What's the best
way for an agrochemical corporation to create new markets in developing
countries and to clean its image? For Monsanto, the answer seems
to be clear: to forge alliances with development groups, using their
micro-credit schemes to make its technologies accessible to poor
farmers. Unabashed by the development community's outcry at its
early efforts to reach one such deal with Bangladesh's world famous
Grameen Bank, Monsanto is trying it again in Thailand. According
to Biothai and the Pesticides Action Network Asia-Pacific (PAN-AP),
Monsanto has found new and willing partners in the Population and
Community Development Association (PDA), the Thai Department of
Agriculture and, most significantly, the International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI).
Under a programme entitled, 'Innovative Partnerships
for Agricultural Changes in Technology" (INPACT), IRRI and
Monsanto are to train farmers on how to use their recommended technologies
- from land levelling to tractor operation to the use of herbicides.
In short, the plan is about transforming Thai farmers' small-scale,
biodiverse, low-input rice cultivation systems into large-scale,
tractor-operated and herbicide dependent rice agriculture much more
able to suit the needs... of Monsanto. NGOs in Asia and around the
world have reacted strongly against the project and are exerting
pressure to stop it. The results of the project in their eyes will
be environmental degradation, and threats to farmers' health, livelihoods
and independence.
Although there is no mystery about Monsanto's motivations
for developing INPACT, IRRI's participation in such a project is
much more concerning. The explanation cannot be limited to the fact
that the head of PDA, Meechai Viravaidya, sits on IRRI's Board of
Directors, or that Monsanto's director of biotechnology was a former
high-level IRRI employee. The fact is that IRRI buys into the Green
Revolution approach to agricultural development, which is driven
by Northern corporations' visions of creating global markets for
input suppliers through the spread of industrial agriculture.
IRRI seems blind to the implications of supporting
an input supplier like Monsanto, which has the clear aim of controlling
and dominating agricultural production, be it through its outrageous
growers' contracts or the control of seed breeding and distribution
using its Terminator Technology. Having been in the business of
plant breeding for the last forty years, the consequences of preventing
farmers from saving seed and from being active participants in the
plant breeding process should be blindingly obvious to IRRI - after
all, farmers' fields are where almost all of the 80,000 rice accessions
in its gene banks have come from! IRRI's participation in the INPACT
project is a sad reflection of the realities behind its rhetoric
of sustainability, equity and feeding the world.
Source: Several articles from PAN-AP web page, http://www.poptel.org.uk/panaplia.htm
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