Feeding the Corporations

For sure, the environment activist, Vandana Shiva, doesn’t have all the answers, just as Naomi Klein and many others don’t either. But collectively, they offer an insight into the ecological problems we face today. It is the socialists who present an alternative feasible and sustainable economy.

In this interview, Shiva highlights some of the failures of the capitalist system in reaching any solution.

“Fifty percent of all greenhouse gases are contributed by corporate-industrial 
chemical agriculture and globalized trade. The chemical system is in fact a fossil agriculture, since it is dependent of fossil fuels. Nitrogen fertilizers, which are produced from fossil fuels, emit nitrogen oxide, which is 300 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Chemical industrial agriculture increase mechanization and use of fossil 
fuels. Long distance transport adds "food miles" and carbon emissions. The destruction of diversity and increasing dependence on a few globally traded commodities has led to deforestation in Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia. Deforestation related to agriculture contributes to 15 percent of the GHGs.”

“Corporate propaganda that chemicals and GMOs reduce hunger is wrong
 because chemicals promote nutritionally empty monoculture commodities
, which create a hidden hunger of nutritional deficiencies. It is wrong because high cost inputs make farmers indebted, and farmers in debt are hungry farmers. Of the 1 billion hungry, 500 million are farmers…Finally, it is wrong because this model produced commodities, not food. The largest expansion in GMOs has been in corn and soya. Most of the corn and soya goes for biofuel and animal feed. Only 10 percent goes to food.
Commodities feed profits of corporations, not people.”

Socialists accept that it is capitalist corporate power and its lust for profit which is the real enemy of humanity and the planet. They set and implement the policies that shape our lives and distort our views of reality. Hopefully, with the help of activists like Vandana Shiva and the growing disparities between reality and the fairy tales, we are beginning to see through the deception. But it requires a socialist analysis to understand fully what must be done to end the environmental rape of our planet