[GJM] Fw: Must read article: Global Famine by Michel Chossudovsky

[mary rose]

I do believe that this article subsantiates Urban Kohler's
argument that "everything is going as planned" -- meaning
that the Cabal is very much succeeding at what it wanted
to accomplish.   But woe to the rest of us.

However, I do have another take on this and will relay it
in the next message.

mary rose


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "GlobalCirclenet" <webmaster at globalcircle.net>
To: <globalnetnews-summary at lists.riseup.net>
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 8:12 PM
Subject: [globalnetnews-summary] Global Famine by Michel Chossudovsky



(To change your settings or unsubscribe please go to
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/globalnetnews-summary)

Global Famine by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8877
Global Research, May 2, 2008

    Humanity is undergoing in the post-Cold War era an economic and social 
crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large 
sectors of the World population. National economies are collapsing, 
unemployment is rampant. Local level famines have erupted in Sub-Saharan 
Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America. This "globalization of 
poverty" --which has largely reversed the achievements of post-war 
decolonization-- was initiated in the Third World coinciding with the debt 
crisis of the early 1980s and the imposition of the IMF's deadly economic 
reforms.

    The New World Order feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the 
natural environment. It generates social apartheid, encourages racism and 
ethnic strife, undermines the rights of women and often precipitates 
countries into destructive confrontations between nationalities. Since the 
1990s, it has extended its grip to all major regions of the World including 
North America, Western Europe, the countries of the former Soviet block and 
the "Newly Industrialized Countries" (NICs) of South East Asia and the Far 
East.

    This Worldwide crisis is more devastating than the Great Depression of 
the 1930s. It has far-reaching geo-political implications; economic 
dislocation has also been accompanied by the outbreak of regional wars, the 
fracturing of national societies and in some cases the destruction of entire 
countries. By far this is the most serious economic crisis in modern 
history. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, First Edition, 
1997)

Introduction

Famine is the result of a process of "free market" restructuring of the 
global economy which has its roots in the debt crisis of the early 1980s. 
It is not a recent phenomenon as suggested by several Western media reports. 
The latter narrowly focus on short-term supply and demand for agricultural 
staples, while obfuscating the broader structural causes of global famine.

Poverty and chronic undernourishment is a pre-existing condition. The recent 
hikes in food prices have contributed to exacerbating and aggravating the 
food crisis. The price hikes are hitting an impoverished population, which 
has barely the means to survive.

Food riots have erupted  almost simultaneously in all major regions of the 
World:

    "Food prices in Haiti had risen on average by 40 percent in less than a 
year, with the cost of staples such as rice doubling.... In Bangladesh, [in 
late April 2008] some 20,000 textile workers took to the streets to denounce 
soaring food prices and demand higher wages. The price of rice in the 
country has doubled over the past year, threatening the workers, who earn a 
monthly salary of just $25, with hunger. In Egypt, protests by workers over 
food prices rocked the textile center of Mahalla al-Kobra, north of Cairo, 
for two days last week, with two people shot dead by security forces. 
Hundreds were arrested, and the government sent plainclothes police into the 
factories to force workers to work. Food prices in Egypt have risen by 40 
percent in the past year... Earlier this month, in the Ivory Coast, 
thousands marched on the home of President Laurent Gbagbo, chanting "we are 
hungry" and "life is too expensive, you are going to kill us.

    Similar demonstrations, strikes and clashes have taken place in Bolivia, 
Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, 
Yemen, Ethiopia, and throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa." (Bill Van 
Auken, Amid mounting food crisis, governments fear revolution of the hungry, 
Global Research, April 2008)

"Eliminating the Poor"

With large sectors of the World population already well below the poverty 
line, the short-term hike in the prices of food staples is devastating. 
Millions of people around the World are unable to purchase food for their 
survival

These hikes are contributing in a very real sense to "eliminating the poor" 
through "starvation deaths". In the words of Henry Kissinger:  "Control oil 
and you control nations; control food and you control the people."

In this regard, Kissinger had intimated in the context of the 1974 National 
Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth 
for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests". that the recurrence of famines 
could constitute a de facto instrument of population control.

According to the FAO, the price of grain staples has increased by 88% since 
March 2007. The price of wheat has increased by 181% over a three year 
period. The price of rice has increased by 50% over the last three months 
(See Ian Angus, Food Crisis: "The greatest demonstration of the historical 
failure of the capitalist model", Global Research, April 2008):

     "The most popular grade of Thailand rice sold for $198 a ton, five 
years ago and $323 a ton a year ago. In April 2008, the price hit $1,000. 
Increases are even greater on local markets - in Haiti, the market price of 
a 50 kilo bag of rice doubled in one week at the end of March 2008. These 
increases are catastrophic for the 2.6 billion people around the world who 
live on less than US$2 a day and spend 60% to 80% of their incomes on food. 
Hundreds of millions cannot afford to eat" (Ibid)

Two Interrelated Dimensions

There are two interrelated dimensions to the ongoing global food crisis, 
which has spearheaded millions of people around the World into starvation 
and chronic deprivation, a situation in which entire population groups no 
longer have the means to purchase food.

First, there is a long term historical process of macroeconomic policy 
reform and global economic restructuring which has contributed to depressing 
the standard living Worldwide in both the developing and developed 
countries.

Second, these preexisting historical conditions of mass poverty have been 
exacerbated and aggravated by the recent surge in grain prices, which have 
led in some cases to the doubling of the retail price of food staples. These 
price hikes are in large part the result of speculative trade in food 
staples.

Speculative Surge in Grain Prices

The media has casually misled public opinion on the causes of these price 
hikes, focusing almost exclusively on issues of costs of production, climate 
and other factors which result in reduced supply and which might contribute 
to boosting the price of food staples. While these factors may come into 
play, they are of limited relevance in explaining the impressive and 
dramatic surge in commodity prices.

Spiraling food prices are in large part the result of market manipulation. 
They are largely attributable to speculative trade on the commodity markets. 
Grain prices are boosted artificially by large scale speculative operations 
on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges. It is worth noting that in 
2007, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), merged with the Chicago Mercantile 
Exchange (CME), forming the largest Worldwide entity dealing in commodity 
trade including a wide range of speculative instruments (options, options on 
futures, index funds, etc).

Speculative trade in wheat, rice or corn, can occur without the occurrence 
of real commodity transactions. The institutions speculating in the grain 
market are not necessarily involved in the actual selling or delivery of 
grain.

The transactions may use commodity index funds which are bets on the general 
upward or downward movement of commodity prices. A "put option" is a bet 
that the price will go down, a  "call option" is a bet that the price will 
go up. Through concerted manipulation, institutional traders and financial 
institutions make the price go up and then place their bets on an upward 
movement in the price of a particular commodity.

Speculation generates market volatility. In turn, the resulting instability 
encourages further speculative activity.

Profits are made when the price goes up. Conversely, if the speculator is 
short-selling the market, money will be made when the price collapses.

This recent speculative surge in food prices has been conducive to a 
Worldwide process of famine formation on an unprecedented scale.

The Absence of Regulatory Measures Triggers Famine

These speculative operations do not purposely trigger famine.

What triggers famine is the absence of regulatory procedures pertaining to 
speculative trade (options, options on futures, commodity index funds). In 
the present context, a freeze of speculative trade in food staples, taken as 
a political decision, would immediately contribute to lower food prices.

Nothing prevents these transactions from being neutralized and defused 
through a set of carefully devised regulatory measures.

Visibly, this is not what is being proposed by the World Bank and the 
International Monetary Fund.

The Role of the IMF and the World Bank

The World Bank and the IMF have come forth with an emergency plan, to boost 
agriculture in response to the "food crisis". The causes of this crisis, 
however, are not addressed.

The World Bank's president Robert B. Zoellick describes this initiative as a 
"new deal", an action plan "for a long-term boost to agricultural 
production.", which consists inter alia in a doubling of agricultural loans 
to African farmers.

     "We have to put our money where our mouth is now so that we can put 
food into hungry mouths" (Robert Zoellick, World Bank head, quoted  by BBC, 
2 May 2008)

IMF/World Bank "economic medicine" is not the "solution" but in large part 
the "cause" of famine in developing countries. More IMF-World Bank lending 
"to boost agriculture" will serve to increase levels of indebtedness and 
exacerbate rather alleviate poverty.

World Bank "policy based loans" are granted on condition the countries abide 
by the neoliberal policy agenda which, since the early 1980s, has been 
conducive to the collapse of local level food agriculture.

"Macro-economic stabilization" and structural adjustment programs imposed by 
the IMF and the World Bank on developing countries (as a condition for the 
renegotiation of their external debt) have led to the impoverishment of 
hundreds of millions of people.

The harsh economic and social realities underlying IMF intervention are 
soaring food prices, local-level famines, massive lay-offs of urban workers 
and civil servants and the destruction of  social programs. Internal 
purchasing power has collapsed, famines health clinics and schools have been 
closed down, hundreds of millions of children have been denied the right to 
primary education.

IMF Shock Treatment

Historically, spiraling food prices at the retail level have been triggered 
by currency devaluations, which have invariably resulted in a 
hyperinflationary situation. In Peru in August 1990, for instance, on the 
orders of the IMF, fuel prices increased overnight by 30 times. The price of 
bread increased twelve times overnight:

    "Throughout the Third World, the situation is one of social desperation 
and hopelessness of a population impoverished by the interplay of market 
forces. Anti-SAP riots and popular uprisings are brutally repressed: 
Caracas, 1989. President Carlos Andres Perez after having rhetorically 
denounced the IMF of practicing "an economic totalitarianism which kills not 
with bullets but with famine", declares a state of emergency and sends 
regular units of the infantry and the marines into the slum areas (barrios 
de ranchos) on the hills overlooking the capital. The Caracas anti-IMF riots 
had been sparked off as a result of a 200 per cent increase in the price of 
bread. Men, women and children were fired upon indiscriminately: "The 
Caracas morgue was reported to have up to 200 bodies of people killed in the 
first three days ... and warned that it was running out of coffins". 
Unofficially more than a thousand people were killed. Tunis, January 1984: 
the bread riots instigated largely by unemployed youth protesting the rise 
of food prices; Nigeria, 1989: the anti-SAP student riots leading to the 
closing of six of the country's universities by the Armed Forces Ruling 
Council; Morocco, 1990: a general strike and a popular uprising against the 
government's IMF-sponsored reforms." (Michel Chossudovsky, op cit.)

The Deregulation of Grain Markets

Since the 1980s, grain markets have been deregulated under the supervision 
of the World Bank and US/EU grain surpluses are used systematically to 
destroy the peasantry and destabilize national food agriculture. In this 
regard, World Bank lending requires the lifting of trade barriers on 
imported agricultural staples, leading to the dumping of US/EU grain 
surpluses onto local market. These and other measures have spearheaded local 
agricultural producers into bankruptcy.

A "free market" in grain --imposed by the IMF and the World Bank-- destroys 
the peasant economy and undermines "food security". Malawi and Zimbabwe were 
once prosperous grain surplus countries, Rwanda was virtually 
self-sufficient in food until 1990 when the IMF ordered the dumping of EU 
and US grain surpluses on the domestic market precipitating small farmers 
into bankruptcy. In 1991-92, famine had hit Kenya, East Africa's most 
successful bread-basket economy. The Nairobi government had been previously 
placed on a black list for not having obeyed IMF prescriptions. The 
deregulation of the grain market had been demanded as one of the conditions 
for the rescheduling of Nairobi's external debt with the Paris Club of 
official creditors. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and 
the New World Order, Second Edition, Montreal 2003)

Throughout Africa, as well as in Southeast Asia and Latin America, the 
pattern of "sectoral adjustment" in agriculture under the custody of the 
Bretton Woods institutions has been unequivocally towards the destruction of 
food security. Dependency vis-à-vis the world market has been reinforced 
leading to a boost in commercial grain imports as well as an increase in the 
influx of "food aid".

Agricultural producers were encouraged to abandon food farming and switch 
into "high value" export crops. often  to the detriment of food 
self-sufficiency. The high value products as well as the cash crops for 
export were supported by World Bank loans.

Famines in the age of globalization are the result of policy. Famine is not 
the consequence of a scarcity of food but in fact quite the opposite: global 
food surpluses are used to destabilize agricultural production in developing 
countries.

Tightly regulated and controlled by international agro-business, this 
oversupply is ultimately conducive to the stagnation of both production and 
consumption of essential food staples and the impoverishment of farmers 
throughout the world.  Moreover, in the era of globalization, the IMF-World 
Bank structural adjustment program bears a direct relationship to the 
process of famine formation because it systematically undermines all 
categories of economic activity, whether urban or rural, which do not 
directly serve the interests of the global market system.

The earnings of farmers in rich and poor countries alike are squeezed by a 
handful of global agro-industrial enterprises which simultaneously control 
the markets for grain, farm inputs, seeds and processed foods. One giant 
firm Cargill Inc. with more than 140 affiliates and subsidiaries around the 
World controls a large share of the international trade in grain. Since the 
1950s, Cargill became the main contractor of US "food aid" funded under 
Public Law 480 (1954).

World agriculture has for the first time in history the capacity to satisfy 
the food requirements of the entire planet, yet the very nature of the 
global market system prevents this from occurring. The capacity to produce 
food is immense yet the levels of food consumption remain exceedingly low 
because a large share of the World's population lives in conditions of 
abject poverty and deprivation. Moreover, the process of "modernization" of 
agriculture has led to the dispossession of the peasantry, increased 
landlessness and environmental degradation. In other words, the very forces 
which encourage global food production to expand are also conducive 
antithetically to a contraction in the standard of living and a decline in 
the demand for food.

Genetically Modified Seeds

Coinciding with the establishment the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 
1995, another important historical change has occurred in the structure of 
global agriculture.

Under the articles of agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO)), the 
food giants will have unrestricted freedom to enter the seeds markets of 
developing countries. The acquisition of exclusive "intellectual property 
rights" over plant varieties by international agro-industrial interests, 
also favors the destruction of bio-diversity.

Acting on behalf of a handful of biotech conglomerates, GMO seeds have been 
imposed on farmers, often in the context of "food aid programs".  In 
Ethiopia, for instance, kits of GMO seeds were handed out to impoverished 
farmers with a view to rehabilitating agricultural production in the wake of 
a major drought . The GMO seeds were planted, yielding a harvest. But then 
the farmer came to realize that the GMO seeds could not be replanted without 
paying royalties to Monsanto, Arch Daniel Midland et al. Then, the farmers 
discovered that the seeds would harvest only if they used the farm inputs 
including the fertilizer, insecticide and herbicide, produced and 
distributed by the biotech agribusiness companies. Entire peasant economies 
were locked into the grip of the agribusiness conglomerates.

Breaking The Agricultural Cycle

With the widespread adoption of GMO seeds, a major transition has occurred 
in the structure and history of settled agriculture since its inception 
10,000 years ago.

The reproduction of seeds at the village level in local nurseries has been 
disrupted by the use of genetically modified seeds.  The agricultural cycle, 
which enables farmers to store their organic seeds and plant them to reap 
the next harvest has been broken. This destructive pattern - invariably 
resulting in famine - is replicated in country after country leading to the 
Worldwide demise of the peasant economy.