Seeds of Occupation and India’s “Stockholm Syndrome”: GMO and Monsanto-Bayer’s “Strategic Presence in India”

=By= Colin Toddhunter

[Photo: Which would you want to eat? Natural yellow mustard seed (lt) or GMO fertilizer incorporated seed (rt)?]

Editor's Note

It seems only right to give at least a nod to Vandana Shiva when speaking of GMOs, particularly of GMOs in India. She has pushed harder and more consistently than almost anyone on this problem, from Monsanto, the issues with bT corn, GMO cotton, and even GMO mustard seed. To my knowledge, her work goes back at least to 2002. The push for the GMO mustard seed is almost a decade old, so it is clear that regardless how long you hold them off, they will persist year after year, decade after decade. Why in the world would companies engage in such a costly project for so long? Obviously there are more than mustard seeds on the table (or under it). The push for the conquest of all agriculture by these monsters is the desire to control two things 1- the world's food supply, and 2) the world's water supply. In controlling those things, they control the entire population of the planet. Further, it allows them to ultimately commodify every living thing on the planet. If this seem like the stuff of some dystopian sci-fi novel, you are correct. Unfortunately, this is a terrible reality. In the following article Toddhunter melds together the issues of occupation and normalization of a condition, and the GMO seed issue in India. As you can tell from my intro, it is not a far leap from GMO seed to full blown occupation.

“Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon described in 1973 in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors.” ~ Wikipedia

In political terms, most people might tend to associate the word “occupation” with a (foreign) military presence that controls a region or country. Any such occupation may not necessarily imply troops visibly patrolling the streets. It can be much subtler. Take Britain, for instance. In the U.K., The Guardian journalist Seumas Milne says that the U.S.’s six military bases, dozens of secretive facilities and 10,000 military personnel in Britain effectively tie the country’s foreign policy into the agenda of the U.S. empire and its endless wars.

The vast majority of Brits do not regard this as an occupation. They might feel they are being “protected” by the U.S. with which Britain has a special relationship. Such is the nature of Stockholm syndrome.

The population is caught up in a yarn that the U.S., Britain and the wider NATO project are all forces of good in an unpredictable and dangerous world (despite the reality which suggests the complete opposite). With the U.S. having a strong military presence across the world, that’s certainly a lot of very special relationships.

But occupation can take many forms. It does not necessarily imply a military presence or military domination. For example, in India right now, there is a drive to get genetically modified (GM) mustard sanctioned for commercial cultivation; this would be the first GM food crop to be grown in the country.

Unfortunately, this push for GM is based on a flawed premise and an agenda steeped in fraud and unremitting regulatory delinquency, and any green light to go ahead would open the floodgates for more unnecessary and damaging GM food crops.

The arguments being put forward to justify the entry of GM food crops is that they would enhance productivity, make a positive contribution to farmers’ livelihoods and be better for the environment. All such claims have been shown to be bogus (with the opposite being true in each case) or at the very least are highly questionable.

GM mustard in India is ultimately a Bayer construct, and, given the takeover/merger with St. Louis-based Monsanto, U.S. interests would benefit from its commercialisation. The Bayer-Monsanto marriage would not only be convenient for the U.S. in Europe (providing it with a much improved strategic foothold there, given that Bayer is Swiss based), but it would also (through Bayer’s GM mustard) provide it with the opportunity to further penetrate Indian agriculture.

Monsanto already has a firm strategic presence in India. It has to an extent become the modern-day East India company. The Bayer merger can only serve to further the purposes of those in the U.S. who have always regarded GM biotechnology in more geopolitical terms as a means for securing greater control of global agriculture (via patented GM seeds and proprietary inputs) in much the same way the Green Revolution did.

In broad terms, U.S. geopolitical strategy has seen the exporting of a strident neoliberalism across the globe underpinned by a devastating militarism. For example, aside from Monsanto’s well-documented links to the U.S. military, its seeds conveniently followed hot on the heels into Ukraine on the back of a U.S.-instigated coup and into Iraq after Washington’s invasion.

The reality behind the globalisation agenda (that transnational agribusiness drives and exploits) is an imposed form of capitalism that results in destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent or structural violence (poverty, inequality, austerity, etc.) via privatization and deregulation for millions in countries that acquiesce.

Part of this structural violence involves the toxic inputs of transnational agribusiness and the imposition of an unsustainable model of Green Revolution farming. The result is huge profits for the agritech/agribusiness cartel and a public burdened with massive environmental, social and health costs.

As if that isn’t bad enough, it must be remembered that the Green Revolution (of which GM represents phase two) is ultimately based on the pilfering of peasants’ seeds that were developed over generations.

Once a country loses control of its seeds and thus its food and agriculture to outside forces, it becomes more deeply integrated into a globalized system of dependency (in some instances, ensuring they become complete basket cases dependent on the U.S.), a process that could be accelerated by trade deals like the the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (U.S.-Europe), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (U.S.-Asia) and the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (U.S.-India), which would allow Washington to extend and further cement its political and economic influence over entire regions.

India’s apparent willingness to hand over its seeds and thus its food sovereignty to foreign interests is steeped in its acceptance of the West’s neoliberalism. Whether this entails complying with World Bank ‘enabling the business of agriculture‘ criteria, an unremitting faith in “foreign direct investment” (displacing its existing model of production with a destructive model that would benefit foreign corporations) or complying with the criteria for ‘ease of doing business‘, it is ironically being carried out under the auspices of a ruling BJP whose nationalistic rhetoric helped it gain power.

Report after report has indicated that small farmers using low-input, ecologically-friendly methods are key to feeding populations in countries like India. And a series of high-level reports (listed here) in India have advised against adopting the GM route.

Given the hold that the World Bank has on India, the revolving door between the World Bank/International Monetary Fund and India’s institutions and the influence of foreign interests and corporations within the agriculture sector, it all begs the question: are sections of the Indian political elite suffering a severe bout of Stockholm syndrome?

Colin Toddhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher. Originally from the UK, he has spent many years in India. His website is www.colintodhunter.com https://twitter.com/colin_todhunter

Source: Global Research.

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