Monbiot on the Corporate Carve-Up

If you haven't already, you should read George Monbiot--in this case, on the corporate carve-up of Africa.

David Cameron’s purpose at the G8, as he put it last month, is to advance “the good of people around the world”. Or, as Rudyard Kipling expressed it during the previous scramble for Africa, “To seek another’s profit, / And work another’s gain … / Fill full the mouth of Famine / And bid the sickness cease”. Who could doubt that the best means of doing this is to cajole African countries into a new set of agreements, which allow foreign companies to grab their land, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets?

Nigeria is making light of these concerns:

Under its "co-operation framework", Nigeria will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in funding – subject to availability – from donors including the US, France, Germany and the UK. In addition, 28 companies have signed letters of intent to invest in a range of projects. Most of the companies are Nigerian, but big multinationals – including Cargill, Syngenta and Unilever – have also signed letters of intent.
Cargill, a private company and one of the dominant firms in the grain business, is investing in starch and sweeteners to realise the potential for cassava. By buying cassava from smallholder farmers and also investing in a sweetener plant, said Adesina, Cargill will be working with smallholder farmers to create a market.

 The best part of this all is that no-one will ever be held accountable if famine isn't, in fact, conquered. If leaders happen to skim money off the top and leave their countries enslaved to international ag corporations, well, it won't matter. They'll never be in the dock, and the policies will never be rescinded--even if they are the result of graft and corruption. Failure, famine, criminality, none of these bring any consequences at all. So everbody's happy--except maybe the poor people trying to live through it.

Mackerel Overfishing II

Satellite image of trawler mud trails off the Louisiana coast via Wikipedia

Over in the UK, mackerel has fallen off the sustainable fisheries list (as I mentioned the other day). Today, George Monbiot over at the Guardian, writes about the new quota rules in place on the mackerel and other fisheries. Of course the news isn't good. I'm reminded of Rapa Nui or Easter Island, when they were able to see that the trees they depended on for survival were being harvested at an unsustainable rate. Rapa Nui is not a really big island, and there is actually a vantage point where you can stand and look around at the whole island. You could see that there were only a few trees left, and you knew that if you didn't stop cutting them down, there would never be another tree. Ever. And when the colonial powers "discovered" the island some years later, there were only a few, half-starved, quite crazy, islanders left. With the head-building frenzy on them, they had knowingly cut down every tree on the island. What little soil there was on the island could now erode away. The boats needed for fishing soon fell into disrepair and became useless. And what was formerly a stable, functional society, had fallen to fallen to religious mania and breath-taking stupidity.
That is the history being played out in our fisheries. Stocks that would have lasted forever with handlining and small boat nets have fallen to the massively stupid trawlers. To a process that not only took too many fish too fast, but destroyed the environment needed by the stocks to replenish themselves. Not only are we as insane as the Easter islanders were, we are that stupid with industrial efficiency.  In Canada, we destroyed the cod fishery (anyone else notice how it's really not coming back?) and we're in the process of destroying the West Coast salmon fishery.
I'll end with a quote from Monbiot's article:

Just before Christmas (which could explain the paucity of coverage the story received), the British government gleefully tore up the scientific advice, trampled the evidence, ignored the pleas of conservationists and gave two fingers to common sense by fighting to prevent the European Union from cutting the catch in the seas surrounding this country.

The chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, Bertie Armstrong, who plainly has a lively sense of humour, called it "a good outcome based on the science". To show how badly this industry has been rolled up in its own nets, he added that "the decision [by the EU] to set our overall share of the mackerel at the traditional level was also a sensible move."
What he is celebrating here is the EU's refusal to resolve the mackerel dispute with Norway, Iceland and the Faroes. All four players insist on awarding themselves a quota way in excess of what the stock can tolerate, with the result mackerel, until a year ago one of the few species not in serious trouble, is now being fished at a completely unsustainable rate. That, dear reader, is a "sensible move".
Again and again over the past few decades, our fishing industry has clamoured noisily to cut its own throat, then responded with astonishment and fury when it collapses as a result. Is there a clearer example of being blinded to your long-term interests by short-term greed?
All this has been accompanied by the government's failure to establish the 127 marine conservation zones it promised, and even more astonishing refusal to exclude industrial activities (principally commercial fishing) from any of the 31 it deigns to designate.

Alzheimer's Me

That's not cauliflower...

George Monbiot has brought to our attention that there seems to be a strong link between "junk food" consumption and Alzheimer's--now in the process of being renamed type 3 diabetes.

Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.
New Scientist carried this story on its cover on 1 September; since then I've been sitting in the library, trying to discover whether it stands up. I've now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I've tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. Though the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.
About 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease worldwide; current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050. But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain's impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the United States, the percentage of the population with type 2 diabetes, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years. If Alzheimer's, or "type 3 diabetes", goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.

This is not about obesity, as such. This is about the ways in which we process our food.  The food we eat has been produced by, as George Monbiot says, "A scarcely regulated food industry [which] can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating." How are we supposed to fight that? It takes a committed government intervention to ensure that, even if it does no real good, at least our food system does no harm. Yet we have a Prime Minister in Canada who is religiously committed to removing all regulation on business.
We can resist as individuals, but we are caring for the results as a society. It would seem, therefore, that we could insist, as a society, that first we do no harm. And the funny thing is, if we did brign about the revolution in our food supply that we so desperately need, it would also serve to democratise the wealth in our food system as well. More producers sharing the pot, well, that's something we can't even imagine in Harper's Canada.
BTW, a fully referenced version of George Monbiot's The Mind Theives can be found here.