If you were to judge the outcome of this month’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit by media reporting, you would come away with the impression that world leaders had made a major breakthrough.

The WTO, which overseas global trading rules, met in Nairobi, Kenya, and attempted to break a nearly 15-year deadlock which has pitched rich nations against developing nations.

The Financial Times hailed last week’s summit as “a victory for the US and EU” and “the final nail in the coffin” of the so-called ‘Doha Development Round’ talks that had been deadlocked since 2001. Much of the rest of the media has echoed this general sentiment.

If this were true, it would be a total disaster for the poorer countries represented at the WTO. Despite the name, the Doha Development Round has little to do with ‘development’ and more to do with liberalising global trade to the benefit of big corporations – like everything about the WTO.

But at least Doha in some way recognised the hypocrisy of rich nations in the WTO: on the one hand forcing southern countries to wrench open their markets and stop protecting their farmers, and on the other hand providing as many subsidies to their own corporations as possible. It was a weak branch that countries like India could cling to in order to say “this is supposed to be about development, but you continue to obstruct our development with your hypocritical trade rules.”

That’s why, in Kenya, rich nations wanted to declare Doha over, and move the WTO onto a whole host of other extremely controversial issues which they could foist on developing countries in the name of ‘free trade’. Highest on the list is so-called ‘investment’.

The idea is that the WTO should develop a set of explicitly pro-big business rules similar to those being discussed in the US-EU deal called TTIP. The dream is that corporations have more rights than human beings, and travel the world unimpeded by democratic laws.

That’s why, in the run up to the conference, many developing countries, led by India, were strongly resisting US-led moves to end the Doha Round and move onto these ‘new issues’. However bad the Doha Round was, it provided a placeholder to allow southern countries to keep their issues on the agenda – like India’s push to be allowed to buy food from farmers at guaranteed prices to stockpile or sell cheaply to the poor.

So what really happened?

The truth is that the outcome was yet another fudge – albeit one that could prove dangerous in the future.

It is true that rich countries succeeded in getting rid of a commitment to continuing the Doha Round in the final text. Instead, the text now merely acknowledges the disagreements over whether to pursue the framework any further. But it’s also true that there was no unambiguous statement that Doha has ended. So that’s a dead heat.

More important was holding out against any mention of the new issues being pushed by rich countries. So even if Doha is destined for a slow death, what takes its place hasn’t yet been agreed. Keeping issues like investment off the agenda was extremely important and testament to the strength of developing country blocs (which the US and EU tried to ‘divide and rule’) and campaigners from across the world.

On the vital issue of whether WTO rules can trump people’s right to food, rich countries didn’t get their way either. Rich countries wanted to rule India’s National Food Security Act out of order. The Act, while successful in reducing poverty and malnutrition in India, has been attacked as being in breach of WTO rules as it involves stockpiling food bought from farmers at fixed (potentially subsidised) prices and distributing it to poor households at a discount.

They failed. India didn’t exactly win either, but at least has a stay of execution. The lack of agreement in Nairobi means that India now has another 2 years until the next ministerial to try and get an agreement for a fairer deal.

A ‘dangerous vacuum’ has been left

Finally, southern countries were successful in securing concessions on cotton (an important issue for states in West Africa in particular) but rich countries wll be the main winners from the ban on agricultural export subsidies, which won’t actually abolish general subsidy schemes like the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which is not explicitly linked to exports or production.

The CAP, which is essentially a huge welfare scheme for (mostly) rich landowners, involves handing out money to owners of land regardless of whether they produce or export anything. The uneven WTO playing field, whereby rich countries’ subsidy schemes are categorised as being ‘allowable’ while poorer countries are prevented from subsidising their farmers, will continue.

As so often at the WTO, no deal would have been better than a bad deal. In the end, there was a deal, but a very vague and weak one. But this could still leave a dangerous vacuum. Without consensus on continuing the ostensibly pro-development Doha Round, by the next ministerial in 2017 there will be greater pressure on WTO members to accept a new agenda based on the interests of richer members.

And regardless of what happens within the WTO process, parallel deals outside the WTO like TTIP will push forward regardless. The danger is that even if no consensus is reached within the WTO, the rich countries will be able to set the rules through a network of bilateral deals that will give other countries no choice but to comply with what will rapidly become a de facto global standard with the WTO increasingly relegated to the sidelines.

The Nairobi deal hasn’t changed what remains a fundamentally unfair system of global trade. But for all that, the Kenya summit did show southern countries can still stand up and prevent the rich world running roughshod over them.

The triumphal rhetoric from the media is unjustified. The outcome could also have been much worse. We have the much maligned ‘deadlock’ at the WTO to thank for that.

Alex Scrivener is policy officer at Global Justice Now.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.

Critics of GM promote pseudo-science, make false claims based on ignorance and are driven by politically motivated ideology.

The actions of these affluent elitists effectively deny food to the hungry. They are therefore committing crimes against humanity. If you follow the GM issue, no doubt you’ve heard this kind of simplistic, tired and predictable diatribe before.

A good deal of the debate surrounding GMOs involves attacking critics of the technology who voice genuine concerns and put forward valid arguments to back up their case.

The attacks by the pro-GM lobby are nonsensical because there is sufficient, credible evidence that questions the safety, efficacy and the science used to promote GM, as well as the politics and practices used to get GMOs on the commercial market.

This evidence has been validated many times before by peer-reviewed studies and official reports. Furthermore, many of the slick PR claims made by the pro-GM lobby have been deconstructed and found to be seriously wanting. Such evidence has been referred or linked to on many occasions in my numerous previous articles, and I see no need to regurgitate this here.

Reasoned, informed debate? Forget it

Attacks on opponents of GM are designed to whip up emotive, populist sentiment and denigrate critics with the aim of diverting attention from the underlying issues pertaining to hunger and poverty, as well as ideology, commercial interests and political motivations of the pro-GM lobby itself.

Lobbyist Patrick Moore has called GMWatch “murdering bastards“. Journalist William Saletan portrays those who question GM as heretics clinging to faith and relying on an “army of quacks and pseudo-environmentalists waging a leftist war on science.” Claire Robinson has taken apart his pro-GM ideology and evangelising here, which is little more than disinformation masquerading as objective journalism.

Former UK environment minister Owen Paterson has described critics of GM as a “green blob” bunch of affluent elitists who are anti-science Luddites. Then there is Fellow of the Royal Society Sir Richard John Roberts, who calls for less politics in science, implying that critics have a political agenda. He says they should stop scaremongering and forwarding propaganda.

Roberts recently said that if you don’t want to eat GMOs, then don’t – conveniently ignoring that fact that Monsanto has denied choice by spending at least $100 million in the US to prevent labelling of GM food. He says that GM is probably safer than traditional foods, which it clearly isn’t, and has expressed dismay over the delay in the production of Golden Rice.

Mirroring the propaganda of the GM sector, Roberts says though Golden Rice became a reality in February 1999 and could have been used as early as 2002, the opposition to GM has ensured that it is not currently available, which again is simply not the case.

He claims more than 15 million children have died or suffered globally due to vitamin A deficiency since 2002. Roberts asks: “How many must die before we consider this a crime against humanity that should be prosecuted?” His claims are baseless and his tactic is deliberately inflammatory.

Another prominent scientist-cum-lobbyist, Anthony Trewavas, uses similar tactics by calling on critics to defer to (pro-GM) scientists and stop forcing their authoritarian views on people, thus denying choice and GM to consumers and farmers alike.

In a similar vein, C S Prakash has used politically-motivated attacks on opponents and made numerous claims in favour of GM in high-profile media outlets that he does not appear to want to back up.

GM proponents ‘driven by fear’

If scaremongering and propaganda are occurring, Roberts, Trewavas, Prakash and others should look a little closer to home because what they are doing is engaging in a high-profile roll-out of psychological projection: accusing opponents of the very things the pro-GM lobby is guilty of doing in order to shift the focus of attention.

The industry and its supporters are driven by politics, commercial gain and ideology. Its very foundation is based on a fraud and the capturing and corrupting of international and national bodies, including the WTO, trade deals, governments and regulators.

And, arguably, it is also driven by fear. “They are scared to death”, says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of several books on food policy. She adds:

“They have an industry to defend and are attacking in the hope that they’ll neutralize critics … It’s a paranoid industry and has been from the beginning.”

While massive financial clout and the capture of key political institutions (thereby curtailing the option of prioritising more productive and sustainable models of agriculture) constitute the power base of global agribusiness corporations, we also must not overlook the role of prominent individuals, whether scientists or media figures.

These foot soldiers of the GM industry try to set the GM debate by painting critics as irrational, ignorant and politically motivated, whereas they (scientists especially) are supposedly objective and untainted by vested interests (clearly untrue). And they have been quite successful at getting this message into the mainstream media.

Readers are urged to check websites such as Lobbywatch, Powerbase and Spinwatch, where they will see links between some prominent GM scientist-lobbyists and big agribusiness companies, the ultra-right group the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Scientific Alliance (described as a front group for corporate interests) and Bivings Group (a public relations company that worked with Monsanto), among others.

And these connections have resulted in well-orchestrated smear campaigns against individuals and groups (see this, this and this), pro-GM propaganda (see this about the sweet potato) and dirty tricks (for example, using fake identities to attacks critcs of GM). At the same time, those responsible for such things carefully manage the message that they themselves are the persecuted victims of ideologically-driven anti-GM campaigners.

The doublespeak and hypocrisy is plain to see.

Carefully avoiding the real problems, and the genuine solutions

If anything matters to the pro-GM lobby, contrary to the public persona it tries to convey, it clearly has little to do with ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ or objective science. It has more to do with undermining and debasing these concepts.

And if it were to genuinely embrace these values, along with ‘humanitarianism’, a concept it also lays claim to, it would flag up and protest against the corporate capture of science and the infiltration by commercial interests of institutions and regulatory bodies, and it would also protest against the way trade and aid is used to subjugate regions and the most productive components of global agriculture – the small / peasant farmer – to the needs of powerful commercial entities.

For all of its talk about GM ‘feeding the world’ and scaremongering about the actions of anti-GM activists leading to the deaths of “billions“ due to their resistance to GM, the pro-GM lobby sidesteps the true nature of hunger and poverty. It is only by understanding the issues raised by Eric Holt-Giménez in the article from which the following quote comes from that we can begin to see how ridiculous the claims of Moore, Trewavas, Roberts and the rest really are:

“The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis.

“The ‘solutions’ they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world’s food.

“For this reason, thus far, there has been little official leadership in the face of the crisis. Nor has there been any informed public debate about the real reasons the numbers of hungry people are growing, or what we can do about it. The future of our food-and fuel-systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies.”

But certain people would rather attack those who do actually flag up and campaign against such things and who desire transparency, democracy and the proper accountability of institutions that supposedly exist to protect the public interest.

The myth of ‘green authoritarianism’

What we get instead is prominent figures decrying these campaigners as ‘murderers’, ‘elitists’ and regressive authoritarian ‘types’ and ludicrously comparing their actions with authoritarian regimes and mass death that occurred under such systems.

Anthony Trewavas is the perfect exemplar: “Most objectors in this area have a political programme not a scientific one but they like to bend science to their own political point of view. Science is by its nature not politics or political propaganda or anything like it. It deals with evidence not superstition, or political or social philosophies.”

Trewavas conveniently sidesteps the underlying politics and commercial interests underpinning GM and instead relies on a heavy dose of propaganda by stating:

“It is an unfortunate situation that in our present world many environmentalist groups have become typically authoritarian in attitude. Greenpeace notably decides its opinions must prevail regardless of others, so it arrogates to itself the right to tear up and destroy things it doesn’t like. That is absolutely typical of people who are unable to convince others by debate and discussion and in the last century such attitudes, amplified obviously, ended up killing people that others did not like. But the same personality type the authoritarian.”

Such a simplistic analysis indicates that Trewavas is not a psychologist, a historian or a political scientist. He is a molecular biologist but appears to think his status qualifies him to have his ill-informed personal views taken as fact and promoted by the media. And he is not alone.

Doing the bidding of powerful business interests

Kevin Folta, another molecular biologist (with close links to big agribusiness), argues that adopting GM would offer “plentiful and affordable food supply using responsible and sustainable agricultural practices.”

Is he also an economist, a political scientist, a trade policy analyst and an ecologist? No amount of gene splicing or fine-sounding rhetoric can overcome the structural factors that lead to poverty and hunger. (Folta has also often spoken on health-related issues, which again are beyond the field of his expertise and has got things wrong.)

Structural inequality, oil prices, debt repayment, trade policy, commodity speculation, land use (eg for biofuels), the destruction of indigenous food systems, access to land and credit, soil health, irrigation, etc, all feed into policies that determine plentiful, affordable food and sustainability.

As the backbone of global food production, especially in the Global South, small farmers increasingly face marginalisation and oppression due to corporate seed monopolies, land speculation and takeovers, rigged trade that favours global agribusiness interests and commodity speculation.

So, what are we to conclude? That certain figures within the pro-GM lobby are objective and independent? That they really do believe in choice and democracy, even when the evidence is clear that such things are being denied consumers and farmers through, for example, unremitting regulatory fraud, rigged markets, secrecy, manipulation of aid and trade and strings-attached loans? That they know where the line is between science and lobbying, between science and propaganda?

Or, based on their associations and their silence on crucially important structural issues that create poverty, hunger and food deficit regions and their false claims and inflammatory remarks on other issues, are we to conclude that they are effectively doing the bidding of extremely powerful commercial interests?

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. You can support his work here.

This article was originally published on Colin’s website.

The UK is drenched in flood waters again. With a changing climate meaning this will become a more and more frequent phenomenon, we’re going to have to start to think more seriously about how to stop heavy rainfall from soaking people out of their homes and rotting fields of valuable crops.

There used to be a creature in Britain which helped significantly with this effort. It was made extinct here around four centuries ago, but recent reintroductions of this rodent have shown the vital role they once had in reducing flooding – and how they could take up that mantle once more.

In spite of their reputation for causing floods, beavers also have the capacity for mitigating the impact of flooding, but on a rather bigger scale.

Before …

Here’s an example to illustrate the point. Some beavers were brought to a farm in the Tay catchment near Bamff in Perthshire, Scotland, to live in large enclosures in 2002, as a demonstration project.

Before there were beavers, across most of the flat land there was a five foot deep ditch running through. In dry times the ditch had very little water in it. In rainy times, and times of rapid snowmelt the water rushed down the ditch and tipped out into the burn that flowed down the little den and on to the neighbouring land.

All that water headed quickly on its way through the agricultural land to the east, and on down the burn and into the Isla and then the Tay. In January 1993, when a fast thaw followed a big freeze, the Tay flooded its banks downstream at Perth and caused widespread damage to homes and great misery to many.

Since then floodwalls have been built in Perth and there hasn’t been another flooding incident yet, but the water has come close to the top of the wall on a number of occasions. Other parts of low-ground Perthshire continue to suffer regular flooding.

The beavers on the farm got established and started breeding by 2005. Over time they built perhaps thirty dams and as a result they are holding up thousands of tonnes of water at the moment, as almost relentless rain has fallen in the last month.

Just beyond the ditch there are two ponds that were dug in the 19th century for recreational use. By 30 years ago they were starting to dry out. One of them had become more of a wetland than a pond, and not a very wet wetland at that. The other had shrunk and was heading the same way.

And after …

The beavers, released into the pond, began by building up the barrage to increase the height of the water. Then when water started to overflow it they dammed the overflow in many places, creating a series of terraced pools.

Looked at from a drought mitigation point of view there would be no question that the beavers have made the low-ground a wetter place than it used to be with plenty of water for livestock even in the driest summer.

But it is clear to see the result if this pattern were repeated in similar places all over the Tay catchment, or any river catchment.

In times of heavy rain or sudden snowmelt, the water rushing down from the highlands would be slowed up and absorbed more effectively by the large ponds, wetlands and streams with flights of beaver dams, than by deep cut ditches designed to channel water as fast as possible on to the next place.

Many small floods upstream prevent big floods downstream

A flood, of course, is a pond in the wrong place. And beavers don’t always put their ponds in the right place. Sometimes they decide to put them in someone’s garden, or over a road. In cases like that they are not seen a flood mitigators, rather as flood creators.

But the point is that, by creating multiple small floods, ponds, pools and wetlands upstream, they can help to mitigate bigger floods downstream.

And small floods made by beavers in inconvenient places can be reduced or drained in various ways. Dams can be removed or modified. Whereas large floods cannot be so easily dealt with and may cause widespread problems.

Along with floodwaters goes sediment, and this becomes a serious pollutant once it reaches the cities and the sea, clogging drains and damaging marine life.

Beaver dams hold back sediment to a hugely significant extent, as shown by studies done in Texas and Belgium. The two species, Eurasian and North American are shown to have much the same impact.

Restoring oxbow lakes and wetlands

With increasing climatic uncertainty it is going to be necessary to take some land in the former floodplains out of agricultural use and restore old oxbow lakes and wetlands to allow the absorption of floodwaters and sediment in times of spate.

As George Monbiot is quite right to point out, how upstream land is managed has a vital role in determining whether or not there are floods downstream. The way to stop water from flooding houses (alongside not trashing the climate) is to stop it from running so quickly off the hills.

For thousands of years, British beavers contributed enormously to this work. It’s time that we allowed them to once more.