“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people” Henry Kisinger.
I fully intended to just do a localized food growing post, but I watched a short news interview with noted Indian sustainability scholar-activist Vandana Shiva, and ended up exploring yet another rabbit hole – that of agricultural land grabs and food control.
In the 1500’s, the European countries began the process of colonialization of much of what we now refer to as the undeveloped world. It’s fascinating that even today that most of these colonialized countries are still relatively undeveloped despite having shed the yoke of colonial rule. During the time of the industrial revolution (but as early as 1600), wealthy land-owners throughout Europe started buying the common areas within their own country’s in a process known as the ‘enclosure movement.’ This had the effect of turning whole area of communal free land into private estates of the wealthy. Since the 1980s, countries with large economies, highly invested in the process of globalization, have been doing a neo-colonialization of these undeveloped countries again. In particular, China has been buying up large tracts of farmland, that were traditional agricultural village lands throughout Africa, to grow food to ship back to feed its own massive population back in China. What has remained below the radar has been a quiet repeat of the enclosure movement everywhere by a new class of wealth, that of the global billionaire class.
I’m fond of commenting on the corporate takeover of global manufacturing in a rush to monopolization, but more and more, these corporations are becoming the personal fiefdoms of billionaire families using them to build their already massive fortunes and desires to control global politics. Case in point, take the Gates’s, (Bill and Melinda, we want to make everyone get vaccinated, Gates), although the Gates’s are just the most well-known neo-billionaires with a set of opinions and the money to push their agendas. Others of their ilk are the Offutt family, the Resnicks, the Fanjuls, the Boswells, and the Bezos to name a few of the top ones. And they work hand-in-hand with the old-monied billionaires like the Rothchild’s and Rockefeller’s as uncrowned global emperors. I’ll stick with Bill Gates for the moment since he is so vocal about his ambitions, but note nearly all the billionaires are doing this. Our good friend Bill, through his foundation, worth over $50 billion, is busy giving grants and funding projects that push his agenda’s of solving world problems. I love how he paints himself as a philanthropist; reminds me of hearing about John D. Rockefeller and his public relations campaign in the early 1900’s to be seen as a philanthropist to hide the fact he was the most ruthless of the American Robber Barons of the latter 1800s, and early 1900s.
Back to our friend Bill Gates. He has technology focused mindset that everything can be solved through technology, such as a GMO agenda to feed the world and a Vaccination agenda to rid the world of many kinds of diseases. Now I am not anti-technology, in fact I quite believe in ‘appropriate technology’ when used wisely, and not as a tool to solve everything like a ballpeen hammer in the hands of an engineer. You know, the old maxim, ‘give an engineer a hammer and every problem looks like a nail.’ What Bill and his billionaire friends have been doing is buying up farmland all over the world to ensure the corporations they invest in use intensive industrial technology such as GMO crops and pesticides with A.I. technology – robotic farmworkers to increase the efficiency and reduce human input. I hardly know where to start in describing his power grab to give us GMO based highly processed chemicalized foods. He has given farmers in poor undeveloped countries access to technology so he can ‘mine’ information from them as to what aspects of localized agriculture works best so it can be adapted to technological inputs.
But it isn’t just the undeveloped countries, it is happening in all the developed countries as well. In the past few years, billionaires have bought up over 33 million acres of farmland in the U.S. Bii Gates is currently the 4th largest farmland holder in America. And his reach is throughout the food and chemical industries as he and his toadies try to dominate global food and medical systems. He started a computer information system with Microsoft, but besides his and Melinda’s Foundation, he is a major owner or investor of many transnational corporate systems that help promote his control and agenda’s and those of his ‘friends’. A list of his investments is a who’s-who of corporate domination: such as Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Kellogg’s, Amazon, Bayer/Monsanto, major oil companies, and all major computer industries. I don’t see an iota of anything involving ecological sustainability in this push for technology to run our world.
Bill and Melinda Gates might be pretending to fund projects to help undeveloped countries through their foundation, but if you look closely at what is being made to occur, it is a top-down hegemonic imposition of ideas and technology into cultures and local ecosystems not ready, or able, to adopt to the same mindsets paradigms that Gates expects to easily transfer. Listen to any talks by Vandana Shiva and you quickly get her focus that local knowledge and techniques that created local self-sufficiency, worked for millennia for a reason. New technology can assist them a lot, but it has to be developed within that system not imposed on them by these ‘haves’ convinced that they know better what the ‘have-nots’ need.
Remember my main mantra about the hierarchy – they need us, we don’t need them. In my book it’s about re-localizing everything in our lives. It’s fine to have economies of scale where some things (like electronic systems are larger) that only make sense to be made in larger facilities for a region, but overall, we need to think local and especially within local ecosystems that are understood at the local level. For instance, what works in Kansas, USA, may be somewhat applicable to Gloucestershire, UK, but totally inappropriate for Zimbabwe and ridiculous for Norway or Siberia. This idea of trying to force-fit technology to every situation because of economic expediency has to be one of our first memes to get rid of as we move into a sustainable world. For instance, Gates is convinced that everyone should buy GMO seeds every year and use expensive toxic pesticides, because he is convinced that crop yields will always be high. It might be a good sales pitch but as many hundreds of thousands of farmers all over the world have found out; the yields are usually temporary (up to 3 years) but the costs of industrial technology rise causing many farmers to be incapable of continuing to use the big chemical Ag system. It is estimated in India alone that over 10,000 farmers a year commit suicide when they become bankrupt and they unable to get their farms back to a previous subsistence system since the farm soil is also depleted because of the chemical assault of industrial Ag.
The hierarchy want to take over everything so they can dictate every detail for us that benefits them. Don’t be misled by Santa Gates’s generosity in giving away $50 billion of his own money. He more than makes that up and more with his nefarious investments in most of the Transnational mega-corporate systems running our world already. The simple solution? Begin to scrutinize what they want us to do and then recognize that in most cases, local knowledge and understanding is best for local decision-making and management. I don’t negate the need for a larger oversight system that is tasked at understanding the bigger picture often ignored by local systems, but that is another discussion.
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