Who Are the Real "Agricultural Terrorists"?

Web Note: With the recent increase in sabotage of genetically
engineered crops, agribusiness, the USDA, and the media are
talking more and more about "eco-terrorism." A recent posting
on the USDA's ListServ Discussion List on Sustainable Agriculture
tries to shed some light who the real "agricultural terrorists" are.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What is Agricultural Terrorism?

A posting From the USDA's ListServ on Sustainable Agriculture
May 23, 2001
By Michelle Gale-Sinex <mgs2369@home.com>

Can you define "agricultural terrorism"? Or anyway give some
examples of what you have in mind when you use the phrase?
I'm not clear on what you mean by that.

By "agricultural terrorism" do you mean the corporations of one
nation having the power or threatening to starve another nation's
people by withdrawing trade-grain supplies for political reasons?

Or when the corporations of one nation seek to replace the
indigenous/landrace crops of another nation's people with
proprietary varieties, simultaneously replacing a commons social
system with a license-and-user-fee-based one, so that food is no
longer a gift of abundant land and focused labor, but a consumer
product requiring participation in a cash economy?

Or the corporations and policymakers of one nation driving its
farmers off the land using urban-derived economic formulas for
land valuation, debt, and ROI, and with no consideration for or
care about rural economic realities or the people who live there...
even though the entire nation's economy runs on their work?

Or a nation's media establishment propagandizing against rural
people in general, representing their lives, work, and history with
hostile, bigoted stereotypes of slack-jawed yokels, incestuous
hicks, gap-toothed gun-toting sodomites, spunky widows, and
apple-cheeked "farm wives"?

Do you mean a nation's corporations partnering with its public
institutions to accrue private gain from publicly developed and
held assets like seeds, soil, and multi-century agricultural knowledge,
and the consequent destruction of cultural memory?

Or agribusiness depending on the labor of families of desperately
poor, unskilled, undocumented, wandering workers to provide
lowest-common-denominator fieldwork that can't be done by
machines?

Or perhaps a nation's powerful corporations deciding that it is
profitable to package the byproducts of industrial processing as
foods, feed it to people, but never test it for its health effects,
and then blaming women for their breast cancer, children for
their hyperactivity, everyone for their obesity, and old people
for dementia?

By "agricultural terrorism" do you mean tinkering with the genomic
base of life on earth in order to find the latest fad in marketing
or profits, and destroying the careers and lives of anyone who
questions that?

Do you mean policymakers and industry groups ignoring the sound
advice of scientists with decades of research on, say, the
transmission of prions, allowing hundreds of thousands of new cases
of brain-wasting dementia to develop among people who are being
told, by PR firms, that their food is safe?

Maybe an example of what you're thinking is the consolidation of
food sectors, such as meat slaughtering and packing, or grain
processing, so that local communities must do what the corporations
who hold these industries tell them to, at the risk of losing their
economic base, their jobs, their homes, and their families?

Or perhaps a corporation going into a rural community, seeking
to site a major toxic-waste-generating facility there, securing tax
breaks from the community, hiring its workers, operating for a
couple years, then withdrawing, and leaving their environmental,
economic, and social wastes behind?

Maybe you mean the shipping of fruits, vegetables, grains, meats,
and their derivative products, back and forth across continents and
the planet, "adding value" (i.e. profits for selected organizations)
while using huge amounts of fossil fuel energy, holding the entire
planet's ecosystems hostage to air pollution and greenhouse gas
emissions, and holding consumers hostage to the fossil fuel industry
as well as agribusiness?

Or are you using the received definition of the term--deriving from
government and corporate interests--which means things like a
handful of activists uprooting a few test plots of GMOs, an activist
deconstructing a McDonald's, or other nations' technicians
developing microbes that could quickly unmask the fragility of a
highly vertically integrated, industrial, fossil-fuel-driven,
monocrop/monovariety-based food system?

"Terror" seems to be the densest element of the term "agricultural
terrorism." Whose terror are are you referring to?

peace
mish