The alimentary crisis and Latin America

By Weekly Archive On May 14, 2008

A
real crisis or a conspiracy?

‘Control
the oil and you’ll control the nations; control the food and you’ll
control the people.’ — Henry
Kissinger (1970)

I’ve
known that phrase from Kissinger for a good many years. I confess
that until now I had not given it much importance. It is an absolute
truth, almost an axiom, that could become a terrible reality.

The
alimentary crisis is real. The price of foodstuffs climbs and climbs.
The reserves drop. The same happens with oil, which places many
nations and peoples who do not produce food or oil in a desperate
situation. Is this the result of a set of random events that coincide
in time, or is it the effect of a plan for world domination?

If
we guide ourselves by Kissinger’s words, it seems to be the latter
rather than the former. And that leads us to ask ourselves other
questions. Was the idea of increasing the production of ethanol
(launched by George W. Bush in March 2007) by utilizing the basic
grains for the feeding of humans and animals also a coincidence?

It
is well known that in order to produce one liter of alcohol for use
in car engines, 1.2 liters of fuel oil must be sacrificed. In other
words, more fuel than the fuel produced. In addition to the fact that
ethanol has become good business for the Bush family, Bush’s
acolytes, and the oligarchies of several countries, isn’t this a way
to provoke a greater shortage of food?

Is
it by happenstance that the big corporations that trade in food and
many investors are speculating with the price of grains, knowing that
speculation can lead to the deaths of millions of human beings?
According to the United Nations, every five seconds a child dies of
hunger or the diseases that accompany hunger.

Was
it pure coincidence that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
World Bank (WB) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) promoted in
the so-called Third World the production of food for export, instead
of guaranteeing the production of crops that might guarantee food to
the people who grow them? In that way, they left the poorest nations
at the mercy of world-market prices.

At
present, 78 nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean
have a deficit in their basic food baskets, as a result of the high
prices of food and the abandonment of traditional crops.

In
37 of those nations, the situation is particularly difficult. Already
there have been demonstrations and the looting of grocery stores and
supermarkets. Also repression and death. Lest you’ve forgotten,
hunger is the worst counselor.

Some
countries have rationed rice; others, corn and wheat. The big Asian
producers of rice, such as Thailand and Vietnam, have reduced their
exports to guarantee domestic consumption. About 43 percent of the
production of corn is used for the feeding of animals. Experts say
that about 20 percent of the world’s harvest of corn will be used for
the production of ethanol. What’s left for human beings?

Is
all this fortuitous or the result of a plan to dominate nations
through hunger? Rice is the basic food for 3 billion people. Corn is
a staple for about 600 million people. Wheat, for hundreds of
millions. In Peru, the Army is making potato bread to try to reduce
the demand for wheat among the population.

In
Haiti, a mixture of mud, salt and vegetable oil is the basic food of
hundreds of thousands of people. The mud is not free. It costs 5
cents a biscuit, and causes abdominal pain and carries parasites and
other diseases.

Haiti,
one of the world’s poorest countries, produced almost all the rice it
needed before the neoliberal rules of the IMF and the WB were forced
upon it. Every year, it requires 400,000 tons. It produces barely
40,000; the rest has to be imported. At the current prices, it is no
wonder that its people have to eat mud biscuits.

The
big producers of food, such as the United States and the European
Union, along with Lula’s Brazil, say the shortage of grain is caused
by an increase in consumption in China, India and other Asian
countries. No doubt, that can cause a slight increase in the prices.
If that’s so, why use grains for the production of ethanol? It is
food, and it’s denied to millions of human beings.

It
is true that the prices of crude oil also affect the cost of
production and transportation of foodstuffs. But who is to blame for
the fact that the instability of the markets — derived from the
situation in Iraq, the threats to Venezuela, and a possible attack on
Iran — leads to speculation? What country with less than 5 percent
of the world’s population daily consumes about 25 percent of the
crude oil produced in the world?

Should
Iran be attacked, the price of crude oil could rise to US$200 a
barrel, an unsustainable price even for the most developed economies.
A true tragedy for the poor countries. Some countries, such as the
Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, are already
experiencing serious difficulties with fuel and food, despite the
unselfish aid provided by the government of Venezuela.

The
recent Alimentary Summit held in Managua, summoned by the governments
of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) and attended by
representatives of 12 countries, including some presidents, was aimed
at uniting the efforts to confront the alimentary crisis that beset
mankind.

For
most of the attendees, the essence of the alimentary crisis lies in
the unequal distribution of wealth worldwide and, above all, on the
neoliberal economic model imposed by some developed countries upon
the rest of the world in the past 20 years.

Of
course, not everyone agreed. President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica
distanced himself from the document, because he’s a devotee of "free
trade." Mexico and El Salvador also distanced themselves from a
set of proposals made by the Venezuelan delegation that ended up in
an addendum to the Final Declaration.

Among
the Venezuelan proposals was the idea of creating a bank of
agricultural products that would reduce the costs of small and
mid-size producers, and to assign $100 million through the Bank of
ALBA to finance agricultural projects. Also, to create a plan within
PetroCaribe to finance the production of foodstuffs.

So
far, awareness has been raised about the gravity of the alimentary
situation and the urgent measures that need to be taken to keep food
from becoming a weapon of war, at least in Latin America. In fact,
food already is a weapon in many parts of the world.

In
any case, beware the great corporations that produce and trade in
food. Beware the corporations that produce transgenic seeds, which
are imposing their products throughout the world, to the detriment of
natural varieties. They are already present in many countries in
Latin America and the Caribbean.

Transgenic
seeds make the farmer totally dependent on the transnational
corporation that produces them; every year, he must buy the seeds,
the fertilizers and the insecticides. In India, 150,000 cotton
farmers have committed suicide because they could not pay their debts
to those transnationals.

The
transnationals are in charge of dominating the food supply and, by
extension, the people, as Henry Kissinger proposed. In a secret
document called National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200),
Kissinger drew a plan of action for the world’s population, aiming to
control it and reduce it by hundreds of millions of people by using
foodstuffs.

Kissinger
wanted to reorganize the worldwide market of food, to destroy family
farms and replace them with large haciendas
and
factories directed by the farm transnationals. Something like that
has been happening since the early 1990s in Mexico and other Latin
American countries. Don’t you think it’s time to take steps to stop
it? I leave the answer to you.