protests with 500,000 farmers on the streets of Bangalore in 1993 to say that this is a recipe for starvation, for destroying agriculture, self-reliance and food security. And the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs -- before the WTO was born -- had a press conference to say that globalization will make food affordable for all.
They forget that food ultimately is not produced in the speculation and commodity exchanges controlled by Cargill in Chicago. It is produced by hard working women and men working with the soil and sun. And if you destroy the capacity of the people to work the land and the capacity of soil to produce, you're going to have hunger. The tragedy is that the hunger of today and the rise of food [prices] is the result of globalization policies, and it is being implemented on a global scale. Unless we bring local food sovereignty and "food democracy" back into the picture, we will not have a solution to this.
WATER

AlterNet: We should also talk about water scarcity. There are major water wars occurring and considerable concern about the future of water. Do you think that water scarcity is being created largely by the phenomenon of privatization or is it resulting from climate change and other such phenomena?
VS: Water scarcity [is] being created by non-sustainable systems of production for both food and textile. Every industrial activity has huge water demands. Industrial agriculture requires ten times more water to produce the same amount of food than ecological farming does. And the "green revolution" was not so green because it created demand for large dams and mining of groundwater.
Industrial agriculture has depleted water resources. In addition, as water has become polluted and depleted, a handful of industry saw water as a way of making super-profits by privatizing it. They are privatizing it in two ways. The first is through buying up entire civic, municipal distribution. The big players in this are Bechtel, Suez and Vivendi.
And interestingly, wherever they go, they face protests. Bechtel was thrown out of Bolivia. Suez wanted to take Delhi's water supply, but we had a movement for water democracy and did not allow them to take over. But there's a second kind of privatization, which is more insidious -- and that is the plastic water bottle. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are leading in this privatization. But in India where Coca-Cola was stealing water, I worked with a small group of village women, and they shut their plant down. Across India, these giant corporations are taking between 1.5 to 2 million liters of water a day and leaving behind a water famine.
AlterNet: Given what is happening as a result of climate change, would we still face a water crisis without these practices?
VS: We would not be facing water problems if people have been allowed to have their economies, to practice sustainability and to live their lives. Every step in the water crisis is due to greed. As the water becomes increasingly scarce, the corporations who control the water become richer. It is the same with food. As food becomes scarce, the corporations controlling food become richer. That is the paradox of the global economy. Growth shows up in the profits of corporations while in the real world, the resources from which they make their profits, shrink.
AlterNet: You have also suggested that these same economic principles are incompatible with the sustenance of democratic governance.
VS: There are many levels at which a market economy called corporate globalization has to kill democracy in order to survive. Take the birth of World Trade Organization (WTO), an undemocratic institution. There are no negotiations on the rules it imposes. These rules are created undemocratically. Then, every time these rules are implemented, there are protests. Normally in democracy, if the will of people say change this policy, governments change. Unfortunately, governance today is run by corporations not the people. Every step of deepening the market economy is a depletion of democracy. Our very governments have been stolen from us, and we have to use democracy to counter these rules, this paradigm, and the absolute destruction [it causes].
Note: Vandana Shiva is one of the seminal thinkers and doers of our times. See more stories tagged with: seeds, monstanto, india, farming, water, food, vandana shiva

Making a Killing from the Food Crisis

Making a killing from the food crisis

The Real News

Devlin Kuyek: "Right now Cargill is making approximately $471 000 an hour in profits"

Tuesday May 13th, 2008

While people around the world are suffering from hunger and protesting the rise in global food prices, major grain traders, such as Cargill, are reporting big profits. Making a Killing from Hunger, a report by international NGO, GRAIN, says that the global food crisis is more than a food shortage or a price blip, it's a structural meltdown, resulting from globalization and neoliberal policies.

Devlin Kuyek is a researcher on global agribusiness for GRAIN, an international NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity. He is also the author of The Real Board of Directors: The construction of biotechnology policy in Canada, and Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada .

Transcript:

VOICE OF ZAA NKWETA, PRESENTER: Global food prices continue to soar, causing hunger and rioting in many parts of the world. But according to a recent report by international NGO GRAIN, there is another side to the story. The report, "Making a Killing from Hunger," says big profits are being made by several food corporations and investors. Devlin Kuyek, a lead author of the report, finds that the problem is more than a food shortage or a price blip; he says the food system is experiencing a structural meltdown.

DEVLIN KUYEK, RESEARCHER, GRAIN: The food crisis is essentially a structural problem. It goes much deeper than this kind of perfect storm scenario that a lot of people have been painting. It has to do with three decades or more of structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization policies that have forced many countries to dramatically alter their food production and to shift to becoming, in many cases, import-dependent. So there's been this move to push production into places that they say is more efficient, and the advice given by agencies like the World Bank and the IMF has been to say, "Let others look after your food production. They can do it more efficiently. You focus on other things." There's the example of Haiti and how it used to be, three decades ago, self-sufficient in rice. It was told to open up its markets by the IMF and its donors. Cheap rice flooded in from the US. It undercut local production; a lot of that declined. So Haiti is put in a position where now it's dependent on imports from the US. And when you get this escalating market prices, of course, the country and large numbers of poor people who live there are extremely vulnerable. And we're in a situation today where the food crisis is really not even a problem with supply; it's more a problem of price, and people can no longer afford to buy it. You've got a shift also in production, the type of agricultural production. Governments have pursued policies to industrialize their agriculture, and this has made agriculture highly dependent on inputs, so whether it's seeds, chemical fertilizers, or machinery, and often dependent on petroleum for production as well. And in the midst of all this, in the global food system that's been created over the last few decades, we have some corporations that sit in the middle of it all and who really have taken a stronger and stronger position in managing the food system. They're the ones who are profiting immensely now from this food crisis. So even though we're in a situation where millions of people can no longer afford to fulfill their basic food needs, you have corporations making record profits, a company like Cargill, which is one of the world's biggest grain traders. There are only a small number of companies that control the trade in basic cereals, and Cargill's one of these companies. And its profits are higher than they've been in years. Right now, Cargill's making approximately $471,000 an hour in profits. Cargill's also one of the world's largest fertilizer companies. And so in a time like this where countries are desperate to increase their food production, Cargill and other fertilizer companies are taking advantage of this and boosting up the prices that they're charging for the fertilizer. I mean, in some cases they're doubling, almost tripling the prices that they were asking for last year, which were already high. Cargill's profits from fertilizer are also topping, you know, $2 billion from last year alone. And then, of course, you have companies like the seed companies, the Monsantos and Syngentas and Duponts, who have been taking an increasingly large share of the global seed market through policies of privatization, through the expansion of GM agriculture, genetically modified crops, and they too are raking in enormous profits. Monsanto's profits, I think, from last year are up about 44 percent. This is a situation we're seeing across the board. It's hard to imagine how you could look at the current scenario and say, well, we need more globalization, we need more trade liberalization. It makes much more sense in this kind of situation that countries get back to basics and start looking at how they're going to satisfy the food needs of their people and not be so dependent on exports and on the world market, not be dependent on a market where corporations can essentially make as much profits as they want, especially in crisis times, when the need is higher and the demand is higher, when people are more desperate. I think if anything we need a complete rethink of the model that we're in.

Criminals of the World, Unite

Criminals of the World, Unite
By Laura Miller, Salon.com
April 16, 2008 | In 2003, a joint operation of British intelligence, the Bulgarian police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Spanish police and the Bolivian Special Antitrafficking Force pulled off a bust that netted the largest amount of cocaine ever seized. The drug was hidden among blocks of medicinal clay destined for Madrid and also, authorities soon discovered, mixed into 770 boxes of powdered mashed potatoes set to be shipped to Varna, Bulgaria, via Chile. A couple of years earlier, a Colombian drug cartel (the source of the shipment) had smuggled a chemist into Bulgaria, where he trained Soviet-educated chemists to extract the coke from various seemingly innocuous substances.
For Misha Glenny, a journalist specializing in the Balkans and author of the new book "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld," the smuggling operation was a prime example of what he calls the "internationalization of organized crime," a phenomenon that has flourished over the past two decades. Estimates suggest that crime accounts for almost one-fifth of the planet's gross domestic product, he reports, and "McMafia" is a sprawling, pell-mell tour of the world's shadow economies, ranging from Russia to Israel to the Mideast, as well as India, Africa and Latin America. Glenny even makes it to western Canada, a seemingly mellow region that, due to the proliferating industry of marijuana cultivation, "is home to the largest per capita concentration of organized criminal syndicates in the world."
Of course, there are criminal syndicates and then there are criminal syndicates. The mild-mannered British Columbian pot entrepreneurs (whose livelihood, Glenny makes it clear, ought to be legalized) seem a long way from the white hot centers of international gangland like Russia and Colombia. Alas, not far enough; one of the pot smugglers Glenny interviewed felt compelled to break with his longtime business partners when they opted to make a kilo-for-kilo trade with cocaine dealers in Florida -- whose sources were no doubt some pretty scary people. Nowadays, serious crime, like serious capitalism, requires globalization. Tony Soprano-style protection rackets are old news, and generally stop at national borders. But trading in contraband goods -- be it drugs, arms, oil or human beings -- inevitably means setting up international relationships and connections. Above all, the big-time criminal needs a way to launder his loot, and there has never been a global climate more obliging for bad men who want to make dirty money look clean.
The reasons for this outrageous blossoming of so many flowers of evil are, according to Glenny, essentially twofold. "The collapse of ... the Soviet Union is the single most important event prompting the exponential growth of organized crime around the world in the past two decades," he writes. A key event in that breakdown was the bizarrely selective deregulation of the Soviet economy. The officials under Boris Yeltsin who executed this "reform," for reasons not entirely clear, liberalized the prices of everything but Russia's natural resources: oil, gas, diamonds and metals. Those lucky enough to get ahold of these commodities at the artificially low, state-mandated prices could turn around and sell them at market rate to the rest of the world. The result was the overnight creation of a generation of Russian oligarchs and "quite simply the grandest larceny in history."
Vast amounts of wealth drained out of Russia and into the pockets of these enterprising, if dodgy businessmen, who in turn deposited the money outside the country in "the biggest single flight of capital the world has ever seen." Meanwhile, the government in Russia was disintegrating, increasingly unable to provide basic services like security, let alone administer the commercial rule of law required by any market economy. So, you're a fabulously wealthy oligarch in an ever-more-Hobbesian Moscow: What do you need? Muscle, obviously, and this is where the notorious mafiya, populated by ex-cops and ex-soldiers with nothing constructive to do, became an essential part of the scene. "The police and even the KGB were clueless as to how one might enforce contract law," Glenny explains. "The protection rackets and mafiosi were not -- their central role in the new Russian economy was to ensure that contracts entered into were honored." Or else.
Glenny points out that the Russian mob was not merely a parasite on an otherwise healthy economy, the way the American mafia has been. The mafiya, he insists, was essential to the transition from socialism to capitalism, given that Russia's Western advisors seemed determined to turn the nation into "a giant petri dish of Chicago-school market economics." At the same time that the USSR was imploding, the holy doctrine of the free market and minimal government had been enshrined by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their disciples. The West embraced the rampant deregulation of international finance markets -- that was the other force behind the rise of global organized crime.
The West was selective in the application of its new religion, however. While pressuring post-Soviet states like Bulgaria to open their economies to foreign imports, America and Europe continued to protect their agricultural industries -- which just so happened to be the only areas in which those states could hope to compete. This inequity, combined with the U.N. sanctions imposed on Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro in 1992, made it almost impossible to survive in the former Yugoslavia without turning to some illicit industry. Meanwhile, the supposedly intractable ethnic conflicts in the region offered no impediment to doing business if you happened to be a gangster. During the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnian Muslim warlords, for example, did deals with Serbs shelling the city, while milking "every last penny out of their compatriots by ratcheting up the price of basic foodstuffs."
All these factors conspired to make Russia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans breeding grounds for a new efflorescence of organized crime. Nevertheless, other nations that Glenny visited are even worse: A tiny breakaway province of Moldova, the self-proclaimed nation of Transnistria, is "the quintessential gangster state," funding itself by selling off stockpiles of old Soviet weaponry to anyone who can pay. "There is enough kit in Transnistria to supply an entire army," a "Western intelligence officer" told Glenny. "It is worth millions and it is deadly." The hoodlums running the place used the proceeds to build a lavish arena and sports complex for a soccer team that can't actually play under the Transnistrian flag because the rest of the world doesn't recognize that Transnistria exists.
The nouveau riche excesses of gang lords never fail to tickle Glenny, who, despite the breakneck pace of "McMafia," always has a moment to describe a fantastical garish mansion or grotesque birthday party. (One Russian oligarch threw a "Soviet nostalgia" party complete with giant portraits of Lenin and Stalin beside gyrating dancing girls in backless miniskirts.) These are, however, only the most floridly vulgar manifestations of an attitude Glenny sees as both the cause and the result of the spread of organized crime: a conscience-free consumerism that is infecting the entire planet. "When I was a student in the 1970s," he writes, "it was considered completely unacceptable among my peer group to visit a prostitute. Yet today, educated young European men think nothing of flying to Estonia or similar East European destinations on stag weekends where hiring prostitutes is all part of the fun."
Whether or not you agree that hiring a prostitute is necessarily always wrong, it's hard to see how any john could inure himself to the sufferings of a prostitute who has been kidnapped, imprisoned, beaten and terrorized into servicing 20 men a night, as was one young Moldavian woman Glenny interviewed in Israel. Tel Aviv, it turns out, is one of two major prostitution hubs in the Mideast. (The other is that paradise of unregulated economic activity, Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.) There, in a brothel, Glenny witness a "pug-ugly" American teenager and two of his buddies give the staff a skeptical once-over. "You see them all the time," his friend explains. "Their parents pack 'em off from the Upper West Side to Israel with a book filled with the phone numbers of synagogues, rabbis, and shuls, and a wad of cash. And then the minute they get here, they head for the whorehouses."
Glenny finds this a sad descent from the socially committed Israel of decades past, the land of kibbutzim, social service idealism and prime ministers who lived in humble two-bedroom apartments (as opposed to the "huge" farm owned by Ariel Sharon). He traces the change to an influx of Russian mobsters in the 1990s. Along with the Chechens and Georgians, groups who were also forced to the "twilight periphery of the Soviet Union," Jews are overrepresented among Russia's oligarchs and gangsters. Israel (where they were entitled to a passport) offered a relatively tranquil haven, complete with banking systems designed to accommodate foreign money. But once the native-born Israelis got a load of the immigrants' sybaritic lifestyles, they wanted the same for themselves, and the ranks and ambitions of the homegrown Israeli mob swelled.
The same trickle-down story has played out in other nations, kleptocracies like Nigeria, whose ruling class simply siphons all the wealth of the world's sixth-largest oil reserve into their own pockets. Graft is so pervasive in Nigera, it has become an "ideology," as Glenny puts it. Small wonder, then, that the nation has become a breeding ground for ingenious scams. "Most Nigerians involved in crime," Glenny writes, "simply mimic the behavior of their thieving elite." Beside identity and credit card theft, the (notably nonviolent) Nigerian crime syndicates specialize in what's called "advance fee fraud," the official term for those imploring e-mails purportedly sent to you by the widow of a high-ranking African official looking for an astute American to help her withdraw $60 million or $80 million from a third-world bank. Otherwise known as 419 scams (the number refers to a section of the Nigerian penal code), these cons have even been celebrated in a hit pop song, "I Go Chop Your Dollar":
Oyinbo man [white man], I go chop your dollar, I go take your money and disappear 419 is just a game, you are the loser I am the winner.
The most spectacular victim of Nigerian advance fee fraud was not, however, a white man, but Nelson Sakaguchi, a director of Banco Noroeste in Brazil. Yes, that's right, a banker fell for one of these scams, to the tune of $191 million, skimmed off the bank's accounts via the offshore banks of the Cayman Islands. The cash was funneled to a Nigerian team led by one Chief Emmanuel Nwude, who, in a London hotel suite, managed to convince Sakaguchi that he was Paul Ogwuna, director of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
That was only the beginning: The psychic trap of the advance fee fraud is that the con man keeps asking for just a little bit more cash to cover some expense required to close the deal, and this doesn't seem like much compared to the money you've already kicked in. Good money follows bad and soon the mark (or "mugu," as the Nigerians dub the victim) is conning himself, unwilling to face the possibility that he's been had. "Sakaguchi's gullibility beggars belief," Glenny marvels, but so does much else about the case, such as the macumba priestess Sakaguchi hired to improve his luck. In the end, he wound up paying her upward of $20 million to perform rituals involving hundreds of thousands of black and white pigeons.
Easy as it is to mock a self-deluded sap like Sakaguchi, most Westerners are to some degree complicit in the criminality that Glenny describes. "Organized crime is such a rewarding industry in the Balkans," he writes, "because ordinary West Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes" -- a huge smuggling concern -- "snorting coke through fifty-euro notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labor on subsistence wages; stuffing their gullets with caviar; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; and purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world." When we ignore where all this contraband comes from we, too, are kidding ourselves.
The ever intrepid Glenny follows his story from an interview with a Mumbai hit man (a perfectly congenial fellow) to a visit to a couple of shipping containers buried under the British Columbian wilderness and stuffed with the latest marijuana growing technology. He buys $6,000 worth of prohibited caviar for $175 in Kazakhstan and interviews foreign laborers living in "subhuman" conditions on the outskirts of Dubai, the money-laundering capital of the world. Occasionally, reality starts to resemble the burlesques of postmodern fiction, as when the Chechen mobsters in Russia started charging other gangs for the right to call themselves "Chechen" (thereby capitalizing on the Chechens' fearsome reputation), provided that the licensees didn't mar the brand by making empty threats. Failing to follow through would bring the dreaded wrath of the real Chechens down on the heads of the transgressors.
These episodes make for great tales, but Glenny also witnesses plenty of suffering; that Moldavian forced into prostitution saw a girl who tried to escape kneecapped and left to die in the Negev desert. He advocates some sweeping action: "If the UN is right and drugs account for 70 percent of organized criminal activity, then the legalization of drugs would administer by far the deadliest blow possible against transnational organized criminal networks." Drug money funds other criminal enterprises (including terrorism), and underground commerce represents taxes lost to the legitimate economy. He also observes that if the U.S. would crack down on offshore banking, criminal syndicates would be much harder-pressed to launder their cash; of course, so too would a lot of rich, tax-dodging Americans and corporations.
Perhaps the most radical demand in "McMafia" is for a unified global strategy to deal with what, ultimately, are border-transcending problems. Glenny isn't against globalization per se -- perhaps he thinks it's unavoidable -- but he insists that it must be done right. "For globalization to work," he writes, "the world needs to be a level playing field: the West has to stop its protectionist practices and it has to reassess its resistance to the free, or at least a freer, movement of labor. The developing world in turn needs to address the issue of corruption and the strengthening of the rule of law. This raises the awkward question of global governance and standards that might be compatible across the world."
The subprime mortgage market meltdown revealed the fact that several high-end Western financial institutions had a pretty feeble grasp on exactly where all their money was and how much they actually had. If experts like these can "lose their way in the mists of financial markets," Glenny explains, "imagine how easy it is for those who do not want to be seen to remain hidden. Globalization needs regulation, but everyone is reluctant to demand it for fear it may discriminate against them." Until then, however, all of us will be paying the hidden costs of the unfettered global free market, costs deducted from our collective humanity as well as our wallets, and in ways we are just beginning to understand.