Thursday 23 July 2009

Paradigm Wars

Paradigm Wars)

Chap 1 Globalization-Assault on Indigenous Resources.
The 350 million indigenous people have been most affected by globalization of the economic system.
Corporation and bureaucracies, the driving forces of economic globalization, can not survive without an ever-increasing supply of oil, gas, minerals, fish. F\freshwater, arable lands, and require infra-structure-new roads, pipelines, dams, electricity grids, air and seaports. The whole economic model is built upon a rickety platform which requires a never-ending exponential economic growth, depending upon a never-ending resource supply.
Corporate growth is the primary base of short-term profits, which determines investment, loans, executive salaries and share value.
We have conflicts, invasion, double dealing, forced removal, cultural and political assault, and often, extreme violence, as the last resources are now left only in lands where native people live.
Indigenous societies have been very successful in maintaining cultures, economies and resources, so have become prime targets of global corporations.
There are an estimated 5,000indigenous societies on earth, a substantial number are in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Africa and the northernmost regions of the world.
Native people face grave threats in the Amazon jungles, mountains of Andes, tundras of the north, forests of Canada, Siberia, and Indonesia, the small islands of the Pacific, agricultural lands of the Philippines, Guatemala, grasslands of Africa.
To resist the current trends “WTO” literacy is essential, GATT, TRIPS, WB, IMF, whose central concepts are:
-Free Trade requires elimination of all taxes, domestic barriers, including environmental, health and labor laws…
-Privatization-transfers to corporate ownership of freshwater, forests, energy sources, genetic structures of plants and humans, water delivery, education, transport, health and sanitation, public broadcasting and welfare.
-Deregulation-lift all controls on corporate behavior, responsibility, liability and accountability.
-Structural Adjustment-WB and IMF require that the nations remodel their economies in return for loans, including social welfare and environmental policies to suit corporate growth.
-Export-oriented growth-favors large-scale export industries to small-scale local farms, markets, artisans and businesses, replacing local economies with trade-oriented systems.
-Free movement of capital-removal of all restrictions on global investors to move capital, in and pout of countries, despite destabilizing effects seen in Latin America, Russia and East Asia.
Advocates of globalization claim that the combination of these concepts will bring an economic utopia. Benefits would ‘trickle down’, “A rising tide will lift all the boats”.
In stead they have greatly increased the separation between the wealth and the poor, concentrated corporate power (in spite of the melt down, Obama is not able to do much, and had to fill up his cabinet with corporate minions and officers), diminishing political and economic democracy, and has devastated the environment, accelerated climate change. The model only lifts yachts.
The model was never actually designed for the common good. An economy based on an ever-increasing supply of resources could not last long. It was designed for
Short-term gains of a small number of corporations at the top.
An article by the University of Queensland, Australia professor, Zohl de Ishtar, offers a devastating report on the half century of US military experimentation on the Marshall islands in the Pacific, that began with atomic testing in Bikini, to Star Wars missile testing on Kwajalein which forced removal of thousands of islanders to a nearly inhabitable island.
Current battles on remaining fresh water, and the pollution of Mayan corn by imported US genetically engineered varieties.
Eco-tourism has converted indigenous communities into cultural zoos.
Extractive industries of oil, gas, gold, and nuclear waste disposal has caused disasters.



Chap 2
We face economic globalization, an outgrowth of the colonization that the people in the South have suffered from for 500 years. They used guns before. They still use them (Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Bosnia, Chechnya, Africa and other places) Now they and their satellites churches, schools and media teach the LDCs to despise themselves. They use the enormous pressure of homogenization and outsourcing, which hurts the South and North both.
Globalization regards all living beings as machines which should be manipulated to function ever more productively. Nature, and all life, has value only as a commodity. Genetically engineered sheep like Tracy, enables them to secrete marketable drugs in their milk. Trade has to be liberated, so that highly subsidized wheat and canola oil can devastate local farmers in Asia.
Corporations grab not only the resources, but also knowledge about local plants-to privatize, and monopolize. They use paramilitary groups to deal with resisters.
Sustainable development has come to mean sustainability of global market economy. The countries that subsidize their products can flood foreign markets.
When indigenous farmers do try to convert traditional farming to cash-crop one, they are overwhelmed by products from Canada and the USA, so they are driven out of their heart and home.
Corporations are allowed investment with 100% equity with no local partners and are free to remove people from their lands (leading to millions of displaced farmers in India alone, with hundreds of thousands of suicides since 1998.
(Europeans saw the problems of the countries they occupied differently. They did not have enough to eat in their own countries. When they arrived in America, they found too much to eat. But they had brought the willingness to battle nature)
The most damaging aspects of international trade policies are that the market price of natural resources are determined by the corporate system, which does not take into account the environmental and social costs. Scientists have turned into accomplices by publishing data which bio-prospectors use.
Whole regions are declared ‘wild’ for exploitation. Natural Habitats are destroyed. WHO has estimated that 80% of non industrial world depends upon traditional medicine. The sources are destroyed.

Impact of IMF/WB Structural Adjustment Programs

IMF/WB requirements for
Aid:
1-Financial/Investment
Liberalization:
-Allow foreign capital investment capital, remove controls on currency, speculation, allow foreign equity to increase to 100%
2-Cuts in Social spending-reduce public expenditure on health, education, welfare
3-Trade/Import Liberalization:-dismantle tariffs/regulation to protect local products, abolish laws limiting entry of foreign agricultural and industry products-remove support for local food production, increase incentives to produce for foreign markets, not domestic ones.-encourage industries to concentrate on assembly, labor intensive products, not local manufacturing industry.
4-Guarantee Property Rights of Corporations: -to gain rights as humans, and be treated as
persons.
5-Privatization of State Agencies and Assets-sell all assets to private sector
6-Currency Devaluation:
7-make government Smaller:-reduce payroll, services, public investment and infra-structure-remove subsidies/price controls on basic food and agriculture for local needs
8-increase interest rates for credit

Benefit for the elite
1 Financial Liberalization:
-can own increased amounts of land, purchase, start enterprises with out local competition, allowed to remove unlimited amounts of money, governments required to change mining and forestry laws to allow foreign ownership, governments to compete for foreign investment by offering tax breaks, lower environmental and labor standards, create free zones.
2 Cuts In social spending:
-more rapid payment of debts to IMF/WB/other banks
3 Trade and import liberalization:
-facilitate dumping of subsidized agricultural produce
-dump surplus manufactured goods
-increases hard currency to buy imports and pay debts.
-eliminates local competition.
-cheap labor more readily available.
4 Property rights:
-corporations gain rights as humans/persons.
5 Privatization of state assets:
-creates private monopolies.
-opportunities for government officials and cronies to get their cut in the deals and acquire assets.
-TNC control over construction/development activities.
-concentrates resources in the hands of global corporations.
6 Devaluation:
-boosts export sector\-Raises value of debt/service
-raises price of imports
7 Smaller government
-reduces regulatory oversight.
8 Increase interest rates
-increases profit of investment, reduces responsibility of negative consequences of investment.

Impact on the poor.

1 Financial liberalization
-decapitlization of nations with volatile capital flow
-loss of control over entire sectors of economy to TNCs
-diminished enforcement of laws to promote people’s rights.
2 Cuts in social spending:
-less access to health, education and social services, rising illiteracy rates..
3 Trade liberalization:
Increases competition with TNCs, erodes subsistence economy
-increases competition with cheap subsidized imports
-bankrupts local forms-increase use of best land for cash crops.
-brings overexploitation of forests and mineral sources.
-threatens food security
4 Guaranteed property rights
-increases conflicts people’s traditional land rights and corporate claims.
5 Privatization of state assets
-Massive job losses as private owners shed jobs
-exclusion of the poor from education, health and social services.
6 Currency devaluation
-intensifies pressure too export
-wages reduced
7 Smaller government
-massive layoffs, government was the largest employer.
-greater inefficiency in government offices.
-increased corruption
8 Increase in interest rates
-reduced chances for people to borrow
-small farmers forced to sell land, become tenant farmers or move to city slums.

WTO and Sovereignty.
WTO framed rules for global trade for all 148 member nations to follow. Its central effort is to reduce the role of individual governments in all economic matters, effectively functions as world government, passes laws, settles disputes in its own courts, and has major financial enforcement powers. It restricts people from influencing their own government. Many cultural, health and environmental standards are direct victims of WTO. Sub-federal governments are restricted from exercising their autonomy in food policy, taxation and resource management.
1 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
Established in 1947 in Bretton woods, along with WB and IMF, set voluntary principles for free trade. They became compulsory with the creation of WTO.
Article 1 “Most Favored Nation” and article III “National Treatment”
Effectively restrict governments from stopping imports from countries on moral or ethical grounds-HR violations, Labor standards, environmental concerns, illicit trade, war-would have been impossible to boycott South African apartheid.
Article III keeps governments from favoring local industries, agriculture. Foreign businesses, banks may take over economy of weak nations, may not protect overexploitation.
Article V Free Transit of Goods: Restricts governments right to regulate trade at borders.
Article XI Qualitative restrictions. Keeps governments from imposing quotas and protecting local resources.
Article XX General exceptions makes governments offer proofs if they want to protect certain trees, animals or human health, that such laws should not be overturned by WTO.
The net result is that nearly all goods (forest, fish, farm, fuel, minerals and fresh water) are commodified and controlled by TNCs and global bureaucracies.

2 Agreement on Agriculture (AoA)
Market access eliminates tariffs, quotas, standards on quality to quantity of imports, increases competition from subsidized imports.
Domestic Supports governments prevented from that.
Export subsidies not permitted. In practice the US and the Europe continue to do it via massive advertising benefits.
WTO rules essentially designed to open up foreign markets for large scale and luxury producers. Discriminating in favor of massive monocultural production (export oriented industrial agriculture)-beef, exotic flowers, soy, luxury vegetables-brings enormous environmental problems, large new infra-structure systems are required, new roads, canals pipelines and ports which destroy habitat.
3 Agreement on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary measures restricts governments from preventing entry of harmful or invasive species or diseases for food safety. Restricts governments ability to regulate import of transgenic products.
4 Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures WTO vigorously enforces corporate rights, it does little to recognize people’s rights. Fishing communities in Coastal areas of India were replaced by massive foreign investor driven shrimp farms, and allows the country to dump shrimp everywhere.
5 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)
Lays down specific requirements for patent regimes nations must adopt to protect inventions and technological innovations. It explicitly allows patenting plants, animals, microorganisms, but does not require patent applicants to declare the source of genetic material.
TRIPS rules have caused major battles between small farmers and agriculture and Pharmaceutical giants (called Bio-piracy). Under its rules, bio-tech companies can privatize genetic resources and legally exercise exclusive rights over the material. This has had a major effect in India.
Bio-prospectors scour the earth for new genetic material. TRIPS does not even require patent holders even to compensate or share benefits with the people.
Field scientist often use indigenous knowledge to identify the most commercially valuable species, and file a patent claim as their ‘discovery’.
Examples include W.R Grace’s patenting of a pesticide derived from ‘neem’ a tree, villagers in India have used through history as a pesticide and medicine. A California scientist filed for a patent on the psychoactive plant hayahuasca, used on the Amazon for spiritual rituals. Other examples are quinoa and sangre de drago in Americas, turmeric and bitter melon in India and kava in Pacific.

6 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS):
Establishes rules for government on how to regulate services, is an attempt at privatization of such services as water treatment and delivery, health care, broadcasting, welfare, insurance and banking.
Bolivia’s indigenous people exposed the water privatization schemes by GATS. In 1999, Bolivia accepted a WB loan, which required that water in Cochabamba, the third largest city be privatized. Bechtel corporation was granted ownership of pipes, pumps, purification and delivery equipment, and gathering and storage facilities. Users who made less than a $ 100.00 a month got water bills of $ 20.00 a month. Water was shut off for non-payment. Riots ensued, martial law imposed, protestors shot dead, before the contract was cancelled.

7 Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA):
Would require elimination of non-tariff barriers, may also ban use of eco-labels.

8 Agreement on Investment:
Will restrict the governments from regulating incoming foreign investments, such as speed bumps, for a certain % of local ownership, on the power of sub-federal governments, and would impose requirement like the ones in NAFTA, that any loss in profits because of local or national rules be compensated by the government, and Rich nations are eager to establish the NAFTA right of foreign investors to sue national governments directly if they enact any measures that reduce planned profit. Corporate Patents Chap
Chap 8 High Tech Invasion: Bio-colonialism.
For hundreds of years colonized people were exploited for resources-land, forest, art, animals and water. Science’s leap into genetic engineering has inspired bio-prospecting by agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations to privatize and monopolize genetic structures and cell lines. It has given birth to bio-colonialism. Through TRIPS corporations can lay monopoly claims to human genes and bio-diversity. When genes become private
Property, they become alienable.
In 1984, a Seattle businessman sued the UCLA that while undergoing treatment for leukemia at the UCLA Medical Center, Moore’s doctor developed a cell line from his blood, which proved valuable in fighting cancer, without his consent. In a landmark decision in 1990, California Supreme Court decided that patients do not have a “property right to the tissues removed from their body.
The decision set a precedent that allows for patenting DNA from individuals, with or without consent.
In 1993, the then secretary of labor Ron Brown filed a patent claim to on the cell line of a Guaymi woman from Panama, because some Guaynami people carry a virus/antibodies, which might be useful in AIDS and leukemia research.
The Hagahai people of Papua New Guinea were subjects of a patent application by the US NIH and anthropologist Carol Jenkins. It was granted in 1994, but abandoned in 1996.
In 2002, the Nau-chah tribe in British Columbia found that samples for arthritis research taken in 1980s at the University of British Columbia were being used by the Oxford University in England. Dr Ryk Ward who had left BC in 1986 had taken about 900 samples without their consent.
In November 2000, an Australian biotech company, Autogen Ltd signed an agreement with the Kingdom pf Tioga’s minister of health to secure exclusive rights to the entire gene pool of the people of Tonga. Because of HR group protests, the proposal was ultimately dropped.
In the Earth summit of 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, signatory parties agreed to the “conservation of biological diversity…sustainable use…fair and equitable sharing of benefits…”
Open ended working group on Access and Benefit sharing is to be negotiated. The focus is on promoting, rather than preventing, the commercialization of genetic resources.
In South Africa, the San people do not eat while hunting, and stave off hunger by chewing the stem of a cactus called Hoodia. In 1997, The South African council for Scientific and Industrial Research, secured a patent on the appetite-suppressing component called P 57, and licensed the development rights to Phytopharm, which sublicensed the rights to Pfizer. Bo body bothered even to inform the San people. In fact Phytopharm claimed that the 100,000 San people were extinct.
In 2003, after a lot of condemnation, the CSIR offered benefit-sharing arrangement to the San people.


Chap 9 Vandana Shiva

During the GATT negotiations the US forced its own patent system onto the world through WTO. US corporations drafted and lobbied for the creation of Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS). Monsanto spokesman admitted “The industries and traders…played simultaneously the role of the patients, diagnosticians, and the prescribing physicians”. TRIPS now the major ‘legal’ means to steal and patent the medical knowledge and seeds of indigenous people: global bio-piracy.
TRIPS removed ethical and moral boundaries by including life forms and biodiversity as patentable matter. Seeds, plants, herbs, and animals have been redefined as machines and artifacts invented by the patentee, despite the fact that corporations made only minor genetic modifications. Seed saving by farmers was transformed to a criminal offense. Life
Science Corporation established article 27.3 (b) to claim patents on genes, seeds, animals and plants. Ciba Geigy and Sandoz have joined to form Novartis, Hoecht with Rhone Poulenc to Aventis, (acquired by Sanofi-Synthelabo), Zeneca merged with Astra, Monsanto owns Cargill seeds, DeKalb, Calgene, Agracetus, Delta and Pine land, and Asgrow. 80% of all GM seeds planted are ‘Monsanto’s’ intellectual property. Monsanto also owns broad species patents on cotton, mustard and Soya bean.
The process of patenting life forms is truly perverse:
1 Ethical considerations-TRIPS laws permit the claim that seeds, plants, animals and human cell lines are “products of the mind” created by Monsanto and their kin.
2 Crimialization of saving/sharing seeds-Framers are converted into “thieves”. Monsanto hires detectives to chase farmers, and sued Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, on whose field ‘Monsanto seeds’ had been flown over by the wind.
Bio-piracy is the term used by the ‘South’ foot the theft of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge through patents_
-It creates false claims to novelty and invention when knowledge has existed for centuries.
-diverts scarce biological resources from the poor to corporate monopolies.
-creates market monopolies excluding the original owners of knowledge from due share in markets. The US sued India in a dispute, and the WTO forced India to change its patent laws and grant exclusive rights to foreign corporations on the basis of foreign patents.
Over time, no one will be able to produce (or reproduce) patented agricultural, medicinal or animal products freely, eroding the livelihood of millions of small producers, prevent the poor from using their own knowledge of medicinal plants. If used, royalties will have to be paid to the patentees.
The US government granted patents for the anti-diabetic properties of karela, brinjal and jaman to two NRIs, Onkar S. Tomer and Kripanath Borah and a partner Peter Glonski, despite the fact that their medical use is well documented in authoritative treatises like “Wealth of India and “Compendium of Indian Medicinal Plants” and “Treatise on Indian Medicinal Plants”.
Neem, haldi, pepper, harar, bahera, amla, mustard, basmati, ginger, castor, jaramla, amaltas. New karela and jaman have all been patented. The situation calls for systemic, not case by case challenge.
The systemic documentation of medicinal/other properties of plants has made piracy easier. 70% of seeds in India are shared and 70% of healing is based on indigenous plants.
Chicanery of corporations:
In the 2002, Convention on Bi0ological Diversity, global agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations strongly fought for the seemingly altruistic concept that bio-diversity is “common human heritage”, ought to be freely accessible, and not locked up by indigenous communities. But once they their hands on such resources, they move immediately to privatize, patent and monopolize and keep all financial rewards to themselves.

Chap 10 Amazon:
Backed by complicit nation states, the WTO, WB, global corporate interests are building new roads, pipelines, dams and power lines deep into forests to exploit oil and mineral reserves and timber, and link them with global markets.
In March 2001, the Italian oil company AGIP oil signed a contract with six Huaorani communities in Ecuador, offering to compensate them with 50 kilogram of rice and sugar, a bag of salt, 2 footballs, 15 plates and cups. 34 cans of tuna and sardines, some medicines, a radio, a battery and solar panel and 3,500.00 to build a school room, in return for building six oil wells on Huaroni lands.
In the case of the Coari-Urucu gas pipeline in Brazil, 7,000 workers and vendors settled around towns, threatening the livelihood of indigenous people.
HR abuses inflicted on local people over the paving of Manuas-Caracas road consisted of beating, torture and killing by Brazilian army. In the 1970s and 1980s, two thousand of the Waimiri-Atroari people disappeared, and they lost 80% of their land.
In the 1980s, the Parakana people of the northeastern Brazilian Amazon were forcibly resettled to make way for the Ticurui Hydroelectric scheme.
The dumping of oil and chemically treated drilling waste into rivers and aquatic system, and concentrated levels of heavy metals and carcinogens results in contamination and afflictions.
In north eastern Ecuador oil producing region, thirty years of Texaco oil operations has left a toxic legacy, and high rates of cancer, skin rashes, sores, stomach and respiratory problems. Cancer rates are three times higher than the national average.
In the Camisea region of Peru in the mid 1980sShell oil conducted exploration for oil and gas. That led to influx of loggers and exposed the indigenous people to whooping cough, small pox and influenza. An estimated 50% of the population died.

Chap 11 Climate Change in the Arctic
Ice was once 5 ft thick, in many place reduced to 5-6 inches.

Chap 12 A-bombs to Star Wars-60 years on Marshall Island
The islands geographic isolation has given the US a mantle of secrecy to develop nuclear bombs, missile and space warfare technology. That has violated the health of the people.
Between 1946 to 1958, the US detonated 66 nuclear bombs in Bikini and Enewetak atolls. In March 1946, all 167 residents of Bikini were relocated to the barren sandbar island of Rongerik. On June 30, 1946, the first post WW II nuclear bomb was detonated on Bikini atoll.
In July 1947, the Marshall islands, along with other Micronesian nations, became the only the UN’s only Strategic Trust Territory under the US administration. The Trust obligated the US to “promote the development of the inhabitants of the trust territory towards self-government or independence…promote the economic advancement…development of fisheries, agriculture, industries, protect…land and resources”
In December 1947, the US government removed the people…
In March 1948, Bikinians were relocated to Kwajalein, and then to Killi with no protected lagoon/harbor which made fishing impossible.
On March 1, 1954, despite reports that that the wind was blowing towards inhibited areas, the US detonated its first deliverable H bomb, 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, over Bikini. The US removed its naval ships out of the area before the test, but took over 48 hours to evacuating the people, who by that time had started suffering from nausea, vomiting and rashes due to exposure to radioactivity. The US Atomic energy commission tried to cover up by declaring that “unexpectedly exposed…there were no burns”. This declaration was belied by the publication on March 7, 1954 of a ‘secret’ medical study.
In December 1956, after 17 more nuclear/hydrogen bombs, the US offered the Enewetak people US $ 25,000 in cash and a $ 150,000 collective trust fund. The Bikinians were given $ 25,000 in cash and 300,000 in trust fund, yielding @ 15.00 per person per year.
In July 1957, the US declared Rongelap island safe for habitation “The habitation of these people on the islands will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings”-Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, internal report
In May 1958, another 32 tests began. According to Rev B. David Williams and the foundation of the peoples of south Pacific…”In 1958, the rate of still birth… and miscarriages…rose to more than twice…”
In 1973, Brookhaven National Laboratory reported that 69% of children under 10 years of age at the time of the tests had developed thyroid problems.
In July 1976, the US congress allowed @ 20 million for nuclear clean up. By May 1977, 100,000 cubic yards of top soil had been scraped off, and dumped in the bomb crater on Runit island, and sealed with cement.
In December 1984, the US National radiological survey reported that almost half the Marshall islands had been contaminated by the US nuclear testing program.
In January 1994, US Congressman George Miller wrote to bill Clinton…they had been used as “guinea pigs” by the US military.
Kwajalein atoll became the “primary range for…ICBM and ABM systems”.
On Ebeye Island 12,000 people live on 100 acres.
After wasting 50 billion dollars on repeated failures of star wars program over 15 years, on October 1, 1997, Clinton restructured the star wars program.
On May 1, 2001 bush signaled unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty. His program was not to protect the US but to deploy hundreds of nuclear weapons in space.
In December 2001, missile testing increased dramatically.

Chap 13 global Water Wars:
Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, twice as fast as the human population. Per UN, by the year 2025, 2/3 of the humans will live under conditions of serious water shortage, and 1/3 under absolute water scarcity. Per WB, “the next WW will be about water”.
The two biggest consumers of freshwater are industrial agriculture and chip manufacturers. Drinking water is a distant third.
Fortune-water privatization is already a $ 400 billion business, 100 billion in the USA, dominated by the likes of Shell oil and Bechtel.
Theft:
Imperialists routinely took the most fertile and water-rich areas.
Sustainable agriculture using a fraction of what industrial agriculture does, is being dismantled.
Even today, the trend continues. Masai of East Africa, and Guarani and Kaiowa of Brazil (January 2002) have been forced to leave their land. In February 2002, Gana and GWI Bush families in the Central Kalahari game reserve of Botswana have had their water supplies cut off by the government.
Privatization of water for drinking and sanitation is most prevalent under IMF/WB coercion called Structural Adjustment Program, required against loan. MNCs are brought in for the business and are guaranteed profit. They in turn fire, reduce the salary of workers.
An estimated 5 million persons, most of them children, die every year due to use of polluted water.
This pattern played out without hindrance till the famed Cochabamba struggle, referred to earlier. The involved MNC, Bechtel was reduced to suing Bolivian government for $ 25 million.
Similar, though less successful struggles are going on in other parts of the world like South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Philippines, Trinidad, Ghana, Tanzania and the USA-in Atlanta, New Orleans and Stockton CA.
In India, people have successfully closed down several Coca-Cola bottling plants.
During 2004, New Delhi had the first People’s water forum.
Venezuela codified that water can not be privatized several years ago, and Uruguay followed suit in 2004.
Cochabamba declaration:
-Water belongs to the earth.
-Water is a fundamental human right.
-Water is best protected by local communities

Chap 18 Genetic pollution of Mayan corn:

Mexico’s corn gene pool is 5,000 years old and includes thousands of varieties and plant relatives specific to each region.
Detection of genetically engineered corn in Southern Mexico was a great shock. The exact cause has not been detected, but most researchers suspect dumping in Mexico of 5 million tons of US maize that contained the material

Chap 19 Nigeria and Big Oil
The massive 1970 oil spill in the Ogoni village Ebubu killed many. Shell oil erected a wall around the site, and government troops sealed off access.
In February 2006, a group calling itself Movement for Emancipation of Niger attacked the Royal Dutch Shell oil production facilities.
Royal Dutch have waged an ecological and economic war against the people of Niger Delta for six decades, with the connivance of Nigerian regimes, military and civilian, which have murderously suppressed their own people.
Oil production, gas flaring (released in air, in Texas, it is compressed into liquid), spillage, construction of canals and waste dumping have already brought Niger Delta to near ecological collapse. Shell can get away with it because of the cordial relations with the military and politicians. They employ their own police, import their own arms and ammunition, and has admitted bribing the Nigerian military.

Chap 20 The Philippine mining act of 1955.
Under pressure of the Asian Development Bank, the government adopted Act, allowing massive influx of foreign mining corporations, which can lease the land for 75 years, keep 100 % control and may repatriate 100 % of their profits.

No comments:

Post a Comment