Comments on: Agribusiness and the Food Crisis: A new thrust at anti-trust

By: T R Nagesh

T R Nagesh — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:58:40 +0000

Re: How would the recent investments in farmland by China and some Gulf countries affect the food crisis.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:08:10 +0000

Re: The food crisis has a new villain: agribusiness.

You’re just figuring this out? What did you think was the chief cause?

By: Triplecrisis

Triplecrisis — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:57:14 +0000

Timothy A. Wise:

I appreciate the comments. The statistics that the world’s hungry are not, overwhelmingly, the urban poor, seems to contradict the popular wisdom. The source cited by agencies from the World Bank on down is the U.N. Hunger Task Force, from 2005. Here is the specific reference:

“Who and where are the hungry? While accurate data are scarce, estimates indicate that the majority of hungry people live in rural areas. The task force believes that about half of the hungry live in smallholder farming households, while roughly two-tenths are landless. A smaller group, perhaps one-tenth, are pastoralists, fisherfolk, and forest users. The remainder, around two-tenths, live in urban areas.”

From “Halving Hunger: It Can Be Done,” Summary version, pp 5-6. Lead authors: Pedro Sanchez, Coordinator; M.S. Swaminathan, Coordinator; Philip Dobie; Nalan Yuksel. UN Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger, 2005.

By: Garrett Connelly

Garrett Connelly — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:19:35 +0000

As a young econ grad, my adviser, Dr. Karcz, told me to incorporate understanding of agriculture into my life study. After an interesting corporate stint in the late sixties and early seventies, I started at the bottom and worked my up to become foreman of a mid-sized hay, grain and cattle operation. Reforestation seedlings and vegetable production was also fairly intense, we packed 25 tons/day of carrots, for example. The general subject of this article was well known by just about every farmer in the country, additionally, today’s situation was accurately predicted then by almost every farmer, it was obvious way back then, without benefit from or need for advanced college degrees. Now the US government continues it’s same old forked tongue concern for the family farm internally as it uses it’s military and financial might to do to small scale human land owners world-wide what perfected and already accomplished against its own people. Don’t get me wrong, this is an intelligent and well written article, it’s problem is innocent faith that the continuing oppressive actions of corporatism gone wild can be stopped without doing something real. Economic reasoning needs to include a lesson for the people, the US Government is broken and something new that sees justice as the key must replace corporatist control over life.

By: Trevor Wells

Trevor Wells — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:56:26 +0000

I need to add that am horrified at the sugar beet fiasco in the United States of America. Here you have a Judge who says the USDA did not follow the law. He orders the USDA to follow the law. Monsanto instructs all its clients to ignore the judgment. In a new case where the alarmed American public are concerned about Monsanto’s clients contempt of Court, Monsanto screams like a pig and claims that sugar beet farmers have not got any other beet to plant than the sugar beet which Monsanto produces. The Judge then finds that this is true. So he says”Even though the USDA acted illegally and the USA system and Monsanto have created this ridiculous situation where farmers are unable to plant any other kind of sugar beet except Monsanto’s sugar beet, we will allow you to plant this monopoly crop”
Then at the same time Vilsack and company are doing the rounds, going through the motions, “investigating whether monopolies exist”.

It is blatantly clear that Monsanto is it own enemy. Monsanto creates Bt resistant cornborer. Monsanto creates herbicide resistant superweeds.
In response to cornborer resistance and herbicide resistant superweeds Monsanto creates SmartStax GM corn which now contains 6 genes that constantly exude six different insectcide toxins and 2 genes which constantly exude herbicide resistance from every single living cellof the plant from seed to mouth.
Monsanto creates “Stewardship of its Technology” programs and the US consumers have to pay the price for Monsanto police to enforce Monsanto Law. US farmers who get caught twice for not complying with Monsanto’s refuge system will be blacklisted and never allowed to plant Monsanto seeds again. Can you think of anything worse, because according to what they told Judge White,there are no others seeds available.
Quite frankly I think Monsanto has become a forked tongue, sorry sight.

By: Trevor Wells

Trevor Wells — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:56:38 +0000

First of all the link that states majority of the world’s hungry are small-scale leads to the United Nations FAO (Food and Agriculture Orginisation) site and a thorough search of that site finds no such statement. Small farmers throughout the world consistently produce more food than the big sky boys who produce Monsanto’s two trick pony, corn and soya.
58 countries have ratified the the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technological for Development.(IAASTD),which was hosted and sponsored by the UN-FAO, is the most comprehensive assessment of agriculture and food security ever undertaken with a the engagement of 400 scientists and agri-experts over 4 years with two peer reviews. The IAASTD outcomes calls for land reform, agro-ecological techniques (proven to enhance farmers’ adaptive capacity and resilience to environmental stresses such as climate change and water scarcity), the building of local economies equitable distribution systems and farmer-led participatory breeding programs. The IAASDT was sponsored by the FAO. It was adopted in Johannesburg in 2009. The only significant dissenting parties to the report were Monsanto and the United States who walked out when priority was not given to their handful of industry experts who believed that large scale industrial planting of GM crops was the answer to climate change. Small farmers produce more food than the total of Monsanto’s two trick pony riders.

By: Reji K Joseph

Reji K Joseph — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:42:40 +0000

It has been the concern over the monopoly power in the seed supply chain which acted as one of the reasons for resistance to genetically modified crops in India. At one point of time, the court had to intervene, to instruct the seed supplier to reduce the cost of Bt Cotton seed by half.

By: mary

mary — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:34:20 +0000

You may find this article interesting…

Panamanian Coffee Production

Coffee is one of the world’s biggest export commodities, the top agricultural export for a dozen countries and one of the world’s ten largest legal agricultural exports by value. (Source: FAO Statistics Division.) According to John Talbot of the University of the West Indies, “Coffee is the second most valuable commodity exported by developing countries, a distant second to crude oil,” but well ahead of third place sugar and other agricultural, forestry and mining outputs.

for full access to free article visit:
http://www.alternativelatininvestor.com/28/agribusiness/panamanian-coffee-production.html