From Net Zero to Glyphosate: Agritech’s Greenwashed Corporate Power Grab
Colin Todhunter
Today, in the mainstream narrative, there is much talk of a ‘food transition’. Big agribusiness and ‘philanthropic’ foundations position themselves as the saviours of humanity due to their much- promoted plans to ‘feed the world’ with ‘precision’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ agriculture and ‘sustainable’ production.
These are the very institutions responsible for the social, ecological and environmental degradation associated with the current food system. The same bodies responsible for spiralling rates of illness due to the toxic food they produce or promote.
In this narrative, there is no space for any mention of the type of power relations that have shaped the prevailing food system and many of the current problems.
Tony Weis from the University of Western Ontario provides useful insight:
World agriculture is marked by extreme imbalances that are among the most durable economic legacies of European imperialism. Many of the world’s poorest countries in the tropics are net food importers despite having large shares of their labor force engaged in agriculture and large amounts of their best arable land devoted to agro-export commodities.”
He adds that this commodity dependence has deep roots in waves of dispossession, the establishment of plantations and the subjugation of peasantries to increasing competitive pressures at the same time as they were progressively marginalised.
In the 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.
By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their productive means) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).
In more recent times, neoliberalism has further reinforced the power relations that underpin the system, cementing the control of agricultural production by global corporations and facilitated by the policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Corporate food transition
The food transition is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability. It envisages a particular future for farming. It is not organic and relatively few farmers have a place in it.
Post-1945, corporate agribusiness, largely backed by the US state, the Rockefeller Foundation and financial institutions, has been promoting and instituting a chemical-dependent system of industrial agriculture. Rural communities, ecological systems, the environment, human health and indigenous systems of food cultivation have been devastated in the process.
Now, the likes of Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta are working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate farmerless farms driven by cloud and AI technology. A cartel of data owners and proprietary input suppliers are reinforcing their grip on the global food system while expanding their industrial model of crop cultivation.
One way they are doing this is by driving the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a contested commentary that has been carefully promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology and tying this to carbon offsetting and carbon credits.
Many companies from various sectors are securing large areas of land in the Global South to establish tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can sell on international carbon markets. In the meantime, by supposedly ‘offsetting’ their emissions, they can carry on polluting.
In countries where industrial agriculture dominates, ‘carbon farming’ involves modifying existing practices to claim that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then sell carbon credits.
This is explained in a recent presentation by Devlin Kuyek of the non-profit GRAIN who sets out the corporate agenda behind carbon farming.
One of the first major digital agriculture platforms is called Climate FieldView, an app owned by Bayer. It collects data from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply, etc. FieldView is already being used on farms in the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Europe.
To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in Bayer’s FieldView digital agriculture platform. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: reduced tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.
Through the app, the company monitors these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets.
In August 2022, Bayer launched a new programme in the US called ForGround. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for tilling equipment, forage seeds and other inputs. But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim emissions reductions in their supply chains.
Places like India are also laying the groundwork for these types of platforms. In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers.
Microsoft will ‘help’ farmers with post-harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices. In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.
CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details –
- Profile of land held – cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions.
- Production details – crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession.
- Financial details – input costs, average return, credit history.
The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution.
However, this initiative also involves providing data on land holding deeds with the intention of implementing a land market so that investors can buy up land and amalgamate it – global equity funds regard agricultural land as a valuable asset, and global agritech/agribusiness companies prefer industrial-scale farms for rolling out highly mechanised ‘precision’ agriculture.
‘Data-driven agriculture’ mines data to be exploited by the agribusiness/big tech giants who will know more about farmers than farmers know about themselves. The likes of Bayer and Microsoft will gain increasing control over farmers, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use.
And as GRAIN notes, getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer. The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with its RoundUp (toxic glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically engineered (GE) Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.
Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel.
GE has always been a solution in need of a problem. Along with its associated money-spinning toxic chemicals, it has failed to deliver on its promises (see GMO Myths and Truths, published by Open Earth Source) and has sometimes been disastrous when rolled out, not least for poor farmers in India.
Whereas traditional breeding and on-farm practices have little or no need for GE technologies, under the guise of ‘climate emergency’, the data and agritech giants are commodifying knowledge and making farmers dependent on their platforms and inputs. The commodification of knowledge and compelling farmers to rely on proprietary inputs overseen by algorithms will define what farming is and how it is to be carried out.
The introduction of technology into the sector can benefit farmers. But understanding who owns the technology and how it is being used is crucial for understanding underlying motivations, power dynamics and the quality of food we end up eating.
Net-zero Ponzi scheme
In its article From land grab to soil grab: the new business of carbon farming, GRAIN says control rather than sequestering carbon is at the heart of the matter. More than half of the soil organic matter in the world’s agricultural soils has already been lost. Yet, the main culprits behind this soil catastrophe are now recasting themselves as soil saviours.
Under the guise of Green Revolution practices (application of chemicals, synthetic fertilisers, high water usage, hybrid seeds, intensive mono-cropping, increased mechanisation, etc), what we have seen is an exploitative form of agriculture which has depleted soil of its nutrients. It has also resulted in placing farmers on corporate seed and chemical treadmills.
Similarly, carbon farming draws farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and big tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are major buyers of carbon credits). The companies intend to make their digital platforms one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.
Those best placed to benefit from these programmes are the equity funds and the wealthy who have been buying up large farmland areas. Financial managers can now use digital platforms to buy farms in Brazil, sign them up for carbon credits, and run their operations all from their offices on Wall Street.
As for the carbon credit and carbon trading market, this appears to be another profitable Ponzi scheme from which traders will make a financial killing.
Journalist Patrick Greenfield states that research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.
The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies – some of them have labelled their products ‘carbon neutral’ or have told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the ‘climate crisis’ worse.
Washington-based Verra operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than a billion carbon credits. It approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest protection programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves.
Although Verra disputes the findings, only a handful of Verra’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions – 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.
The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study.
Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, has been researching carbon credits for 20 years, hoping to find a way to make the system function.
She says that companies are using credits to make claims of reducing emissions when most of these credits don’t represent emissions reductions at all:
“Rainforest protection credits are the most common type on the market at the moment. But these problems are not just limited to this credit type. These problems exist with nearly every kind of credit.”
Genuine food transition
The ‘food transition involves’ locking farmers further into an exploitative corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and private equity funds. Farmers will be reduced to corporate labourers or profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.
The predatory commercialisation of the countryside is symptomatic of a modern-day colonialist mindset that cynically undermines indigenous farming practices and uses flawed premises and fear mongering to legitimise the roll-out of technologies and chemicals to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.
A genuine food transition would involve transitioning away from the reductionist yield-output industrial paradigm to a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises local food security, diverse cropping patterns and nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures.
It would involve localised, democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture (there are numerous concrete examples of regenerative agriculture, many of which are described on the website of Food Tank).
This would also involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense and free from toxic chemicals and ensuring local (communal) ownership and stewardship of common resources, including land, water, soil and seeds.
This is the basis of genuine food security and genuine environmentalism – based on short-line supply chains that keeps wealth within local communities rather than it being siphoned off by profit-seeking entities half a world away.
Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his “mini e-book”, Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Cultivating Resistance, here.
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The glyphosate should be stuffed down your neck until you die miserably, fucking stupid assholes!
A quick note on a certain commenter here and his lengthy, opaque comments. His main gripe seems to stem from just two short paragraphs that refer to Jason Hickel.
I also used a quote by Tony Weis. Both Weis and Hickel are referred to in order to shed brief insight into how power relations have historically shaped the prevailing food system.
Weis’s expertise lies in food sovereignty, industrial agriculture and developing systems of cultivation and trade that improve farmers’ lives. In this respect, my interests overlap with Weis.
But because I also refer to Hickel, the commenter deems it necessary to go down the ‘degrowth’ rabbit hole and attack the article for not discussing degrowth or acknowledging it as the solution to the problems humanity faces.
I chose not to expand on Hickel and degrowth and to concentrate on describing how big agritech is distorting farming and trapping farmers on its high-tech treadmills. And my solution for challenging and resisting this relates to changing how we farm and produce food. In turn, this is based on localisation, food sovereignty and political agroecology. Of course, these concepts often link to the degrowth issue, but my focus was deliberately narrower.
The commenter says I am giving “A disingenuous passing reference (to Hickel) that completely avoids the solutions-thinking JH is proposing.”
Indeed, because that was not the purpose of the article.
I could have referred to any number of writers to make my point. If I had taken a quote by Marx, it does not necessarily follow that I should then give a detailed account of socialism as the ‘solution’. I see nothing “disingenuous” in my reference to Hickel.
Apparently, the article is also ungrounded in any fact and that capitalism, neoliberalism and colonialism are nothing but fictive entities – these concepts are merely outpourings of nonsense. Quite a claim.
A touch of projection?
Readers can make their own minds up.
If one thing and one thing only could be done to make the world a better place, that one thing would have to be destroying the Stock Market. Especially the Futures Market.
It wouldn’t cure all humanity’s ills. But at least the world would no longer be one giant Casino.
Honest Q: – Why does ‘Net Zero’ somehow involve all of us imbibing/ingesting/injecting ever greater quantities of poison?…
…- Asking for a friend… 😉
Net Zero does not say what is to be brought to zero. That is a hint.
And they will lie and force their shite onto the people through lax labelling laws, thanks to our corrupt and bloated government institutions, like they’ve done with genetically engineered soy, peanuts, corn, etc.
Yet more information confirming that neither Big Business or any government is acting in the interests of ordinary people.
At the Paris Climate Conference, we heard the admission that small-scale and traditional farming is
-. far more efficient in production
-. vital to sustainability.
It is also largely independent in inputs. Yet, PTB have managed to bury the message from Paris. WB, IMF and WTO and other gangsters push the destruction of local food security. Satrapies comply as follows:
– withholding loans or other aid to traditional farmers
– accepting and imposing poor crop varieties, cash crops and destrutive agro-chemicals
– ending local subsidies while accepting subsidised imports
– selling arable land to foreigners for any crop including “carbon credit” forests
– accepting bribes through the offshore banking system.
Trusting a Bayer to advise you on how much to spray or fertilize: what could go wrong?
I am making another call out on these pages for people wanting to build a community around food in the Merseyside Wirral area in north west England.
I have a third of an acre that I have turned into a community allotment. My main problem is finding people that will actually put in the work and sacrifice some of their nice little life to build a community around local grown nutritious food. Have had everyone from vegan to new age gurus to just normal families and always seems to be the same once summer comes people don’t have the time or interest.
if you are in the area and interested please get in touch
Lazy Bastards, they’ll come running sooner or later. Good luck.
I don’t know if the “forest fires” of the past in CA or presently in Canada have any present connection to the war on food, but here’s a little something:
PG&E, which has a Rothschild board member, is involved in weather modification. And, according to materials disclosed due to a FOIA request, PG&E has a satellite-based laser. And a PG&E e-mail notes that it is capable of destroying any place within its range.
(Destroy– as in burning)
I doubt if any laser has such power for such distances through air. This could be another flat-Earth type of operation.
Colin Modihunter’s home made facts:
Antonym’s home made facts:
•I’m right.
• You’re wrong.
• So there.
Anonymous Antonym’s whataboutism default position and outright lies relating to what I have/have not said. Any mention of India is always taken to be a personal attack on Modi. It’s tiresome.
Not all Germans have been left in the cold:
https://brownstone.org/articles/who-owns-biontech/
From your Link:
“the main profiteer in the Covid-19 “vaccine” gold rush of the last two years is not Pfizer, but previously tiny German firm BioNTech… As shown in my earlier article here, for 2021 and 2022 combined, BioNTech earned over $31 billion in Covid-19 “vaccine” with a whopping 77 percent profit margin as compared to Pfizer’s $20 billion on an estimated 27.5 percent profit margin.”
Those German Girls are not so Green after all, the Gold-diggers.
When we stop asking questions we have ‘grown up’
Yeah, into an ignoramus:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/06/proven-guilty-of-innocence-but-not-naivety/
Voices ☺. organic chemistry Monsanto USA. I’d forgotten names until I came to the US noticing the vast range of products available to Americans for their back gardens. I think names are no longer of concerns other than perhaps the elevated middle classes whom choose not to grow anything of nutritional values in their own back yard.
Politically blaming each other is utterly foolish which will only enhance their very owned irrelevance…subsistence etc.etc.to monetary property valuations.
There is one funding defining unavoidable overriding factor however more often conveniently omitted in discussions…..The greater distances from what that person choses to consume leading all the back to where it came from to begin with. ..supply chains, each link is easy explainable to the most stubborn dummies. Here’s the Chit…Pinprick, you got two mins more of Chit Chat, CCP..No.. really..ok Cronie CCCP.
I think that’s what The Market calls…A Red Cent Prick.
Thanks for this! So the more pesticide you use, the more carbon credits you get. That should come as a surprise to many people.
What I wonder is where the profits are. A land owner that uses his farmland without pesticides produces more and better food. Converting to pesticides and genetically modified crops reduces his output. That’s wealth destruction.
How do you turn this destruction into wealth creation or extraction?
Well, the land owner, or farmer in this case, will continue to lose profits, as you point out. But he will be required to buy inputs from large agro companies. Eventually, this will drive him into real debt even with all those nice “carbon credits” he’s generating for someone, and he will owe those companies more than he can produce. They’ll graciously accept his land as payment for those debts, thereby consolidating the corporation’s holdings. As that farmer’s debt may be less than his actual property value, that corporation just made a killing on the “purchase’ of his land…. If lucky that famer may walk away with a little money for that land after paying his debt, but I would imagine not much and maybe they penalize him because he’s no longer generating all those nice carbon credits for his investors, so he could walk away with nothing or even still owing said large agro corporation.
I guess we’d call that extraction from the farmer to create wealth for the large corporation or those who invest in it. But yes, it’s definitely wealth destruction for the farmer who has now lost everything, but who cares about him or her as long as the corps are making money and the stock market returns are positive for investors.
But then you know all this by now. Destruction on one side, enrichment on the other. Guess which side always wins that game?
“Guess which side always wins that game?”
Not always. Dutch farmers seem to be winning the 3rd Boer War.
Britain can always dream of producing a new Attlee, taxing the parasites, digging for victory and feeding itself.
With Attlee as Coalition Prime Minister while Churchill was making great speeches, Britain became the only country in history to increase the health of its population while fighting a major war.
“When Churchill took the chair we heard a great speech and went home at midnight feeling we had witnessed an historic event. When Attlee took the chair there was an agenda, we worked through it and went home at 5pm feeling we had done a good day’s work” — Downing Street secretary, WW2.
Thanks for your thoughts. You say it’s about ownership of lands. That’s a common topic these days! One result of the Ukraine war seems to be gain of land ownership for Western investors.
So the investors force the farmers out with rules on pesticides. The farmers have to mortgage their land to purchase the pesticides. They can’t repay the loans and ownership of the lands passes to the investors. At this point, why keep using the pesticides? The investors now own the land, why not make the most of it?
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.
From The First Global Revolution, 1990, by The Club of Rome
The Club of Rome inspired the UN’s Agenda 2030 and whole Sustainable Development movement, it was co-founded by David Rockefeller and other rich and politically powerful people, its membership is made of the same elites who go to the Bilderberg conferences, Trilateral commission, WEF, etc.
The First Global Revolution was written just as the communist bloc fell apart in 1990. In that book they said that since communism was ending, spending so much money on the military industrial complex (MIC) could now also end — that the rational response would be to use that money for them. Their stated idea is to over-hype man-made environmental problems in order to create anxiety or fear in people, to make them anxious enough to inspire governments, especially America, to financially support their agenda.” From To Agenda 2030 and Beyond
Soylent Green is people.
#eatthebugs
So, Big Pharma tried and failed to kill us all, now it’s time for Big Farmer to have a go.
Its not the tools that are the problem. As usual its the corporate infrastructure that hijacks and perverts everything in the search for raw material for what they call ‘financial engineering’.
Most famines have occured in the midst of plenty. Its never that there’s not enough food to go around but rather there’s not enough money available for people to buy that food (and the other side of the coin — not enough of a market to make growing the food profitable).
Everything boils down to ‘making those payments’ with the added twist that in the modern world ‘yield management’ focuses productive effort not on what’s good for people and the world we live in but what can make the largest profit.
While I agree that there is a desire for profit, seeking profit isn’t a cause in of itself.
Meaning, that when the majority of people on the planet, are moral, of good character, and ethical, they make choices in business that provide profit while at the same time not harming anyone.
In today’s world of fractionalized banking (Dishonest Money), debt based monetary policy, and a Central Banking Cartel, dictating all manner of economics, we have a system that is dominated by people of no morals, bad character, and unethical behavior, that causes massive harm to all people. These types of people don’t care who dies due to famine as they stuff their pie hole with all manner of food.
Nothing is going to change until people rise up and strike down those that have taken control of everything.
I think Nature usually takes care of the ‘rising up and taking down part.’ And then, historically, the most egalitarian society rules for a fraction of a geological second, evinced by archaeological sites such as the Harappan.
In his 2018 book (and his 2020 book) Hickel does indeed describe how the net flows of the European colonial appropriation of wealth, resources, and labour impoverished, indeed, created the Third World (not his term) – creating “the Divide.” In his follow-up work he goes on to describe how the “net imperial appropriation” never ended, it just transformed. (Those are his actual terms.) (Cf.“Post-Colonialism”)
The Third World is the creation of the First World supplying materials, consumer products and subsistent labour gratis; wherever 74% of the excess material use as imperial appropriation is consumed by us, effectively for free. That is a netzero consumer powergrab by us in the HICs. We live their poverty.
Indeed, Hickel, Kallis, Hornborg et al describe our net appropriation as “Ecologic Unfair Exchange”; expanding Amin and Emmanuel’s concept of “hidden transfers of value” as subsidising the ‘western’ consumptive lifestyle by $2.2 tn per annum. Much of the material and labour they supply goes from their land to our landfill in six months as municipal waste. A parasitic feat of such spectacular disregard for life that would not be achievable if we had to do the labour ourselves (at their rates); and/or pay the Third World the going rate for their materials. The Third World would then be the First World. If the ratios of extraction and repression were inverted: I wonder how we would perceive things than?
Thereafter, there is no divide as such; only an asymmetric material flow and inverse proportional lifestyle imperialism; accelerating privative and possessive accumulation and proportional repressive dispossession, dehumanisation, alienation and marginalisation – that which is a structural dependency to western civilisation. The HICs get materially richer because the LICs get progressively pauperised by our material consumptogenesis.The whole earth-transforming production and consumption bioaccumulation cycle goes from their resources to their sinks with netzero economic benefit to anybody, just accelerating ecologic harm.
In all of his work – particularly in “Less is More” – Hickel also gives the solution to this lifestyle imperialism; namely,“degrowth.” We who consumed the world – as centred on neo-European materialism – could choose not to consume the rest of the world. Redressing the balance of that $2.2 per annum draining alone – if achieved by materialist degrowth as redistribution – would be “enough to end extreme poverty, globally, fifteen times over.” [Hickel] We live globalised poverty.
Indeed: “Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain (“hidden transfer of value”) totalled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.” We lived the pauperisation and proletarianisation of this and the otherised of the species.
Funny, I read no such direct inference above; only an obliquely referenced corporatism, neoliberalism, “profit seeking entities half a world away” – that’s us. For a fraction of the energy-consumption parasitised from the Third World employed into making figmentary ‘corporate demons’ – the evil 0.001% – the real and true state of the world could have been exposed long ago.
Please read what Jason actually said elsewhere – and not just the reactionary version; namely on his blog: “jasonhickel.org” where most of the above can be sourced. Otherwise, the data is clear – we do the consuming and the obscuring: while they do the expiring, perspiring and dying. But that could be changed. Degrowth or barbarism?
You will own nothing and be happy.
Translation:
We will steal your property, kidnap your children, and drug you, and mind control you, into thinking you are happy.
but first of all we will take away your jobs and economic independence, and we will transform the working class into a mass of useless eaters, without economic independence, without social and economic identity, therefore without civil and political rights. This is the real tragedy that is taking place.
Only to people that don’t possess arms.
This is claptrap written by hired academic shills, to evade the real question and truthful answer of whom is directly profiting from the corporate rape, exploitation and control of commonly owned resources in the third, second and first world.
The labor is being extracted by the national and multinational corporations (who are owned and controlled by the same entities who owned and control all governments) not by “the west”. And not by the end consumers of the products.
This deliberate avoidance of blame by governments in cahoots with corporate entities, specifically to sell unneeded products in excess packaging to consumers whilst offering special tax breaks to these multinationals, and letting them extract the common wealth, without reimbursing citizenry, all whilst urging consumers in the 1st world to consume, is a well organized, worldwide racketeering operation that has been functioning since the East India Company et al, was formed and slaves were used to amass fortunes for this cartel. It’s a world wide conspiracy by the cartel owners of these corporate entities that are the real hidden profiteers and the engineers of all the exploitation. Easily proven by following the money.
What we are talking about here is exactly material consumption that end users use and discard as measurable in tonnes. Like 27 tonnes per capita in the HICs and fuck all of fuck all in the rest of the world because the resources have gone north, not south. A material flow that would be creating merry hell if the ratio of exploitation was inverted.
Whilst transnational monetary flows are not nothing, and they are not immaterial; they are however mostly nothing. What happens when a bank transfers any amount of money? The binary codes re-arrange electronically. This is not directly comparable with materialist consumer flows of matter as product. The ‘money’ is mostly a claim (lien) on future energy conversions and flows which have not happened yet and may not happen; but the material flows are happening. The exploitation is real. The suffering is real. The dying is really happening here and now.
You do have a point about the investor class who will always invest in future profit; but in the last 40y that money is lent into existence on computer ledgers; particularly since 2008 that lending is ponzi and mostly cosmetic; the profits of which are profits on energy and material consumption yet to happen; currently there is more money in circulation that resources in the ground so all that chimeric profit will be wiped out. Those energy claims do distort the pricemaking market; but that is a separate issue from net imperial appropriation which is material.
In the meantime the exploitation continues as it always at an unprecedented scale that is as completely unsustainable as it is corrupt. Whatever is happening is creating really real material discrimination between us and them as it always has; whichever is structural violence not to be scapegoated when we are directly profiting from the rape of labour, exploitation of common resources creating a third world by our mode of living.
It is the sheer scale of extraction that belies what you are saying; a tiny percentile of the population is not capable of material exploitation on the scale of a 19TW civilisation consuming 100 bn tonnes of primary raw matter that ends up with an end user briefly on its way to the tip (with little or no marginal utility between the redundant and the next new thing). We do not even want much of the stuff we buy and it is definitively not necessity for us but choice; choice that directly decreases necessity for them. We could choose differently instead of passing the buck?
What I was also trying to highlight was the seeming distortion of Hickel’s work. The solution is degrowth not defence of our consumption by blaming the corporation (a fictive personhood) instead of its people (natural personhood); or its CEOs who almost certainly live in the HICs as end users and consumers; all those multinational corporations and government as ‘entities’ are in fact material consumers, not logos in a video. We are completely blind to the energy and matter we use — logos do not consume — people do.
And by the way, we pretty much maxed out on our exploitation; the market is dangerously imbalanced, there is not enough energy or matter left to fulfil those token claims; at some point there will be a massive reduction in the value of binary code in corporate HQs (are you watching the banking situation?); where will CEO pay be then if not in consumption? The entities that you are pointing to are in fact chimeric but the persons who work there are really real end users.
All in all, it is a complete and utter shitshow that could have been ended at any time, but we chose not to; follow the money you say; follow the energy conversion of matter into waste subsidised by the lives of the supermajority of humanity across time such is the progress of pollution I say.
We could choose to redistribute our wealth instead of extracting their health into our lifestyles.
Thanks for your thoughts!
As an old man, I’ve read that before. In 1980 I was taught that all oil would be gone by 2000. Yet today, oil consumption is higher than it was back then.
I was also taught that the Earth was too small for everyone to live a Western lifestyle. Yet China has lifted a billion people out of poverty. Today China builds three times more cars than the USA.
So what was called unsustainable in 1980 turned out to be something that could triple in size. What makes you sure today is different?
I did reply yesterday, but it has not appeared, maybe because I included links to Simon Michaux’s quantifying the mineralogic quantities we would need to proceed at the pace we want to proceed at — outstripping the finite resources left between 1,000 and 7,000% depending on the particular metal. The soundbite for the report id that “We consumes 700bn tonnes of copper to create civilisation so far; we plan on consuming the same amount in the next 22 years” which is not only impossible, but somewhat undesirable. Anything we build will have to be maintained with a paucity of materials to do so — including nuclear — which he does think will play a part, but highly caveated limited deployment to maintain critical infrastructure. What ”critical infrastructure” means and whether it is economic or ecologic criticaly we choose to save is the ethical dilemma facing us that nobodey wants to confront but ‘we’ must;
PS: you probably know that those shady ‘entities’ get paid in shares (and buybacks) — shares in what exactly? The market expects 3% growth compounded for the next 200 y; rates of monetary flows that are stalling and getting ever more divergent from overproduction. The market is hype, only the suffering is real.
Well put @Researcher, its a shame, the majority of the populace do not understand this pertinent point………….
The article above references JH in passing to provide a little context – and so that readers might then check out his work. I think readers on OffG with an interest in this area are aware that people in the rich countries ‘lived (and live) the pauperisation and proletarianisation’ of people elsewhere without having to spend eight paragraphs on the work of JH.
A disingenuous passing reference that completely avoids the solutions-thinking JH is proposing as grounded in empirical evidence. The article and the many of the comments are based on normative opinion, ungrounded in any fact. Food is a problem, but it is not the whole problem, even industrial agriculture only accounts for ~1% of economic activity (if you read the GRAIN report, ~80% of the world food production in LICs is not even included.) So how about addressing the other 99% of the total economic activity as a whole system empirical critique?
JH, Kallis, et al are at least trying to do that. We need to address the 99% of the consumption and find out what we as a species activity are trying to achieve — then do it with less. Unless we address the whole of the problem we can only get partial solutions and a great deal of conspiracy theory; whichever addresses nothing.
‘We’ strip the world of value, exploit our fellow human — let’s face it, based on the colour of their skin as a virtual pigememtocracy — for short term virtual ‘gain’ and irreplaceable commodification much of which we throw away; and you think we can contain that psychosis on a farm any time soon? We deal with the whole problem as a whole species psychology or we transfer that emnity to fictive entities.
Don’t worry, I know the answer. I know exactly what we are going to do. I just wish ‘we’ would spend some time to reconsider. For which the enormity of the biophysical civilisation-bound consumptogenesis is the only logical ground. We need to bring our psychology in line with our physiology in order to simplify.
“The article and the many of the comments are based on normative opinion, ungrounded in any fact.” Now whose being disingenuous? The claim that the article is fact free is just nonsense.
Small farms still produce between 50-80% of the world’s food, but they have been pushed onto less than 25% of the arable land. So, let’s not underestimate the subsidy-sucking, livelihood-destroying, dependency-creating impact of industrial agriculture on billions of people across the globe.
And let’s not understate how its forced implementation is part and parcel of the neoliberal reforms that are forced onto places like India, which have now also been compelled to chase the holy grail of GDP growth. In India, it is patently clear that the urban elites and middle classes have benefitted at the expense of farmers. And that leads me to agree with you that “We need to address the 99% of the consumption and find out what we as a species activity are trying to achieve.”
That’s exactly what prioritising a shift to the forms of food cultivation suggested in the piece would do. The food system is structured to fuel the model of ‘growth’ we have witnessed. Agrarian systems have been shaped to supply cheap food to enable this.
We must challenge the prevailing urban-centric, consumption-led economic model that has led the world to where it is. And that’s where localisation, agroecology and food sovereignty come in – they are not empty concepts and are not used lightly. They are integral to this strategy. Agroecology is vital for supporting local communities rather than serving as inputs for the relentless pursuit of economic growth.
The work of Helena Norbert-Hodge and The Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology does indeed lead us to question what we as a species are trying to achieve. And much has been written on ‘food sovereignty’ and its role in developing a different world. You can be dismissive or as supercilious as you like – but no one is avoiding the ‘solutions’ – or engaging in “conspiracy theory”.
There seems to be a discrepancy in the understanding of “positive” and “normative” statements where “positive” statement refers to empiric data and normative opinion does not. Positive statements are logically ‘concrete’ and “de re”; normative opinion is abstract and “de dicta” — if not actually fictive. Which is why I refer to the anthropogenic system as a whole.
When i refer to “100 bn tonnes” of primary raw material or “19TW” or primary energy production and consumption; these are verifiable but also all-inclusive of the primary raw matter and primary raw energy of all human activity as an anthropogenic singularity that does not break down into individual activity; but also includes all multinational corporations, ‘neoliberalism’, the ‘market economy’, and all “shadowy actors half a world away” — and everything else we as a species actually do — as a whole species inequality, inequity, and pernicious precarity undermining our own ecologic infrastructure.
So we have to consider the whole as whole simply because the part as part speculation is not only misleading, it is actually killing off life and the life support capacities — where life is the support of life (sumbiogenesis) — and the whole species activity is acting against life.
Everybody knows we are only as good as our next breathe and everybody knows that the air, water, food, and waste management are in fact synergic; and every body knew that as we grew and grew into a species apart as a scientific, industrial, incorporation — Human Inc. — that morally chose to alter nature to ‘improve’ the quality of human nature. So why?
Mostly because ‘we’ can invent representations and arrange them in novel ways without reference to anything and impose our interpretation of life on the living; with disastrous and extinctual consequences. So we really do need to make the logic/physiologic distinction between whole species activity as all-inclusive logic (summum genus) and all normative logic that references imaginability as thin air (infima species.)
So if ‘we’ ever could agree on the highest and most inclusive category as summative; then ‘multinational corporations’, ‘CEO’, ‘shady actors’ and any other linguistic entities that can be categorised as ‘Them’ — which are already included summatively — ‘They’ can be discarded as reduplicated ‘entities’ applying Okham’s Razor; and the now concrete and positive discourse could address the whole as whole and not be ‘refuted’ by “part as part” reduplicated entities as infima species.
There is a great more to be said on this — including Habermas’ “discourse ethics” and “warranty” of validity of statement — but nobody wants reschooling in logic; especially not here. Which is why some sort of Illichian “rational deschooling and ecologic reschooling” androdidactic (adult learning from adult as peer-to-peer) network would be invaluable.
Sorry if this seems so pedantic, but the difference I made in the larger context are a matter of contemporaneous living and dying; which blaming ‘multinnational corporations’ is disingenuous because even though they exist; they have already been included in the summum logic quantified at “100bn tonnes” and so on whichever is all-inclusive.
All the good work of genuine activism can be dismissed by thin air and populism; pointing this out is not supercilious or dismissive but actually to the point. We need to establish the whole system truth and then exclude all supercilious excessive speech as outpourings of none-sense. I’m well aware of agroecology is the solution, but our daily activity is the problem: multinational corporatism and neoliberalism are excessive labels for our activity so therefore are a logical redundancy. If ‘we’ are the problem, ‘we’ are the solution.
OK, I’ve quickly looked at all your comments on here. There’s a lot of dense academic style writing. I need things simple – your argument seems to be that human activity is to blame for where we find ourselves. As for capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism, etc – we can forget about these things as they are “excessive speech” and “none-sense”. This is your whole system ‘truth’. A brief response is possible?
If you want a real cure, you have to find the root cause or first principle; to follow the aetiology. Capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism are symptomatic — not causative — these are culturally created technics aimed at some end; only what end? It is not ‘my’ system of truth, it is all of ours; we all work but so far, without a teleologic ethics. As for consequentialism, we can always invent some fictive entity whilst we work toward an end nobody wants.
I’ll sign off here with this.
Fictive entities, cultural constructs and none-sense based on normative opinion. Or objective realities that are the actual root cause of over-consumption?
Analyses that bring together political agroecology, ecosocialist approaches and capitalism (like on the Monthly Review and Climate & Capitalism sites) can offer practical solutions that challenge the growth paradigm and which do not leave a high-living elite intact imposing net-zero austerity on the rest of us – which is the way things seem to be going.
Mostly it is one fictive entity — the psyche — that is the root cause of overconsumption: we turn well-ordered nature into dissatisfaction, enmity, ressentiment, and so on — as a literal ‘cancel culture’ — that will never stop unless we deal with it root and branch. The alternatives have been around much longer that the species psychosis but were rejected and subjected as ‘primitive’ by the collective psyche. Other than that we are agreed on the solution, but maybe not the root cause which is the everyday activity of everybody. If we could ever face that without recrimination, blame, or aversion — ‘we’ might be able to effect the change we need (Cf: “The Great Turning” Joanna Macy.)
Metta.
The few exploiting the many.
The true history of the world.
It started within families and became a plague of ignorance and hubris that will consume most of humanity.
It ain’t over ’till the plus size ‘them’ sings: there is a vanishingly minute chance avoiding the worst; it is not as if colonial scholars have not been pointing out our dark side or ‘shadow’ for centuries; it is just that we can escape from the world into our phantasmic ‘entities’ whilst we work to consume; if and only if ‘we’ can align ‘our’ thinking with biophysical actuality, then….?
The paranoic creation of representations with no grounding in physiology or biophysical materiality is the bane of the ‘western mind;’ confabulation and simulation will collapse when “the Real” irrupts into the collective psyche according to Lacan; then we will probably all kill each other in order to preserve ‘our’ phantasmagoria; “Man is the greatest enemy of Man” because we do not understand our split psyche according to Jung. We could though, it is not as if enough time has passed…. “Humankind cannot stand very much reality” Eliot.
Love, beauty and awe are the realities. Everything else is mind pabulum.
more poke-in-the-eye from MSM vermin
Paris needs to learn to live with rats, mayor concedesCity hall forms committee to look into cohabiting with vermin.
https://www.politico.eu/article/paris-learn-live-rats-mayor-anne-hidalgo/
We’ve always shared our space with so called vermin. Politics are infested with the human type and appear harder to get rid of than the four legged type.
All scientific research on human behaviour is done by rats or pigs, why? Because rats and pigs have the same physic and behavioural patterns as humans.
They are crawling along the house walls looking for someone or something you can give a parking fine or a velocity fine and missing papers fine.
They often open the refrigerator to see if there is a little piece of flesh to eat during the day.
In the offices they are crawling along the corridor floor spreading rumours, gossip, sneering at their competitors.
They eat and drink everything like humans; whoppers, industrial swine meat, pomme frites. dirty drinking water with flour, nanobots and quicksilver in it.
Anne Hidalgo understood it, and you will understand it too. Sooner or later you will understand it. If not by nudging then by fines and force. That you are like them.
Science and Research wouldnt do it if it was not the case! Period.
Is that a truism or just the bias of those that chose those animals?
Self-evident is a better word to common people than truism.
Its a triumph for the evolution theory, for the way we are, and for Klaus Swap loans.
That men’s roots are rat to pig to pink apes to gorillas to cro-magnon man, to man to woman to trans-woman with a schlong, to trans-humanist to cyborg.
Its so self evident.
I do not consider anyone else’s decisions, as to how I should view the world, as self evident.
As far as the THEORY of evolution, it has already been proven to be inaccurate, if not outright false.
There are no transitory fossils that support evolution. There is fossil evidence that modern man, as in homosapians, have been here for 100s of millions of years. What the zealots of evolution tout as “transitory” evidence is just artist renderings dictated by the zealots.
Moreover, the Theory of Evolution, would have us believe that complex biological systems could be created by a hurricane passing over some puddles. Or the idea that a tornado could pass through a junkyard and drop out of itself a functional automobile.
Your transition of animals to humans is exactly what TPTB want us to believe. A theory for separating people from their soul. One of the very reasons I refuse to comply.
“There is fossil evidence that modern man, as in homosapians, have been here for 100s of millions of years”.
Come on, no one can say a fossil is millions of years old.
Its difficult enough to map the last 6-7000 years of our history.
Our earliest the stone age is said to be 4-6000 years old.
I would be careful in believing anything “science” says coming from a microscope and odd calculations no one can check and people are anticipated to believe in, seeing our fake and make believe world during all times and today.
We can see stone tools, see the pyramids, and paintings etc and make logical conclusions. But a bone and skull form here and there dont make the day no matter how much professor people claim to be.
Anyway, maybe you didn see the humour in the connection between Heathrow Airport and the Klaus Swap Slap loans.
Agreed.
However that is the assertion by some archeologists.
Ah, La Peste. Great book, glad to see Camus making a comeback.
Climate emergency!
Bizarre that all the hot temperatures recorded are always at Heathrow Airport.
Of course miles of black tarmac and aviation fuel burning has no affect on the temperature there…
This is not bizarre. Its a proof of global warming and you refuse to admit it. Self hating duu.
Trolls gonna troll.
And just like all the other “evidence” offered to “prove” there’s GW it is absolute rubbish and not proof of anything but manipulation.
It was a joke. Maybe a bad joke, but still a joke. :-D.
The Uk farming press have been pushing “precision” farming for years, in addition to all the other tech that is being offered to farmers. Industrial/Chemical/ Intensive “agriculture” has, as stated here, been relentlessly pushed since 1945. Part of this story is the use of chemicals that are found in explosives in what has been described as a “war on soil”.
The situation is particularly appalling with livestock systems, with chickens and pigs suffering the worst in low windowless buildings and no access to the real world.
Husbandry is an ancient craft and there is no place for chemical poisons, abuse of animals, soil, air and water on a healthy farm. People often complain that organic food is too expensive. The truth is that organic (particularly if sourced from a farm shop/market) is the true cost of quality food and cheap food is a myth. It is a myth because our soils, water, air and animals are paying the price for it.
Well said.
We are experiencing the climax of industrialized agriculture across the board.
People have no clue what it takes to raise animals for food.
Then the human energy, and effort, to slaughter, harvest, and butcher the meat.
Then the time it takes to develop the skill and knowledge to make a good salami for example.
Same goes for fruits, vegetables and grains.
Like Kissinger said, control the food and control the people.
For those that want to learn more, check out Joel Salatin. You can find him on most every platform.
Why, for a moment, did my brain turn his name into Joseph Stalin.
I need a break.