Today I thought I would take a few steps back and look at the plight of small farmers in developing countries within a broader context.
And it’s scary.
The sins of large coffee companies and governments relating to the coffee trade pale in the face of the actions of even larger transnational agrochemical and biotechnology corporations.
Find a comfortable chair and read through some of the background material on the EtcGroup.org site.
Biopiracy, genetic modification, nanotechnology, terminator seed technologies and intellectual property theft are just a few of the threats faced by farmers in developing countries.
Every major food crop, from rice to maize, wheat to potatoes and beyond is in the sights of large western companies.
These companies try to patent grains that have been grown by indigenous peoples for centuries.
They modify the genetics of the seeds they sell...so that the seeds of those plants are sterile. This means the farmer can no longer save seeds for the next season, but has to buy new seed from the companies.
They also modify the genetics to make the plants dependent on particular types of herbicides and pesticides which are sold, of course, by the same companies.
The list goes on and on.
OK...I’ll be back to fair trade coffee in the next post.
But just for a moment I wanted to take that step back and look at the problems of small farmers in developing countries from a wider viewpoint.
The wider you go, the more greed and destruction you’ll see.
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