Nigerian Fertility Threatened By GMO's!
Ever since the Neolithic Revolution began around 10,000 years ago, farmers and communities have been dedicated to enhancing the productivity, flavor, nutritional value, and other characteristics of seeds. They have shared and broadened their understanding of the health benefits and medicinal properties of plants, as well as the unique growth patterns of plants and their relationships with other plants, animals, soil, and water. The unrestricted sharing of seeds among farmers has been crucial in preserving biodiversity and ensuring food security.
There is currently a significant theft of seeds and biodiversity occurring, not only by corporations that are consolidating through mergers to become fewer and larger, but also by extremely wealthy billionaires who can use their wealth and influence to get whatever they want. At the forefront of this movement is Bill Gates, the billionaire from Microsoft.
During the introduction of the Green Revolution in India and Mexico, farmers' seeds were collected from their fields and stored in international institutions for the purpose of developing green revolution varieties designed to be responsive to chemical fertilizers.
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) were among the pioneers in collecting various crops from farmers' fields and substituting them with chemical monocultures of rice, wheat, and corn. Subsequently, many others adopted this practice.
The act of taking control of farmers' seeds is exemplified by the disgraceful dismissal of Dr. R.H. Richaria, a leading rice research scientist in India, from his position as the head of the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Cuttack, Orissa. The institute housed the world's largest variety of rice, but Dr. Richaria was removed for refusing to allow the IRRI in the Philippines to unlawfully take the collection from India. Following his removal, orchestrated by the World Bank, Indian farmers' intellectual property was transferred to the IRRI in the Philippines, which later became a part of the newly established Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The seed heritage of farmers is stored in CGIAR's private seed banks, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations. Since 2003, BMGF has invested over $720 million in CGIAR centers, which now oversee 768,576 farmer seed accessions, the largest repositories of crop diversity worldwide.
Similar to the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation leverages its financial strength to dominate the agricultural sector and shape government and institutional agricultural strategies. As the primary supporter of the CGIAR, Gates has effectively expedited the transition of research and seeds from scientific organizations to commercial entities, consolidating and streamlining the appropriation of intellectual property and seed monopolies via intellectual property legislation and seed policies.
The CGIAR is undergoing significant restructuring and centralization, highlighted in a recent open letter by IPES Food on 21 July 2020. The 'One CGIAR' initiative, backed by major donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and the US and UK governments, aims to consolidate the CGIAR's 15 collaborating centers into a single legal entity.
The goal of "One CGIAR," managed by the "One CGIAR Common Board," is to integrate it into "One Agriculture," also known as "Gates Ag One" - a strategic initiative by Gates to assert control over the global seed supply. Gates has announced plans to increase the current CGIAR budget significantly, from $850 million to $2 billion annually.
Even though the Green Revolution in India and Mexico has been acknowledged as unsuccessful for a long time, in 2006 Gates introduced AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. The mistake of introducing this unsuccessful technology in Africa is extensively discussed in the two articles by Nicoletta Dentico and Tim Wise.
The Seed Freedom movement has been advocating for the CGIAR gene banks to return the farmers' varieties that were taken from them. The Green Revolution's history since the 1960s has demonstrated that relying on chemical-intensive monocultures has depleted Earth's ability to sustain life and food production by eradicating biodiversity, damaging soil and water, and exacerbating climate change. This approach has marginalized small-scale farmers by burdening them with debt for external inputs, while also compromising food and nutritional security. The past fifty years have highlighted that Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty, and Knowledge Sovereignty are essential for the sustainable future of agriculture and food production..
In addition to controlling the seeds of farmers in the CGIAR seed banks, Gates, together with the Rockefeller Foundation, is heavily investing in the collection of seeds from around the globe. These seeds are then stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault located in the Arctic archipelago, also known as the Doomsday Vault. This vault was established to gather and preserve a worldwide assortment of seeds, in collaboration with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Crop Trust.
Based in Germany, the Crop Trust oversees the funding and coordination of the Svalbard Seed Vault. In addition to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Crop Trust receives financial support from backers like CropLife Dupont/Pioneer Hi-bred, KWS SAAT AG, and Syngent AG.
The Seed Vault houses the largest number of accessions for rice, wheat, and barley crops, with over 150,000 samples of wheat and rice, and nearly 80,000 samples of barley. Additionally, sorghum, various bean species, maize, cowpea, soybean, kikuyu grass, and chickpea are well-represented. Crops like potatoes, peanuts, cajanus beans, oats, rye, alfalfa, the cereal hybrid Triticosecale, and Brassica species are each represented by 10,000 to 20,000 seed samples.
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