On January 1, 1995, the WTO was officially established with powers to enforce its corporate-written laws on member states. US agribusiness was already dominant, but it now had a new unelected supranational body to advance its private agenda on a global scale. WTO is a "policeman" for global free trade and "a (predatory) battering ram for the trillion dollar annual world agribusiness" part of it for its giants. Its rules are written with teeth for "punitive leverage" to levy heavy financial and other penalties on rule violators. Under them, agriculture is a priority because American companies are dominant.
Cargill wrote the rules that Engdahl calls the "Cargill Plan." They:
-- ban all government farm programs and price supports worldwide (but wink and nod at massive US subsidies);
-- prohibit countries from imposing import controls to defend their own agricultural production;
-- ban agricultural export controls even in times of famine so Cargill can dominate world export grain trade; and
-- forbid countries from restricting trade through food safety laws called trade barriers; this demand also opens world markets to unrestricted GMO food imports with no need to prove their safety.
The International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council lobby (IPC) worked with Cargill and US agribusiness to advance this agenda. Four so-called Group of Four QUAD countries took the lead - the US, Canada, Japan and EU. Meeting in secret, they set policy for all 134 WTO members that for agriculture was drafted by US agribusiness giants like Cargill, Monsanto, ADM and DuPont along with EU giants, Nestle and Unilever. They were designed to erase national laws and safeguards in favor of unrestricted free markets favoring Global North countries.
Through patents, GMO giants control staple crop seeds and need WTO leverage to force them on a skeptical world. It's done through WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) along with its Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Until the advent of agribusiness, food production and its markets were local. That's now changed with corporate giants in control and able to set prices by manipulating supply.
AoA rules were established to help. They also enforce agribusiness' highest priority - "a free and integrated global market for its products." Included are GMO ones the senior Bush administration ruled are "substantially equivalent" to ordinary seeds and crops and need no government regulation.
That provision is written into WTO rules under its "Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS). It states that national laws banning GMO products are "unfair trade practices" even when they endanger human health. Other WTO rules (called "Technical Barriers to Trade") are in place as well. They prohibit GMO labeling so consumers don't know what they're eating and can't avoid these potentially hazardous foods.
The 1996 Biosafety Protocol was drafted to solve this problem, and it should be in place for that purpose. Developing country demands, however, were "ambushed by the powerful organized government and agribusiness lobby." It sabotaged talks and insisted biosafety measures be subordinate to WTO trade rules favoring developed states. As a result, talks collapsed, safety concerns are ignored, and the path was cleared for the unrestricted spread of GMO seeds worldwide.
Under WTO's TRIPS rules, all member states must pass patent-protecting intellectual property laws that make knowledge property. That, in turn, "open(s) the floodgates" nearly everywhere for the proliferation of GMO seeds and foods, even in violation of national food safety laws.
GMO giants have powerful friends in government backing their agenda. George Bush is one of them, and in 2003 he made the proliferation of GMO seeds his top priority after the Iraq war. With that support, GMO companies are pushing things to the limit with a brazen example Engdahl gave involving the Texas biotech company, RiceTec.
It schemed to patent Basmati rice, the dietary staple across Asia for thousands of years. With IRRI collusion, the company stole the seeds, patented them under Rockefeller Foundation-crafted rules, and the 2001 Supreme Court decision in Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred made it possible. It "enshrined the principle of allowing patents on plant forms and other forms of life in (this) groundbreaking case." Under the ruling, GMO plant breeds can be patented, and US government agencies are complicit in helping agribusiness giants ensure nothing stops them from doing it.
As a result, the GMO monoculture onslaught threatens plant species diversity everywhere. With full Washington and WTO backing, major biotech companies are patenting every plant imaginable in GMO form. By the beginning of the new millennium, Engdahl referred to a "Gene Revolution (as a) monsoon force in world agriculture" with four dominant companies controlling GMOs and related agrichemical markets" - Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Agrisciences and Syngenta in Switzerland from the merger of the agriculture divisions of Novartis and AstraZeneca.
The "world's number one" is Monsanto. The company was discussed in Part I of this review, and Engdahl quoted its chairman saying his goal is a global fusion of "three of the largest industries in the world - agriculture, food and health - that now operate (separately, but) changes....will lead to their integration." That was over seven years ago. Now it's happening.
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
Figuratively, I am trying to push down my hair back to its normal position on my head. From time to time I have read hints at what is going on with agribusiness, but never so comprehensively as Engdahl must tell it, and how incisively Lendman projects the thrust of the book.
Thank you, Mssrs. Engdahl and Lendman, for the alert on this near-unbelievable creeping conquest of the earth.
by
MyTwoCents (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 36 comments)
on Monday, January 7, 2008 at 3:21:23 PM
