Or better yet, buy one of Jeff’s books offered below. 

Jason’s résumé is impressive. He is a writer, media critic, and veteran of the digital communications industry. As a digital media strategist, he is familiar with the techniques and tactics commonly used by mainstream news media to shape narratives that disguise imperialism. He is interested in the false historical narratives that underpin the foreign policies of the United States and which ensure those policies are only feebly resisted.

Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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=By= Vandana Shiva

Chemical corporations are trying to impose patents on all living organisms… They are trying to destroy our local food systems and replace them with industrial junk food by changing food and health safety as well as bio-safety, through ‘harmonisation’.

The only way to counter globalisation just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree.” This is how dear friend and eminent writer Mahasweta Devi, who passed away on July 28, at the age of 90, quietly laid out her imagination for freedom in our times of corporate globalisation in one of her last talks.

Our freedoms, she reminds us, are with grass and trees, with wildness and self-organisation (swaraj), when the dominant economic systems would tear down every tree and round up the last blade of grass.

From the days we jointly wrote about the madness of covering our beautiful biodiverse Hindustan with monocultures of eucalyptus plantations, which were creating green deserts, to the work we did together on the impact of globalisation on women, Mahaswetadi remained the voice of the earth, of the marginalised and criminalised communities.

She could see with her poetic imagination how globalisation, based on free trade agreements (FTAs), written by and for corporations, was taking away the freedoms of people and all beings. “Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think. In the last two decades, our economies, our production and consumption patterns, our chances of survival and the emergence of a very small group of parasitic billionaires, have all been shaped by the rules of deregulation in the WTO agreements.

In 1994, in Marrakesh, Morocco, we signed the GATT agreements which led to the creation of WTO in 1995. The WTO agreements are written by corporations for corporations, to expand their control on resources, production, markets and trade, establish monopolies and destroy both economic and political democracy.

Monsanto wrote the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of WTO — which is an attempt to claim seeds as Monsanto’s invention, and own seeds as “intellectual property” through patents. It has only one aim — to own and control seed and make super-profits through the collection of royalties. We have seen the consequences of this illegitimate corporate-defined “property” right in India; with extortion of “royalties” for genetically modified (GMO) seeds leading to high seed prices.

Cargill, Inc wrote the WTO’s agreement on agriculture. As a result, India, the largest producer of oilseeds and pulses, has become the biggest importer of both these produce. The edible oils being imported are GMO soya oil and palm oil — both extracted with hexane through solvent extraction; both leading to massive deforestation in Argentina, Indonesia and Brazil. We are importing dal from Canada and Mozambique, while our fertile pulse growing lands are being handed over to foreign corporations for growing bio fuel. This model destroys agriculture and food systems everywhere. We are thus destroying our health as well as the health of the planet.

The junk food industry wrote the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) agreement of WTO. Our Prevention of Food Adulteration Act 1954 was replaced with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), which is being used to shut India’s rich and diverse, small-scale, home and cottage industry-based food businesses, under pseudo-safety laws.

All new FTAs take away the sui generis option in TRIPS in WTO and are aimed at giving fangs to International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which establishes rules of uniformity, at a time when we know that diversity is vital to nutrition as well as climate resilience.

Twelve countries, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA in February 2016. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is an FTA between the Asean nations and their six trading partners — India, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Since Asean countries are the most populous, RCEP will affect a greater number of people than other FTAs. And through RCEP, these countries may be dragged into the TPP under pressure of harmonisation, especially on issues related to seed.

The TPP requires all its signatories to join UPOV 91. It allows patents on “inventions derived from plants” which would open the floodgates of bio-piracy, as in the case of neem, basmati and wheat. The TPP has sections on “biologicals” which covers biological processes and products, thus undoing the exclusions in the WTO TRIPS agreement. Given how there is a rush to patent and impose untested and hazardous vaccines, and new GMO technologies like gene editing and gene drives, it is clear that the TPP is the instrument for the next stage of bio-imperialism.

At WTO, India managed to ensure countries could exclude plants and animals from patentability, which translated into article 3(j) in our patent laws. India ensured that UPOV could not be forced through WTO and countries had a sui generis option for plant varieties. This translated into the Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001, for which the writer was a member of the expert drafting group.

Not having achieved total monopoly on seeds through the WTO, chemical corporations (biotechnology and seed corporations) are trying to impose patents on all living organisms and all production systems based on living organisms through new FTAs. They are also trying to further destroy our local food systems and replace them with industrial junk food by changing food and health safety as well as bio-safety, through “harmonisation”.

Finally, global corporations, and those who control them, are trying to define corporations as having personhood through investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems, which are secret tribunals where corporations and investors can sue governments for acting according to their constitutional obligations in the interest of their citizens.

Thus, corporations are trying to replace our democracies with secret agreements and secret courts controlled by the 0.01 per cent super wealthy. The time is ripe for a planetary freedom movement that defends and protects the freedoms of all beings from this 0.01 per cent.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (South End Press, 2001), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), Monocultures of the Mind (Zed, 1993), The Violence of the Green Revolution (Zed, 1992), and Staying Alive (St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin

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=By= Mathew Maavak

Photo by AK Rockefeller

The US position vis a vis China has been an interesting evolution to watch. China has rapidly moved from “yet another third world country” to be used for its cheap labor pool, into an economic competitor who holds (or held as it has been selling off US debt) about 7% of US government debt (Investopedia). Much of China’s rise to the top has been because US manufacturing saw China as the go-to labor market and much of US productive capacity now sits firmly in China (for example approximately 97% of all vitamins and supplements sold in the US are manufactured in China).

“The total U.S. goods trade deficit with China reached $324.2 billion in 2013. Between 2001 and 2013, this growing deficit eliminated or displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs” (EPI, 2015)

Big business also eyed China (and still does) as the largest untapped commercial market on the planet. However, after growing China into a financial monster, the US must now try to find a way to control what they have played such a large role in creating. The attempt to renege on allowing China into the WTO as a member with standing is one of those strategies.

-rw

The West is accusing China of manipulating global markets yet again. This time, it wants to delay a much-anticipated Market Economy Status (MES) for China under the World trade Organization (WTO). When China joined the WTO in 2001, it was pre-conditionally designated as a centrally-planned “non-market economy” for the next 15 years – till December 2016.

Now that the “probationary period” is almost over, the West is balking. European lawmakers voted overwhelmingly on May 12 to designate China as a “non-market” economy.

There is nothing new in this latest trade tirade. Beijing faces the same old accusations of artificially glutting global markets with cheaper products from its state-subsidized enterprises. This results in a Made in China item in every household that matches – in frequency and costs – the annual bankruptcy tally in the West. This is the borderless free market system working at its best, but “laissez-faire” no longer excites its Western originators. In fact, it has conveniently disappeared from the vexing corpus of Western business clichés.

Trade disputes involving China are of epic, bazaar proportions. They involve items ranging from chicken feet, thermal paper, steel sinks, lawn equipment, automotive radial tyres, and VSF textiles to amoxicillin. But it is Chinese steel that is currently agonizing EU lawmakers.

China, in fact, has already taken steps to reduce its steel overproduction. The Hebei provincial government had recently announced the phased closure of 240 of its 400 steel mills by 2020. Hebei accounts for 25 percent of all steel production in China. But even with such declared plans of factory closures in Hebei and elsewhere, China’s annual excess steel capacity would still be in the region of 200 million tons.  The total steel workforce facing redundancy in the Hebei province alone may exceed one million workers – three times the number of steelworkers in the EU. That is a staggering figure from one Chinese province alone, entailing a sacrifice that EU policymakers seem to conveniently ignore.

The EU’s steely recriminations, however, tend to mask its growing angst over several strategic undercurrents along the revived Silk Road.

China’s current steel surplus, reportedly weighing over 400 million tons, may take years to be absorbed into various One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiatives. Until then, Beijing needs to keep many of its factories intact. That means more Chinese steel in the market, and more insolvency reports from the West.  In a classic Catch-22 situation, a WTO-prescribed “rationalization” (closure) of Chinese factories may render many OBOR proposals stillborn due to the ensuing paucity of cheaper steel. Some of China’s Silk Road partners do not have the capital to afford market prices for steel and this seems to be what the EU is banking on.

The Western stratagem seems ingenious enough. Raise trade barriers against China, apply pressure on its exports and undermine the OBOR process over next two or three years through selective interpretation of a turgid WTO legal codex.

The EU needs its factories running for other reasons as well.  Germany alone will spend €94 billion on refugees until 2020. Apart from housing, integration, German language courses and social welfare benefits, this budget includes educational material for adults on proper toilet and gender etiquettes.  The Mannheim Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) estimates Germany’s refugee crisis to cost €398 billion. When this sum is extrapolated across the EU, total refugee costs may easily exceed €1 trillion by 2020.

If the West thinks that Asian enterprises are going subsidize this madness by applying WTO-style brakes to its industries, then it better think again.

Mathew Maavak is a doctoral researcher in security foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). His areas of study include strategic foresight; open source intelligence (OSINT); science, technology and innovation (STI); national policy-making; Eurasian integration; and global risks and uncertainties.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?