It has started: Big corporations institutionalize land-grab to control the global food production

globinfo freexchange

 

As we were writing back in 2014:

 

                     Having secured the new labor force through fully automated machines, what has left for the dominant elite now, is to take all the resources. Big corporations are grabbing huge cultivable areas especially in the developing countries in order to control food production. 

We have come now to the point where big corporations literally institutionalize land-grab to control the global food production.

 

As The Grayzone recently revealed [emphasis added]: 

In June 2019, the office of UN General Secretary António Guterres, without previous discussion in the General Assembly or any other intergovernmental process, signed a strategic partnership with the World Economic Forum. [...] The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit was initiated through a partnership with the World Economic Forum, with limited participation of other UN bodies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization or the Committee on World Food Security, which traditionally handle food policies. In contrast to previous food summits, there was no intergovernmental body that convened the summit. The current president of AGRA, Agnes Kalibata, was named as special envoy to the summit, a clear sign of the hand of the Gates Foundation. The lack of transparency and corporate agenda of the summit were denounced in an open letter signed by more than 500 civil society organizations in March 2020. The summit seeks to erase the last 15 years of progress in recognizing human rights in food systems, and instead promotes false solutions like “zero-net emissions”, “soil carbon pricing”, and “a new deal for nature”, that in practice put more control over land, biodiversity, and water in the hands of elite and secretive bodies run by corporations.

Early this year we identified the next step by private corporations to institutionalize the 21st century corporate feudalism using Nevada as a testing field for the transition. As we wrote, the Western economic model is about to be transformed into something even worse than capitalism, towards a kind of 21st century corporate feudalism. And the US state of Nevada is about to become the testing field for such a transition in the most official way!

Recall that the elites had already mentioned the probability of a "widespread societal upheaval" due to the takeover of jobs by artificial intelligence, but not earlier than 2020, according to a 2016 World Economic Forum study.

COVID-19 pandemic may have accelerated the plans of the elites to fully automate production and get rid of as much human workforce as possible, prior to any potential major societal upheavals. The UK may become a pioneer now in that process due to the crisis emerging mostly from the lack of workforce in critical supply sectors.

And the strategic partnership of the UN with the World Economic Forum in 2019 marks the beginning of the next big step: the agricultural land-grab until full control of global food production by corporations.

  

As The Grayzone article also points out:

 

La Vía Campesina is possibly the world’s largest social movement. Made up of 200 million small farmers, peasants, farm workers, and indigenous peoples, it has popularized the idea of food sovereignty as the right of peoples to control and defend their own food systems using healthy, agro-ecological methods. After years battling against free-trade agreements and the World Bank in the streets of Seattle, Cancun, and Seoul, La Via Campesina made an incursion into institutional politics, helping to draft and carry the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants through 18 years of negotiations, until it was passed by the UN General Assembly in December 2018.   This declaration protects the right of rural people to access land, water, seeds, and other resources in order to produce their own food and that of their society.   [...]   Opposition to AGRA’s corporate takeover of the African countryside is part of what drove La Via Campesina and farmers across the continent to demand a place at the table in UN debates about food. After the world food crisis of 2008, the UN Committee on World Food Security was reorganized to allow social actors such as La Via Campesina to participate as non-voting delegates in debates about food policy. Three consecutive UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food have largely endorsed La Vía Campesina’s proposals: redistributive land reform and agroecological farming can end hunger while dramatically reducing agriculture’s contribution to problems like greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere, pollinator population decline, and freshwater scarcity.

 

Obviously, not only state, but also international institutions have been taken over by the big corporations - a critical step to establish their global neofeudalism. And it seems that the only resistance against this extremely Dystopian prospect, can only come from global social movements, like La Vía Campesina, who are "standing up for democracy and against big capital's devastation of their lands, farms, and communities."