Tag Archives: Tax Dollars

Your Tax Dollar – Selling Monsanto Abroad

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Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

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| Sat May. 18, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Kenya, 2009. USAID Photo Gallery

Nearly two decades after their mid-’90s debut in US farm fields, GMO seeds are looking less and less promising. Do the industry’s products ramp up crop yields? The Union of Concerned Scientists looked at that question in detail for a 2009 study. Short answer: marginally, if at all. Do they lead to reduced pesticide use? No; in fact, the opposite.

And why would they, when the handful of companies that dominate GMO seeds—Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow—are also among the globe’s largest pesticide makers? Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have given rise to an upsurge of herbicide-resistant superweeds and a torrent of herbicides, while insects are showing resistance to its pesticide-containing Bt crops and causing farmers to boost insecticide use. What about wonder crops that would be genetically engineered to withstand drought or require less nitrogen fertilizer? So far, they haven’t panned out—and there’s little evidence they ever will.

Yet despite all of these problems, the US State Department has been essentially acting as of de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel, a new Food & Water Watch analysis of internal documents finds.

The FWW report is based on an analysis of diplomatic cables, written between 2005 and 2009 and released in the big Wikileaks document dump of 2010. FWW sums it up: “a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods that they do not want, and lobby foreign governments—especially in the developing world—to adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops.”

The report brims with examples of the US government promoting the biotech industry abroad. Here are a few:

The State Department encouraged embassies to bring visitors—especially reporters—to the United States, which has “proven to be effective ways of dispelling concerns about biotech [crops].” The State Department organized or sponsored 28 junkets from 17 countries between 2005 and 2009. In 2008, when the US embassy was trying to prevent Poland from adopting a ban on biotech livestock feed, the State Department brought a delegation of high-level Polish government agriculture officials to meet with the USDA in Washington, tour Michigan State University and visit the Chicago Board of Trade. The USDA sponsored a trip for El Salvador’s Minister of Agriculture and Livestock to visit Pioneer Hi-Bred’s Iowa facilities and to meet with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack that was expected to “pay rich dividends by helping [the Minister] clearly advocate policy positions in our mutual bilateral interests.”

The State Department hotly pushed GMOs in low-income African nations—in the face of popular opposition.

Another example: this 2009 cable, referenced in the FWW report, shows a State Department functionary casually requesting US taxpayer funds to  to combat a popular effort to require labeling of GMO foods in Hong Kong—and boasting about successfully having done so in the past. Why focus on the GMO policy of a quasi-independent city? Hong Kong’s  rejection of a mandatory labeling policy “could have influential spillover effects in the region, including Taiwan, mainland China and Southeast Asia,” the functionary writes, adding that her consulate had “intentionally designed [anti-labeling] programs other embassies and consulates” could use.

The report also shows how the State Department hotly pushed GMOs in low-income African nations—in the face of popular opposition. In a 2009 cable, FWW shows, the US embassy in Nigeria bragged that “U.S. government support in drafting [pro-biotech] legislation as well as sensitizing key stakeholders through a public outreach program” helped pass and industry-friendly law. Working with USAID—an independent US government agency that operates under the State Department’s authority—the State Department pushed similar efforts in Kenya and Ghana, FWW shows.

Yet, as FWW points out, in so aggressively pushing biotech solutions abroad, State is bucking against the global consensus of ag-development experts as expressed by the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project, convened by the World Bank and the United Nations and completed in 2008, to assess what forms of agriculture would best meet the world’s needs in a time of rapid climate change. The IAASTD took such a skeptical view of deregulated biotech as a panacea for the globe’s food challenges that Croplife America, the industry’s main industry lobbying group, saw fit to denounce it. The US government backed up the biotech lobby on this one—just three of the 61 governments that participated refused to sign the IAASTD: the Bush II-led United States, Canada, and Australia.

So why why are our corps of diplomats behaving as if they answered to Monsanto’s shareholders with regard to ag policy? My guess is GMO seed technology, dominated by Monsanto, as well as our towering crops corn and soy crops (which are at this point almost completely from GM seeds) are two of the few areas of global trade wherein the US still generates a trade surplus. The website of the State Department’s Biotechnology and Textile Trade Policy Division puts it like this:

In 2013, the United States is forecasted to export $145 billion in agricultural products, which is $9.2 billion above fiscal 2012 exports, and have a trade surplus of $30 billion in our agricultural sector.

I guess US presidents, Democratic and Republican alike, are bent on preserving and expanding that surplus. President Obama altered much about US foreign policy when he took over for President Bush in 2009; but he doesn’t seem to have changed a thing when it comes to pushing biotech on the global stage. And the impulse is not confined to the State Department. Back in 2009, when Obama needed to appoint someone to lead agriculture negotiations at the US Trade Office, he went straight to the ag-biotech industry, tapping the vice president for science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, Islam A. Siddiqui, who still holds that post today.

Meanwhile, the State Department operates an Office of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Textile Trade Affairs, which exists in part to “maintain open markets for U.S. products derived from modern biotechnology” and “promote acceptance of this promising technology.” The office’s biotechnology page is larded with language that reads like boilerplate from Monsanto promo material: “Agricultural biotechnology helps farmers increase yields, enabling them to produce more food per acre while reducing the need for chemicals, pesticides, water, and tilling. This provides benefits to the environment as well as to the health and livelihood of farmers.”

 

from:    http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/05/us-state-department-global-marketing-arm-gmo-seed-industry

Peter VanBuren On the Largest US Embassy

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Inside the World’s Largest Embassy

Welcome to the Vatican-sized US Embassy in Baghdad, home to a $2 million dead lawn and the world’s worst bar scene.

Editor’s note: In 2009, Peter Van Buren, a two-decade veteran of the Foreign Service, volunteered to go to Iraq. Drawn by “the nexus of honor, duty, terrorism, and my oldest daughter’s college tuition,” he signed on as the head of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, part of a “civilian surge” to rebuild the country and pave the way for the withdrawal of American combat troops. He’d joined the biggest nation-building exercise in history, a still-unfinished $63-billion effort that Van Buren compares to “past[ing] together feathers year after year, hoping for a duck.” Van Buren’s acerbic new memoir, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, recounts his two years as an official feather-paster in a country that’s become an afterthought to most Americans.

Even before he hit the ground, Van Buren found that the State Department’s efforts to stabilize Iraq were as haphazard and unrealistic as the initial military effort to invade the country. In his acknowledgments, Van Buren singles out former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, “who led an organization I once cared deeply for into a swamp and abandoned us there.” Not surprisingly, Van Buren, who still works for the State Department, has ruffled some feathers at Foggy Bottom. “The State Department…is like a Mafia family: one doesn’t talk about family matters outside the family,” he told Publisher’s Weekly. “When a colleague learns about my book, the first question is always ‘Are you in trouble?’ I am afraid the answer is yes.” Van Buren says the department has been investigating him and that his boss delivered a threatening message from an unnamed superior, “just like in a gangster movie.” 

Though Van Buren spent much of his time in Iraq in the field, in the excerpt below, he recalls life inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, home to an immense, surreal US Embassy and “the world’s worst bar scene.”

The World’s Biggest Embassy (104 acres, 22 buildings, thousands of staff members, a $116 million vehicle inventory), physically larger than the Vatican, was a sign of our commitment, at least our commitment to excess. “Along with the Great Wall of China,” said the ambassador, “it’s one of those things you can see with the naked eye from outer space.” The newly opened embassy was made up of large office buildings, the main one built around a four-story atrium, with overhead lights that resembled sails. If someone had told us there was a Bath & Body Works in there, we would not have thought it odd.

The World’s Biggest Embassy sat in, or perhaps defined, the Green Zone. Called the Emerald City by some, the Green Zone represented the World’s Largest Public Relations Failure. In the process of deposing Saddam, we placed our new seat of power right on top of his old one, just as the ancient Sumerians built their strongholds on top of fallen ones out in the desert. In addition to the new buildings, Saddam’s old palaces in the Zone were repurposed as offices, and Saddam’s old jails became our new jails. Conveniently for Iraqis, the overlords might have changed but the address had not. The place you went to visit political prisoners who opposed Saddam was still the place you went to look for relatives who opposed the Americans.

The new embassy compound isolated American leadership at first physically and soon mentally as well. The air of otherworldliness started right with the design of the place. American architects had planned for the embassy grounds to have all sorts of trees, grassy areas, and outdoor benches; the original drawings made them look like a leafy college campus. For a place in the desert, the design could not have been more impractical. But in 2003, no projection into the future was too outlandish. One building at the compound was purpose-built to be the international school for the happy children who would accompany their diplomat parents on assignment. It was now used only for offices. Each embassy apartment offered a full-size American range, refrigerator, and dishwasher, as if staffers might someday take their families to shop at a future Sadr City Safeway like they do in Seoul or Brussels. In fact, all food was trucked in directly from Kuwait, along with American office supplies, souvenir mugs, and T-shirts (“My Father Was Assigned to Embassy Baghdad and All I Got Was…”, “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel”) and embassy staff members were prohibited from buying anything to eat locally. The embassy generated its own electricity, purified its own water from the nearby Tigris, and processed its own sewage, hermetically sealed off from Iraq.

Welcome to the Green Zone: Kjirstin/FlickrWelcome to the Green Zone, now stay off the grass Kjirstin/Flickr

The ambassador, who fancied himself a sportsman, ordered grass to grow on the large sandy area in front of the main embassy building, a spot at one time designated as a helicopter-landing zone, since relocated. Gardeners brought in tons of dirt and planted grass seed. A nearly endless amount of water was used, but despite clear orders to do so, the grass would not grow. Huge flocks of birds arrived. Never having seen so much seed on the ground in one place, they ate passionately. No grass grew. The ambassador would not admit defeat. He ordered sod be imported into Kuwait and then brought by armored convoy to the embassy. No one confessed to what it cost to import, but estimates varied between two and five million dollars. The sod was put down and hundreds of thousands of gallons of water were used to make it live, in what was practically a crime against nature. Whole job positions existed to hydrate and tend the grass. No matter what Iraq and nature wanted, the American Embassy spent whatever it took to have green grass in the desert. Later full-grown palm trees were trucked in and planted to line the grassy square. We made things in Iraq look the way we wanted them to look, water shortages throughout the rest of the country be damned. The grass was the perfect allegory for the whole war.

to read the rest, go to:    http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/baghdad-peter-van-buren-we-meant-well?page=2