An excellent and outrage-inducing article, "The New Colonialist Food Economy: How Bill Gates and agribusiness giants are throttling small farmers in Africa and the Global South", shows how Western interests, led by the US and now including the Gates Foundation, have been working for decades to tighten intellectual property laws and criminalise seed saving and sharing on farms throughout Africa. For example, Ghana’s Plant Variety Protection Act — based on the same draft law as the proposed African Union protocol — makes farmers “liable on summary conviction to a fine of not less than 5,000 penalty units... or term of imprisonment of not less than ten years and not more than fifteen years”. The aim of the plan is to undermine farmer-managed seed economies and oversee their forced integration into the “value chains” of global agribusiness. These changes threaten the livelihoods of Africa’s small farmers and their collective genetic heritage, including staple grains, legumes, and other crops their ancestors have been developing and safeguarding since the dawn of agriculture. Since the 1980s, agribusiness, its sponsor governments, and its mega-philanthropy allies have targeted farmer control of seed as though it were a tumour, using national laws and threats to push governments throughout the Global South to introduce patent-protected hybrids and GMOs. The most direct beneficiary of this plan is the four-company oligopoly that controls half the global seed market and 75 percent of the global agrichemicals market: Bayer (formerly Monsanto), Corteva (formerly DowDuPont), BASF, and Syngenta, a subsidiary of ChemChina. There's a link to a non-paywalled archived version of this article here. The Nation

 

 

Last year the Alliance for Science’s lobbyist for GMOs, Mark Lynas, teamed up with two co-authors to publish in a peer-reviewed journal an article that equated people who criticise GMOs with those who spread “misinformation” on climate change, COVID, and vaccines. They claim that “misinformation” about GMOs in the media has given rise to negative public attitudes and overly strict regulatory regimes. They single out Africa as a continent where media “misinformation” is a particular problem and call this “a worrying finding given the potential for genetic engineering to deliver improved nutrition and food security in the continent”. Given the partisan nature of the article, GMWatch was concerned to discover that it was being used to pressure African governments to drop their restrictions and bans on GMOs. Now a critical response to Lynas and his co-authors has passed a stringent peer review process and been published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe. “Agricultural GMOs and their associated pesticides: misinformation, science, and evidence” is co-authored by GMWatch co-director Claire Robinson together with molecular geneticist Prof Michael Antoniou, sociologist Dr Irina Castro, and agroecologist Dr Angelika Hilbeck. In their paper, Antoniou et al show that the Lynas et al article is so full of incorrect claims and methodological weaknesses that it is itself an example of misinformation. GMWatch

 

 

Indigenous First Nation elder Ray Owl speaks in a video clip from the documentary film, Into the Weeds, about the impacts of glyphosate spraying on Canada's forests: "You don't hear no birds singing. You don't see no eagles, no crows flying around, any insect, nothing. It's sterile." @GMWatch on Twitter

 

 

With an aim to make rural areas self-sustaining and society healthy, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Manipur has started promoting Natural Farming with an emphasis on rural development in the State. Dr Tensubam Basanta Singh of ICAR, Manipur said that he sees Natural Farming as a saviour of society from the effects of consuming vegetables and crops that are grown using high quantities of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Although there are no concrete regulations for Natural Farming, it does not encourage using chemical fertilisers, pesticides, heavy machinery or even hybrid seeds. This farming method emphasises cultivating crops, vegetables and fruits using manures, manual labour and pesticides extracted from plants like neem, tobacco leaves, artemisia, and garlic, he said. The Sangai Express

 

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