Food Crisis & Disaster Capitalism

[Guest guest]

Naomi Klein: Bush Sees Crises in Fuel, Food, Housing and Banking as

Chance to Exploit Us More

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

Posted on July 16, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/91656/

As the country and the world reel from crises ranging from

skyrocketing oil prices and global food shortages to housing and

climate change, how best to understand the government policies being

pushed through? Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman interviewed Naomi

Klein, author of 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster

Capitalism'.

Goodman: Food crisis now around the world.

Klein: Well, this is another example of how the shock doctrine, the

strategy that I document in the book of using a crisis, using a

situation of desperation, often a situation where developing

countries need foreign aid, because they're facing a disaster, to

leverage very, very unpopular pro-corporate policies. Now, you know

in the book the examples that I give are, for instance, how the

tsunami in Asia was used and the fact that countries like Sri Lanka

needed aid, and in that moment you had international lenders coming

in and saying, " Oh, well, we'll give you aid, but we want you to

privatize your water, your electricity system, hand the coastline

over to resorts. "

Well, we're seeing a version of this. We're seeing a version of

disaster capitalism in the context of the food crisis, where you

have that same desperation, you have a need for aid, for debt

forgiveness, for new policies, and now we're hearing another sort of

echo chamber response from the World Bank, from the US State

Department, from the agribusiness companies, and that refrain is,

the cause of the food crisis is that too many of these countries

don't allow genetically modified foods, and genetically modified

crops can feed the world and solve the food crisis, so trying to use

this crisis to break through a legislative barrier that exists for

good reason, just as domestically in the United States the oil

crisis is being used by the Bush administration to try to break

through the bans on offshore oil, on ANWR.

So now we have this other talking point that we're hearing again and

again, which is genetically modified foods can feed the world. There

is no scientific evidence for this. Quite the opposite. Genetically

modified seeds do not increase yields for crops. They increase

profits for agribusiness companies. They simplify farming. But they

don't increase yields, and in many cases they decrease yields.

Goodman: Because?

 

Klein: Because this is actually not what they're genetically

modified to do. I mean, if you think about Roundup Ready, I mean,

what it's genetically modified to do is be compatible --

Goodman: You mean the soy and the fertilizer?

Klein: Yes, to be compatible with Monsanto's [herbicide]. It's not

about increasing crop yields. And they haven't actually figured out

the technology for how to increase crop yields.

One of the things that I find really worrying is that companies --

and similar to the oil crisis, Amy, we're seeing record profits from

Monsanto, from Cargill, from all the big players, in the context of

the food crisis. We're also seeing something else, which is that

these companies are buying up hundreds of patents on seeds that they

claim are " climate-ready. " " Climate-ready " is -- we've heard about

Roundup Ready, which means they're ready for roundup [herbicide];

now, the new phrase is " climate ready, " which means they're ready

for climate change, which means that these seeds apparently can grow

in the context of drought, can grow in the context of highly

salinated earth because there's been a flood. And Monsanto and

Syngenta, other of these big biotech companies, have bought up

hundreds of these patents.

And this is worrying on many levels. I think it's worrying, because,

once again, we're seeing a disincentive to actually get us out of a

future of climate chaos, because we see ways to profit. But then,

when we look at how aggressively we know a company like Monsanto

protects its patents, when it comes to their Roundup Ready seeds,

the suing of small farmers, the surveillance of farmers -- there was

an incredible story recently in Vanity Fair about the heavy-handed

legal tactics and use of private security, just harassing farmers

who dare to save their seeds from one growing season to the next,

breaking Monsanto's patent. So if they really are developing seeds

that are climate ready and they're also patenting them and buying

them up, then really what we're seeing is not a future of feeding

the world, but once again a future of a kind of climate apartheid,

where it becomes less accessible and more expensive to have the

crops that will grow in this future.

And so, I think people need to identify this right away, and the

discussion needs to be about the right to food, about food being a

human right. This is far too important to allow players like

Monsanto to privatize the future of the crops that can grow within a

context of climate change.