MOBILIZATION TO DOUBLE FOOD PRODUCTION

IS IN FULL SWING!

 

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, April 18, 2008

 

{Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the founder of the Schiller Institute and

the chairwoman of the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo) in

Germany. Her article has been translated from German, and

subheads added. This is a pre-publication copy.}

 

In a worldwide mobilization, with literally life-or-death

consequences, an increasing number of governments are taking

their own urgent measures to increase agricultural production, so

that, as soon as possible, they can regain the food security

which the enforcers of free trade have been denying them for so

many years now. Because when hundreds of millions, or even up to

2 billion human beings, are struggling just to stay alive, and

when revolts, wars of starvation, and revolutions loom, any

government which wants to remain in office, has no recourse but

to attend to its citizens' general welfare.

Meanwhile, the increasingly obvious bankruptcy of the

globalized system and of unregulated free-market economics,

hasn't prevented its propagandists from continuing to hawk their

poison as a cure for the ailing world economy. So, for example,

the World Trade Organization's director-general Pascal Lamy, and

Peter Mandelson, British Commissioner of the European Union for

Trade, in charge of negotiations with the World Trade

Organization (WTO), are currently attempting to bring the

so-called Doha Round to a conclusion by late May or early June,

seeking to eliminate the last remnants of Europe's Common

Agricultural Policy (CAP). If they succeed, this will result in

dramatic losses of up to 20% for Europe's farmers.

The beneficiaries of this policy--a policy which is all the

more repulsive in light of the starvation afflicting so many

around the world--would be the big food cartels, as well as the

hedge funds and other speculators, all of whom have an interest

in curtailing production. Faced with the collapse of the ``New

Economy'' market bubble and of the U.S. mortgage market, they

have either hurled themselves into speculation on foodstuffs, or

else have convinced themselves that, in the biofuels market, they

have found a new, magical source of profit maximization. Lurking

behind them, first and foremost, is the British oligarchy and its

co-thinkers worldwide, who want to expand the power of

supranational bureaucracies such as the WTO, the International

Monetary Fund, the European Union, etc., in order to rule the

entire world as their empire. The losers in this game are the

billions of people in the developing countries who face

starvation, along with the European farmers who are increasingly

deprived of the means to survive--and all the rest of us, the

consumers who have to pay ever higher prices for food.

This week in Geneva, Crawford Falconer, the WTO agricultural

negotiations chairperson, is expected to present a paper which

proposes that all agricultural questions should not be dealt with

separately, but rather should be lumped together with all other

commodities--i.e., that food should be an object of speculation,

just like any other commodity. This neoliberal free-trader is

determined to push the Doha Round agreement through by late May,

so that by six months from now--before the Bush Administration

leaves office--all governments will have signed off on it.

 

              - Resistance Grows to WTO Policy -

Fortunately, resistance to this is mounting in France,

Germany, and Italy. French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier

has released his own paper, which not only defends Europe's CAP,

but recommends it as a model for Africa, Latin America, and other

regions. He excoriates the WTO's practice of forcing developing

countries to give up agricultural production for domestic

consumption, in favor of so-called ``cash crops,'' i.e.,

harvesting for export, so that the debt which has piled up

because of IMF conditionalities, can be paid. As an alternative,

Barnier calls for increasing agricultural production everywhere,

not just where it might be profitable. He is being supported in

this by Horst Seehofer, Germany's Minister for Food, Agriculture,

and Consumer Protection, and by Italy's Agriculture Minister. In

all likelihood, it will come to a direct confrontation between

these three on the one side, and the opposing position of the

British and of EU Agriculture and Rural Development Minister

Mariann Fischer Boel--at which point it will become clear once

again, that the EU's policies are diametrically opposed to the

interests of Europe's nations.

Meanwhile, an international mobilization of the Schiller

Institute and of the LaRouche Youth Movement on five continents,

calling for a doubling of food production, has coincided with

many countries' efforts to supply their people with adequate

food, to increase domestic production, and thus to release them

from the WTO regime's death-grip. The mobilization aims to put

the need to double food production onto the agenda of the

conference of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which

takes place in Rome on June 3-6.

Taking only two of dozens of examples:

* In Argentina, the chairman of the Chamber of Deputies'

Agricultural Committee, Alberto Cantero, organized a hearing, at

which he spoke out in favor of a doubling of domestic food

production and for the creation of a state agency for overseeing

the marketing of foodstuffs; and in an exclusive interview

[published in this issue of {EIR}], he expressed support for the

Schiller Institute's call for putting a doubling of food

production worldwide onto the FAO's conference agenda.

* In the United States, Democratic Presidential candidate

Hillary Clinton, speaking at an election rally in South Dakota,

was enthusiastically applauded when she answered a question from

a representative of Lyndon LaRouche's ``Food for Peace''

initiative, saying that food production must, of course, be

massively increased, and that American farmers must be enabled to

help conquer hunger, and to help other countries such as Haiti to

become self-sufficient.

In view of the enormous extent of the world hunger crisis--a

crisis made still worse by the recent catastrophes in Myanmar and

China--more and more people are summoning up the courage to speak

out and name the true culprits. At a hearing held by the

Financial Services Committee of the U.S. House of

Representatives, experts spoke out in favor of a revolution in

agriculture, and stressed the necessity to prevent the IMF and

World Bank from forcing ``conditionalities'' on the developing

countries, with destructive consequences, for which those

institutions are never held responsible. A number of experts,

including Dr. Raj Patel of the University of California,

Berkeley, backed the analysis set forth by UN Special Rapporteur

Olivier de Schutter, that the world must now pay the price for

its 20 years of mistakes, and that the World Bank and IMF are

chiefly to blame. Dr. Patel also attacked former U.S. Secretary

of Agriculture John Block, who, in an infamous speech at a GATT

meeting in 1986, claimed that the idea that developing countries

could become self-sufficient, was an anachronism. And so, even

though, so far, this has been only talk, and Congress has not yet

passed any effective legislation on it, these discussions about

the causes of the catastrophe are still useful.

 

                 - No `Triage' Is Necessary -

There's also more discussion about ways to solve the crisis.

At a seminar in Ottawa by the International Development Research

Center, many speakers, including Robert Zeigler, director general

of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), stressed

that supplying the world with sufficient affordable food would

not be a problem: All that would be required, would be to equip

farmers with the best currently existing technologies and

cultivation methods. A forecast issued by the International Food

Policy Research Institute points out that a termination of the

swindle of subsidies for biofuels production would result in

immediate 20% price reductions for corn, 14% for manioc, and 11%

for wheat.

But, at a press conference in Lima, Peru held in connection

with the EU and Latin America summit meeting, EU Commissioner

Mandelson responded to a question from a Schiller Institute

representative, by claiming that no such connection exists

between food prices and biofuels! Someone ought to bring a tape

measure to determine how much longer Mr. Mandelson's nose grew

with that one! Because the fact is, that a person could live {for

six months} on the food required to produce a single tankful of

ethanol for a mid-sized automobile! And the misanthropes who fill

their tanks with ethanol in order to soothe their

eco-consciences, can use that as a measure of how many peoples'

lives they're destroying each year.

Meanwhile, the UN World Food Program is experiencing ever

more triage against the 82 Low Income Food Deficit Nations

(LIFDN)--a program of triage by which some receive assistance,

and some not, with the poorest nations having simply no chance,

since they cannot pay the higher prices. Some countries, however,

are attacking the root of the problem.

President Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal, for example, has

initiated a program which not only covers the total consumption

of grains, rice, manioc, milk, meat, etc., but which is also

aimed at keeping the corn cribs full. President Bingu wa

Mutharika of Malawi has likewise overridden the ``laws of the

free market,'' and has issued coupons for seed, and is granting

subsidies for fertilizers, so that a 283% increase in grain

production can be achieved. In the Philippines, which formerly

had been self-sufficient in rice, but which was turned into one

of the world's biggest rice importers under the IMF and WTO

regime, is about to launch a massive ramping-up of production.

Malaysia is likewise determined to become self-sufficient in

food. And many other countries are about to draw the same

conclusions from the collapse of neoliberal free trade.

Yet another confirmation of the free-traders' incompetence,

was revealed recently by Yves Mersch, governor of the Central

Bank of Luxembourg and member of the European Central Bank

governing council. He has expressed great concern over the rapid

collapse in the value of structured securities which the ECB has

been accepting from various Spanish, Dutch, and British banks, as

collateral in exchange for ECB credits. The scandal is that it

had been clear from the very outset, that this so-called

collateral in fact consists of unsalable financial ``toxic

waste,'' and that even non-banks such as Lehmann Brothers and

Acquire Leasing, an Australian-based firm specializing in

automobile leasing, have gotten into the act. A big question mark

should be placed over whether these practices are even in

compliance with the ECB's own statutes.

One thing, at any rate, is certain: The majority of

humankind is not prepared to go down with what even German

President Horst Köhler has admitted is a collapse of the

globalized financial system. And the voices speaking out in favor

of doubling of food production, are going to crescendo into a din

which is impossible to ignore.

Moreover, the foreign ministers of Russia, China, and India

met in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and agreed on close collaboration

on the international and regional level. One aspect of this, is

the demand that India immediately become a permanent member of

the UN Security Council; another is that India will refuse to

back Kosovo's independence. The intensification of these three

nations' strategic partnership--which will also be the subject of

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's upcoming visit to India--is

not only the predictable answer to the Bush Administration's

unilateralism and to NATO's and the EU's imperial plans for

eastward expansion; it also portends a new center of gravity,

which is already fast becoming a gathering-point for many

developing countries.

We in Europe have a choice: Either we stick, on ideological

grounds, with the WTO, IMF, and World Bank's failed model of

globalization, {à la} the Lisbon Treaty, thereby making ourselves

into an enemy of the strategic partnership among the

Russia-China-India-allied nations and the developing countries;

or, the nations of Europe become a true partner and friend of

those nations. The latter course, however, requires that we enact

effective laws against speculation, and for promoting physical

production in agriculture and industry, and that here at home, we

once again put human beings at the center of our economic policy.

And no matter what happens, the LaRouche Movement is now

setting the agenda for the future: doubling of food production, a

New Bretton Woods System, and a New Deal for the whole world!