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Women Feed the World, Not Corporations, The control over the entire food…
Women Feed the World, Not Corporations
This is a provocative title to a provocative reading. But is it true? Let's see the evidence brought by the reading.
In Africa, 80% of local food production is done by women.
Reference number 19, which is described as a citation to a collaboration of the current author and Maria Mies. I will assume this is true or close to reality.
In Asia, 50 to 60% of local food production is done by women.
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In a study in Nepal, seed selection was found to be a primarily a female responsibility.
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In a single African home garden, more than 60 species of food producing trees were counted.
Citation number 9. That said, by definition, this is a grove, not a home garden.
Citation 9 claims that women are the biodiversity experts of the world, but only cites Africa, Asia and a part of Mexico.
None of the referenced material is included in the reading, but I am assuming the complete text has them cited at the end.
In Indian agriculture, women use 150 different species of plants for vegetables, fodder and health care.
Citation number 9. That said, several aspects of Indian culture promotes a vegetarian lifestyle. While not all Indians are vegetarian (20 to 39% according to Wikipedia), they have definitely developped a diet rich in vegetable variety.
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In Veracruz, Mexico, peasants utilize approximately 435 wild plant and animal species, of which 229 are eaten.
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In Negerian hom gardens, women plant 18-57 plant species in a single home garden. In sub-Saharan Africa, women cultivate as many as 120 different plants in the spaces left alongside the cash crops managed by men. In Guatemala, home gardens that account for less than 0.1 hectare of land grow more than ten tree and crop species.
Citation number 8. I see nothing inherently wrong here. Then again, this is about gardens, not food production.
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Today, just a handful of corporations control the global food system
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The Fourteenth Amendment (added to protect the rights of freed slaves) was reinterpreted to cover corporations.
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With the rights of natural persons, corporations could undermine the rights of real people.
Corporations are claiming that their economic power to influence elections, to control seeds, and to dominate our food system is a part of their "freedom of speech."
In May 2014, the state of Vermont passed the first GMO labeling law in the United States. In reponse, Monsanto, together with the Grocery Manufacturer Association claimed that this "impose[d] burdensome new speech requirements."
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Sixty countries across the world have mandatory GMO labeling laws, but several efforts in the United States have been blocked by industry.
In California and Washington, Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association spent nearly $100 million to defeat the vote in favor of labeling.
A corporation cannot vote, but it can steal elections through corporate funding. Limits on financing elections were interpreted by the US Supreme Court as interferences with the "free speech" of a corporation.
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Underlying problems
Wealth inequalities
Bigger and bigger food oligopolies (getting worse), i.e. 78.5% of dry pasta market is controlled by 3 corporations
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Greedflation: food companies are increasing inequalities because they want to give more money to their shareholders
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Ownership of production
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We should try and reduce wealth inequalities by giving back the production and land to the people who are consuming the food
The control over the entire food chain, from seed to table is shifting into the hands of global corporations.
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Seed selection (and sovereignty), biodiversity and nutrition are diminishing in the hands of corporations.
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Corporations can appropriate all the food the world produced by farmers and turn it into a commodity.
Five gene giants have replaced billion of producers and processors, which has created global food insecurity.
More than two billion people are cursed with obesity and related diseases due to industrial processed junk food.
The Green Revolution.
New varieties of "miracle" seeds, for which Borlaug received a Nobel Prize, are rapidly spreading across the third world also sowed the seeds of a new commercialization of agriculture.
Borlaug ushered in an era of corporate control of food production by creating a technology through which multinationals acquired control over seeds and hence over the entire food system.
The Green Revolution commercialized and privatized seeds, removing control of plant genetic resources from peasant in the Global South.
This control was in turn given to international research centers run by the World Bank, such as the CIMMYT and IRRI and to multinational corporations.
The Green Revolution was a strategy based on destroying the self-reproducing characteristic and genetic diversity of seeds.
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Hybrid "miracle" seeds are a commercial miracle because farmers have to buy new supplies of them every year; they do not reproduce themselves.
Hybrids do not produce seeds that duplicate the same result because hybrifs do not pass on their vigor to the next generation.
With hybridization, seeds are no longer a source of plant life, producing sustenance through food and nutritiion; they are now a source of private profit.
Money takes over.
The Green Revolution seeds were useful only for corporations that wanted to find new avenues of profit in seed and fertilizer sales.
The international agencies that financed research on the new seeds also provided the money for their distribution.
The impossible task of selling a new variety to millions of peasants who could not afford to buy these seeds was solved by the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the FAO, and a host of bilateral aid programs, which began to accord high priority to the distribution of HYV seeds.
The Green Revolution has spread monocultures of chemical rice and wheat through both hybrid seeds and GMOs, driving out biodiversity, and hence, nutrition, from our farms and diets.
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