Ukraine grain
© business-in-ukraine.com.uaBeautiful Ukraine grain. Now you see it...soon you won't.
Small family/peasant farms pro­duce most of the world's food. They form the bedrock of global food pro­duc­tion. Yet they are being squeezed onto less than a quar­ter of the planet's farm­land. The world is fast los­ing farms and farm­ers through the con­cen­tra­tion of land into the hands of rich and pow­er­ful land spec­u­la­tors and agribusi­ness corporations.

By def­i­n­i­tion, peas­ant agri­cul­ture pri­ori­tises food pro­duc­tion for local and national mar­kets as well as for farm­ers' own fam­i­lies. Big agritech cor­po­ra­tions on the other hand take over scarce fer­tile land and pri­ori­tise com­modi­ties or export crops for profit and for­eign mar­kets that tend to cater for the needs of the urban afflu­ent. This process dis­places farm­ers from their land and brings about food inse­cu­rity, poverty and hunger.

What big agribusi­ness with its indus­trial model of glob­alised agri­cul­ture claims to be doing - address­ing global hunger and food short­ages - is doing noth­ing of the sort. There is enough evi­dence to show that its activ­i­ties actu­ally lead to hunger and poverty - some­thing that the likes of GMO-agribusiness-neoliberal apol­o­gists might like to con­sider when they pro­pa­gan­dize about choice, democ­racy and hunger: issues that they seem unable to grasp, at least beyond a self-serving super­fi­cial level.


Comment: Another of humanity's productive and long-proven working systems infiltrated, overrun and ruined by self-serving, authoritarian pathological units.


pitching hay
© images.archives.jdc.orgFamily farming, becoming a thing of the past.
Small farm­ers are being crim­i­nalised, taken to court and even made to dis­ap­pear when it comes to the strug­gle for land. They are con­stantly exposed to sys­tem­atic expul­sion from their land by for­eign cor­po­ra­tions. The Oak­land Insti­tute has stated that now a new gen­er­a­tion of insti­tu­tional investors, includ­ing hedge funds, pri­vate equity and pen­sion funds, is eager to cap­i­talise on global farm­land as a new and highly desir­able asset class. Finan­cial returns are what mat­ter to these enti­ties, not ensur­ing food security.

Con­sider Ukraine, for exam­ple. Small farm­ers oper­ate 16% of agri­cul­tural land, but pro­vide 55% of agri­cul­tural out­put, includ­ing: 97% of pota­toes, 97% of honey, 88% of veg­eta­bles, 83% of fruits and berries and 80% of milk. It is clear that Ukraine's small farms are deliv­er­ing impres­sive out­puts.

How­ever, The US-backed top­pling of that country's gov­ern­ment seems likely to change this with the installed pup­pet regime hand­ing over agri­cul­ture to US agribusi­ness. Cur­rent 'aid' pack­ages are con­tin­gent on the plun­der­ing of the econ­omy under the guise of 'aus­ter­ity' reforms and will have a dev­as­tat­ing impact on Ukraini­ans' stan­dard of liv­ing and increase poverty in the country.

Reforms man­dated by the EU-backed loan include agri­cul­tural dereg­u­la­tion that is intended to ben­e­fit for­eign agribusi­ness cor­po­ra­tions. Nat­ural resource and land pol­icy shifts are intended to facil­i­tate the for­eign cor­po­rate takeover of enor­mous tracts of land. (From 2016, for­eign pri­vate investors will no longer be pro­hib­ited from buy­ing land.) More­over, the EU Asso­ci­a­tion Agree­ment includes a clause requir­ing both par­ties to coop­er­ate to extend the use of biotech­nol­ogy, includ­ing GMOs.

In other words, events in Ukraine are help­ing (and were designed to help) the likes of Mon­santo to gain a firm hold over the country's agriculture.

Fred­eric Mousseau, Pol­icy Direc­tor of the Oak­land Insti­tute last year stated that the World Bank and IMF are intent on open­ing up for­eign mar­kets to West­ern cor­po­ra­tions and that the high stakes around con­trol of Ukraine's vast agri­cul­tural sec­tor, the world's third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat, con­sti­tute an oft-overlooked crit­i­cal fac­tor. He added that in recent years, for­eign cor­po­ra­tions have acquired more than 1.6 mil­lion hectares of Ukrain­ian land.

West­ern agribusi­ness had been cov­et­ing Ukraine's agri­cul­ture sec­tor for quite some time, long before the coup. It after all con­tains one third of all arable land in Europe.

An arti­cle posted on Ori­en­tal Review notes that since the mid-90s the Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Busi­ness Coun­cil had been instru­men­tal in encour­ag­ing the for­eign con­trol of Ukrain­ian agriculture.

In Novem­ber 2013, the Ukrain­ian Agrar­ian Con­fed­er­a­tion drafted a legal amend­ment that would ben­e­fit global agribusi­ness pro­duc­ers by allow­ing the wide­spread use of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied seeds. Ori­en­tal Review notes that when GMO crops were legally intro­duced onto the Ukrain­ian mar­ket in 2013, they were planted in up to 70% of all soy­bean fields, 10 - 20% of corn­fields, and over 10% of all sun­flower fields, accord­ing to var­i­ous esti­mates (or 3% of the country's total farmland).

Accord­ing to Ori­en­tal Review, "within two to three years, as the rel­e­vant pro­vi­sions of the Asso­ci­a­tion Agree­ment between Ukraine and the EU go into effect, Monsanto's lob­by­ing efforts will trans­form the Ukrain­ian mar­ket into an oli­gop­oly con­sist­ing of Amer­i­can corporations."

It amounts to lit­tle more than the start of the US coloni­sa­tion of Ukraine's seed and agri­cul­ture sec­tor. This cor­po­rate power grab will be assisted by local banks. Appar­ently these banks will only offer favourable credit terms to those farm­ers who agree to use cer­ti­fied her­bi­cides: those that are man­u­fac­tured by Monsanto.

Inter­est­ingly, the invest­ment fund Siguler Guff & Company has recently acquired a 50% stake in the Ukrain­ian Port of Illichivsk, which spe­cialises in agri­cul­tural exports.


Comment: "Container Terminal Illyichevsk" was established in 2005 to expand the infrastructure of the Illyichevsk seaport and increase turnover in a joint agreement between CTI and the State Enterprise Illyichevsk Commercial Sea Port (ICSP). The total amount of CTI's investments reached $56M. On January 27, 2015, the agreement between CTI and ICSP was terminated by Odesa regional commercial court arguing that the termination of the contract contradicted, among other legal provisions, the Law of Ukraine "On Sea Ports of Ukraine". CTI is appealing the ruling. Siguler Guff & Co has a 50% share in CTI. The other 50% is owned by German forwarding company SRR Deutschland (25%) and citizen of Ukraine, Andrey Pavlyutin (25%). Ukraine - "the new land of 'opportunity.'"


We need look no fur­ther than to Ukraine's imme­di­ate neigh­bour Poland to see the dev­as­tat­ing impact on farm­ers that West­ern agribusi­ness con­cerns are hav­ing there. Land grabs by for­eign cap­i­tal and the threat to tra­di­tional (often organic) agri­cul­ture have sparked mass protests as big agribusi­ness seeks to monop­o­lise the food sup­ply from field to plate.

The writ­ing is on the wall for Ukraine.

The sit­u­a­tion is not unique to Poland, though; the impact of poli­cies that favour big agribusi­ness and for­eign cap­i­tal are caus­ing hard­ship, impact­ing health and destroy­ing tra­di­tional agri­cul­ture across the world, from India and Argentina to Brazil and Mexico and beyond.

In an article by Christina Sarich, Hilliary Mar­tin, a farmer from Ver­mont in the US, encap­su­lates the sit­u­a­tion by saying:
"We are here at the [US-Canadian] bor­der to demon­strate the global sol­i­dar­ity of farm­ers in the face of glob­al­iza­tion. The cor­po­rate takeover of agri­cul­ture has impov­er­ished farm­ers, starved com­mu­ni­ties and force-fed us genetically-engineered crops, only to line the pock­ets of a hand­ful of multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions like Mon­santo at the expense of farm­ers who are strug­gling for land and liveli­hood around the world."
The US has since 1945 used agri­cul­ture as a tool with which to con­trol coun­tries. And today what is hap­pen­ing in Ukraine is part of the wider US geopo­lit­i­cal plan to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Rus­sia and to sub­ju­gate the country.

While the Transat­lantic Trade and Invest­ment Part­ner­ship (TTIP) is intended to inte­grate the wider EU region with the US econ­omy (again 'sub­ju­gate' may be a more apt word), by intro­duc­ing GMOs into Ukraine and striv­ing to even­tu­ally incor­po­rate the coun­try into the EU the hope is that under the ban­ner of 'free trade' Monsanto's aim of get­ting this tech­nol­ogy into the EU and onto the plates of Euro­peans will become that much easier.