Wednesday 09-15-10

The backlash begins against the world landgrab
The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008.

Last week's long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence.

As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China, the Pacific Rim, and even India are trying to lock up chunks of the world's future food supply. Western agribusiness is trying to beat them to it. Western funds - many listed on London's AIM exchange - are in turn trying to beat them. The NGO GRAIN, and farmlandgrab.com, have both documented the stampede in detail.

Hedge funds that struck rich 'shorting' US sub-prime have rotated into the next great play of our era: 'long’ soil. "Productive agricultural land with water on site, will be very valuable in the future. And I've put a good amount of money into that," said Michael Burry, star of 'The Big Short'.

Needless to say, this has set off a fierce backlash. Brazil has passed a decree limiting acreage held by foreign-owned companies, the latest evidence that our half-century era of globalisation may be drawing to a close.

Authorities are probing whether firms are using local fronts to disguise investment in Mato Grosso and Amazonia. "Brazilian land must stay in the hands of Brazilians," said the farm development minister, Guilherme Cassel. It is starting to feel like the early 1970s when the military regime more or less froze out foreign buyers.

Where will this leave the plans of SinoLatin Capital, Goldman Sachs, Harvest Capital, or Berkshire Hathaway? Warren Buffett, wisely, is exploring his $400m venture in soya and sugar with a Brazilian partner.

Argentina is drawing up its own law, pressed by the country's bishops. More than 7pc of national territory is owned by foreigners. The Benetton brothers have 900,000 hectares of Patagonia, some on disputed Mapuche tribal land. George Soros has holdings, so does CNN's Ted Turner, and currency trader Joe Lewis, who made himself a public enemy by blocking public access to the majestic Hidden Lake.

"There are many foreigners who don’t buy to produce, but rather to position themselves in places with water, mineral resources and hydrocarbons," said Pablo Orsolini, a sponsor of the legislation.

In Madasgascar, a deal with Korea's Daiwoo Logistics to plant corn on territory half the size of Belgium led to the downfall of the government in 2008. The lease was revoked. "Madagascar's land is neither for sale nor for rent," said the new president. Even Australia's senate has called for an audit of foreign-owned land and water projects.

The allure of global land is obvious. The World Bank says industrial and “transition” countries are losing 2.9m hectares of cultivated farmland each year. China is paving over its fertile belt on the Eastern seabord, and depleting the water basin of the North China Plain for crop irrigation.

Cheng Siwei, head of China's green energy drive, told me last week that eco-damage of 13.5pc of GDP each year outstrips China’s growth rate of 10pc. National wealth is contracting. "We have an intangible environmental debt that we are leaving to our children," he said. So does India. Much of the globe is stealing food from the future.

The World Bank said we must lift production 70pc by 2050 to meet a triad of converging demands: extra mouths; rising use of animal feed from grains as Asia moves up the affluence ladder to meat-based diets; and the biofuel drive.

This will not be easy. The great leap forward in crop yields is fading. The Bank said rises in wheat and soya yields have declined from 2pc a year to zero since the 1970s in the West. Yield growth for rice and soya in emerging economies has fallen from 3pc to 1pc.

"With few break-through technologies on the horizon, the scope for yield gains seems lower than in the past. Irrigation has contributed to past growth in crop yields, but water scarcity in many regions is now a major constraint," it said. The Green Revolution is "exhausted".

There is plenty of land in the former Soviet Union, where crop planting has fallen by 30m hectares since the sovkhoz collectives of the Khruschev era. Yields are still barely half Western levels on many Russian farms.

Untapped hinterlands lie in Africa (Congo and Sudan) and Latin America. Developing countries are freeing up 5.5m hectares a year. There is a theoretical reservoir of 445m hectares of unforested cropland in the world, on top of the 1.5bn hectares in production.

Rich countries do not face a Malthusian crisis. They face a shift in the terms of trade between country and city, a reversal of urban dominance since the industrial revolution. We are on a thinner margin of food security, just as we are on a thinner margin of oil security.

But those who live in poor countries that rely on food imports most certainly did have a Malthusian moment in 2008 when bread riots swept Egypt, Indonesia, and a string of states in Africa.

Last week, 10 people died in riots in Mozambique, set off by Russia's grain export ban. Wheat prices have doubled since June. The World Bank said the number of people who go to bed hungry each night has risen from 830m to more than 1bn over the past three years.

The morality of the global land rush is finely balanced. Good projects are exactly what we need to solve the food crisis. They bring investment, know-how, and transport links. They create jobs. Peru's auction scheme on the Pacific Coast has been a success.

Yet the World Bank appears deeply torn. While the report endorses the Bank's open-door globalisation agenda, the sub-text dissents on every page. "Large land acquisitions come at a high cost. The veil of secrecy that often surrounds these deals must be lifted," it said.

It warns of a "resource curse" that may enrich a small elite, leaving wreckage behind. Proposals are not properly screened. Peasants are forcibly displaced. Communal grazing lands are closed off. Some investors manipulate opinion with a media blitz of false promises. Nothing has been produced so far on almost 80pc of the land purchased. Benefits are often minimal, "even non-existent". In Africa, the land rush is diverting effort from the core task of helping small farmers raise yields.

The Bank implicitly questions whether it is wise to divert half of the world's increased output of maize and wheat over the next decade into biofuels to meet government “mandates". It will be another decade before the stalks and other inedible parts of plants can be used in bulk.

Personally, I am coming to the conclusion that the biofuel drive is misguided, given that mass solar power and throrium-based nuclear reactors – coupled with electric cars - could step into the energy breach with less destructive effects. All it takes is global leadership. As Friends of the Earth reproaches us, every time we make a frivolous journey in an over-powered car we are hurting somebody.

Land is not a commodity. It has an atavistic pull in most cultures, and is semi-sacred everywhere. Absentee landlords who amass chunks of the earth – however well-intentioned - will be expropriated. Politics always prevails.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7997910/The-backlash-begins-against-the-world-landgrab.html

Feds Spent $800,000 of Economic Stimulus on African Genital-Washing Program
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex.

The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011.

“NIH Announces the Availability of Recovery Act Funds for Competitive Revision Applications,” the grant abstract states. “We propose to evaluate the feasibility of a post-coital genital hygiene study among men unwilling to be circumcised in Orange Farm, South Africa.”

Because AIDS researchers have been unsuccessful in convincing most adult African men to undergo circumcision, the UCLA study proposes to determine whether researchers can develop an after-sex genitalia-washing regimen that they can then convince uncircumcised African men to follow.

“The aim of the proposed feasibility study is to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a post-coital male genital hygiene procedure, which participants will be asked to practice immediately post-coitus or at least 12 hours after,” reads the abstract.

Entitled “Community-Based HIV VCT: South Africa,” the name of the broader umbrella project, the program plans to test how well received the penis-washing regimen is among South African men.

If most of the men in the study wash their genitals after sex, are willing to do so after the study ends, and report that their partners accept the regimen, the researchers will develop another study to see if the “penile cleansing procedure” actually works to prevent HIV infections.

“If we find that men are able to practice consistent washing practices after sex, we will plan to test whether this might protect men from becoming HIV infected in a later study,” the grant says.

The study’s lead investigator Dr. Thomas J. Coates was the fourth highest-funded researcher in the country in 2002 and is currently conducting HIV research on three continents.

CNSNews.com asked both Coates and NIMH the following question: “The Census Bureau says the median household income in the United States is $52,000. How would you explain to the average American mom and dad -- who make $52,000 per year -- that taxing them to pay for this grant was justified?”

Coates, who was unavailable for comment, directed CNSNews.com to ask grant-related questions of his assistant, Darya Freedman, who did not respond.

The NIMH also declined to respond to CNSNews.com’s question.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/75198

The money of fools
Words are supposed to convey thoughts, but they can also obliterate thoughts and shut down thinking. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a catchword can "delay further analysis for fifty years." Holmes also said, "think things, not words."

When you are satisfied to accept words, without thinking beyond those words to the things -- the tangible realities of the world -- you are confirming what philosopher Thomas Hobbes said in the 17th century, that words are wise men's counters but they are the money of fools.

Even in matters of life and death, too many people accept words instead of thinking, leaving themselves wide open to people who are clever at spinning words. The whole controversy about "health care reform" is a classic example.

"Health care" and medical care are not the same thing. The confusion between the two spreads more confusion, when advocates of government-run medical care point to longer life expectancies in some other countries where government runs the medical system.
Health care affects longevity, but health care includes far more than medical care. Health care includes such things as diet, exercise and avoiding things that can shorten your life, such as drug addiction, reckless driving, and homicide.

If you stop and think -- which catchwords can deflect us from doing -- it is clear that homicide and car crashes are not things that doctors can prevent. Moreover, if you compare longevity among countries, leaving out homicide and car crashes, Americans have the longest lifespan in the western world.

Why then are people talking about gross statistics on longevity, as a reason to change our medical care system? Since this is a life-and-death issue, we need to think about the realities of the world, not the clever words of spinmeisters trying to justify a government takeover of medical care.

American medical care leads the world in things like cancer survival rates, which medical care affects far more than it affects people's behavior that leads to obesity and narcotics addiction, as well as such other things as homicide and reckless driving.

But none of this is even thought about, when people simply go with the flow of catchwords, accepting those words as the money of fools.

Among the many other catchwords that shut down thinking are "the rich" and "the poor." When is somebody rich? When they have a lot of wealth. But, when politicians talk about taxing "the rich," they are not even talking about people's wealth, and what they are planning to tax are people's incomes, not their wealth.

If we stop and think, instead of going with the flow of catchwords, it is clear than income and wealth are different things. A billionaire can have zero income. Bill Gates lost $18 billion dollars in 2008 and Warren Buffett lost $25 billion. Their income might have been negative, for all I know. But, no matter how low their income was, they were not poor.

By the same token, people who have worked their way up, to the point where they have a substantial income in their later years, are not rich. In most cases, they never earned high incomes in their younger years and they will not be earning high incomes when they retire. A middle-aged or elderly couple making $125,000 each are not rich, even though politicians will tax away what they have earned at the end of decades of working their way up.

Similarly, most of the people who are called "the poor" are not poor. Their low incomes are as transient as the higher incomes of "the rich." Most of the people in the bottom 20 percent in income end up in the top half of the income distribution in later years. Far more of them reach the top 20 percent than remain in the bottom 20 percent over the years.

The grand fallacy in most discussions of income statistics is the assumption that the various income brackets represent enduring classes of people, rather than transients who start at the bottom in entry-level jobs and move up as they acquire more experience and skills.

But if we are going to base major government policies on confusions between medical care and health care, or on calling people "rich" and "poor" who are neither, then we have truly accepted words as the money of fools.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=1166848

Big Sis To Get Expanded Role In Policing Internet

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
September 14, 2010

Two cybersecurity bills that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the Internet in the event of a national emergency have now been merged into a single unified piece of legislation that Democrats will try to pass before the end of the year, with the Department of Homeland Security being given a larger role in policing the world wide web.

Janet Napolitano’s DHS will be handed broader authority to determine how to handle potential cybersecurity threats. Photo: Center for American Progress.

Under the new draft bill, which is a combination of the two versions originally crafted by Senators Joe Lieberman and Jay Rockefeller, Janet Napolitano’s DHS will be handed broader authority to determine how to handle potential cybersecurity threats.

“DHS will get expanded authorities. I think that’s clear,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert with think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has studied the new bill.

An expanded role for Homeland Security would be somewhat ironic given the fact that the DHS itself recently failed an extensive cyber-security audit conducted by the agency’s own Inspector General.

“The DHS US-CERT office is currently plagued by at least 600 vulnerabilities that could compromise sensitive data, including 202 which have been classified as high-risk,” reported TG Daily.

Homeland Security’s failure to adequately secure its own internal network will lead to questions about why the agency should be given vast new authority to secure America’s cyber assets and the public Internet.

Democrats want to get the bill passed within the next four weeks, although “sticking points” could delay the legislation, according to a Senate aide familiar with the bill. However, lawmakers are determined to put the package up for a vote before the end of the year.

“Senate Majority Harry Reid has put the measure on his list of top-priority bills to get through the Senate this year,” sources told MoneyControl.com.

Lieberman’s version of the original bill includes language that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the world wide web for at least four months with no congressional oversight. The combined version appears to shift that responsibility to DHS, who under the pretext of a national emergency could block all Internet traffic to the U.S. from certain countries, and close down specific hubs and networks, creating an ominous precedent for government regulation and control over the Internet.

Cybersecurity legislation is being promoted as a vital tool to defend the nation’s critical infrastructure against cyber- terrorism. However, as we have highlighted, the threat from cyber-terrorists to the U.S. power grid or water supply is minimal. The perpetrators of an attack on such infrastructure would have to have direct physical access to the systems that operate these plants to cause any damage. Any perceived threat from the public Internet to these systems is therefore completely contrived and strips bare what many fear is the real agenda behind cybersecurity – to enable the government to regulate free speech on the Internet.

As we reported back in March, the Obama administration’s release of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a government plan to “secure” (or control) the nation’s public and private sector computer networks, coincided with Democrats attempting to claim that the independent news website The Drudge Report was serving malware, an incident Senator Jim Inhofe described as a deliberate ploy “to discourage people from using Drudge”.

Fears that cybersecurity legislation could be used to stifle free speech were heightened when Senator Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley that the real motivation behind the bill was to mimic the Communist Chinese system of Internet policing.

“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” said Lieberman.

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

As we have documented, the Communist Chinese government does not disconnect parts of the Internet because of genuine security concerns, it habitually does so only to oppress and silence victims of government abuse and atrocities, and to strangle dissent against the state, a practice many fear is the ultimate intention of cybersecurity in the United States.

http://www.infowars.com/big-sis-to-get-expanded-role-in-policing-internet/