Who are the real ‘food fascists’?
Brand asked Shiva why the global uprising of farmers — from Sri Lanka and India to Germany, England and the Netherlands — against the globalization of agriculture had come to be cast as a right-wing idea by the press.
Shiva said Mussolini himself defined fascism as “the convergence of economic and political power.” “Food fascism,” she said, “is the recent control over our food systems by giant corporations and the billionaires.”
Under colonialism, the British controlled the land, she said, but they didn’t control the food. The advent of agricultural industrialization, the green revolution and globalization made it possible for corporations to take control of food.
The call for “food sovereignty,” she said, “came as the call as opposite to the food dictatorship and food fascism.”
Now, she said, those people want to complete the separation of people from the land that began with colonialism.
Today, they want “farming without farmers.”
Being able to plant a seed, input love, knowledge and sun and produce food, “is the only truly independent production system and it’s that freedom they want to attack,” Shiva said, because they are threatened by it.
So they discredit farmers by calling them “fascists” and “right wing.”
“And anybody who facilitates that is essentially doing the work of these globalists,” she said, “they’re the fascists.”
How ‘philanthropy’ buys control
Today, people who talk about the disproportionate power and influence that billionaires like Bill Gates have over global agriculture and health are regarded as “conspiracy theorists,” Brand said.
He asked Shiva to explain Gates’ rise to power in plain language and with facts.
Shiva said people like Gates became wealthy through neoliberal trade liberalization, where trade in information, in the software and other forms of data Gates produced, went completely untaxed.
Then, she said, they used that money “philanthropically” to gain control of other sectors.
By donating massive sums of money to the global seed bank, to the World Health Organization and to media organizations such as The Guardian and the BBC, Gates and other billionaires took control of those institutions.
It even gives them the power to control governments, she said, who have been made desperate for money through indebtedness.
Gates and Silicon Valley, she said, “are very big players in the fake food future of farming without farmers, food without farms.” And they get journalists such as The Guardian’s George Monbiot to promote it.
No comments:
Post a Comment