Showing posts with label Monsanto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monsanto. Show all posts

Apr 13, 2014

Agriculturists or People Without Land

Agriculturists Without Land 


The following is a critique of the content of the above article and aims to open a discussion on the issue of social movements being incorporated within the system when they can not be defeated by physical (violent repression) means. Comments related to the subject are welcome and will be published as soon as possible.

MST is a 30 year old movement in Brazil.  It has both class and social characteristics.  It is a movement for people without land by the people without land.  Brazil is the country with the largest percentage of the population having no access to land.  Very counter-intuitive if you consider the vast area of jungle and unexplored forests created by the Amazon.  This means that a very small group of people have converted all land to private status.  This was done with a mechanism called IMF when the country first started going bankrupt 40 years ago.

This article nevertheless calls the MST movement agriculturists without land, which apart from being poorly written reveals a specific political value.  What we can conclude from it is that land is perceived as means of production which utilizes specialized workers to produce for others.  Something that as far as we can find about MST it is not.  What is odd about the article and drew our attention is the term agriculturists, meaning agricultural workers, which if searched through the net it has not been used before in reference to MST.

Dec 9, 2013

The Monster is Right on Top of Us




Argentine Protesters vs Monsanto:

Reprint Troops at the entrance to the construction site where Monsanto is building a factory in Malvinas Argentinas. Credit: Screen capture from a video on the Acampe protesters’ Facebook page 

MALVINAS ARGENTINAS, Córdoba, Argentina , Dec 2 2013 (IPS) - The people of this working-class suburb of Córdoba in Argentina’s central farming belt stoically put up with the spraying of the weed-killer glyphosate on the fields surrounding their neighbourhood. But the last straw was when U.S. biotech giant Monsanto showed up to build a seed plant.
The creator of glyphosate, whose trademark is Roundup, and one of the world’s leading producers of genetically modified seeds, Monsanto is building one of its biggest plants to process transgenic corn seed in Malvinas Argentinas, this poor community of 15,000 people 17 km east of the capital of the province of Córdoba.