Embedding Transnational Agribusiness and GMO’s into African Agriculture*

The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has just released the report For your own good!, which outlines the GMO industry’s expansion across Africa. The report focuses on non-commercial traditional crops, such as cassava, sorghum, sweet potato, pigeon pea, cowpea, banana and rice, which corporations are attempting to genetically modify and roll out under the guise of philanthropy.

The report reveals that a great deal of research and development is currently underway into the genetic modification (GM) of these crops. Most of the on-going trials concentrate on drought and salt tolerance, nitrogen use efficiency, resistance to tropical pests and diseases and nutritional enhancement (bio-fortification). The key countries that have been targeted include:

• Burkina Faso
• Egypt
• Ghana
• Nigeria
• Kenya
• Uganda
• Malawi

The genesis of GM research into these crops can be found in royalty-free donations of various patented GM traits by several transnational companies to experimental programmes undertaken by African scientists employed by government ministries. These companies include Monsanto, Dupont and Pioneer Hi-bred.

Mariam Mayet, Director of the ACB, says:

“This indicates that the GM industry, under the veil of technology donations and public financing, is effectively managing to make further inroads into imposing GM on the African continent. By focusing the research on traits meant to ‘benefit’ farmers and malnourished populations, through inter alia, bio-fortification, the industry is intent on giving a humanitarian face to the real involvement, vested interests and expanding influence of these MNCs in African agriculture”.

The main players involved include the African Agriculture Technology Foundation (AATF), which is on the receiving end of many of the technological property rights donations, the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Program (ABSP) and the Program for Biosafety Systems (PBS). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and USAID fund the latter organisations.

U.S-based research institutions such as the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (DDPSC) (for cassava) and universities (notably Michigan State University and Kansas State University) play a major role in this ‘philanthropic’ research.

The ACB report notes there is a dearth of literature that critically addresses bio-safety issues and socio-economic aspects relating to the bio-fortification of indigenous crops through GM. According to the authors, this is especially important given the need to move away from an over-emphasis on food fortification strategies towards a permanent solution: diet diversification through locally available foods, which was recognised as early as 1992 by the U.N. International Conference on Nutrition.

As is the case with the controversial Golden Rice research and development project, the report argues these GM projects are diverting financial and human resources and policies and practices away from implementing the real solutions that can be found within the diversity of natural foods and farming.

Zakiyya Ismail, Consumer Campaigner with the ACB argues:

“The real solutions to address vitamin and mineral deficiencies can be found in ecological farming systems, and traditional kitchen and home gardens, which can better contribute to healthy and diverse diets and empower people to access and produce their own healthy and varied food.”

ACB stresses that smallholder farmers must be given the right to choose their means of production and survival. It adds even if gene sequences and constructs are donated, the accompanying requisite GM inputs will be expensive for farmers. GM crops are highly likely to increase the costs of production for farmers and lead them into indebtedness and dependency.

The report by ACB follows a Global Justice Now report that outlines the role of BMFG in spearheading a drive into Africa on behalf of ‘corporate America’ to facilitate a GMO/green revolution.

With assets of $43.5 billion, BMGF is the largest charitable foundation in the world and distributes more aid for global health than any government. Its strategy is intended to deepen the role of multinational companies, even though these corporations are responsible for much of the poverty and injustice that already plagues the Global South. The foundation’s programmes have a specific ideological strategy that promotes neo-liberal economic policies, corporate globalisation, GMOs and an outdated (colonialist) view of role of aid in ‘helping’ the poor.

Global Justice Now shows that the senior staff of BMGF’s programmes are overwhelmingly drawn from ‘corporate America’. As a result, the question is: whose interests are being promoted – those of corporate America or those of ordinary people who seek social and economic justice rather than charity?

Continue reading…

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CNN Just Got Hit by a Massive Truth Bomb–The Facts of Life Are Conservative

“Could be bullshit. I mean, it’s mostly bullshit right now.”

And there you have it, a CNN producer, caught on camera, frankly admitting that “fake news” isn’t some regrettable accident of the 24-hour news cycle.

“Fake news” is CNN’s entire business model. (The business model of quite a few other liberal MSM outlets too, if the tantalizing hints being dropped by James O’Keefe are to be believed…)

As a fellow human being I feel sorry for the poor guy caught on camera by Project Veritasadmitting this stuff — because he’s probably going to lose his job.

But as a fellow journalist I feel about as much sympathy for him as I do for all those idiot jihadists who go out to fight in Raqqa and Mosul, lured by the cool videos of the beards, black flags, and AKs with the wailing soundtrack. Did they seriously imagine when they joined ISIS/CNN that it was all just going to be about the glamour and the hot chicks and the purity of the noble cause?

And I’m really not being high minded here. It just seems to me that one of the most basic, entry-level precepts that any serious news organization ought to be observe – and that CNN most patently never has observed, or not for a very, very long time – is this:

Facts are sacred. The truth always makes the best story. You do not make shit up.

Not only ought this stuff to be obvious, but it ought to come instinctively. Isn’t the whole attraction of joining an unglamorous, overworked, underpaid trade like journalism that you want to discover the truth about the world: all the stuff that they would rather you didn’t know?

That’s certainly been my own experience in the last few years covering the climate change/enviro-lunacy beat. I’ve never much enjoyed all the flak I’ve got from the left-wing media; still less have I liked being rejected by so many friends. But the thing that has kept me going through the hard times is that I know I’m doing good and making a real difference: there are some devious bastards out there doing terrible stuff and I’m exposing their knavery and holding them to account.

For any self-respecting journalist, I’d call that “job done.”

Sometimes I get asked by people on the other side of the argument: “What if you’re wrong?”

Here’s the first thing I’ll do if I’m wrong about climate change. I’ll write a big piece explaining why I’m wrong. Then I’ll find someone who is prepared to pay me for writing the opposite of what I do now.

This isn’t because I’m a moral paragon. It’s because I’m lazy and because I prefer the easier life: writing journalism where you have to keep making up your “facts” is much, much harder than doing what I do now, which is basically, copying out true facts and then adding a few nice adjectives and thinking up a snarky final sentence.

That said, I would have to concede that this is much easier to do if you’re politically on the right rather than on the left.

Margaret Thatcher once said “The facts of life are conservative.” And as in so many things, she was absolutely spot on. This, as you can imagine, makes life very, very difficult for people in the overcrowded left-wing media. (It’s overcrowded because so many journalists think they’re left wing).

Every day, they wake up to a world where: Israel is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East with the best human rights record; socialism is failing everywhere it is being tried from Venezuela to North Korea; the worst, most fascistic acts of violence and intolerance are being committed by left-wing people calling themselves “anti-fascists”; Islam is not a “religion of peace”; Trump is doing a great job as president — way, way better than his predecessor Obama; man-made climate change is the biggest scam in the history of science, politics, or economics…

And somehow they’ve got to construct stories demonstrating the opposite because it’s what their dumb-assed audiences want to hear.

How, if you’re running a left-wing media organization, do you reconcile this yawning gulf between the facts on the ground and your preferred political narrative?

Simple: you remake the world so that black is white and white is black; you create your own facts.

The liberal media has achieved this in myriad ways: selective reporting; emotive storytelling where opinion masquerades as news; targeting and vicious demonizing of anyone on the other side of the argument; the extensive quotation and celebration of people on the left who have successfully infiltrated schools, universities, branches of government, and other institutions both public and private, so that their skewed version of events becomes the official narrative.

But perhaps the deadliest weapon in the liberal media’s armory is this: the continual pretence it makes that its news reporting is fair, balanced, and honest; that it is constantly striving after objective truth; that only its enemies in the malign right-wing press are guilty of biased journalism.

And for years organizations like CNN — not to mention the New York Times, the Washington Post and their various UK counterparts like the Guardian and the BBC — have been getting away with this because, as someone once said (maybe Churchill, maybe Lenin, maybe Mark Twain — no one is quite sure), “a lie is half way round the world before the truth has got his boots on.”

One of the malign consequences of this deliberate and cynical lie (which comes straight out of the Leninist playbook) is that conservative media outlets have been continually forced onto the back foot, forever having to defend themselves against the charge that they serve up politicised news designed to advance their right wing agenda.

Which they do, of course. Fox News does it. Breitbart does it. The Daily Caller does it. The Sun and the Daily Mail do it. Every one of them is undoubtedly guilty of serving up journalism with a right wing slant.

The key element missing from this particular calumny is that the left wing media demonstrates at least as much bias, if not more. It just won’t admit it.

Continue reading…

— White House: CNN ‘a Disgrace to All of Media, to All of Journalism’

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CNN Caught On Hidden Cam Saying Russian Thing Is BS

Project Veritas, the undercover news group devoted to exposing how the establishment really thinks, got a CNN producer on camera to admit that the news network’s coverage of the phony Trump colluded with Russia story is a cynical effort to whip up ratings, a false narrative promoted to make money, not a bid to report the news as a first draft of history.

Hence, its wall-to-wall coverage of the Democrats’ Russia narrative, despite there being no there there. CNN has mentioned Russia 60,000 times since President Trump was inaugurated.

Here’s the thinking behind the obsession that has occupied a huge part of the Trump presidency:

Speaking on camera, CNN supervising producer John Bonifield in Atlanta told Project Veritas:

Project Veritas: The more CNN is constantly like Russia this, Russia that…

Bonifield: Because it’s ratings.

Project Veritas: Because it’s ratings?

Bonifield: Our ratings are incredible right now.

After that, he admitted there was little substance to the story – the network was just catering to what its leftist viewers wanted to hear:

Project Veritas: But honestly you think the whole thing is just like bullshit

It could be bullshit. It’s mostly bullshit right now, like we don’t have any big giant proof.

I just feel like they don’t really have it, but they want to keep digging. So I think the president is probably right to say like ‘ook you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.’

And why did think it was a false narrative? Because if there were any substance to the story…

Bonifield: It would leak. If it was something really good, it would leak.

and

Bonifield: The leaks keep leaking I just refuse to believe that if they had something really good like that, it wouldn’t leak. (inaudible) I just feel like the don’t really have it but they want to keep digging.

Bonifield suggested it was ratings-driven and it came from the top. The CEO of the network, he said, told the editors:

“Good job covering the climate accords but we are done, let’s move back to Russia.”

Bonifield also admitted he was cynical and most of his colleagues were, too. Questioned about journalistic ethics, he said with withering sarcasm: “that’s adorable.”

So what can be said is going on? CNN is no longer a news network – it’s more a whip-up-the-left operation, to make leftists feel good about their crazed anti-Trump suspicions. It’s ratings-driven, not news-driven. And it’s interfering with what President Trump was put into office by voters to do.

It’s a strange beast these days. It’s not really about news. It’s about fake news.

James O Keefe in the above video:

The American people are fade up with fake news, and the mainstream media they can not trust, it’s corporate greed, market pressures, Managers without integrity, newsroom boses without courage, journalists who don’t even leave their desks.

The Very Purpose of Journalism is to Expose the World for What it Is – Not to Create False Political Narratives nor to Make Money.

— Project Veritas Undercover Investigation: CNN Producer Admits Network Hyping ‘Mostly Bullsh*t’ Trump-Russia Scandal for ‘Ratings’

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The West’s Secret Pact to Get Mideast Oil

“British Petroleum and The Redline Agreement”

In this book, Edwin Black talked about the 1928 agreement signed by a consortium of oil companies that created a Western-controlled oil cartel in the Middle East which he argues is the root of decades-long struggle over power and energy supplies. He talked about the role of petroleum in the creation of Iran, Iraq, and other countries in the Middle East and in U.S. foreign policy.

BRITISH PETROLEUM and the REDLINE AGREEMENT is the third and latest entry in a series of books written by award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black that tackles the issues surrounding automobiles, energy, and transportation. The previous two books are INTERNAL COMBUSTION and THE PLAN: HOW TO RESCUE SOCIETY THE DAY THE OIL STOPS. As with all of his other books (10 total), Black relies upon a crack research team to uncover and compile an exhaustive trove of heretofore unknown factual information and data.

The book opens with startling details of the most tragic global event to occur between the September 11th attacks and the Japanese Tsunami – the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It then reaches back to mid 19th century America to explain the founding of the oil industry, before moving half a world away to the troubled oil-rich vastness that became known as the Middle East. For the first time, it is possible to clearly understand the transformation of Mesopotamia into Iraq, Persia into Iran, and how a Hashemite tribal leader came to be installed as the King of Iraq, a land he had no right to rule.

BRITISH PETROLEUM and the REDLINE AGREEMENT exposes the hidden truths that led to two world wars, countless regional conflicts, millions of dead servicemen and civilians, economic depression, wide-spread health hazards and rampant global terrorism. Although I’m reluctant to describe a book of this magnitude as entertaining, it is certainly that. But more importantly, it is an instructive, fascinating account that is even more relevant today since the subject is at the heart of the current “greatest” financial depression, and because the next oil-induced world war would probably conclude with a cataclysmic exchange of nuclear weapons.

Watch this video for relevant questions and responses with Edwin Black

In his earlier book, “The War Against the Weak,” Edwin Black documents the collaboration of American corporate philanthropic organizations with Nazi Germany researchers to create a white, Nordic master race. Black has also documented the forceful sterilization of 60,000 Americans in genetic-control campaigns taking place as recently as 1900.

The journalist is an international investigative author of 80 award-winning editions in 14 languages in 65 countries. With more than one million books in print, his work focuses on genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropic abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation. He has been interviewed on “Oprah,” NBC’s “Today” show, CNN’s “Wolf Blitzer Reports” and NBC’s “Dateline,” as well as leading networks in Europe and Latin America.

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Novartis Flu vaccines banned by some European countries

“I was recently told by a wise Ethiopian monk that he had a warning dream 20 years ago to tell folks that they should avoid taking vaccines completely”

Health regulators in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Spain imposed an immediate ban on Novartis AG’s flu vaccines Thursday after possibly contaminated flu shots were found in batches in Italy,

 

Continue reading…

 

 

Globalism Is Killing Us All

In the past, diseases like tuberculosis and malaria have been number one health concerns around the world.

But not anymore.

In today’s world, globalization is the number one health risk facing humanity.

A new study released this week by the Blacksmith Institute reveals, for the first time ever, the impact of industrial pollutants on communities across the planet. It found that industrial waste dump sites containing toxic horrors like lead, mercury, and chromium, poison more than 125 million people in 49 different low and middle income nations around the planet. And the authors of the study say this is a very conservative estimate and likely even more people are sickened by this rampant industrial pollution. In fact, the report says that industrial pollution is now a bigger global health problem for the world than malaria and tuberculosis.

Just look at what’s happening in places like Zamfara, Nigeria. It’s a state without children – or, at least, very few children walking around.

Why? Because hundreds of children who work in gold mines are exposed to high levels of lead.  Back in March of 2010, the organization Doctors Without Borders arrived on the scene in Zamfara and found that hundreds of children had died from lead poisoning and thousands more were diseased by it.  Mortality rates in some villages were as high as 43%.

This is a genocide carried out by transnational corporations that have no restraints on how they operate in what were once sovereign nations. And ultimately, this is a consequence of globalism.

Plain and simple, globalization is the empowering of transnational corporations and the neutering of sovereign governments to keep their populations safe from these transnational corporate behemoths.

Continue reading…

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