Chaos and U.S. Power

Gilbert Achcar on U.S. foreign policy and violence in the Middle East; Jack Miles on Iraqi oil; Syed Saleem Shahzad on Musharraf's predicament; Alain Gresh on America's New Backyard

Read together, these three commentaries suggest how fragile things are becoming in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon, countries which are regarded in decreasing order of importance by U.S. planners. The strategic challenge they are faced with, like the British a century ago in the same region, is maintaining a level of conflict between clients and non-clients that is high enough to prevent broad alliances against foreign influence from forming, but low enough to prevent total chaos.

But as Alain Gresh shows in the above article, U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan (like Soviet-occupied Afghanistan) are becoming magnets for multinational, multiethnic coalitions of pan-Muslim nationalists, many from countries thousands of miles away. The indirect U.S. backing of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, direct U.S. involvement (including air and naval deployments) in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia last winter, the expansion of the Afghan war into Pakistani Waziristan, and threats war against Iran from Republicans and Democrats alike have involved the U.S. in armed conflicts and local struggles from the Horn of Africa to South Asia. (One might add that, with U.S.-Malian and U.S.-Filipino joint military exercises and operations taking place in the last year, the U.S. is at war across the entire Muslim world.)

An excerpt from Gresh's article:

The landscape of the Middle East has been redrawn. This was the objective of Pentagon strategists and the neo-conservatives; but it is doubtful whether the results match their dreams of remodelling the region to secure the lasting hold that the French and British established after the first world war.

Western forces are directly involved in ferocious conflicts across the broader Middle East. Afghanistan has collapsed into chaos, dragging US and Nato troops down with it. It will be hard to heal the wounds in Iraq, where religious and ethnic rivalries and resistance to foreign occupation have caused hundreds of thousands of casualties – more, according to some observers, than the Rwandan genocide. Lebanon is mired in a silent civil war between Fuad Siniora’s government and the opposition, centred on Hizbullah and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement; despite a significant UN presence, the war with Israel could resume at any moment. Colonisation and repression have accelerated the geographical and social fragmentation of Palestine, and the possibly irreversible collapse of the national movement. Since Ethiopia’s US-backed intervention in December 2006, Somalia has been called the “new front in the war on terror”. Then there are Darfur, the tensions in Pakistan, a “terrorist threat" in North Africa and the possibility of a new confrontation between Syria and Israel.

A self-fulfilling prophecy
All these conflicts have been subsumed into a US world view that projects a specific meaning on to them. During and after the cold war, the US (like the Soviet Union) viewed any crisis in the light of the East-West conflict. So the issue in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s was not the Sandinista struggle against a brutal dictatorship in an attempt to build a fairer society, but the danger that the country might become part of an “evil empire” (4). This cost the people of Nicaragua a decade of war and destruction. The US is indifferent to the problems of the Palestinians, the crisis in Somalia or the sectarian conflict in Lebanon; it is fixated on a global confrontation between good and evil. And this discourse feeds al-Qaida’s vision of a continuing war against Jews and crusaders.

This dichotomy has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which local forces have exploited for their own ends. Somalia’s transitional federal government – corrupt, incompetent warlords–persuaded the White House that international terrorism was at work (5). The US responded by encouraging Ethiopian military intervention in an attempt to expel the Union of Islamic Courts forces that had seized Mogadishu six months previously (see page 4). Global preconceptions eclipsed the real internal situation. Christian Ethiopia’s invasion of its Muslim neighbour served only to enhance the credibility of ultra-radical Islamist groups (6). Lebanon is a fragile entity that depends upon a subtle sectarian alchemy. By deciding to support one side against the other, the US and France made any internal resolution more difficult. Lebanon has become a battleground where the West and its allies can confront Iran and Syria. And any compromise, however necessary, is in danger of being perceived as a victory for the “forces of evil”. As they have multiplied, the conflicts have become interrelated. Weapons, combatants and skills move across porous frontiers, sometimes in the wake of hundreds of thousands of refugees driven into exile by the fighting. Over the past two years combat techniques pioneered in Iraq have spread to Afghanistan – the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against troop transports, and suicide bombings, which were unknown during the Soviet occupation (and which have now also spread to Algeria).

This summer, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, hundreds of fighters, many of them foreigners who fought in Iraq, held out for more than three months against the Lebanese army. There are thousands of Arab, Pakistani and central Asian combatants now on the loose, all trained in Iraq. Others, trained by the US and Pakistan to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, migrated to terrorist groups in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere, as well as into al-Qaida. All these wars have encouraged a profitable trade: weapons handed out to the Iraqi security forces are now in the hands of Turkish criminals (7).

This sense of overspilling regional violence is confirmed by these news reports:

Dozens feared dead in suicide bomb blasts in Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Fifteen people killed in seven coordinated bomb blasts in Uttar Pradesh, India. The blasts took place near court complexes in three different cities: Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad.

And look at the violence in Iraq from the just the last few days:

Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/24/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/23/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/22/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/21/07
Twin Bombings Kill at Least 26 in Iraq

In other news: Human rights organizations call for a halt to the demolition of 3,000 public housing units in New Orleans. The same cynicism and greed that leads rich countries to push liberalization on the poorest ones is also leading developers to see dollar bills in the "whitening" of New Orleans. This is just another example. Read more!

Green Capitalism, Climate Change, GMOs

Against all historical evidence, the EU is claiming that rapid liberalization will "help Africa develop." In a new draft agreement on Economic Partnership Agreements with the East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda), Brussels is asking the EAC to remove tariffs on 80% of products within 15 years. Kenyan farmers have attempted to file a lawsuit in Kenyan courts to prevent the government from signing the agreement.

The greed and cynicism of the EU, which is matched by the US in its dealings with Latin America, Asia and Africa, is all the more striking in the context of climate change. Right now, a bevy of forecasts from NGOs and governments alike are predicting agricultural declines in the southern hemiphere due to climate change; hundreds of millions of farmers could be driven off the land in the next half-century.

But the loudest European and North American voices on the subject of agriculture in the South are the agribusiness lobbies clamoring for easy access to overseas markets, followed by think tanks and research foundations arguing for a "second Green Revolution." The latter claim that genetically engineered drought- and salt-resistant crops will be the answer to climate-induced agricultural declines. But one has to ask whether the forces driving this research are altruism and contrition over past exploitation, or a coalition of "green capitalists," such as those pushing biofuels like jatropha.

The following article, published earlier this week in the Washington Post, makes truly chilling reading on several levels: the genocidal scenarios bandied about like movie plots; the GMO schemes discussed without mention of possible ecosystemic side effects.

Facing a Threat to Farming and Food Supply

By Rick Weiss Monday, November 19, 2007
Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe's citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture. Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years--along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts-- will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet's lower latitudes, where most of the world's poor live. India, on track to be the world's most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger. Africa--where four out of five people make their liviing directly from the land--could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice.

Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent. Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago. And those estimates do not count the effects of new plant pests and diseases, which are widely expected to come with climate change and could cancel out the positive "fertilizing" effects that higher carbon dioxide levels may offer some plants. Scenarios like these--and the recognition that even less-affected countries such as the United States will experience significant regional shifts in growing seasons, forcing new and sometimes disruptive changes in crop choices--are providing the impetus for a new "green revolution." It is aimed not simply at boosting production, as the first revolution did with fertilizers, but at creating crops that can handle the heat, suck up the salt, not desiccate in a drought and even grow swimmingly while submerged. The work involves conventional breeding of new varieties as well as genetic engineering to transfer specific traits from more resilient species.

As part of those efforts, scientists are also busily preserving seeds from thousands of varieties of the 150 crops that make upmost of the world's agricultural diversity, as well as wild relatives of those crops that may harbor useful but still unidentified genes."For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt," said Ren Wang, director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a network of agricultural research centers. "It's important that we have a wide pool of genetic diversity from which to develop crops with these unique traits."At the same time, scientists are finding that agriculture and related land uses, which today account for about one-third of all greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, can be conducted in much more climate-friendly ways.

But time is of the essence if a worldwide crisis in food security is to be avoided, said William R. Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington-based nonpartisan economic think tanks."You'll have a tripling of world food demand by 2085 because of higher population and bigger economies, and I would not be surprised to see as much as one-third of today's agricultural land devoted to plants for ethanol," Cline said. "So it's going to be a tight race between food supply and demand."The work of developing adaptive plants has begun to pay off. Researchers have discovered ancient varieties of Persian grasses, for example, that have an incredible tolerance for salt water. The scientists are breeding the grasses with commercial varieties of wheat and have found they are growing well in Australia's increasingly salty soils.

Other research is building on the recent discovery of a gene that helps plants survive prolonged periods underwater. Even rice, which grows in wet paddies, will die if it is fully submerged for more than three or four days, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. But recent tests on farms in Bangladesh show that a new line of rice containing the flood-resistance gene can live underwater for two weeks. That's going to be important, Zeigler said, because 70 percent of the world's poor live in Asia -- most of them in south Asia -- where rice is the staple. Yet 50 million acres of that region are already subject to seasonal flooding that can temporarily submerge plants under 10 to 12 feet of water. And the problem is predicted to worsen as climate change brings more intense rainfall there."Crops grow in weather, not in climate," Zeigler said, meaning they must be able to survive not only the anticipated average rises in temperature but also the day-to-day extremes that come with climate change.

Corn is another staple that is getting gussied up to party with the hardy--in this case in preparation for dry spells, which are predicted to increase in Latin America and other corn-growing regions, with a potential 20 percent drop in production over the next 25 years. Recent tests in South Africa showed that drought-resistant maize plants, created by breeding, produced 30 percent to 50 percent more corn than traditional varieties under arid conditions.

But the real test, scientists say, will be to splice in potent drought-resistance genes from plants such as sorghum and millet, which are famously productive even in parched, sub-Saharan Africa. That assumes consumers and regulators will accept such engineered crops, which have been shunned in many countries because of economic and environmental concerns. To the extent that plants cannot adapt to change, farmers will have to. In Uganda, where coffee is an important cash crop but where temperature increases are expected to devastate the plants, researchers are hoping that by planting shade trees, growers can preserve the industry while perhaps even increasing biodiversity. In other parts of Africa, farmers are being taught to add fruit trees to their subsistence farms. The trees can survive droughts and waterlogging better than crops planted annually, and so can serve as an economic bridge across hard times.

Farmers in developed countries must also prepare, experts say. A recent study by researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico concluded that wheat growers in North America will have to give up some of their southernmost fields in the next few decades. But they will be able to farm a full 10 degrees north of their current limit, which extends from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Cape Harrison, Labrador. That means amber waves of grain will be growing less than 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and Siberia will become a major notch in the wheat belt. By changing their practices, and not just their crops, farmers can also temper the buildup of greenhouse gases. New technologies that measure soil nutrient levels are allowing farmers to add only as much fertilizer as is really needed--important because the excess nitrogen in those chemicals gets converted in the soil into nitrous oxide, which has 300 times the greenhouse activity of carbon dioxide. Studies also show that by plowing or tilling less frequently -- planting seeds in the stubble of a previous crop, for example --farmers can significantly reduce evaporation in dry areas and also cut the amount of carbon dioxide released from the soil (and from the exhaust of their tractors, if they have them). Crops grown this way also trap carbon more effectively, becoming part of the solution instead of adding to the problem.

For the truly pessimistic, there is always the "doomsday vault," a seed bank being constructed in a Norwegian mountainside that nations around the world are stocking with every kind of seed imaginable. After all, you never know what kind of plant trait is going to save humanity if the climate makes an unexpected turn, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is leading the effort and who has boasted that the vault will be protected in part by the region's polar bears.That is assuming, of course, that rising temperatures or the newly arrived wheat farmers will not have driven them away.

Meanwhile, new social science research suggests a persistent historical correlation between climate, war and population declines. Building on the work of University of Hong Kong geographer David Zhang, Georgia Tech political scientist Peter Brecke and a team of researchers compared a database of 4,500 wars between 1400 and 1900 with climate change records assembled by paleo-climatologists. They found a persistent pattern of turbulence and warfare during colder periods, followed by migration and population declines, and relative calm in warmer periods. But the researchers argue that the effect of climate change could be analogous to temperature declines in the past, as extreme heat, like extreme cold, will disrupt agriculture and increasing migration pressures. I will reserve judgment until I get a chance to read the paper. But their conclusions are interesting. Read more!

News and Analysis 11/20/07

The FBI has reported that hate crimes in the U.S. rose 8% in 2006. Of 7,720 "single-bias incidents," 51.8% were "racially motivated." Hate crimes are a minor issue, however, compared to the fact that the income gap between blacks and whites has grown in the last 30 years. And it's no surprise: what is sometimes mythologized as a post-civil rights period of ascent towards equality has really been one of retrenchment and backlash. From tax-based school funding to the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush prison boom, the policy of the U.S. government toward black and brown America since the 1970s has been one of racial neoliberalism.

Since Hurricane Katrina, many have warned that white elites will attempt to 'whitewash' New Orleans demographically and politically as well as economically. Well, this is exactly what is happening. The NY Times reports that the New Orleans City Council is now majority white for the first time in two decades.

The death toll from the cyclone in Bangladesh last week, initially calculated at around 1,000, has now been lifted to 3,100. In the most affected districts of the country, according to CBC, up to "70 percent of of homes — mostly made of mud and bamboo — have been partially or completely destroyed, while an estimated 300,000 hectares of crops were lost in the storm." The death toll numbers are probably low, however. From Bangladesh's Daily Star: Pounded Patharghata now a valley of death

The official death count for the upazila, until Saturday, was 307. But even a cursory examination on the ground, witness reports, and simply from the number of mass graves, the death toll is well over 3,000. Cut off from the rest of the country, the upazila was accessible only by air or a long-route by the sea. The approach road was blocked by fallen trees and power-lines, preventing any relief vehicle from entering within a 40-kilometre area.The corpses were found wrapped in paddy sheaves on rice fields, emanating heavy stench of rotting flesh. Most of the bodies were found one or two kilometres from where their homes had been. Some bodies lay tangled on tree branches, some were lining the shore, some unidentified were just left to rot. Sidr rose out of the southern-most village of Patharghata -- Padma. First, it took out a five-kilometre stretch of homes that had been built on the slope of a long mud-baked embankment lining the border of the village. In its wake, a 20-feet tidal surge wiped out the entire community. The tide swept the houses and most of its inhabitants, carrying them two to three kilometres inland. Most of the corpses were found three, sometimes four villages away. In one small pocket, where a 100-metre stretch of the embankment was damaged by a previous flood, the tidal surge wreaked its greatest havoc.The tide broke through the embankment and channelled all of its awesome power through that 100-metre gap razing all of at least 50 homes in one clean sweep.The power of the deadly tidal surge is evident by the vanishing of the big mosque building, made of bricks and concrete, which used to occupy a section of that small pocket."We were about to run to the shelter my mother, my wife, two nephews, and I when we saw the great big wave. I looked up and up and there was no end to it. It swept us up and I grabbed the first tree trunk that I could find," said Delwar, one of the rare survivors from the ill-fated 50 homes. The rest of his family died. At least 135 corpses from that small pocket of Padma village were found till Saturday morning.Similar ghastly stories were found in three other villages along the Baleshwar river, in Rohita, Tangra, and Gouharpur. With at least 400 corpses from Padma village alone, the death toll was rising and no one knew or dared to imagine what it was.

Some 20,000 people protested the School of the Americas at Fort Bening, Georgia yesterday. The School of the Americas, like Philip Morris (now Altria), has renamed itself in an attempt to shed bad publicity. It now calls itself the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Indeed, the SOA is so notorious that 203 members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to close it in June, but came up six votes short of the majority.

Run by the U.S. Department of Defense, the SOA has been a major conduit of state terror in Latin America since 1946. SOA graduates include a long rogues' gallery of military dictators and death squad commanders. To name just a few, graduates of the SOA are implicated in atrocities in Argentina (Leopoldo Galtieri, Roberto Viola), Bolivia (Hugo Banzer), Peru (Vladimiro Montesinos), Panama (Omar Torrijos, Manuel Noriega), Guatemala (José Efraín Ríos Montt), Honduras (Policarpo Paz Garcia, Aquilino Sorto Gonzalez, and many others), El Salvador (Roberto D'Aubuisson, Jose Guillermo Garcia, and many others). And this merely scratches the surface, as at least 63,000 Latin American military personnel have been trained in the school, averaging 700-1,000 students a year.

Even the most ardent ex-Cold Warriors, quick to defend all U.S.-backed state repression between 1917 and 1989 as a justifiable counter to "the threat of communism" (the same arguments are now recycled for Uribe, Mubarak, Musharraf, Arroyo...) cannot defend the documented slaughter of 200,000 Mayan indian civilians, the assassination of archbishops and trade unionists, the torture and rape of teenage girls and nuns.

Even if most Americans do not understand the role of the U.S. government in arming, training and funding thugs and killers in other countries, the populations of those countries do. And those on the recieving end of chemical weapons, coups, proxy invasions and nuclear weapons are likely to percieve U.S. foreign policy a bit differently from those who get their news from MSNBC, CNN and FOX.

Similarly, for most Kenyans the phrase "Mau Mau" conjures up savagery of the white British kind, rather than of the black African kind. Read more!

News and Commentary for 11/17/07

The U.S. Congress has passed the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement. Among the provisions: removal of duties on some 80% of U.S. exports to Peru, including subsidized cotton, corn and wheat (which will drive more Peruvian farmers off the land); expanded rights to drill in the Peruvian Amazon (which is why Occidental Petroleum, for example, has been lobbying hard for the FTA); and the greater opening of Peru's urban commercial sectors to foreign competition (hence the enthusiasm of Wal-Mart, Citibank, and others).

Brazil may purchase a nuclear submarine to "protect" the massive offshore oil reserves recently discovered at Tupi.

Speaking of nukes, the always-perceptive Azmi Bishara has written a good op-ed piece on Hiroshima and the Machiavellian logic of U.S. elites.

A massive cyclone hit Bangladesh on Thursday, killing a reported 1,100 people. Some 650,000 coastal villagers have fled to shelters, and 150 fishing trawlers are unaccounted for. The cyclone caused the power system in much of Bangladesh to collapse, leaving millions without power. This also led to a disruption in piped water supplies, as pumps could not be started.

The water problems in Bangladesh are a reminder of the complex supply chains and interdependencies that make urban life possible. The water crisis in Atlanta is another such reminder.

Climate Change and Water Wars

Tom Engelhardt's points out in this article that severe droughts are simultaneously afflicting the southern and midwestern U.S., North Africa, southeastern Europe, Mexico and Australia. Speculating about the possibility of mass migrations and resource conflicts over water in the U.S., he asks why the topic of water security--and what will happen if drought conditions take hold in major cities like Atlanta--is rarely broached in the U.S. media.

The IPCC impact assessments suggest that, even by conservative projections, there will be reductions in crop production in the most populous rural areas on the planet over the next few decades. But we have no reason to believe in convervative projections: U.S. carbon emissions are not only growing, their rate of growth is accelerating, and is predicted to continue to accelerate.

While there may actually be a boost in food production in parts of the U.S. due to climate change, in much of the farm belt food production will decrease. The IPCC 4th Assesment Report predicts:

"By mid-century, annual average river runoff and water availability are projected to increase by 10-40% at high latitudes and in some wet tropical areas, and decrease by 10-30% over some dry regions at mid-latitudes and in the dry tropics, some of which are presently water-stressed areas. [...] Crop productivity is projected to increase slightly at mid- to high latitudes for local mean temperature increases of up to 1-3°C depending on the crop, and then decrease beyond that in some regions. At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2°C), which would increase the risk of hunger. Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase with increases in local average temperature over a range of 1-3°C, but above this it is projected to decrease. [...] Increases in the frequency of droughts and floods are projected to
affect local crop production negatively, especially in subsistence sectors at low latitudes."

Two things need to be noted here: 1) these "subsistence sectors in low latitudes" include the most densely populated parts of coastal Asia, Africa and Latin America; and 2) increases of 1-2°C (under which "crop productivity is projected to decrease" in these regions) are at the low end of moderate IPCC predictions for temperature increases. So a fall in crop productivity in most of the world, most dangerously in the bread baskets of the southern hemisphere, is virtually assured. And this despite the fact that, at current growth rates, world population is expected to "crest" at 9 billion by 2050 . Unequivocally, then, anyone who advocates "business as usual" is advocating mass death.

Unfortunately, in a culture where possessive individualism is exalted by all-pervasive private and state propoganda as the highest collective aim, action on climate change might require its effects being "brought home" to the global north through drought and wildfires. As long there is a perceived geographical split between the greatest per capita carbon emitters and the greatest victims of climate change, it is likely that popular pressures will remain weak. Read more!

Bottlenecks, Supply-Demand Crises, and Rising Food and Oil Prices

As Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pointed out in his 1971 classic The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, all forms of production and consumption are ultimately tributaries of solar energy flow captured through mining, forestry and agriculture. Despite the vast diversity of output in the global economy—from art to artillery—the main inputs are relatively simple: fossil fuels, minerals, timber and food (especially grains).

One of the results of the Industrial Revolution was to tie food production to fossil fuel inputs. The supply-demand dynamics of food and oil (and the distortions of cartels and subsidies) are as inseparable in industrial capitalism as air is from water in the atmosphere. And now the atmospheric effects of fossil fuel inputs since 1750 could reduce yields of rice, wheat and corn by as much as a third in Asia, Africa and Latin America(where the overwhelming majority of subsistence farmers now live).

These news stories from the last few days capture the interrelated dynamics of food production, oil consumption and climate change:

Global Food Crisis Looms as Climate and Fuel Shortages Bite
Rising Food Prices To Hit Consumption
Frenzy in the Markets as Oil Heads for $100 a Barrel
IEA Sounds Alarm Over Huge Energy Demands
High-Prices Oil Adds Volatility to Power Scramble

To see how these interrelationships work, look no further than the U.S. corn industry. As Michael Pollan shows in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the seeming diversity of products in U.S. supermarkets is largely corn-based. Corn-based sweeteners have replaced cane sugar in most U.S. soft drinks; U.S. bacon, eggs, milk and hamburgers (through corn-based pig, chicken and cattle-feed) ultimately come from corn. Corn is used in 2,500 out of 10,000 products sold in the average U.S. supermarket. This dietary monopoly is made possible through obscenely large subsidies ($51.3 billion from 1995 to 2005), about 63% of which go to the top 10% of enterprises, the main suppliers of corporate processors like Cargill and Archer Daniel's Midland. In fact, 3 or 4 corporations control 81% of corn exports in the U.S., 60% of the grain handling facilities, 61% of flour milling, and 49% of ethanol production.

The result (a real irony considering the anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. corn belt) is an export subsidy to the agribusiness giants of over $100 million annually to dump U.S. corn on the Mexican market under the neoliberal NAFTA rules. According to the Mexican government itself, U.S. corn dumping has driven around 2 million Mexican farmers off the land. CAFTA is now bringing this dynamic to Guatemala, Honduras and other signatories with small corn farmers.


Besides fuelling poverty in Latin America and obesity in the U.S., this subsidized corn production is fragile, because it's overwhelmingly oil-based. On average, 10 calories of fossil fuel energy are burned for every 1 calorie of food energy produced in the U.S. The fertilizers, the tractors, the processing equipment, the refrigerated trucks, the plastic packaging and grocery bags: all require oil.

The intimate connection of oil and food inputs at the base of the global economy means that changes in supply and demand affect both. We see this in rising food and oil prices worldwide, reported side by side by the Financial Times today:
To be continued...






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