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FEEDBACK: IRRI Did Not Betray Us
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Masipag News & Views
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Dec 06, 2001 19:31 PST
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On the Jasmine issue:
IRRI DID NOT BETRAY US, IT'S SIMPLY BEING TRUE TO ITSELF
Dear Friends,
Like biological systems, human history carries a stamp of the truth no
matter how ardously we work to veil it, obfuscate or pretend otherwise.
Why are we so "shocked" so "outraged" by IRRI's present "betrayal"?
The IRRI was NEVER intended as an institute designed to protect the
world's heritage in the interests of the world's peoples who nurtured
the world's food systems to feed us all. IT WAS DESIGNED FROM THE OUTSET
TO DO THE CONTRARY..WHICH IS, TO DELIVER THE WORLD'S HERITAGE TO
AMERICAN CORPORATE PRIVATE PROPERTY. AND IT HAS SUCCEEDED IN ITS
ENTERPRISE. I am not being cynical, I am being mournfully honest.
Let us NOT FORGET that DR. Richaria of India had painstakingly collected
60,000 rice varieties from Indian farmers all across the land to set up
the Indian Rice Researh Institute in Cuttack, Orissa. THAT WAS THE
WORLD'S FIRST AND ONLY IRRI and it should have remained so. All rice
producing nations could have developed and managed their own seed banks
and shared this critical heritage with the world's family farmers under
their own terms. Why did this not happen ?
The Rockerfella/Ford Foundation funded institute in the Phillipines
(remember, a USA protectorate under Marcos then, with the USA Military
Base directly involved in USA wars in the region..Korea and Vietnam)was
FORCED upon the 'third world', and Dr. Richaria's seed stocks were
FORCIBLY delivered to this institute as the initial base of its
operations. Dr. Richaria was FORCIBLY removed from his job because he
refused to yeild these seeds to this American run institute, OBVIOUSLY
CREATED TO SERVE AMERICAN CORPORATE INTERESTS FOR ANYONE WITH THE
HONESTY TO ADMIT IT; "third world' 'friendly' in location only...in a
Marcos managed Phillipies !(In the old
days, before third world national liberation movements, when imperialism
bore its brazen face, its leaders ie. the American president, atleast
spoke with some candor.."he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is OUR
son-of-a-bitch" it was said of dictators who plied American commercial
and military interests on their peoples). I personally interviewed Dr.
Richaria just months before his unfortunate demise to verify this story
which I had initially read in an Indian publication.
And let us not forget, this institute has spearheaded the transformation
of global, especially 'third world' agriculture to SERVE COMMERCE. Its
service to the Biotechnology Industry and the USA patent regime is
merely a most logical outcome of its ORIGINAL IMPETUS.. inevitable and
coldly, heartbreakingly, predictable.
No matter its pious words about alleviating world hunger, its actions on
the ground SCREAM through the silent mouths of the world's BILLIONS of
wretched humans louder. All IRRI's dissembling words would lose meaning
if only we would stop pretending that words have meaning over ACTIONS !!
The only way to discern double-speak is to measure the words by the
action; allowing for doubt, the long term outcome of the actions.
A few honest questions is the best test. What would a program TRULY
designed to alleviate world hunger look like ? Would it take from
farmers fields the seeds FARMERS have nurtured, for every manner of
yeild to meet their needs, and transform these seeds into something
only "research scientists" can 'improve' in exhorbitantly expensive
laboratories ? Would it increasingly make farmer's home grown seeds
non-viable while increasingly forcing upon them only commercially
PURCHASED Seeds ?
Would it develop seeds that in order to produce the promised yeilds
would DEMAND, DEPEND UPON, exhorbitantly expensive 'inputs' all factory
produced, OFF THE FARM, by multinational corporations, thereby OBLIGING
farmers(WITHOUT ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY FOOD !), to depend upon government
subsidies or to relinquish their land to those who do have BUYING POWER
to be 'farmers'? Do people/corporations with "buying power", invest in
'business opportunities'that do not promise PROFITS?
Would an agriculture institute designed to alleviate world hunger
promote policies that displace hundreds of millions of subsistence
peasants into a landess labor stream dependent on the vagaries of a
GLOBALIZED economy to find the jobs, to earn the money, to BUY the food
to sate their hunger? Would it, by the "science" it creates help to
concentrate farmland in the hands of fewer and fewer LARGE LANDOWNERS ?
Would it tie the capacity of the "third world" to feed its people to its
earnings in a Global Marketplace where even enmasse the third world
commands NO POWER TO SET THE PRICE FOR THE PRIMARY AGRICULTURAL
COMMODITIES IT SELLS ? Would it create a web of
agricultural dependencies so complex that every third world nation would
enter a treadmill of ETERNAL DEBT AND STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMS ?
Would it invalidate farmers traditional knowledge so acutely as to
create a crisis of confidence in tried and true methods of growing food
? Would it take every EVIDENCE of VASTLY INCREASING WORLD HUNGER and
ASSERT THAT IT BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS OUTCOME ? WOULD IT NOT
EXAMINE ITS OWN POLICIES, NOT RADICALLY REVISE ITS OWN APPROACH ? WOULD
IT INSTEAD, AGGRESSIVELY, MAKE FIERCE CLAIMS of EFFICACY AND PROMOTE
MORE OF THE SAME? WOULD IT CONSISTENTLY PROMOTE AS 'SCIENCE' WHAT IS
ESSENTIALLY A PROGRAM IN AGRICULTURE CAPITALIST ENTERPRISE? Would it
oversee, for every food dollar spent, an increasingly diminishing return
to the farmer and a substantially
multiplying return to corporate producers ? Would it tip the scales
towards vastly increased production of "value added" snack foods while
inhibiting the production of foods vital to poor people's diets?
One might say that I am blaming the IRRI unfairly for all the world's
agricultural ills. I believe that the record speaks for itself. It does
not need any exaggeration on my part. The IRRI, and its cohort of
networked institutes in their worldwide web have together orchestrated
the complete delivery of third world agriculture into the suffocating
grip of global corporate enterprise. What colonialism started is being
completed by such agencies. Third world elites have allowed this Trojan
Horse to undo the work of their freedom struggles, and people the world
over are all paying the horrible price of the biological, ecological,
economic, political, social,cultural and spiritual devastation it has
perpetrated EVERYWHERE.
After all, how we produce and distribue food is the basis of all human
"economics". Our societies, no matter how removed they may seem from
'farm and country' are built on this base. Those who envisioned IRRI and
its brother institutes were not unaware of this. They were not naiive
novices blundering their alturistic way into trying to 'feed the world'.
The world WOULD BE FEEDING ITSELF TODAY left well enough alone. But the
course of USA agriculture enterprise would have foundered.
It had fed the second world war and it would, by its own internal
compulsions, HAVE TO, "feed the world" on a 'war footing' like it or
not. The FAO was neither altruistically nor accidentally the first of
the UN institutes developed by the USA IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE WAR.
The multinational corporate presence on the FAO Board Of Advisors was
not mere coincidence. It is quite accurate to state that post WWII
history of world agriculture could not be written without a primary
focus on the development of USA Agriculture Exports. IRRI and the CGIAR
institutes are integral to this history and outcomes of it.
Yet even well-informed activists mute their criticisms and act shocked
at the present 'betrayal'. A velvet glove on an iron fist cannot
disguise the IMPACT of the fist, no matter how well it sheilds the
appearance. The impact of the IRRI has brought us to this pass , we do
not need to participate in the disembling in order to acknowledge the
many honest individuals who have worked and still work for such
institutions.
My own nobel, honourable long-dead and terribly missed father was a
victim of his deep trust in such institutions. His excrutiatingly
painful death due to prostate cancer riveted my attention to the
so-called 'science' of IRRI. I have studied its origins and history..its
inspiration and development..going all the way back to the plantation
economies of colonial agriculture.
From its inception, the "science' of what we have come to accept as
modern agriculture is, inalienably, one facet of colonialism, commerce
and war and imperialism. We may fool ourselves, but we cannot trick the
historical record. Our path to liberation is to acknowledge this record
and to embrace paths that disconnect this history from our future if
there is to be one.
We should NOT BE ASKING FOR ANY COMPROMISE WITH ANY OF THE CGIAR
INSTITUTIONS. We should instead consider how to take charge of all their
operations. From RAFI to the Third World Network, Food First, Navadanya,
IFOAM---through all our linked groups worldwide, we should work with our
supportive foundations to develop a plan to TAKE CHARGE of our seed
stocks and establish our own laws of sharing, with family farmers
everyhere, with organic growers worldwide, to the explicit exclusion of
all corporate enterprise in agriculture. We should recognise the
SERIOUSNESS of our purpose.
The Monsantos and Unilevers of the world are at the heart of the WTO
enterprise. OUR seeds and agricultural resources are their life-source.
So are they ours, fundamental to our bilogical,ecological,economic,
social, cultural and SPIRITUAL survival.We CANNOT ALLOW THEIR TAKE OVER,
MONOPOLY, AND FURTHER EROSION.
It is important to uneqivically recognize that what we are calling
IRRI's "betrayal" is IRRI's COMMITMENT TO ITS ONLY MANDATE : that is to
DELIVER WORLD AGRICULTURE TO GLOBAL CORPORATE PRIVATE PROPERTY. In all
its years of operation it has done so with impunity..with the
collaboration of third world elites who have overseen a wanton give away
of their people's food security to global corporate monopoly. Let us not
bury our heads in the minutiae of the 'good'which individual IRRI
scientists have done in the face of the crisis the institution has
perpetrated. Let us face the truth and act boldly.
In Solidarity,
Premilla
dsha-@del6.vsnl.net.in
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