On Monday this week Iowa State University graduate students delivered 57,309 petition signatures to ISU’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences opposing human feeding trials for a genetically modified (GM) banana.

At the same time AGRA Watch members in Seattle, Washington delivered the same petition to the headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, denouncing plans to introduce the GM banana to Uganda and other African countries.

The petition was initiated in response to an email sent to the ISU student body in April 2014 inviting young women (ages 18-40) to eat genetically modified bananas in return for a $900 payment.

It asks the University and the Gates Foundation to cease supporting the GM banana study, including human feeding trials, and to change the trajectory for this type of research conducted at public universities.

The GM bananas are based on the Cavendish variety that dominates international trade, enriched with beta carotene. This follow the model of the now notorious ‘Golden Rice’, and has the purported goal of reducing Vitamin A deficiency in Uganda and other parts of the world. The ISU study, funded by the Gates Foundation, examines the uptake of beta carotene from the bananas and its conversion into Vitamin A in the body.

Bridget Mugambe, a Ugandan campaigner with Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, declared, “What is eluding the Gates Foundation is the existence of diverse alternative sources of Vitamin A rich foods that are easily planted and readily available in Uganda. The need for this Vitamin A rich GM banana is clearly assumed, and may sadly end up destroying a food that is at the very core of our social fabric.”

Alleged ‘biopiracy’ – DNA from Papua New Guinea cultivar

This is not the first time that the Gates Foundation has caused a furore over their GM bananas. Over $15 million have been used to develop these bananas with the aim of producing fruit with high levels of pre-Vitamin A, Iron and Vitamin E.

The genes for this GM banana are taken from an existing banana cultivar from Papua New Guinea, causing AGRA Watch to describe the project as “a clear example of biopiracy” – because the indigenous peoples that have developed the cultivar over millennia of cultivation have neither consented to its use in the GMO nor do they receive any benefit.

In addition, there are already hundreds of banana cultivars that are naturally high in beta carotene and grown around the tropics in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. Promotion of these existing cultivars could provide a simple answer to addressing the Vitamin A deficiency with no need to resort to genetic modification and the use of patented plant varieties.

Campaigners are also suspicious at the choice of the Cavendish banana, the cultivar which makes up 99% of current banana trade, for the project. The variety is highly susceptible to fungal and other infections, and may be need to be sprayed dozens of times with agrochemicals each growing season.

By contrast existing red banana cultivars are much more disease resistant and suitable for chemical-free smallholder cultivation. The concern is that the real intention of the carotene-enhanced Cavendish may be to secure lucrative export markets as the new ‘superfood’ for western consumers.

A coalition of over 100 US, African and international organizations expressed concerns in an Open Letter that the GM  bananas will have an adverse affect on Ugandan agriculture, food security and food sovereignty. “The banana may have negative long-term impacts on Ugandan agriculture”, says Magombe.

“Many banana varieties serves as staples in Ugandan diets. Ugandans have the right to have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food.”

GM bananas pose risks to students

Campaigners also point out that there has been no prior animal testing of this product, and the study is one of the first ever human feeding trials ever of a GMO. So participating ISU students would be consuming a product of unknown safety.

And the safety concern is not limited to students or activists. Among those concerned at the hazards of the experiment is Dr. David Schubert, a molecular biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:

“Beta carotene is chemically related to compounds that are known to cause birth defects and other problems in humans at extremely low levels, and these toxic chemicals are possible if not likely by-products of plants engineered to make large amounts of beta carotene.

“Since there is no required safety testing of the banana or any other GMO, doing a feeding trial in people, especially women, should not be allowed. It is both unethical and immoral, particularly because there are several naturally occurring varieties of banana that are safe and have higher levels of beta carotene than the GM varieties.”

His comments make the idea of feeding the GM bananas to young women who might be pregnant or become pregnant during the course of the study appear especially unwise.

In addition, there is much about the study that is non-transparent: concerned ISU community members have yet to receive answers about the research design, risks, nature of the informed consent given by the subjects, and the generalizability of the study

The future of agriculture in Africa does not lie in GMOs

The demonstrations come on the heels of a widely-reported new critique of the Gates Foundation, commissioned by UK-based Global Justice Now, which accuses the organisation of sacrificing the small farmers that gow most of Africa’s food to corporate interests.

In the report entitled ‘Gated Development‘, the organization argues that “big business is directly benefitting, in particular in the fields of agriculture and health, as a result of the foundation’s activities.” The report goes on to claim that the foundation creates “a corporate merry-go-round where the [foundation] consistently acts in the interests of corporations”.

Mariam Mayet, Director of African Centre for Biodiversity (South Africa) stated, “We in Africa vehemently oppose the introduction of GM crops plants into our food and farming systems that is being carried out in the name of the public good.

“Once again we would like to draw attention to the conclusions of the 400 global experts of the IAASTD report, who are under no illusion that the current obsession with yield and productivity (personified in the extreme by GMOs) is a panacea for a more ecologically sustainable and equitable food system.”

The CREDO petition is a follow-up to a petition launched in 2015 by ISU graduate students who, in partnership with AGRA Watch, collected over 1,000 signatures, which were delivered in December. Signatures were collected in a partnership between ISU graduate students, AGRA Watch and CREDO Mobile.

Vanessa Amaral-Rogers is a freelance journalist writing mainly on environmental themes.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Why is Bill Gates backing GMO red banana biopiracy‘ by Adam Breasley & Oliver Tickell.

Principal source: ‘AGRA Watch‘.

Monday’s uprising of French farmers, who blocked roads across northern and western France with tractors, burning tires and piles of steaming manure, was but the latest of a wave of protests by dairy farmers at the sharp end of the EU’s ‘free trade’ policies.

Last September some 5,000 dairy farmers from across Europe converged on Brussels accompanied by 1,450 tractors and engaged in pitched street battles with riot police amid piles of burning straw. The action was the culmination of a wave of dramatic cross-border protests, cows occupying store aisles, and ferocious clashes.

The farmers succeeded in winning promises of a €500 million aid package – but no structural changes that would create a fair market for their produce, without pitting Europe’s small scale family farmers against the world’s largest and cheapest producers.

The protests, led by the European Milk Board, the European Farmers’ Union (Copa), and the European Coordination Via Campesina, were a coordinated response to the European Commission’s elimination of milk supply quotas, in place since 1984. The full repeal at the start of April was followed by a 24% drop in prices over five months, leading much of the press to declare that milk was now “cheaper than water”.

Global trade deals accelerate ‘race to the bottom’

Following two years of rapidly decreasing global demand for milk, and already increasing global supply, the quotas’ termination placed major strain on dairy farmers that could yet do great damage to their ability to make a living in the industry.

The EU, as the largest dairy-producing region in the world, maintained its commitment to trade liberalisation despite the uproar, and has already begun the process of replacing direct market interventions with US-style subsidies. Meanwhile, the reduction in the cost of milk products greatly benefits large food processing companies like Nestlé by improving their access to cheaper ingredients, at the expense of small producers.

But these militant uprisings show that farmers and food system workers can unite and fight back against a neoliberal trade agenda that will only ever push down the prices and wages they receive.

It is no secret that global trade is going through a major transformation. The EU-US TTIP agreement under consideration has been compared in scale by negotiators to the European internal market, while Hillary Clinton has called it an “economic NATO” – apparently intended as a term of praise.

In addition, the recently-concluded, but not yet effective, TPP deal between a dozen Pacific nations, including the United States, Canada and Mexico, covers an area that generates 40% of the world’s GDP.

This crucial phase of the push to create a new global economic system through proposed free trade deals, on top of policy changes being carried out by existing institutions such as the European Union, will have many effects of a currently uncertain nature.

One certainty, however, is that their impact on the global working class will be harsh, especially for workers in the global agriculture system. Recent struggles over dairy pricing demonstrate how some of the people who stand to lose the most from these deals have begun to fight back.

Dairy sector is now a major ‘free trade’ battle field

As Europe continued reeling from the summer’s developments, a major point of contention in the TPP negotiations was Canada’s interventionist system of dairy ‘supply management’. Thanks to last-minute concessions, supply management appears to be safe for now, although the included import increases will still pose a hardship for small farmers and yet more will have to be spent on subsidies to counter its ill effects.

The comparatively gentle terms of the dairy provisions in the final agreement, and the electoral collapse of the country’s social-democratic NDP opposition in October, mean the issue is likely settled for now, although organised opposition to TPP remains.

While North American dairy farmers may be pacified for the time being, the stakes will be just as high in the battle against TTIP. Dairy is one area of trade where tariffs remain relatively high, and US agribusiness is expected to target economic supports for ‘non-competitive’ farmers in the TTIP – particularly the EU Single Farm Payment.

The dairy industry, therefore, remains a major field in the global war on small farmers, agricultural and food production workers, and on the food rights of the world’s poor.

Meanwhile, corporate profiteering and law-breaking

The rampant gangsterism of late-stage food processing companies in the dairy industry is typified by one recent price-fixing scheme: an investigation found that between 2006 and 2012, executives at 90% of French yoghurt and dairy dessert manufacturers, including major player Nestlé-Lactalis, used dedicated mobile phones to arrange “clandestine meetings in hotels” in order to introduce coordinated price increases.

Similarly, it is not uncommon for the largest companies to collude while bargaining with smaller ingredient suppliers in order to ensure that their bids remain as uncompetitive as possible,

These are major strategies for large food processing companies in general – unlike many in the manufacturing sector, they depend almost as much upon cheap ingredient prices and the proximity of their facilities to large consumer markets as they do on cheap labour. This is especially true for dairy – a product highly perishable in its fresh form; the insulated transport of liquid milk alone accounts for a third of total production costs.

In the age of global capitalism, these types of costs pose a stubborn geographic impediment that food manufacturers have aimed to eliminate through their political influence.

As the Corporate Europe Observatory found earlier this year, agribusiness representatives have held more meetings with TTIP negotiators than has any other industry; in addition to industry groups such as FoodDrinkEurope, both Mondelez International and Nestlé have met with the negotiators on their own, multiple times each.

Meanwhile, transnational corporations have utilised existing trade mechanisms and the ongoing negotiations as a central component of a growth strategy based on expanding sales into developing markets, while also running small local competitors out of business. The result is that developing nations become highly dependent on imports and on the food corporations to provide them.

Now ‘free trade’ trumps human rights

Under current policies, governments are expected to value free trade over human rights. Since the 1995 WTO Agreement on Agriculture, there has been a concerted push to create a ‘global agriculture’ system and participating governments have agreed to a set of rules which compel them to prioritise trade liberalisation over food security or sustainable development.

NGOs, including Oxfam, ActionAid and a number of US faith denominations, have condemned the TPP agreement on this basis. They argue that its provisions “fail to take into account that national food security is a legitimate interest governments must protect”, and that simply increasing national food supplies through trade – with no guarantee of its fair distribution – does not satisfy this standard.

In the face of the decades-long corporate onslaught, organisations including the IUF union federation and anti-poverty NGOs have challenged existing trade goals with an alternative ‘rights-based’ approach to global food production and distribution.

The upsurge in farmer militancy is an encouraging sign that others in the food chain are also prepared to fight back when they recognise a mortal threat to their interests. Their approach has the potential to unite masses of farmers with trade unionists throughout the world in pursuit of shared interests against the large corporations that control much of the world’s agricultural policy.

A global struggle for good food, good jobs and good pay

The primacy of food manufacturers within this neoliberal agriculture system threatens not only food access and public health, but also the livelihoods of over a billion people employed in the sector – an entire third of the global workforce.

Just as small suppliers have suffered from corporate expansion, the biggest food corporations have concurrently transformed local labour markets. They employ people in appalling conditions throughout most of the world. As an increasingly few companies come to dominate local agriculture in developing markets, they introduce a submissive, easily-threatened, temporary workforce, destroy local producers and promote further impoverishment.

For example, Nestlé, in addition to (allegedly) encouraging trade unionist assassinations in Colombia, avoids permanent employment relationships by classifying large numbers of employees as ‘non-core’. These workers hold roles in production, packaging and distribution that may be filled by temps on an indefinite basis.

As a result, there are entire countries where most of the company’s workforce is employed through temp agencies. This process is encouraged by a system of intra-regional competition among facilities, tracked with sophisticated IT systems. The elimination of political and regulatory barriers to trade will fit these existing structures of corporate operations, especially given their need to transcend the geographic challenges that are inherent in food production and distribution.

The movement for food sovereignty is a crucial stage in the international struggle for workers’ rights. A trade unionist approach to food justice has the potential to unite a broader coalition in support of the rights of workers and small farmers in developing countries. The dairy protests that began last summer and continue today show that such a broad-based movement can meet the challenge.

People can still take back control of the food system and in doing so will allow agricultural workers to take control over their livelihoods. As long as international trade is designed in the interests of the large food manufacturers and against those of workers and small producers, we remain on a dangerous path.

David Miller is a labor activist and writer based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. This version includes some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

On Monday this week Iowa State University graduate students delivered 57,309 petition signatures to ISU’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences opposing human feeding trials for a genetically modified (GM) banana.

At the same time AGRA Watch members in Seattle, Washington delivered the same petition to the headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, denouncing plans to introduce the GM banana to Uganda and other African countries.

The petition was initiated in response to an email sent to the ISU student body in April 2014 inviting young women (ages 18-40) to eat genetically modified bananas in return for a $900 payment.

It asks the University and the Gates Foundation to cease supporting the GM banana study, including human feeding trials, and to change the trajectory for this type of research conducted at public universities.

The GM bananas are based on the Cavendish variety that dominates international trade, enriched with beta carotene. This follow the model of the now notorious ‘Golden Rice’, and has the purported goal of reducing Vitamin A deficiency in Uganda and other parts of the world. The ISU study, funded by the Gates Foundation, examines the uptake of beta carotene from the bananas and its conversion into Vitamin A in the body.

Bridget Mugambe, a Ugandan campaigner with Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, declared, “What is eluding the Gates Foundation is the existence of diverse alternative sources of Vitamin A rich foods that are easily planted and readily available in Uganda. The need for this Vitamin A rich GM banana is clearly assumed, and may sadly end up destroying a food that is at the very core of our social fabric.”

Alleged ‘biopiracy’ – DNA from Papua New Guinea cultivar

This is not the first time that the Gates Foundation has caused a furore over their GM bananas. Over $15 million have been used to develop these bananas with the aim of producing fruit with high levels of pre-Vitamin A, Iron and Vitamin E.

The genes for this GM banana are taken from an existing banana cultivar from Papua New Guinea, causing AGRA Watch to describe the project as “a clear example of biopiracy” – because the indigenous peoples that have developed the cultivar over millennia of cultivation have neither consented to its use in the GMO nor do they receive any benefit.

In addition, there are already hundreds of banana cultivars that are naturally high in beta carotene and grown around the tropics in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. Promotion of these existing cultivars could provide a simple answer to addressing the Vitamin A deficiency with no need to resort to genetic modification and the use of patented plant varieties.

Campaigners are also suspicious at the choice of the Cavendish banana, the cultivar which makes up 99% of current banana trade, for the project. The variety is highly susceptible to fungal and other infections, and may be need to be sprayed dozens of times with agrochemicals each growing season.

By contrast existing red banana cultivars are much more disease resistant and suitable for chemical-free smallholder cultivation. The concern is that the real intention of the carotene-enhanced Cavendish may be to secure lucrative export markets as the new ‘superfood’ for western consumers.

A coalition of over 100 US, African and international organizations expressed concerns in an Open Letter that the GM  bananas will have an adverse affect on Ugandan agriculture, food security and food sovereignty. “The banana may have negative long-term impacts on Ugandan agriculture”, says Magombe.

“Many banana varieties serves as staples in Ugandan diets. Ugandans have the right to have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food.”

GM bananas pose risks to students

Campaigners also point out that there has been no prior animal testing of this product, and the study is one of the first ever human feeding trials ever of a GMO. So participating ISU students would be consuming a product of unknown safety.

And the safety concern is not limited to students or activists. Among those concerned at the hazards of the experiment is Dr. David Schubert, a molecular biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:

“Beta carotene is chemically related to compounds that are known to cause birth defects and other problems in humans at extremely low levels, and these toxic chemicals are possible if not likely by-products of plants engineered to make large amounts of beta carotene.

“Since there is no required safety testing of the banana or any other GMO, doing a feeding trial in people, especially women, should not be allowed. It is both unethical and immoral, particularly because there are several naturally occurring varieties of banana that are safe and have higher levels of beta carotene than the GM varieties.”

His comments make the idea of feeding the GM bananas to young women who might be pregnant or become pregnant during the course of the study appear especially unwise.

In addition, there is much about the study that is non-transparent: concerned ISU community members have yet to receive answers about the research design, risks, nature of the informed consent given by the subjects, and the generalizability of the study

The future of agriculture in Africa does not lie in GMOs

The demonstrations come on the heels of a widely-reported new critique of the Gates Foundation, commissioned by UK-based Global Justice Now, which accuses the organisation of sacrificing the small farmers that gow most of Africa’s food to corporate interests.

In the report entitled ‘Gated Development‘, the organization argues that “big business is directly benefitting, in particular in the fields of agriculture and health, as a result of the foundation’s activities.” The report goes on to claim that the foundation creates “a corporate merry-go-round where the [foundation] consistently acts in the interests of corporations”.

Mariam Mayet, Director of African Centre for Biodiversity (South Africa) stated, “We in Africa vehemently oppose the introduction of GM crops plants into our food and farming systems that is being carried out in the name of the public good.

“Once again we would like to draw attention to the conclusions of the 400 global experts of the IAASTD report, who are under no illusion that the current obsession with yield and productivity (personified in the extreme by GMOs) is a panacea for a more ecologically sustainable and equitable food system.”

The CREDO petition is a follow-up to a petition launched in 2015 by ISU graduate students who, in partnership with AGRA Watch, collected over 1,000 signatures, which were delivered in December. Signatures were collected in a partnership between ISU graduate students, AGRA Watch and CREDO Mobile.

Vanessa Amaral-Rogers is a freelance journalist writing mainly on environmental themes.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Why is Bill Gates backing GMO red banana biopiracy‘ by Adam Breasley & Oliver Tickell.

Principal source: ‘AGRA Watch‘.

Monday’s uprising of French farmers, who blocked roads across northern and western France with tractors, burning tires and piles of steaming manure, was but the latest of a wave of protests by dairy farmers at the sharp end of the EU’s ‘free trade’ policies.

Last September some 5,000 dairy farmers from across Europe converged on Brussels accompanied by 1,450 tractors and engaged in pitched street battles with riot police amid piles of burning straw. The action was the culmination of a wave of dramatic cross-border protests, cows occupying store aisles, and ferocious clashes.

The farmers succeeded in winning promises of a €500 million aid package – but no structural changes that would create a fair market for their produce, without pitting Europe’s small scale family farmers against the world’s largest and cheapest producers.

The protests, led by the European Milk Board, the European Farmers’ Union (Copa), and the European Coordination Via Campesina, were a coordinated response to the European Commission’s elimination of milk supply quotas, in place since 1984. The full repeal at the start of April was followed by a 24% drop in prices over five months, leading much of the press to declare that milk was now “cheaper than water”.

Global trade deals accelerate ‘race to the bottom’

Following two years of rapidly decreasing global demand for milk, and already increasing global supply, the quotas’ termination placed major strain on dairy farmers that could yet do great damage to their ability to make a living in the industry.

The EU, as the largest dairy-producing region in the world, maintained its commitment to trade liberalisation despite the uproar, and has already begun the process of replacing direct market interventions with US-style subsidies. Meanwhile, the reduction in the cost of milk products greatly benefits large food processing companies like Nestlé by improving their access to cheaper ingredients, at the expense of small producers.

But these militant uprisings show that farmers and food system workers can unite and fight back against a neoliberal trade agenda that will only ever push down the prices and wages they receive.

It is no secret that global trade is going through a major transformation. The EU-US TTIP agreement under consideration has been compared in scale by negotiators to the European internal market, while Hillary Clinton has called it an “economic NATO” – apparently intended as a term of praise.

In addition, the recently-concluded, but not yet effective, TPP deal between a dozen Pacific nations, including the United States, Canada and Mexico, covers an area that generates 40% of the world’s GDP.

This crucial phase of the push to create a new global economic system through proposed free trade deals, on top of policy changes being carried out by existing institutions such as the European Union, will have many effects of a currently uncertain nature.

One certainty, however, is that their impact on the global working class will be harsh, especially for workers in the global agriculture system. Recent struggles over dairy pricing demonstrate how some of the people who stand to lose the most from these deals have begun to fight back.

Dairy sector is now a major ‘free trade’ battle field

As Europe continued reeling from the summer’s developments, a major point of contention in the TPP negotiations was Canada’s interventionist system of dairy ‘supply management’. Thanks to last-minute concessions, supply management appears to be safe for now, although the included import increases will still pose a hardship for small farmers and yet more will have to be spent on subsidies to counter its ill effects.

The comparatively gentle terms of the dairy provisions in the final agreement, and the electoral collapse of the country’s social-democratic NDP opposition in October, mean the issue is likely settled for now, although organised opposition to TPP remains.

While North American dairy farmers may be pacified for the time being, the stakes will be just as high in the battle against TTIP. Dairy is one area of trade where tariffs remain relatively high, and US agribusiness is expected to target economic supports for ‘non-competitive’ farmers in the TTIP – particularly the EU Single Farm Payment.

The dairy industry, therefore, remains a major field in the global war on small farmers, agricultural and food production workers, and on the food rights of the world’s poor.

Meanwhile, corporate profiteering and law-breaking

The rampant gangsterism of late-stage food processing companies in the dairy industry is typified by one recent price-fixing scheme: an investigation found that between 2006 and 2012, executives at 90% of French yoghurt and dairy dessert manufacturers, including major player Nestlé-Lactalis, used dedicated mobile phones to arrange “clandestine meetings in hotels” in order to introduce coordinated price increases.

Similarly, it is not uncommon for the largest companies to collude while bargaining with smaller ingredient suppliers in order to ensure that their bids remain as uncompetitive as possible,

These are major strategies for large food processing companies in general – unlike many in the manufacturing sector, they depend almost as much upon cheap ingredient prices and the proximity of their facilities to large consumer markets as they do on cheap labour. This is especially true for dairy – a product highly perishable in its fresh form; the insulated transport of liquid milk alone accounts for a third of total production costs.

In the age of global capitalism, these types of costs pose a stubborn geographic impediment that food manufacturers have aimed to eliminate through their political influence.

As the Corporate Europe Observatory found earlier this year, agribusiness representatives have held more meetings with TTIP negotiators than has any other industry; in addition to industry groups such as FoodDrinkEurope, both Mondelez International and Nestlé have met with the negotiators on their own, multiple times each.

Meanwhile, transnational corporations have utilised existing trade mechanisms and the ongoing negotiations as a central component of a growth strategy based on expanding sales into developing markets, while also running small local competitors out of business. The result is that developing nations become highly dependent on imports and on the food corporations to provide them.

Now ‘free trade’ trumps human rights

Under current policies, governments are expected to value free trade over human rights. Since the 1995 WTO Agreement on Agriculture, there has been a concerted push to create a ‘global agriculture’ system and participating governments have agreed to a set of rules which compel them to prioritise trade liberalisation over food security or sustainable development.

NGOs, including Oxfam, ActionAid and a number of US faith denominations, have condemned the TPP agreement on this basis. They argue that its provisions “fail to take into account that national food security is a legitimate interest governments must protect”, and that simply increasing national food supplies through trade – with no guarantee of its fair distribution – does not satisfy this standard.

In the face of the decades-long corporate onslaught, organisations including the IUF union federation and anti-poverty NGOs have challenged existing trade goals with an alternative ‘rights-based’ approach to global food production and distribution.

The upsurge in farmer militancy is an encouraging sign that others in the food chain are also prepared to fight back when they recognise a mortal threat to their interests. Their approach has the potential to unite masses of farmers with trade unionists throughout the world in pursuit of shared interests against the large corporations that control much of the world’s agricultural policy.

A global struggle for good food, good jobs and good pay

The primacy of food manufacturers within this neoliberal agriculture system threatens not only food access and public health, but also the livelihoods of over a billion people employed in the sector – an entire third of the global workforce.

Just as small suppliers have suffered from corporate expansion, the biggest food corporations have concurrently transformed local labour markets. They employ people in appalling conditions throughout most of the world. As an increasingly few companies come to dominate local agriculture in developing markets, they introduce a submissive, easily-threatened, temporary workforce, destroy local producers and promote further impoverishment.

For example, Nestlé, in addition to (allegedly) encouraging trade unionist assassinations in Colombia, avoids permanent employment relationships by classifying large numbers of employees as ‘non-core’. These workers hold roles in production, packaging and distribution that may be filled by temps on an indefinite basis.

As a result, there are entire countries where most of the company’s workforce is employed through temp agencies. This process is encouraged by a system of intra-regional competition among facilities, tracked with sophisticated IT systems. The elimination of political and regulatory barriers to trade will fit these existing structures of corporate operations, especially given their need to transcend the geographic challenges that are inherent in food production and distribution.

The movement for food sovereignty is a crucial stage in the international struggle for workers’ rights. A trade unionist approach to food justice has the potential to unite a broader coalition in support of the rights of workers and small farmers in developing countries. The dairy protests that began last summer and continue today show that such a broad-based movement can meet the challenge.

People can still take back control of the food system and in doing so will allow agricultural workers to take control over their livelihoods. As long as international trade is designed in the interests of the large food manufacturers and against those of workers and small producers, we remain on a dangerous path.

David Miller is a labor activist and writer based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. This version includes some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

Monday’s uprising of French farmers, who blocked roads across northern and western France with tractors, burning tires and piles of steaming manure, was but the latest of a wave of protests by dairy farmers at the sharp end of the EU’s ‘free trade’ policies.

Last September some 5,000 dairy farmers from across Europe converged on Brussels accompanied by 1,450 tractors and engaged in pitched street battles with riot police amid piles of burning straw. The action was the culmination of a wave of dramatic cross-border protests, cows occupying store aisles, and ferocious clashes.

The farmers succeeded in winning promises of a €500 million aid package – but no structural changes that would create a fair market for their produce, without pitting Europe’s small scale family farmers against the world’s largest and cheapest producers.

The protests, led by the European Milk Board, the European Farmers’ Union (Copa), and the European Coordination Via Campesina, were a coordinated response to the European Commission’s elimination of milk supply quotas, in place since 1984. The full repeal at the start of April was followed by a 24% drop in prices over five months, leading much of the press to declare that milk was now “cheaper than water”.

Global trade deals accelerate ‘race to the bottom’

Following two years of rapidly decreasing global demand for milk, and already increasing global supply, the quotas’ termination placed major strain on dairy farmers that could yet do great damage to their ability to make a living in the industry.

The EU, as the largest dairy-producing region in the world, maintained its commitment to trade liberalisation despite the uproar, and has already begun the process of replacing direct market interventions with US-style subsidies. Meanwhile, the reduction in the cost of milk products greatly benefits large food processing companies like Nestlé by improving their access to cheaper ingredients, at the expense of small producers.

But these militant uprisings show that farmers and food system workers can unite and fight back against a neoliberal trade agenda that will only ever push down the prices and wages they receive.

It is no secret that global trade is going through a major transformation. The EU-US TTIP agreement under consideration has been compared in scale by negotiators to the European internal market, while Hillary Clinton has called it an “economic NATO” – apparently intended as a term of praise.

In addition, the recently-concluded, but not yet effective, TPP deal between a dozen Pacific nations, including the United States, Canada and Mexico, covers an area that generates 40% of the world’s GDP.

This crucial phase of the push to create a new global economic system through proposed free trade deals, on top of policy changes being carried out by existing institutions such as the European Union, will have many effects of a currently uncertain nature.

One certainty, however, is that their impact on the global working class will be harsh, especially for workers in the global agriculture system. Recent struggles over dairy pricing demonstrate how some of the people who stand to lose the most from these deals have begun to fight back.

Dairy sector is now a major ‘free trade’ battle field

As Europe continued reeling from the summer’s developments, a major point of contention in the TPP negotiations was Canada’s interventionist system of dairy ‘supply management’. Thanks to last-minute concessions, supply management appears to be safe for now, although the included import increases will still pose a hardship for small farmers and yet more will have to be spent on subsidies to counter its ill effects.

The comparatively gentle terms of the dairy provisions in the final agreement, and the electoral collapse of the country’s social-democratic NDP opposition in October, mean the issue is likely settled for now, although organised opposition to TPP remains.

While North American dairy farmers may be pacified for the time being, the stakes will be just as high in the battle against TTIP. Dairy is one area of trade where tariffs remain relatively high, and US agribusiness is expected to target economic supports for ‘non-competitive’ farmers in the TTIP – particularly the EU Single Farm Payment.

The dairy industry, therefore, remains a major field in the global war on small farmers, agricultural and food production workers, and on the food rights of the world’s poor.

Meanwhile, corporate profiteering and law-breaking

The rampant gangsterism of late-stage food processing companies in the dairy industry is typified by one recent price-fixing scheme: an investigation found that between 2006 and 2012, executives at 90% of French yoghurt and dairy dessert manufacturers, including major player Nestlé-Lactalis, used dedicated mobile phones to arrange “clandestine meetings in hotels” in order to introduce coordinated price increases.

Similarly, it is not uncommon for the largest companies to collude while bargaining with smaller ingredient suppliers in order to ensure that their bids remain as uncompetitive as possible,

These are major strategies for large food processing companies in general – unlike many in the manufacturing sector, they depend almost as much upon cheap ingredient prices and the proximity of their facilities to large consumer markets as they do on cheap labour. This is especially true for dairy – a product highly perishable in its fresh form; the insulated transport of liquid milk alone accounts for a third of total production costs.

In the age of global capitalism, these types of costs pose a stubborn geographic impediment that food manufacturers have aimed to eliminate through their political influence.

As the Corporate Europe Observatory found earlier this year, agribusiness representatives have held more meetings with TTIP negotiators than has any other industry; in addition to industry groups such as FoodDrinkEurope, both Mondelez International and Nestlé have met with the negotiators on their own, multiple times each.

Meanwhile, transnational corporations have utilised existing trade mechanisms and the ongoing negotiations as a central component of a growth strategy based on expanding sales into developing markets, while also running small local competitors out of business. The result is that developing nations become highly dependent on imports and on the food corporations to provide them.

Now ‘free trade’ trumps human rights

Under current policies, governments are expected to value free trade over human rights. Since the 1995 WTO Agreement on Agriculture, there has been a concerted push to create a ‘global agriculture’ system and participating governments have agreed to a set of rules which compel them to prioritise trade liberalisation over food security or sustainable development.

NGOs, including Oxfam, ActionAid and a number of US faith denominations, have condemned the TPP agreement on this basis. They argue that its provisions “fail to take into account that national food security is a legitimate interest governments must protect”, and that simply increasing national food supplies through trade – with no guarantee of its fair distribution – does not satisfy this standard.

In the face of the decades-long corporate onslaught, organisations including the IUF union federation and anti-poverty NGOs have challenged existing trade goals with an alternative ‘rights-based’ approach to global food production and distribution.

The upsurge in farmer militancy is an encouraging sign that others in the food chain are also prepared to fight back when they recognise a mortal threat to their interests. Their approach has the potential to unite masses of farmers with trade unionists throughout the world in pursuit of shared interests against the large corporations that control much of the world’s agricultural policy.

A global struggle for good food, good jobs and good pay

The primacy of food manufacturers within this neoliberal agriculture system threatens not only food access and public health, but also the livelihoods of over a billion people employed in the sector – an entire third of the global workforce.

Just as small suppliers have suffered from corporate expansion, the biggest food corporations have concurrently transformed local labour markets. They employ people in appalling conditions throughout most of the world. As an increasingly few companies come to dominate local agriculture in developing markets, they introduce a submissive, easily-threatened, temporary workforce, destroy local producers and promote further impoverishment.

For example, Nestlé, in addition to (allegedly) encouraging trade unionist assassinations in Colombia, avoids permanent employment relationships by classifying large numbers of employees as ‘non-core’. These workers hold roles in production, packaging and distribution that may be filled by temps on an indefinite basis.

As a result, there are entire countries where most of the company’s workforce is employed through temp agencies. This process is encouraged by a system of intra-regional competition among facilities, tracked with sophisticated IT systems. The elimination of political and regulatory barriers to trade will fit these existing structures of corporate operations, especially given their need to transcend the geographic challenges that are inherent in food production and distribution.

The movement for food sovereignty is a crucial stage in the international struggle for workers’ rights. A trade unionist approach to food justice has the potential to unite a broader coalition in support of the rights of workers and small farmers in developing countries. The dairy protests that began last summer and continue today show that such a broad-based movement can meet the challenge.

People can still take back control of the food system and in doing so will allow agricultural workers to take control over their livelihoods. As long as international trade is designed in the interests of the large food manufacturers and against those of workers and small producers, we remain on a dangerous path.

David Miller is a labor activist and writer based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. This version includes some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

‘Keep fossil fuels in the ground’ was the soundbite of climate campaigners in 2015. This year, it’s time to put that into practice in the UK.

The Government professes its enthusiasm for the Paris climate agreement – the aim of which, to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, requires us to leave over 80% of all fossil fuel reserves untouched.

Yet David Cameron’s administration is still going all out to frack for shale gas – and, astonishingly, it’s still allowing millions of tonnes of coal to be dug up from massive opencast coal mines.

Britain’s last deep coal mine shut its doors last December – its closure marked with sombre reports that, understandably, mourned the passing of an industry that once employed hundreds of thousands of men.

It came not long after the Energy Secretary, Amber Rudd, pledged to phase out coal power stations by 2025 (but only if some other form of power generation has appeared to take its place).

So reports of the imminent death of British coal are, as Mark Twain might have put it, greatly exaggerated. Indeed, in 2016, plans are afoot for new opencast mines that would extract a further 10 million tonnes of coal from UK soil.

This highly destructive form of mining – gouging great holes in the landscape, employing far fewer workers than deep mines – has been the preferred method of profit-seeking companies since the coal industry was privatised in 1994.

Two huge mines, in particular, are currently in contention -one that will forever damage one of England’s most stunning landscapes; and another that will blight one of Wales most impoverished communities.

A gigantic coal mine between sand dunes and nature reserve

The beautiful Druridge Bay in Northumberland is the proposed site for one of these mines – Highthorn, a 3-million-tonne monstrosity. I visited Druridge Bay recently with local members of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Save Druridge campaign group.

As we walked through the sand dunes lining the shore, I tried to imagine how this planned carbuncle would look, squatting between a nature reserve thronged with birds, National Trust beaches and the windswept arc of the bay.

But it wouldn’t only wreck a stunning view; tourism is also a big part of Northumberland’s economy. It’s no surprise that the owner of the bustling café next to the beach, fill to bursting when we visit it for coffee, is vociferously opposed to the mine.

The company agitating for Highthorn, Banks Group, already run two opencast coal mines to the south, on land belonging to climate sceptic Times columnist Viscount Matt Ridley.

But they’ll face a fight to get Highthorn approved. The community at Druridge has seen off similar projects before – in the 1980s, they successfully fought off plans for two nuclear power stations on exactly the spot where the opencast mine is now proposed.

Showering coal dust over one of Wales most disadvantaged communities

The second major mine on the cards this year lies in the heart of the South Wales coalfield. Merthyr Tydfil, one of the poorest constituencies in the country, is already burdened by Britain’s biggest opencast coal pit at Ffos-y-fran – the coal-dust it spews out soils laundry and clogs the lungs of a population already suffering from high levels of respiratory diseases.

Two years ago the mine operators, Miller Argent, announced plans for a new 6-million-tonne opencast pit on the other side of the hill at Nant Llesg. Nant Llesg was thought to be defeated after a concerted campaign by the community and Friends of the Earth, that saw Caerphilly Council make an historic break with the past and reject the mine last August.

But over the winter, Miller Argent appealed the decision, going over the heads of the council and community to the national Planning Inspectorate for Wales.

Their first move has been to apply to put a enclose the common land where the mine would be dug with a five-kilometre fence – notifying the community of their intentions with a small advert in the back pages of a local newspaper on New Year’s Eve. If that was designed to avoid attention, it hasn’t worked: a staggering 8,913 people have objected, outraged that a coal company is pursuing enclosure in the 21st century.

As if that wasn’t underhand enough, the murky dealings around Nant Llesg have grown still murkier with news that the parent companies of Miller Argent have recently sold their shares to a new investor, Gwent Investments.

The quiet transaction – to a firm with no experience of mining and, it appears, no capital prior to last September – has raised questions about whether these opencast mines would ever be properly restored.

The Welsh Government has previously commissioned work to advise it on the risks associated with operators failing to restore opencast sites, and in 2015 the Welsh Assembly voted for a moratorium on opencast mining – but the Welsh Government haven’t yet acted on this.

Put an end to onshore fossil fuel extraction!

Instead of pursuing fracking and prolonging the life of old coal, Friends of the Earth is calling on the Government to end fossil fuel extraction on UK soil by the end of this decade. It’s entirely achievable: permit no new coal mines, and the existing sites will exhaust themselves by 2020.

Forget the pipe-dream of shale gas, which has been rejected by communities and will never deliver the energy security the Government claims to want. Instead, harness what our rainy, windy little island has in abundance: renewable energy from the wind, waves, sun and tides.

And as the oil price rout threatens thousands of jobs in North Sea oil and gas, make sure these skilled workers don’t join dole queues but are retrained in installing offshore wind turbines, wave power machines and tidal arrays.

Britain’s past may have been coal, but our future should be making intelligent use of the elements around us.

Guy Shrubsole campaigns on flooding, fossil fuels, and climate change at Friends of the Earth England, Wales & Northern Ireland. Previously he worked at Defra.

Investors in fossil fuels are being warned that they may risk losing their money, because the markets for coal and liquefied natural gas are disappearing.

In both cases it is competition from renewables – principally wind and solar power – that is being blamed for the threat.

The cost of electricity from renewables continues to fall in Europe and Asia as the number of wind and solar installations grows in both continents, cutting demand for imported gas and coal.

Two separate reports on coal and gas were published at the same time as a round of annual financial reports from oil companies showed that this third fossil fuel could be in serious trouble too.

Despite massive cutbacks on exploration and development, companies like Shell and BP still need a price of US$60 a barrel by the end of this year if they are to break even on many of their current projects – almost double the current market price.

The news comes just as the UK government reveals its plans to ban local authorities and other public sector bodies from divesting their pensions funds and investment portfolios from fossil fuels – on pain of “severe penalties”. The paradoxical move could condemn public sector pensioners to an impoverished retirement.

Australian and US coal most vulnerable as export markets fall away

Overproduction of coal, gas and oil spells trouble for investors in mines, pipelines, ports and the other infrastructure needed to transport fossil fuels round the globe. The cost of development requires a long lifetime for the equipment and a high long-term guaranteed price for the fuels if investors are to get their money back.

The first report, ‘Stranded Assets and Thermal Coal‘, found that Australian and US coal assets were the most vulnerable. Australian mines were particularly at risk because of their heavy reliance on exporting coal to markets that were rapidly shrinking.

Australia exports three times as much coal as it consumes locally, but two of the world’s largest markets for coal, India and China, are cutting imports. India’s imports fell by 34% last year and China’s by 31%. Australia’s mines were also seen as high-risk because of environmental regulations and the widespread opposition to their development.

US coal assets were risky because of competition from cheap gas for the same markets. This meant exporting coal and competing in a world market where there is already a significant surplus. The report said company statements made it clear that investors were not being given the full picture of the risks from environmental regulation and policy.

Many countries pledged in the Paris Agreement reached last December to cut their coal use. If these pledges were kept, the report said, then much of the coal currently shown as an asset would have to be left in the ground.

Will fossil fuel markets recover? Don’t bet on it

A separate report, on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), also raises the possibility that investors may lose their money. The trade is based on the fact that gas is cheap in the US and expensive in Europe, so the expense of liquefying it and transporting it to Europe is offset. Large investments are being made in the pipelines, ships and ports required to transport it.

There are two problems outlined in the report, ‘LNG and Renewable Power‘. The first is that the price of gas, which is tied to that of oil, has dropped in Europe, squeezing the margins of the companies that are spending large sums setting up the supply line.

The second is that the market for gas is itself shrinking as the output of the solar panels and wind farms increases. Unless gas investors can see a long-term return from a stable market they will not make a profit, and LPG becomes high-risk.

Predictions on the future of fossil fuel investments all hinge on the price of oil. With big oil companies – and many countries – needing the current price to double to more than $60 a barrel to break even on their current investments.

Almost everybody in the business believes it is only a matter of time before prices double, treble or quadruple back to their former highs. But there are some notable exceptions. For example, the CEO of Vitol’s CEO last week told Bloomberg that the current run of low prices is likely to persist for a decade.

And Paul Spedding, former global co-head of oil and gas research at HSBC, an adviser to Carbon Tracker, believes the price of oil may never recover. Structural changes in energy markets, more efficient electric cars, batteries and hybrid solutions no longer favour oil, he says. The European Union, for example, is already reducing its demand by 1.5% a year.

Similar drops can be expected elsewhere as governments strive to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement. If that happens, an oil surplus will become the ‘new normal’ and investors in fossil fuel producers will face a difficult future.

Paul Brown, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former environment correspondent of The Guardian newspaper, and still writes columns for the paper.