BIOFUELS LEADING TO LAND GRAB AROUND THE WORLD...

Biofuels and ‘Land Grabs’ in Poor Nations

By James Kanter

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/biofuels-and-land-grabs-in-poor-nations/

12 June, 2009

Current protections against land-grabs in developing countries are “absolutely insufficient,” said Olivier De Schutter, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food.

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, warned on Thursday that biofuels remain an important driver behind big land acquisitions and land leases in poor countries that jeopardize local inhabitants’ food security.

About one-fifth of the activities that Mr. De Schutter deemed as “land grabs” – often backed by hedge funds or sovereign wealth funds – are projects in parts of Africa and Asia aimed at growing crops to make feedstock for biofuels.

“There still is a vast market for first-generation agrofuels,” said Mr. De Schutter, who added that he considered the safeguards adopted by the European Union in 2008 “absolutely insufficient to monitor to the impacts on the countries concerned by shifts in land use for agrofuels production.”

Next-generation biofuels made from plants that would reduce competition with food crops were still in development and so the existing incentives for biofuels in the United States and European Union remained a cause for grave concern, he said.

These newer fuels “were too distant for the moment to say that we can continue to insist on the use of agrofuels for transport.”

He also underlined that second-generation agrofuels “will be hugely water consuming.”

Mr. De Schutter was in Brussels to propose a set of principles and measures to curb “land grabbing” by investors seeking agricultural lands for major crops, like soy and jatropha, which are often exported to produce food for rich-world consumers or to produce biofuels.

He said some large-scale land investments provided much-needed new infrastructure and employment.

But he said that new rules were needed because some investments were leading to evictions, sudden losses of farm and grazing lands, and greater competition for water resources.

Mr. De Schutter was appointed to his post in 2008 by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

BIOFUELS CAUSE OF 75% OF GLOBAL FOOD PRICE INCREASE

World Bank Secret Report Confirms Biofuel Cause of World Food Crisis

by F. William Engdahl

source: www.globalresearch.ca

July 10, 2008

A secret study by the World Bank, which reportedly has not been made public on pressure from the Bush Administration, concludes that bio-fuel cultivation in especially the USA and EU are directly responsible for the current explosion in grain and food prices worldwide. The US Government at the recent Rome UN Food Summit claimed that "only 3% of food prices" were due to bio-fuels.

The World Bank secret report says that at least 75% of the recent price rises are due to land being removed from agriculture—mainly maize in North America and rapeseed and corn in the EU—in order to grow crops to be burned for vehicle fuel.

The World Bank study confirms what we wrote more than a year ago about the madness of bio-fuels. It fits the agenda described in the 1970’s by Henry Kissinger, namely,

‘If you control the food you control the people.’

According to the London Guardian newspaper which has been given a copy of the suppressed report, the World Bank study was completed in April, well before the June Rome Food Summit, but was deliberately suppressed as "embarrassing to the position of the Bush Administration."

The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is a former top Bush Administration official. Washington is trying to use a crisis which its bio-fuel subsidies created, since a new Farm bill passed in 2005, to advance the spread of Genetically Manipulated Organisms such as GMO maize, soybeans, rice and other crops patented by Monsanto and other "gene giants."

Their strategy is to use the explosive rise in grain prices worldwide, a rise fuelled by hedge funds and troubled US and European banks and investment funds pouring billions of dollars into speculation that grain prices will continue to soar.

In other words, the food "crisis" is a crisis of speculation in food futures.

The planned EU and USA bio-fuel acreage quotas and the periodic droughts and floods in key growing regions such as the USA Midwest then provide backdrop for speculative price run-ups.

But the main driver is that tens of millions of hectares of prime agriculture land in the world’s two largest food export regions - the USA and the EU - are being permanently removed from food production in order to grow raw material to be burned for vehicle fuel.

The suppressed study

The World Bank study, the most detailed analysis of the global food crisis so far, concludes that bio-fuels have forced "food prices up by 75%." That is far more than previous estimates.

That is a damning refutation of the politically-motivated US Department of Agriculture estimate that plant-derived fuels add only 3% to food prices. The report is expected to increase pressure on the European Union governments as well as Washington to change their present bio-fuel subsidy and support policies.

The report has been leaked just days before the important annual Group of 8 industrial nation leaders’ summit held in Hokkaido Japan. The food crisis will be a major topic there as pressure on governments grows to do something.

The World Bank report estimates that doubling and tripling of world food prices in the past three years have forced an added 100 million people below the poverty line. That has triggered food riots from Bangladesh to Egypt.

The report as well calculates that even the successive droughts in Australia and other major food regions have had only a "marginal" impact on food prices.

Within the EU, for example, as of April all vehicles in the UK must contain fuel with at least 2.5% bio-fuel. The EU has in place a target of mandatory 20% by 2020, a staggering amount.

George W. Bush has cynically claimed higher food prices are merely due to higher demand from India and China.

The leaked World Bank study refutes that:

"Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

"Without the increase in bio-fuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," the World Bank report states.

The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and February 2008. Higher energy and fertilizer prices accounted for an increase of only 15%. Bio-fuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

The study demonstrates that production of bio-fuels has distorted food markets in three main ways.

First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going to production of bio-diesel.

Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for bio-fuel production.

Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

The real agenda behind the food crisis

The World Bank study is the first to include all three factors. What is missing from the World Bank study however is the longer-term geopolitical agenda behind the present global food and energy crises.

As I document in great detail in my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, the long term agenda of powerful leading circles in the West, particularly represented in tax exempt private foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford and Gates foundations and the private wealth behind them, is a long term agenda of population reduction, in the interests of the global economic and financial elites.

Food scarcity, higher prices for basic foods in developing countries as well as control of food seeds through patent and Terminator suicide seed sales by Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, BASF, Bayer and a few select agriculture chemical seed giants—the "horsemen of the GMO Apokalypse," have been developed to advance the agenda of massive depopulation of the developing world.

The policy goes back, as the book documents in detail, to the early years of the 20th Century when Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Gamble, H.G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, and other wealthy circles backed the development of eugenics research. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the eugenics and forced sterilization research at the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (today's Max Planck Institute) until it became too politically hot in 1939.

After the end of the war, Rockefeller and others in the eugenics movement decided for political reasons to change the name of eugenics. The new name they chose was "genetics."

GMO is a project, based on wrong science, financed with over $100 million of private money from the Rockefeller Foundation. The ultimate aim is for the first time in history to control life on the planet.

As Henry Kissinger put in during the 1970’s food crisis, "control the food and you control the people."

In this light it is worth noting that as a solution to a crisis which it deliberately created by its massive government subsidies to farmers to grow bio-fuels instead of food, the Bush Administration made and continues to make a major pressure at the Rome Food Summit in early June and after, to open the doors to GMO as the alleged "solution" to world hunger.

On June 13, just after the Rome UN Food Summit, John Negroponte, US Deputy Secretary of State, stated,

"We therefore are strongly encouraging countries to remove barriers to the use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology," adding, "Biotechnology tools can help speed the development of crops with higher yields, higher nutrition value, better resistance to pests and diseases, and stronger food system resilience in the face of climate change."

Washington and the GMO companies now use the more deceptive term, "biotechnology" instead of the controversial GMO term, in a linguistic ploy to overcome opposition.

Independent scientific studies and countless farmer reports have shown that long-term planting of GMO or bio-tech crops as the gene giants prefer to call it, far from giving higher crop yields, lowers the yields and development of resistant "super-weeds" usually mean more, not less Roundup or other GMO-paired chemical herbicides and pesticides are needed. In short the glorious claims for GMO are marketing fraud.

According to highly informed reports, Washington had been told that Pope Benedict XVI would endorse the spread of GMO, something the Vatican until now has been strongly opposed to on moral and other grounds, as a solution to world hunger. At the last minute that endorsement did not happen for reasons only the Pope perhaps knows.

Groups like Greenpeace and the London Independent newspaper in the days before the Rome UN summit reported interviews with senior Church figures stating that the policy reverse was expected.

There is strong circumstantial evidence that the entire Rome UN Summit was orchestrated by Washington, London’s Gordon Brown and other Malthusian governments in part to try to convince the Pope to reverse its policy on GMO. The Roman Catholic Church today stands as one of the most important moral barriers to widespread acceptance of GMO in many developing countries such as the Philippines and Latin America.

The leak of the World Bank report adds a dramatic new element into what is becoming one of the major political issues along with oil price manipulation.

F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of Seeds of Destruction, Global Research, 2007 [see below], and the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,’ His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

He may be contacted via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net

BIOFUELS RESPONSIBLE FOR GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis

Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/03/biofuels.renewableenergy

3 July 2008

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

"It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House," said one yesterday.

The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium on the use of plant-derived fuels.

It will also put pressure on the British government, which is due to release its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher Report. The Guardian has previously reported that the British study will state that plant fuels have played a "significant" part in pushing up food prices to record levels. Although it was expected last week, the report has still not been released.

"Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises," said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. "It is imperative that we have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough to eat."

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.

Since April, all petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include 2.5% from biofuels. The EU has been considering raising that target to 10% by 2020, but is faced with mounting evidence that that will only push food prices higher.

"Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

Other reviews of the food crisis looked at it over a much longer period, or have not linked these three factors, and so arrived at smaller estimates of the impact from biofuels. But the report author, Don Mitchell, is a senior economist at the Bank and has done a detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices, which allows much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food supply.

The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact.

Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US production of ethanol from plants.

"It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices," said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser, last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."

US politics and the food crisis (video)

The worldwide food shortage is the result of deliberate, Malthusian policies of genocide.

Instead of Wars of Starvation,Let Us Double Food Production

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, May 2008


The fiery letters of an unprecedented human catastrophe already stand flickering on the wall, and it will be fatal for the world as a whole, if we do not succeed immediately, in the coming days and weeks, to declare globalization a failure, and to set everything into motion to double agricultural production capacity in the shortest possible time!

This is of the utmost urgency: Since October 2007, there have been food riots in over 40 nations. According to Rajat Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, 1 billion Asians (!) are already at serious risk from the hunger crisis, and in Africa, Ibero-America, and among the poor on the other continents, an additional 1 billion face the same fate. But according to Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), since December his organization has been unable to raise 10.9 million euros (!) in order to purchase seed for poor farmers in developing countries. The rich states are simply not willing to support the developing countries with money, seed, and investment in infrastructure, Diouf told an FAO conference on Latin America in Brasilia in mid-April.

Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, pointed to an additional aspect of the crisis; namely, that the use of food for biofuels is a “crime against humanity.” In order that we might fill our gas tanks with ethanol with clear ecological conscience, people in the Third World must starve (and also die—HZL). Speaking of the resulting food riots, Ziegler said, “These are riots of utter despair by people who fear for their lives, and who, nagged by deathly fear, take to the streets.”

And that’s only the beginning. Because, as long as the current policy of the “rich” nations—i.e., the free-trade doctrine of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Union Commission, and so on—continues, the food cartels and speculators will take advantage of the conditions created by the escalating systemic crisis of the world financial system, to maximize their profits and to feed price inflation, without the farmers reaping any benefit therefrom. And if the world’s central banks continue their practice of using tax revenues in an attempt to make up for the speculative losses of private banks, then we are going to see hyperinflation à la Weimar Germany spread around the globe.

Under these circumstances, the entire planet will be swept by the storm winds of food riots, until humanity descends into a new dark age of chaos, gang warfare, and climbing death rates—or, until justice and life with human dignity are established for all human beings on this planet.
The Oligarchy’s Malthusian Axioms

For the year 2050, the UN forecasts a population growth of 33%, that is, from the current 6.7 billion to approximately 9 billion human beings. The demand for food will rise correspondingly, and if we add the approximately 2 billion who are currently undernourished, then a doubling of food production is a good rough measure on which we can orient our planning efforts.
Noel Celis
A child in Manila, the Philippines, reaches for rice, while his exhausted mother rests beside him. The worldwide food shortage is the result of deliberate, Malthusian policies of genocide.


One would be hard put to find another issue which more effectively unmasks the oligarchical axiomatic state of mind, as this one. The U.S.-Eurocentric outlook regards the prospective population growth as a threat, bringing with it the challenge of mass immigration of poor people into the developed countries, and the struggle to secure raw materials (most of which are located in the poor countries). This viewpoint was most recently expressed by Michael V. Hayden, U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, at a speech at the University of Kansas. He asserted that this growth will occur chiefly in the nations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, places where this population growth cannot be sustained economically, thus leading to a heightened danger of violence, rebellion, and extremism.

This same oligarchical axiomatic outlook underlies the unspeakable strategy paper issued by five retired generals, who count as the first among the six primary challenges to the world community, population growth and the unequal distribution of the demographic curve in the various continents. This poses the greatest threat to prosperity, responsible government, and energy security, these generals say. The model for this neo-Malthusian, imperial world-view is the infamous National Strategic Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), drafted by Henry Kissinger in 1974, which declares all raw materials around the world to be a U.S. strategic security interest.

The truth is, that the oligarchical model which Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz set into motion on Aug. 15, 1971, with the end of Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods system and of fixed currency exchange rates, thereby systematically guiding the economy into the direction of unregulated free trade, has now completely failed. This 1971 paradigm-shift away from production and into speculation—unregulated credit generation in the so-called offshore markets such as the Cayman Islands, where 80% of all hedge funds are headquartered—ushered in the emergence of today’s casino economy.

Since that time, step by step, each new precedent has gone in the direction of the neo-liberal model: the creation of the eurodollar market; the 1974 oil price swindle; the 1975 hardening of “IMF conditionalities”; the assaults by the Carter Administration, beginning in 1976, against “mercantilist tendencies in the developing countries”; Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s 1979 high interest rate policy; the policies of “Reaganomics” and “Thatcher economics” in the 1980s, including the mergers and hostile takeovers typifying a process of ever greater cartelization; Alan Greenspan’s invention of miraculous “creative credit instruments” following the Crash of 1987; and the unfettered globalization following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the transfer of industrial production into “cheap production countries”—all these were further mileposts in the same direction.
Behind Today’s Hunger Catastrophe

It is in this context that we must consider today’s exploding hunger catastrophe. Formerly, since 1957, the European Economic Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had been designed to supply the population with sufficient foodstuffs at reasonable prices, so that farmers had an appropriate income and agricultural production could be increased. But with the introduction of unfettered globalization, other, entirely different criteria took precedence. With the 1992 agricultural reform, consumer price reductions were instituted, for example: beef -20%, grains -30%, and milk -15%. But there were no provisions for corresponding compensation to the farmers. Instead, they were offered financial assistance tied to compliance with “ecological criteria.”

The farmers had been talked into this deal with the argument that they “must hold their own on the world market,” i.e., they must be able to compete with cheapened production abroad. In practice, however, it meant that many farmers had to shut down completely, while others could run their farms only as a part-time occupation, such that a career in farming became unattractive for the young generation, resulting in the loss of many family farms.

This trend in the direction of free trade was escalated by the so-called Uruguay Round, the final negotiation session of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which ended their former practice of considering the rules of agricultural production from the standpoint of food security, and instead bound themselves to the strict rule of free trade, and thus to the food cartels’ demand for maximization of profit.

Since that time, millions of farms have gone bankrupt, and the process of cartelization has taken hold to such an extent, that in five months, the FAO has been unable to pull together a pitiful 10 million euros so that, in the midst of this hunger catastrophe, the poor countries might be able to sow seed—seed which is controlled by only three companies!

The replacement of GATT—which still had the form of a multilateral agreement among states—by the World Trade Organization, a supranational bureaucracy with far-reaching independent powers, portended a further round of deregulation, abolishment of all trade barriers not bound by collective bargaining agreements, and “harmonization” of member-states’ standards. The chief beneficiaries of these measures in the direction of free trade, were, once again, the food cartels. Since then, completely anonymous WTO boards of experts have enjoyed the right to impose penalties on violators against free trade, without these “experts” being obliged in any way to account to voters for their actions.

For the European Union, the Agenda 2000 and the agricultural reform of 2005 further stepped up the tempo in the direction of reduction of surpluses (and thus the destruction of foodstuff reserves and exports). Instead of setting fair producer prices which could cover production costs, compensatory payments were made for leaving land fallow—“set-aside” policy—and for completely arbitrary environmental protection measures. And so, the trend toward sell-offs of independent family farms proceeded apace.

Former German Minister of Agriculture (and later Consumer Protection Minister) Renate Künast, and Austrian former EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development, and Fisheries Franz Fischler, were correct when they spoke of a systemic change being introduced with this agricultural reform. Fischler cynically observed at the time, that the compulsory price reductions would also bring about a reduction in the intensity of cultivation, because the farmers would not have any money left for fertilizer or pesticides.

A bit later, some farmers fared better financially for a while, because of the EU subsidies for cultivation of plants for biofuels—but with the above-mentioned catastrophic consequences. And it should be pointed out the pioneer in the use of foodstuffs for the production of ethanol, was Benito Mussolini.

Under the WTO and EU Commission regime, production capacity was reduced in the industrial nations, while at the time, the developing countries were forced to export cheap foodstuffs in order to earn cash to repay foreign debt—and this, frequently, even though their own population was not adequately supplied with food. And so, today, the economic and moral bankruptcy of this system of British free trade and Manchester capitalism is plain for all to see.

Fortunately, there is also resistance against the genocidal policies of WTO and EU free trade. In recent weeks, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier and German Consumer Protection Minister Horst Seehofer have begun a campaign aimed directly against the EU policies. Barnier started a European-wide campaign in defense of the CAP, a policy which some free-trade fanatics (such as David Spector, an Associate Professor at the Paris School of Economics, and the Financial Times) are demanding be completely abolished, despite the hunger crisis. Barnier attacks the idea that the poorest countries should export food to the rich countries, as a total departure from reality, since it is precisely such a policy which has ruined subsistence agriculture and local production in the poorest countries. Instead of this, Barnier demands that Africa, Latin America, and Asia likewise institute their own CAPs—i.e., a protectionist parity system.
Emergency Measures Needed Now

There can be only one answer to the obvious bankruptcy of murderous free trade: We need a worldwide mobilization for the most rapid possible doubling of agricultural production.

The WTO itself must be dissolved, immediately.

Leading up to the FAO conference in Rome on June 3-5, all means, including unconventional ones, must be made available for enabling the FAO to set a program into motion to increase agricultural production worldwide. This must include a new “Green Revolution,” as well as medium-term measures for the expansion of infrastructure, the building up of food-processing industries in developing countries which do not have them, and for water management.

The topic of a new and just world economic order must be put onto the agenda. In view of the existential significance of this issue for the future of all humankind, a special session of the UN General Assembly must be convened on this theme.

The New Bretton Woods system, and a New Deal for the entire world, in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt—measures which many heads of state and economists have been calling for—must immediately become the subject of an emergency conference of heads of state, who must decide upon a new world financial system which would permit all nations to develop. The building of the Eurasian Land-Bridge must be agreed upon as the keystone for reconstructing the world economy.

In the U.S. Declaration of Independence—which the Schiller Institute’s founding conference in 1984 adopted as its charter by making it applicable for all nations of this world, by just a few wording changes—it says:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This Declaration of Human Rights must hold true still today—for all human beings on this planet. What we need today, is men and women who fight with passion and love for the idea of a just world order, one in which the community of nations can live together in peace and human dignity. Life, Liberty, and Happiness mean, above all, that all people have enough to eat and that poverty is abolished—something which we have all the technological means to bring about. Whether we can make this vision into reality, or whether we instead speed humanity into collapse, is how each one of us will be measured by history.

Article source: http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/hzl_double_food.html

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