Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which the government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be natural and the inevitable consequences of impersonal “market forces.” … If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they’ll have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”

Reich’s point is that market forces aren’t the result of a free market, which doesn’t exist, never has existed, and probably never will exist. What we do have is a highly engineered marketplace with hundreds of thousands of rules–rules most often created behind closed doors by people who will benefit from every word and comma they put into place. These rules take endless form–the tax code, appropriations bills, new laws, court rulings, executive orders, and administrative guidance to name just a few.

Democrats and Republicans alike–at all levels of government and in all three branches–design these market forces. They grant favors to local businesses, friends, and favored industries, as well as emerging and dying technologies. While these rules are more likely to limit the liability from the disastrous effects of mountain top coal removal than they are to provide tax benefits to solar energy, most industries have figured out how to play the game. They hire lobbyists, donate to politicians–and they find the benefits exponentially greater than the cost. Journalist Nicholas Kristof noted that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries alone spent $121,000 per member of Congress on lobbying last year. Research from Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics shows that corporations in general get up to $220 return for every dollar they “invest” in lobbying Congress.

The governing classes and elected officials have always created the rules of the economic game. These legal frameworks and the systems they support affect our nation’s economy and daily life more than the most visible government programs, including social security, food stamps, or health care. 

Reich goes on to say:

The rules are the economy. … As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized [in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for different government—often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.

In the book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang writes:

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How “free” a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined “free market” is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

OUR “UNFREE MARKET”

Many opposed environmental regulations, which first appeared a few decades ago on things like cars and factory emissions, as serious infringements on our freedom to choose. Opponents asked: If people want to drive in more-polluting cars, or if factories find that more-polluting production methods are more profitable, why should government stop them? Today, most people accept these regulations, but they’re a sign of an unfree market. So some limitations on freedom (i.e., protective legislation) can be helpful. But most “unfreedoms” can be devastating. In essence, we have to choose which unfreedoms we want to live with.

Most would consider monopolies a sign of an unfree, and even an immoral market. Monsanto, through the licensing of technology with its GMO seeds, controls 90% of the soybeans and 80% of the cornplanted and grown in America. According to the Center for Food Safety, this drove up the average cost of planting a single acre of soybeans 325%. For corn, the cost has risen 2,659% between 1994 and 2011. So through its monopolized control of seeds, it is driving the price of food through the roof, ensuring the starvation of millions of people around the world.

Powdered cocaine is a drug generally preferred by rich, white Americans, while the poor tend to use crack cocaine. While both are illegal, crack carries a legal penalty 100 times longer than the same substance in powdered form. It seems that there’s also no free market when it comes to jail terms. Not surprisingly, with wealth, power, and influence come lighter criminal penalties.

Higher education has also never been part of the free market. Admissions spots at universities are “sold” more often that we we’d like to believe, whether through the influence of legal donations, or powerful friends or family.

The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

SOCIAL INEQUITY BY DESIGN

“We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”—Louis Brandeis

An undeniable result of this unfree market is the continued consolidation of wealth and influence. On average, CEO pay has increased 937% between 1978 and 2013. The average worker’s pay increased just 10.2% over the same period. This increase has little to do with the increasing value of these CEOs, and everything to do with the power and influence they have over the rules of the system that allow them to enrich themselves. 

The real earnings of the median male have declined 19% since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall 41% from 1970 to 2010. Among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people live in what is considered “deep poverty,” meaning their incomes are 50% below the official poverty line. One quarter of the nation’s Hispanics and 27% of African Americans live in poverty.

Reich writes: “There is no longer any significant countervailing force (like powerful labor unions), no force to constrain or balance the growing political strength of large corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.” He also describes research conducted by Princeton professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which analyzed 1,799 policy issues to determine the influence of economic elites and business groups on public policy issues compared to average citizens. It found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.” 

The notion that we live in a democracy turns out to be just another illusion. The deteriorated state of our democracy more easily enables the wealthy and powerful to write the rules and give themselves the greatest benefits. Activists Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha argue that the current set of rules that articulate the values of our economic operating system can be best characterized as extractive, exploitative, greedy, selfish, elitist, hierarchical, patriarchal, life-denying, and indeed, psychotic. They invoke the Cree Indian term, wetiko, which is a cannibalistic spirit with an insatiable desire for consumption, that eventually even subsumes its host. They are essentially saying that the animating force of late-stage capitalism is the mind-virus of wetiko.

In sum, we have a system that has already chosen winners and losers. A system that elaborately ensures who gets into Ivy League colleges, gets the best jobs, makes the most money, and enjoys the most privileged lives. This is the same system that decides which businesses receive the most corporate welfare, benefit most from regulations, receive the best protection from foreign competitors, and are most likely to get the best returns on their lobbying dollars. We have, at the end of the day, the freest marketplace that money can buy. A system created by wetikos to perpetuate wetiko.

THIRTEEN WAYS TO START FIXING THE PROBLEM

The solution lies not in a freer marketplace with less government intervention, but in a marketplace that expresses the wishes and best interests of the majority, in one that fairly protects the rights of minorities with what we might call a “democratic marketplace,” driven by a commitment to justice, equity, interdependence, ecological regeneration, and the well-being of all life. 

How do we move toward this goal? Here are 13 ways to start fixing the deep psychosis of our system.

1.  Get money out of politics. We must overturn Citizens United v. FEC, support organizations like Free Speech For People (which has led an attack on the ruling), and ultimately transition to 100% publicly financed elections.

2.  Require disclosure on the source of funding for any and all documents published academically or in the public domain.

3.  Create new anti-trust laws that prevent and eliminate monopolies.

4.  End all corporate financial subsidies.

5.  End insider trading.

6. Initiate an immediate living wage and transition to a basic minimum income for all citizens.

7.  Expand the definition of unionized labor to increase the number of workers that unions represent.

8.  Set a corporate minimum tax rate of 25%.

9.  Eliminate the second home mortgage deduction.

10.  Increase funding available to fund Employee Stock Ownership Plansand build greater tax incentives for co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership.

11.  Stop transferring the cost of product externalities from business to society. The American Sustainable Business Council (which I cofounded) has a working group developing policy recommendations that would begin to move us toward full-cost accounting.

12.  Permanently eliminate payroll taxes.

13.  Mandate that women make up 50% of the directors of all public and private companies over the next three years.

This is not an exhaustive list, but rather an example of what is possible that highlights how many existing solutions already exist. We have been taught that politics and economics are separate fields. But that is an artificial distinction that serves the power elites and their agents of exploitation. We must rein in the corporate take-over of society so that we can reimagine commerce, community, and government itself, and usher in a just transition to a post-capitalist, post-wetiko world. You can .

Jeffrey Hollender (@JeffHollender) is cofounder and former CEO of Seventh Generation, and now the CEO of Sustain Natural. He is the author of six books, including How to Make the World a Better Place: A Guide to Doing Good.

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here. This article was originally published in Fast Company.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on March 30, 2016.

[Photos: Flickr users Quinn Dombrowski, John Murphy, Tobin, Adam Swank, brownpau. vitaliy_73 via Shutterstock]

The post 13 Ways We Can Fix The “Free Market” So It Works For Regular People, Not Just The Rich appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This emerging industry is rapidly growing. Already, the same four mega-corporations that dominate the seed and pesticide industries (Bayer-Monsanto, DowDuPont, Syngenta-ChemChina and BASF) are moving to gain control of digital agriculture and outpace the growth of competitors.

Currently, these “Big Four” platforms are Bayer-Monsanto’s Climate FieldView , DowDupont’s Granular, Encirca and AcreValue, Syngenta’s AgriEdge Excelsior and BASF’s Xarvio and Maglis.

The rise of digital agriculture can further foreclose paths for farmer innovation, serve as a powerful gatekeeper of farmer information and transform farmers from independent business operators to captured users. For example, digital agriculture services can provide exact prescriptions for seed planting and pesticide use. With corporate control over these algorithms, companies can tell farmers exactly where and how to treat their land. That same company has an incentive to direct farmers to use seeds and pesticides that they manufacture.

For example, BASF’s Grow Smart Rewards program offers cash back when farmers use its digital agriculture platform and buy certain pesticides manufactured by the company instead of competitors’ products.

Additionally, digital agriculture platforms are enabling major agribusiness corporations to gain access to tremendous amounts of farm data. Farmers own all of the individual data produced from their farm. The digital agriculture company owns all of the data aggregated from multiple farmers to recommend decisions. This is especially important when considering data portability.

In order to have complete control over their data, farmers must be able to transfer it to a different platform while deleting it from the old platform. While a farmer provides data through Climate FieldView to Bayer-Monsanto, they also receive recommendations based on a collection of data from other farms. In other words, the farmers’ collective data benefits all who have “invested” data into the platform.

However, Climate FieldView’s privacy policy shows a farmer can only delete data that isn’t currently being aggregated with other farmers’ data.

Five neighboring farmers all growing the same crops could submit soil moisture measurements to a digital platform. The platform may view their measurements, compare them to yields, then offer all five farmers specific irrigation plans. All farmers would benefit from their contributions. Yet if one of those farmers became dissatisfied and decided to change platforms, the farmer cannot delete their soil moisture data from the database.

On the surface, this may not matter. But now, that farmer’s neighbors are benefitting from his or her data. The neighbors might have a competitive advantage, while the farmer who left receives no compensation for their competitor’s gain.

These data practices are anticompetitive: they allow a few dominant platforms to grow their databases and profit from farmers’ data while offering nothing in return for the farmers that leave the platform. In order to be truly competitive, digital agriculture needs to allow farmers to freely remove data and transfer it to a new platform, or delete it entirely.

Especially with a robust startup culture in the technology sector, there should theoretically be room for smaller companies to find their niche and offer their own digital agriculture platforms that give farmers more choices. These theoretical platforms would lack the conflict of interest inherent in the platforms of the Big Four companies who can use digital agriculture to push sales of their own products. However, In order to limit competitors from entering this market, the Big Four are utilizing a number of tactics, some of which are unique to the agriculture industry.

Bayer-Monsanto’s design of Climate FieldView gives a perfect example of the ways in which tremendous resources can quickly lead to market dominance in a burgeoning industry. At this stage, Bayer-Monsanto’s first priority is growth, measured in the number of acres on which Climate FieldView is paid for and deployed.

In 2017, Monsanto announced that it surpassed its goal of having Climate FieldView on 25 million acres and reached 35 million acres instead. Agriculture retailer incentives drive much of this growth.

Prior to the completion of the Bayer-Monsanto merger, a CoBank report predicted that the largest impact of the current wave of mergers (Bayer-Monsanto, DowDupont and Syngenta-ChemChina) would be on rebate programs. These programs have become extremely important for retailers, who are required to sell a certain amount of a given product in order to receive cash back. The now-completed mega-mergers will primarily affect rebates in two ways.

First, larger companies have the power and capacity to push for higher sale volumes, which will increase the number of units retailers are required to sell to receive a rebate. Second, these new mega-corporations have more complicated portfolios than ever before.

Digital agriculture is one important piece of the new, complicated platforms and portfolios. In January, CropLife magazine reported that Monsanto was significantly increasing the rebate requirements for Climate FieldView. The author, Paul Schrimpf, speculated that it could be beneficial for some retailers to simply give Climate FieldView to farmers for free, just to reach the rebate requirements.

This control over retailer practices allows companies like Bayer-Monsanto to mass-distribute its digital agriculture platform — to the detriment of smaller, independent companies without a network of retailers profiting off of rebates.

Immense control over retailers has not been enough to stymie tech startups wanting to provide their own individual digital agriculture tools.

Many farmers use Climate FieldView for one or two very specific features. Therefore, there is certainly a market for startups to provide very specialized products that may be cheaper than a large platform and only offer what a farmer may find useful.

In 2016, Monsanto recognized this trend and decided to invest in the Microsoft playbook from the 1990s. Hence, the modern Climate FieldView platform was born.

Similar to how Microsoft turned Windows into a one-stop shop for computing needs, Monsanto expressed the desire to build a “centralized and open data platform.” In this platform, Climate FieldView acts as a sort of “App Store” for agriculture. Startups place their digital agriculture products within the Climate FieldView program for users to choose which ones they like. The startups gain increased access to customers while Bayer-Monsanto gets a share of the profit and access to all of the data.

Climate FieldView is the ultimate power play in a still-forming industry. Since the platform is rapidly growing, it has become a gatekeeper for other digital agriculture products. As a gatekeeper, Bayer-Monsanto gets to pick winners and losers, influencing the path the entire industry will follow.

The Big Four have almost complete control over conventional agriculture across the globe, and these corporations will increase dominance through digital agriculture. These aggressive practices and the potentially disastrous consequences are concerning for small family farmers. Digital farming only addresses the needs of industrial scale farmers and could be used to further lock farmers into a system of chemically intensive agriculture, where they are forced to use the seeds and chemicals the companies manufacture.

This agricultural technology could be a force for good, but it is already on pace to become as anticompetitive as the rest of the agriculture industry and simply another tool for corporate control over farmers — and our food system. It is important that we question how this technology will affect the future of farming and farm labor. Digital agriculture shifts farmer data ownership to mega-corporations so that these corporations can micromanage large sectors of farmland and limit farmer choice and competition — all for the benefit of their bottom lines.

To address this, policy must catch up to this emerging technology and offer farmers control over their data rather than leaving the issue to individual corporations to decide. In the meantime, farmers interested in utilizing data analysis can look to platforms provided by companies not manufacturing seeds and pesticides to ensure they receive unbiased advice.

The digital agriculture revolution does not have to follow the patterns of the past. Farmers’ access to their own farm data must be protected to ensure it can be used to bolster the economic and environmental sustainability of agriculture. Digital agriculture must bolster farmer independence rather than increase corporate control over farmers and our food system.

For more information regarding digital agriculture, see Friends of the Earth (US) full report, Bayer-Monsanto Merger: Big Data, Big Agriculture, Big Problems. The report details the myriad ways in which digital agriculture has the potential for gross corporate abuse of farmer data and how the combination of seeds, chemicals and data into combined platforms will increase corporate control.

Jason Davidson is the Food and Agriculture Campaign Associate at Friends of the Earth (US). He supports the Bee Action Campaign. Jason worked on the campaign as an intern before joining Friends of the Earth as staff.

Prior to Friends of the Earth, he interned at Climate Reality Project and served as a research assistant in the Geography Department at George Washington University.

He holds a B.A. in Geography with a minor in Geographic Information Systems and American Studies from George Washington University.

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The trend goes by several attractive names, like “smart” farming, “precision” or digital agriculture. The vision is common though: a ‘technocentric’ approach, including gradual to extreme mechanization of farm management supported by algorithmic, data-driven procedures and sophisticated tools, like cloud computing, specialized software, drones and Internet of Things.

The agri-industry and policy makers are majorly implicated in this new digital era: Giant agri-corporate mergers, like Bayer/Monsanto, develop a very strong parallel agricultural data-science agenda and market policy, buying smaller companies which specialize solely in data management related to soil, irrigation, weather or climate, like Monsanto did with start-up Climate Corp. Another mix of smaller, ambitious, and often opportunistic entrepreneurial players enter as well the agricultural sector with a multitude of promises on digital solutions to important agricultural and environmental issues.

Both EU and global data economy policies back these efforts by facilitating the creation of a market players’ ecosystem, including corporations, researchers, developers and infrastructure providers, in order to ensure that value will be extracted by data and a novel economic sector will rise. Of course, this new business expresses a genuine market-oriented and neoliberal approach, for delivering profits and entrepreneurship opportunities from new topics.

But, before evaluating the effectiveness of such solutions, we must identify the well- documented problems, stemming from the modern food production system. What is taken for granted both by scholars and international institutions like FAO, is that combating the scarcity of resources, the reduction of soil and water pollution, the greenhouse gas emissions and the loss of species and habitat are major issues that have to be managed quickly. It is also undeniable that this kind of global change requires developing much more sustainable agricultural systems, which will depend less on high synthetic inputs and fossil fuels and will be characterised by efficient resource use, low environmental impacts and, last but not least, climate change resiliency, in order to produce sufficient and healthy food.

So, can digital and (bio)technological innovations really meet these goals? Despite the hype, it appears not to be the case. The paradigm derived by such approaches is largely conceived to aim only at a “weak” ecological modernisation of agriculture, as many scientific authors suggest. Their effect is restricted to a partial increase in the efficiency of inputs and resource use and some decrease of production costs, which are however accompanied by the high costs of farm management’s mechanization. Often these tools developed ignore main ecological processes, under whose principles the agricultural ecosystems function. In a better case scenario, these innovations may just lead to partial substitution of inputs with some short-term positive effects on the sustainability and stability of the food system. And that’s it. They fail to address serious concerns on the structural weakness of the modern food system, which generates a major part of the negative impact to environment and society.

Another key issue is the problematic innovation process followed. In the above mentioned approaches, the narrative and practice of innovation is restricted to a framework of economically driven developments promoting technological solutions. The innovation transfer’s mode mainly follows a top–down procedure towards the end users, farmers or agronomists. Under this framework, as innovators are regarded only the scientists and agricultural advisors, who design and promote tools and practices, and companies, that develop and provide the technological solutions. Technological development is mostly out of reach to any but the agTech giants, as highlighted in the debate’s opening article. Suddenly sort-of-solutions become ‘one size-fits-all’ recommendations: farmers then must follow strategies and practices that evolve along with their research outputs and corporate technologies. In other words, these are innovation processes that create vertically developed and hierarchically-based tools, obviously fitting to serve better an industrially-scaled and profit-oriented farming system and the market itself.

Of course, the above criticism does not suggest some kind of agro-Luddism approach condemning advanced technologies, which are here already – like it or not. It has been already recognised that alternative examples of digital or analogue agricultural innovations that support the transition towards truly sustainable food systems can exist and are not inherently incompatible with the framework of an agroecological approach. The examples of open source agricultural technology initiatives, like farmhack in US, collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers, as l’Atelier Paysan in France or international research projects, like Capsella. As many times described, agroecology is an emerging concept which provides a holistic approach for the design of genuinely sustainable food systems. It does not simply seek temporary solutions that will improve partially the environmental performance and productivity of the food systems. It stands mostly for a systemic paradigm of perception change, towards a full harmonization with ecological processes, low external inputs, use of biodiversity and cultivation of agricultural knowledge.

The important thing about agroecological design of the food systems is that they emphasize independent and participatory experimentation and not the reliance on high technology and external suppliers, with a high degree of dependency on additional support services. Therefore, it becomes obvious that hi-tech and any other technological solutions can stand as a complementary element to agroecological innovation processes, and only when the development of innovative tools includes a peer-to-peer planning framework and user involvement within the reach of an economy of the commons, as the above mentioned examples do.

Thus, the main issue is related to the way innovation processes evolve – in whose interests, and with who’s participation, do they emerge? We should realise that innovation lies in the creative process, not only in the generated tool itself. Bearing this in mind, it becomes evident that it is the lack of autonomy that matters – in other words, the absence of the end user’s engagement in the technology’s development. Appropriately used, technology can share power with all actors collectively involved in developing the innovation. And this appropriate use of technology allows us to democratize knowledge.

Vassilis (Vasileios) Gkisakis, Agronomist (MSc, PhD): Vassilis specialises in Sustainable Agriculture and Agrobiodiversity, with a background in Food Science. He worked previously in the organic farming sector, while he has collaborated with several research groups across Europe on organic farming/agroecology, olive production, biodiversity management strategies and food quality.

He is a contracted lecturer of i) Organic Farming and ii) Food Production Systems in the TEI of Crete and visiting lecturer of Agroecology & Sustainable Food Production Systems in the Agricultural University of Plovdiv. He is official reviewer in one scientific journal, Board member of the European Association for Agroecology and moderator of the Agroecological Network of Greece and also the owner of a 20 ha organic olive and grain farm.

The post AgTechTakeback | Neither neoLuddism nor Corporate Ag – Towards a Holistic Agroecology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article reports on a number of important new initiatives that have the potential to integrate the various projects and movements working  against the enclosure of living material and for the seed commons. An important read for saving the endangered food supply of humanity now and in the future. Penned by Rachel Cernansky, it was originally published in Ensia.com.

Rachel Cernansky:  Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren’t just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf. Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.

A determined fellow dedicated to the millennia-old tradition of plant breeding, Morton still breeds lettuce — it just takes longer, because more restrictions make it harder for him to do his work.

“It’s just a rock in the river and I’m floating around it. That’s basically what we have to do, but it breaks the breeding tradition,” he says. “I think these lettuce patents are overreaching and if they [were to hold up in court], nobody can breed a new lettuce anymore because all the traits have been claimed.” He continues to work with what is available, breeding for traits he desires while being extra careful to avoid any material restricted by intellectual property rights. He has also joined a movement that is growing in the U.S. and around the world: “open source” breeding.

Astronauts on the International Space Station grew and ate Outredgeous red romaine lettuce in the station’s “Veggie” system, a test kitchen for growing plants in space. Photo by NASA

If the term sounds like it belongs in the tech world more than in plant breeding, that’s no accident. The Open Source Seed Initiative, inspired by “the free and open source software movement that has provided alternatives to proprietary software,” was created to ensure that some plant varieties and genes will remain free from intellectual property rights and available for plant breeders in perpetuity. As part of the initiative, commonly known as OSSI, U.S. breeders can take a pledge that commits the seeds they produce to remain available for others to use for breeding in the future.

That doesn’t mean they can’t build a business with or sell them. What the pledge does is allow farmers who buy seeds from an open-source breeder to cross them with other material to breed their own varieties and save them for future seasons — two things many crop patents forbid. Dozens of breeders and seed companies have committed to OSSI since the initiative’s launch in 2014.

Compromised Future

For University of Wisconsin–Madison professor emeritus and OSSI board member Jack Kloppenburg, control of seeds and the ability to breed new crops are matters of both food security and environmental protection. Seeds play a role in larger issues like biodiversity, farmers’ rights, control of the food system and use of agricultural chemicals, which many independent breeders try to avoid or reduce by breeding natural resistance into crops themselves.

Kloppenburg emphasizes that the open-source movement is not about genetically modified organisms; patents can affect all crops, vegetable or grain, GMO or conventional, organic or not. “Control over the seed is what’s at the core of all environmental sustainability that we’re working toward,” he says, pointing to the increased consolidation in the global agriculture industry, most recently with the mergers announced between ChemChina and Syngenta in August 2016, and Monsanto and Bayer in September. “If you go to the farmer’s market and you’re interested in buying good, local, sustainably produced vegetables, you also need to understand that most vegetables are coming out of a breeding process that is itself endangered. We will not have food sovereignty until we have seed sovereignty.”

The Open Source Seed Initiative, where U.S. breeders take a pledge committing their seeds to remain available for others to use for breeding in the future, is in contrast to the practice of patenting seeds and crop traits. Photo by Jack Kloppenburg

OSSI supporters argue that as planting material becomes more restricted through intellectual property rights, the future of the food supply is compromised because the gene pool is continually shrinking. OSSI executive director Claire Luby, whose Ph.D. thesis focused on genetic variation and availability within carrots, found that about one-third of all carrot material has been protected by intellectual property rights, rendering it unavailable or difficult for plant breeders to use. Similar estimates do not yet exist for other crops, but experts such as Luby are confident that big commodity crops such as corn are even more heavily impacted than crops such as lettuce and carrots.

A Matter of Perspective

Growers breed plants to selectively express desirable traits — from those that will improve a crop’s taste or color, to those that help crops thrive in certain environments and resist threats such as pests or disease. Opponents of crop-trait patents say the increase in patents is shrinking the catalog of plant material available to breeders at a time when the need for genetic diversity is greater than ever, thanks to the less-predictable conditions brought on by climate change.

In an email, Monsanto spokesperson Carly Scaduto recognized the importance of genetic diversity, saying it’s crucial for the company’s operations and Monsanto works to preserve diversity through its four gene banks and by collaborating with institutions around the world, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But she disagreed with the notion that intellectual property suppresses other breeding efforts. “Patents and [plant variety protection] inspire innovation,” she wrote. “Basically, the patent creates a map to allow anyone else to do the same once the patent expires. Oftentimes those ‘how to’ instructions enable others to accomplish the same result by finding another method to get there. So rather than hindering innovation, such protection facilitates it by placing more material and know-how in the public domain.”

Morton, however, argues waiting the 20 years for a patent to expire is no way to encourage innovation, and waiting that long to breed crops that can adapt to changing conditions is a losing battle. Even that misses the main point for Morton, though: genetic resources have always belonged to the commons, and should continue to be a public good, he says. “[Independent plant breeders] have neither the time nor money for such formalities, and monetary incentives are not what move us. We want to improve farming for farmers. That’s a different motivator, not promoted by stifling the free use of the best and newest genetic resources.”

Independent plant breeder Frank Morton selects lettuce seed in his breeding nursery. Photo by Karen Morton

Furthermore, Morton takes issue with the very concept of patenting a plant trait. “You didn’t actually create it,” he says. “The plant created it, and the plant breeder has no idea how the plant created that trait. It is just nature at work.”

For Carol Deppe, an Oregon plant breeder and OSSI board member, there’s another component to breeding that’s important. “When you breed a variety, you breed your own values right into the variety,” she says. “If you believe in huge agribusiness farms with monocultures that are managed with massive doses of herbicides, then you breed your concept of what agriculture should be like into that variety. I do exactly the opposite.”

While a handful of medium-sized companies (those with international markets but smaller than, say, Monsanto) hold patents, most smaller seed companies are able to survive without patenting — they either are opposed to the practice, have decided the process is too costly to be worthwhile, or both.

Morton argues that avoiding intellectual property protection also encourages more active breeding. “Seems to me that my incentive to crank out new stuff is stronger than [companies that patent]. I need new stuff constantly to feed my catalog with new material, knowing that my competitors will be selling my varieties within a few years,” he says. “A patent creates a 20-year insulation against competitive intrusion, which seems pretty cushy from my perspective.”

Global Response 

While the U.S. seems to be leading the open-source charge, the concept is rapidly spreading around the world. In India, the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, which describes itself as a professional resource organization, runs an open-source seed program, working with farmers to preserve seeds for traditional food varieties and to involve them in breeding new varieties that meet specific needs. The organization also helps farmers access and market open-source seeds. German organization Agrecol is in the process of launching an open source “license,” essentially a more formal, legally binding version of the OSSI pledge for breeders in the European Union. (Regulations governing breeding differ from country to country, so the OSSI pledge cannot simply be adopted as-is in Europe or elsewhere.) In early November the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, declared that conventionally bred plants should be nonpatentable, marking a shift from the European Patent Office’s current stance, which permits patents for conventionally bred crops. The statement is not law, however; it will now be up to European governments to push the patent office to implement the commission’s statement.

In October 2016, the Dutch organization Hivos hosted a conference on open-source seed systems in Ethiopia, attracting farmers, community seed bank operators, and representatives of governments, non-governmental organizations and seed companies from around East Africa to learn about the open-source seed movement and the global shift toward patenting seeds.

Willy Douma, who runs Hivos’ open-source seed systems program, says the organization is in the process of building a global alliance on open-source seed systems that it hopes to launch formally next year. A coalition of environmental and development groups (including Hivos, international development nonprofit USC Canada and the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) has compiled a database of seeds and biodiversity around the world to publish the Seed Map Project. And in a report published in September, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food — a collaboration of philanthropic foundations, including the WK Kellogg Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and more — said that to ensure a resilient food supply, farmers need to be able to access, exchange and improve seeds, and have a voice in shaping seed policies. The report also emphasized the role that diverse, local seed supplies play in sustainable food systems — a connection that Luby of OSSI hopes more people start to make soon.

“The food movement has focused on where is it grown and how is it grown, and the seed systems haven’t been as much a part of those conversations,” she says. “We’re trying to connect with people to say, ‘Hey, there’s an even deeper layer to your food.’”

Photo by tamaki

Photo by Syd3r

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In April, Pennsylvania became the 24^th state to legalize medical cannabis, a form of the plant popularly known as marijuana. That makes nearly half of US states. A major barrier to broader legalization has been the federal law under which all cannabis – even the very useful form known as industrial hemp – is classed as a Schedule I controlled substance that cannot legally be grown in the US. But that classification could change soon. In a letter sent to federal lawmakers in April, the US Drug Enforcement Administration said it plans to release a decision on rescheduling marijuana in the first half of 2016.

The presidential candidates are generally in favor of relaxing the law. In November 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would repeal all federal penalties for possessing and growing the plant, allowing states to establish their own marijuana laws. Hillary Clinton would not go that far but would drop cannabis from a Schedule I drug (a deadly dangerous drug with no medical use and high potential for abuse) to Schedule II (a deadly dangerous drug with medical use and high potential for abuse). Republican candidate Donald Trump says we are losing badly in the war on drugs, and that to win that war all drugs need to be legalized.

But it is Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein who has been called “weed’s biggest fan.” Speaking from the perspective of a physician and public health advocate, Stein notes that hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from chronic pain and cancers are benefiting from the availability of medical marijuana under state laws. State economies are benefiting as well. She cites Colorado, where retail marijuana stores first opened in January 2014. Since then, Colorado’s crime rates and traffic fatalities have dropped; and tax revenue, economic output from retail marijuana sales, and jobs have increased.

Among other arguments for changing federal law is that the marijuana business currently lacks access to banking facilities. Most banks, fearful of FDIC sanctions, won’t work with the $6.7 billion marijuana industry, leaving 70% of cannabis companies without bank accounts. That means billions of dollars are sitting around in cash, encouraging tax evasion and inviting theft, to which an estimated 10% of profits are lost. But that problem too could be remedied soon. On June 16, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved an amendment to prevent the Treasury Department from punishing banks that open accounts for state-legal marijuana businesses.

Boosting trade in the new marijuana market is not a good reason for decriminalizing it, of course, if it actually poses a grave danger to health. But there have been no recorded deaths from cannabis overdose in the US. Not that the herb can’t have problematic effects, but the hazards pale compared to alcohol (30,000 deaths annually) and to patented pharmaceuticals, which are now the leading cause of death from drug overdose. Prescription drugs taken as directed are estimated to kill 100,000 Americans per year.

Behind the War on Weed: Taking Down the World’s Largest Agricultural Crop

The greatest threat to health posed by marijuana seems to come from its criminalization. Today over 50 percent of inmates in federal prison are there for drug offenses, and marijuana tops the list. Cannabis cannot legally be grown in the US even as hemp, a form with very low psychoactivity. Why not? The answer seems to have more to do with economic competition and racism than with health.

Cannabis is actually one of the oldest domesticated crops, having been grown for industrial and medicinal purposes for millennia.  Before 1937, it was also a component of at least 2,000 medicines.

In early America, it was considered a farmer’s patriotic duty to grow hemp. Cannabis was legal tender in most of the Americas from 1631 until the early 1800s. Americans could even pay their taxes with it. Benjamin Franklin’s paper mill used cannabis. Hemp crops produce nearly four times as much raw fiber as equivalent tree plantations; and hemp paper is finer, stronger and lasts longer than wood-based paper. Hemp was also an essential resource for any country with a shipping industry, since it was the material from which sails and rope were made.

Today hemp is legally grown for industrial use in hundreds of countries outside the US. A 1938 article in Popular Mechanics claimed it was a billion-dollar crop (the equivalent of about $16 billion today), useful in 25,000 products ranging from dynamite to cellophane. New uses continue to be found. Claims include eliminating smog from fuels, creating a cleaner energy source that can replace nuclear power, removing radioactive water from the soil, eliminating deforestation, and providing a very nutritious food source for humans and animals.

To powerful competitors, the plant’s myriad uses seem to have been the problem. Cannabis competed with the lumber industry, the oil industry, the cotton industry, the petrochemical industry and the pharmaceutical industry. In the 1930s, the plant in all its forms came under attack.

Its demonization accompanied the demonization of Mexican immigrants, who were then flooding over the border and were widely perceived to be a threat. Pot smoking was part of their indigenous culture. Harry Anslinger, called “the father of the war on weed,” was the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration. He fully embraced racism as a tool for demonizing marijuana. He made such comments as “marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others,” and “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” In 1937, sensational racist claims like these caused recreational marijuana to be banned; and industrial hemp was banned with it.

Classification as a Schedule I controlled substance came in the 1970s, with President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. The Shafer Commission, tasked with giving a final report, recommended against the classification; but Nixon ignored the commission.

According to an April 2016 article in Harper’s Magazine, the War on Drugs had political motives. Top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman is quoted as saying in a 1994 interview:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Competitor or Attractive New Market for the Pharmaceutical Industry?

The documented medical use of cannabis goes back two thousand years, but the Schedule I ban has seriously hampered medical research. Despite that obstacle, cannabis has now been shown to have significant therapeutic value for a wide range of medical conditions, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, glaucoma, lung disease, anxiety, muscle spasms, hepatitis C, inflammatory bowel disease, and arthritis pain.

New research has also revealed the mechanism for these wide-ranging effects. It seems the active pharmacological components of the plant mimic chemicals produced naturally by the body called endocannabinoids. These chemicals are responsible for keeping critical biological functions in balance, including sleep, appetite, the immune system, and pain. When stress throws those functions off, the endocannabinoids move in to restore balance.

Inflammation is a common trigger of the disease process in a broad range of degenerative ailments. Stress triggers inflammation, and cannabis relieves both inflammation and stress. THC, the primary psychoactive component of the plant, has been found to have twenty times the anti-inflammatory power of aspirin and twice that of hydrocortisone.

CBD, the most-studied non-psychoactive component, also comes with an impressive list of therapeutic uses, including against cancer and as a super-antibiotic. CBD has been shown to kill “superbugs” that are resistant to currently available drugs. This is a major medical breakthrough, since for some serious diseases antibiotics have reached the end of their usefulness.

Behind the Push for Legalization

The pharmaceutical industry has both much to gain and much to lose from legalization of the cannabis plant in its various natural forms. Patented pharmaceuticals have succeeded in monopolizing the drug market globally. What that industry does not want is to be competing with a natural plant that anyone can grow in his backyard, which actually works better than very expensive pharmaceuticals without side effects.

Letitia Pepper, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, is a case in point. A vocal advocate for the decriminalization of marijuana for personal use, she says she has saved her insurance company $600,000 in the last nine years, using medical marijuana in place of a wide variety of prescription drugs to treat her otherwise crippling disease. That is $600,000 the pharmaceutical industry has not made, on just one patient. There are 400,000 MS sufferers in the US, and 20 million people who have been diagnosed with cancer sometime in their lives. Cancer chemotherapy is the biggest of big business, which would be directly threatened by a cheap natural plant-based alternative.

The threat to big industry profits could explain why cannabis has been kept off the market for so long. More suspicious to Pepper and other observers is the sudden push to legalize it. They question whether Big Pharma would allow the competition, unless it had an ace up its sleeve. Although the movement for marijuana legalization is a decades-old grassroots effort, the big money behind the recent push has come from a few very wealthy individuals with links to Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company and producer of genetically modified seeds. In May of this year, Bayer AG, the giant German chemical and pharmaceutical company, made a bid to buy Monsanto. Both companies are said to be working on a cannabis-based extract.

Natural health writer Mike Adams warns:

[W]ith the cannabis industry predicted to generate over $13 billion by 2020, becoming one of the largest agricultural markets in the nation, there should be little doubt that companies like Monsanto are simply waiting for Uncle Sam to remove the herb from its current Schedule I classification before getting into the business.

. . . [O]ther major American commodities, like corn and soybeans, are on average between 88 and 91 percent genetically modified. Therefore, once the cannabis industry goes national, and that is most certainly primed to happen, there will be no stopping the inevitability of cannabis becoming a prostituted product of mad science and shady corporate monopoly tactics.

With the health benefits of cannabis now well established, the battlefield has shifted from its decriminalization to who can grow it, sell it, and prescribe it. Under existing California law, patients like Pepper are able to grow and use the plant essentially for free. New bills purporting to legalize marijuana for recreational use impose regulations that opponents say would squeeze home growers and small farmers out of the market, would heighten criminal sanctions for violations, and could wind up replacing the natural cannabis plant with patented, genetically modified (GMO) plants that must be purchased year after year. These new bills and the Monsanto/Bayer connection will be the subject of a follow-up article. Stay tuned.

Originally published as “As the War on Weed Winds Down, Will Monsanto Be the Big Winner?” at Ellenbrown.com

Photo by DonGoofy

The post The IP-based Enclosure of the World’s Largest Agricultural Crop appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Even if it’s true that Roundup is safe if used to company specifications, as Monsanto claims, when is it ever so used? Given the gross power imbalances in the agribusiness industry, nobody’s going to hold giant plantation farmers to account for cutting corners when it comes to their workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals. Back in the 80s, I witnessed the large-scale use of Roundup to “eradicate weeds” on the lawn outside Old Main at the University of Arkansas. In fact it also eradicated the grass and killed some of the oak trees as well. And even as the physical plant workers themselves applied the Roundup in getups that looked like space suits, groups of students clad in shorts and tank tops casually strolled through the clouds of toxic chemicals.

I would also add that it’s disingenuous to give Roundup a pass based entirely on its danger or non-danger to consumers. The effects of Roundup — and the system of large-scale monoculture plantation farming it’s a part of — on farm workers and the ecosystem are also important.

No doubt libertarians will object to labelling requirements at all, including active ingredients. But libertarians also tend to favor a vigorous civil law of torts — or should so favor, if they’re not hypocrites — as a substitute for the regulatory state. And part of tort law is the ability to subpoena evidence relevant to an alleged harm. In a libertarian legal order (stipulating for the moment the unlikely possibility that anything resembling corporate agribusiness could ever have arisen in a free market in the first place), given the prevalence of cancer like non-Hodgkin lymphoma among agricultural workers exposed to Roundup, there would long ago have been lawsuits in which Monsanto was compelled to disclose the full list of ingredients in Roundup. And in any case “trade secrets” guaranteed by law, or enforced by any means other than the actual secrecy of the company itself and non-binding on third parties, would not exist at all.

So the existence of legally protected trade secrets is a weapon against the health and welfare of the public, depriving them of any knowledge of the nature of toxic chemicals they may be exposed to.

This is nothing new. We’ve already seen it in regard to the cocktail of ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which is also kept secret from the potentially affected public by “intellectual property.”

And, in addition to the deaths caused by “intellectual  property” itself, the state doesn’t mind, when necessary, inflicting large-scale death in its enforcement of “intellectual property” — as indicated by leaked diplomatic letters from the Colombian embassy (“Leaks Show Senate Aide Threatened Colombia Over Cheap Cancer Drug,” The Intercept, May 14). Colombia has been taking steps towards approving a cheaper generic form of the patented cancer drug imatinib, which costs $15,000 for a year’s supply. An aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch — an intimate friend of the pharmaceutical industry and an ultra-hawk on all “intellectual  property” issues — expressed “concern” to Colombian diplomats that if Novartis’s “intellectual  property” rights were violated the drug industry might “become very vocal and interfere with other interests that Colombia could have in the United States.” In particular, “this case could jeopardize the approval of the financing of the new initiative ‘Peace Colombia.’” Peace Colombia is an attempt at a negotiated peace settlement between the government and guerrillas, and includes funding for the cleanup of land mines.

So basically Pharma’s Congressional hitmen are willing not only to cause death by denying affordable life-saving medicine. They’re also willing to obstruct (“Nice peace plan you got there…”) an end to a civil war that has killed thousands, and the deactivation of land mines in a country with the second-highest rate of land mine casualties in the world.

“Intellectual property” isn’t just theft. It’s terrorism.

Photo by Artist in doing nothing.

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