The Huffington Post, Sustainable Pulse, and Before It's News report on U.S. government pressure on El Salvador to buy GMO seeds.
The U.S. government, a revolving door for Big Agra's biotech, is indeed bullying El Salvador into using genetically modified seeds just as current headlines suggest.
"'I would like to tell the U.S. Ambassador to stop pressuring the Government (of El Salvador) to buy 'improved' GM seeds,' said [President of the El Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technologies (CESTA)] Navarro, which is only of benefit to U.S. multinationals and is to the detriment of local seed production," reported Sustainable Pulse.
Through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a self-described "independent U.S. foreign aid agency that is helping to lead the fight against global poverty," created by Congress in 2004, $277 million in aid is being dangled over El Salvador's head if, as the World War 4 Report puts it, "the Salvadoran Agriculture Ministry continues its current practice of buying seeds from small-scale Salvadoran producers for its Family Agriculture Plan."
The threat was apparently made, "with clear intentions to advance the interests of transnational agricultural companies."
While distributing seed packets under the program from small Salvadoran producers (instead of multinational corporations like Monsanto) have actually spurred the growth of basic food crops by a third and employed over 200,000 hectares for cultivation thus achieving the goals that MCC's entire existence are supposedly based on nearly $300 million in aid might be withheld simply because El Salvador isn't using Monsanto's GMO seeds.
So which is it? Foreign aid or a corporate pay day?
(Score: 3, Informative) by AnonTechie on Wednesday June 25 2014, @09:59AM
Many aid giving countries have used these very same methods to promote their products/services. This is not the first time nor will it be the last time that such techniques are used !! Welcome to reality.
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @10:45AM
Not just reality. The Federation aggressively promoted its high-yield grain quadrotriticale, to the point of bullying Sherman's Planet into using it. Fortunately some helpful Klingons thwarted the plans of those meddlesome Feds.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hoochiecoochieman on Wednesday June 25 2014, @11:21AM
This is not "reality". This is hideous and should be denounced and punished.
Stop trying to make horrible things normal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:26PM
Hideous and horrible? You have lost your sense of perspective.
This is bad for local seed growers and probably a bad deal in the long term for the recipient country, but
- The countries are not being forced. They have a choice. They can leave the money on the table if they want to.
- Small companies have long and will for a long time lose out to larger companies, if only because of economies of scale.
The worst part of this offer is that it continues the self-interested style of foreign aid. That's not hideous and horrible, that's just plain bad.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hoochiecoochieman on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:52PM
It's hideous and horrible, because it's a king-size bully stepping on the weakest of the weak.
Besides, it threatens food safety worldwide. If these practices (and some other) are not stopped, in a few years a huge genetic heritage that is in the public domain will have been replaced by a few strains, owned and controlled by two or three American and European corporations. To me, that's a nightmare scenario. Calling it "plain bad" is short-sighted, at best. Imagine something like the Irish Great Hunger in a worldwide scale.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:40PM
This is reality - realpolitik. You are correct that it is hideous. This doesn't mean that it's not the way things do work though.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 25 2014, @11:26AM
For a related example of this, the US gives a bunch of military aid to Egypt, on the condition that they buy their equipment from the US. It's just yet another technique to siphon money from the taxpayer into the hands of favored corporations and individuals, with the added bonus of propping up a favored government in another country.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by forkazoo on Wednesday June 25 2014, @06:02PM
This is part of the reason why the U.S. is so keen to restore military aid to Egypt regardless of the political condition there. Fundamentally, the program is actually about corporate welfare for major military corporations, with Egypt just getting to skim some off the top. They just need some "Ally" state to dump all the helicopters that they buy from Lockheed or whoever. Military aid to Australia doesn't make sense because we can turn a profit selling the F-35's, military aid to Iran doesn't make sense because they are active enemies, but "middle ground" states like Egypt that wouldn't buy significant amounts of US military hardware are a huge target for what would, in any other context, be considered a scam where corporations get to rob people as long as they hand guns to thugs.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @11:40AM
Kinda reminds me this golden oldie When using open source makes you an enemy of the state [theguardian.com]
USA gov loves Microsoft and Monsanto.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @11:31PM
Further down in the thread, I mentioned Cablegate. [google.com]
The USA gov't not only shills for the huge incumbent "American" corps[1], they will outright lie for them.
[1] Those are actually multi-nationals that don't pay USA taxes and have no particular loyalty to the USA; they would pack up and bug out if they could make 0.1 percent more profit elsewhere.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:50PM
Just from the summary the facts I glean are that aid is being offered for El Salvador to buy US seeds instead of local small scale seeds. In other words, the USG seems to be offering foreign aid with the condition that the recipient buy from US manufacturers, and the GMO/organic aspect is just a side effect of the fact that most US seed manufacturers make GMO seeds. For what it's worth this self-interested style of foreign aid is nothing new and has been around at least since the end of WW2.
PS - Before It's News is a crappy source. Consider that these are their top stories right now:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @11:04PM
offering foreign aid with the condition that the recipient buy from US manufacturers
I agree with the earlier poster: the word that should have been in the title is coerce.
As you and others have noted, this behavior is not news; it's called mercantilism. [wikipedia.org].
(Despite what the Wiki article says in its initial paragraph, this is hardly an obsolete practice; it has simply morphed a bit.)
Apparently, a bunch of folks missed the Cablegate episode. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [mrpogson.com]
Note: Pogson now orders comments bottom-to-top but doesn't number them that way. :roll:
.
Before It's News is a crappy source
That site doesn't seem to have any original content.
It appears that they are an aggregator for articles with a permissive license (e.g. CC). [google.com]
At one point, I went looking for an additional site with a copy of an article I read on CounterPunch.org (their Web guy is an idiot, stuck in 1996).
I found BeforeIt'sNews, but their center-justified pages look like some 8 year old's hobby site.
So, agreed: avoid that domain.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by caseih on Wednesday June 25 2014, @02:22PM
The US uses aid, particularly food aid, as a weapon to advance national causes, which means the causes of the corporations to which the government is beholden. And has for years. It's very sad, and certainly not ethical. Nations only want to ask for help as a last resort, and to answer such requests with this kind of manipulation is galling.
I have no real problems with GMO food in general, and might not have a problem asking countries to allow US companies to sell GMO food and seed to them in exchange for trade agreements. But of course trade agreements are weapons too, and never equal. They always favor the US in some way. Can't win.