The global food economy, served and shaped via state and corporate control of the food chain, has resulted in unquantifiable levels of pollution, destruction and exploitation in every dimension of agriculture, from soil to seed, to plant, to animal and to man. In other words: our existence.

As we approach the second decade of the 21^st century, it is becoming abundantly clear that an entirely new vision, understanding and implementation is required in order for agriculture to truly serve its original purpose of feeding humanity (all peoples) with good quality, affordable and mostly local foods in ways that do not harm the environment.

In order to make this wholesale shift it is necessary to entirely step aside from State and corporate control of the food chain. No compromise is possible here. Maintaining and re establishing the genuine independence of farmers throughout the world is a prerequisite for our survival as sentient, healthy human beings.

Non participation in the corporately controlled global market place must, in order to be effective, be accompanied by the widespread implementation of localised, quality food production and consumption practices. Practices that bring into close proximity the food grower and the food consumer; at the same time – by-passing entirely, the corporate multiple chains that profit by keeping them separate. This is the only way that genuine accessibility of optimum condition foods and medicinal plants can be ensured for billions of people throughout the World.

Continuing to adhere to the present corporate and state controlled food and farming regimes means that:

• Farmer’s time honoured right to save their seeds and to cultivate, distribute and trade the produce resulting from these seeds will continue to be subverted, curtailed and stolen.
• People’s right to perpetuate the biodiversity of locally adapted native plants, herbs and animals will be denied.
• People’s rights to gain lawful access to unused or barren land for the purpose of growing food for their own consumption in ways that do not harm the environment will be blocked.
• People’s time honoured right to carry on the daily operations of good farming practice unhindered by state and corporate power structures, will be denied.

It is the obligation of head’s of state to consult the people, in advance, about any new laws or alterations of the current law and any political questions concerning agriculture.

“Farming for the People with the People” therefore calls for all farmers, growers and sympathetic citizens, to take back control over their destinies and to join together to free our agricultural practices from the corporate treadmill of destruction and despair to which they now are tied.

At the same time, we call upon the Polish government, and all national governments, to act NOW on the demands of the vast majority of their citizens to:

• Ban all forms of genetic engineering in agriculture, horticulture, silviculture and fisheries.
• Withdraw all financial support for factory farming regimes that dehumanise agriculture and debase the animal kingdom.
• Prohibit, without exception, any and all patenting of plants, animals, their traits and genes, as well as patents on breeding methods. Thereby making it unlawful to attempt to exercise control over biodiversity.

Every Country should have the right to protect its food sovereignty.

We call for a people led and people owned renaissance of agriculture. One which will liberate the creativity and ingenuity of man and draw inspiration from the time honoured peasant and family farming practices that still form the foundation of self sufficient, sustainable and ecological agricultural production throughout the world.

Please feel free to use and adopt in your Country!

This document was ratified on the occasion of the 10^th anniversary of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside (ICPPC) www.icppc.pl

during the seminar “Food Sovereignty, Self Sufficiency and the Family Farm”

November 20/21 2010.

The days of the Polish love affair with America may soon be coming to an end. The hegemonic ambitions of US geopolitics are causing Washington to actively seek new avenues to exploit, both militarily and through corporate buy-outs of national assets in Eastern Europe. In Poland’s case, a high percentage of those national assets have already been sold off to pay debts incurred by reliance on huge loans packaged by the International Monetary Fund.

The latest US’s gifts to Poland do not come in pretty parcels, nor are they likely to be as innocuous as the worn out F1 11 fighter planes sold to the Polish air force a few years ago. Poles, already softened-up by the Coca Cola company, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds – three corporate giants offering poison dressed up as something edible – are now being counted on not to offer any serious resistance to the next phase of attack. However, resistance is exactly what is needed. To find out why.. read on.

If corporate America gets its way and the Polish government gets its rewards – Poland will host, firstly: genetically modified food crops that permanently contaminate the natural food chain and turn once biodiverse fields into sterile monocultures. Secondly: corporate shale gas extraction (called ‘Fraking’) which pumps highly toxic chemicals into underground rock strata (shale) at high pressure thereby creating fissures which release natural gas. Then there’s the small matter of permanent US missile silos and army bases to be established in as yet undisclosed sites in the Polish countryside.

MISSILES

The Warsaw Voice of March 7 2011 had this to say:

“As was announced by our two presidents in December, we plan to establish a new permanent U.S. Air detachment in Poland, build missile defences in Poland, and as agreed at the NATO summit, develop a contingency plan for the region, Clinton told journalists at a joint briefing with Minister Sikorski ahead of their talks. Russia has been long opposed to the project, saying it could destroy the strategic balance of forces in Europe.”

The U.S. has bombed 21 Countries since World War II and has killed or displaced millions of innocent citizens in the process. The U.S. military/administration is perhaps the planet’s most infamous modern day ‘war criminal’ with an ever lengthening list of crimes against humanity to its name. England marches just a few steps behind.

FRAKING

To understand the environmental implications of ‘Fraking’ please see film GASLAND http://www.wykop.pl/link/708253/zagrozenie-wynikajace-z-wydobycia-gazu-lupkowego/

It appears that Prime Minister Tusk has already opened up the Polish countryside to US corporate exploitation via a deal that will allow leading US petroleum companies into the Country to drill for natural gas in the substantial fields that lie under much of the Polish countryside. Warnings are already being voiced that this will place severe strain on national water reserves and road infrastructures due to the vast volumes of water that are required to be transported to and from the drilling sites.

The water that is extracted as part of this process, is polluted with the chemicals that have been used to force open the shale rock and millions of litres of such water has to be dumped somewhere..

In the US, where Fraking is already prolific, the chemicals used in this process are now threatening underground drinking water reserves across millions of hectares of land and thousands of communities. Hundreds of households have been horrified to find gas coming out of their kitchen taps along with poisoned drinking water. The film (above) shows that when a match is put to this supply it catches fire instantly.

Fraking has all the hallmarks of yet another ruthless exploitation of nature for highly questionable goals. But its not too late to stop this as the French have already successfully done. Please urgently add your support to ‘Stop Fraking’ by writing to the Minister of the Environment and demanding a stop to this highly destructive process.

GMO

Genetically Modified Organisms are seen by the current US administration as an essential component of its global export earnings. To this end US corporations like Monsanto plc are State supported so as to extend their GM plant and animal breeding programmes into all areas of the world. Poland is now on the receiving end of this drive to modify and patent the global seed and animal breeding chain and to thereby consign nature’s designs to history.

In spite of the fact that we now know that GM animal feed causes infertility in rodents and that the Roundup Ready herbicides that are an indispensable part of the GM package cause placental damage in pregnant mothers – the Polish government consistently refuses to ban GM seeds and animal feeds.

Government ministers prefer to avert their eyes – even when genetically modified maize pollen has cross contaminated large areas of organic maize in Spain when the distance between these two crops was far beyond the supposed ‘safe levels’. Nine European Countries – including France and Germany – have already banned GM crops. They have found the evidence against them irrefutable.

Given that these facts are well known and well documented, the Polish government’s refusal to ban GMO is beginning to look like criminal negligence.

President Obama flies into Poland on May 27. No doubt his mission will include firming up the Polish government’s support for troops, missiles, wars, GMOs, Fraking and other such unwelcome objectives.

So don’t dream about any favours coming from the United States. You may find out that the dream isn’t a dream at all, but a cleverly packaged nightmare. It will be too late by then.

Just say “Enough!” And say it now.

Julian Rose (May 2011)

Answer: Hit the seeds. The starting point of our genetic resource base and the foundation of the biodiversity of the planet and all its edible (and inedible) products. The true battle lines of the GMO resistance and acceptance war are being drawn up around the future of our right to grow our own food and to live lives independent of the crushing conformism of corporate greed. Food sovereignty is the absolute right of every citizen and every human community on this planet, and those historically most actively engaged in defending this sovereignty are the world’s peasant farmers.

They are a breed of humanity professionally engaged in the maintenance of permanently evolving living seed banks, set in the fields and community plots that are responsible for feeding the great majority of the world’s ever expanding population. And it is for this reason that, for the corporate controlled status quo, they remain amongst the most denigrated working peoples of our divided planet.

Peasant farmers are the last line of absolute resistance to the global corporate take over of the food chain. The red blood that runs through their prominent veins is the
most valuable human asset mankind possesses – it is quite literally the key to our survival as sentient, loving, humane beings. No wonder then, that the World Trade Organisation, The International Monetary Fund, The United States Department of Agriculture, the European Union and virtually all national governments and self declared dictators
wish to see the last of them. They are, infuriatingly, holding up the ultimate submission of mankind to the great genetic experiment with its accompanying tool kit of overt and covert mind control techniques and technologies, mindless materialism and psychopathic, unbridled megalomania.

We need, at this point, to be fully aware that the devil’s brew does not stop at genetic engineering of our crops and animals, it is about to embark on the genetic modification of human babies. The British government is now debating “The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill” which is being introduced with one of its aims being legalising production of genetically modified human embryos – a techno-science that can lead on to the unrestrained creation of patented GM babies. Without a major outcry, this bill will pass into UK law sometime this year. Where is the resistance?

Should it fail to be blocked, the passing of this act will constitute another big step towards establishment of the Orwellian society familiar to readers of ’1984′. It is currently by-passing most opposition by making claims of eradicating otherwise untreatable sicknesses. This is the reasoning that can open the Pandora’s box for unrestricted eugenics.

In the meantime, in the sky above our heads, another highly visible weapon in the armory
of ‘advanced human control syndrome’ is regularly manifesting itself. “Chemtrails” – congealing high flying (military) jet fuel particles that remain stuck in the sky failing, unlike normal jet trails, to disperse and disappear into the atmosphere. ‘Chemtrails’ stick in the sky and form thin veil-like clouds that filter sunlight and release on those below, an as yet not fully diagnosed cocktail of chemicals including aluminium, silicon and barium; chemicals with neuro-toxic side effects, including disturbance of the human neocortex as well as climatic modification capabilities.

Fogging the human mind and altering the weather are two useful adjuncts to the imminent introduction of a new generation of ‘climate engineered’ GM seeds, currently awaiting a green light from the European Commission, incuding the infamous ‘terminator’ self destructing seed. A host of new patent applications are currently awaiting official clearance which, it is claimed, will provide a whole new range of novel, patented GM seeds capable of providing our ‘food future’ in the oft’ predicted extreme conditions of drought, flood and salinity. The European Commission, in the mean time, is winning some muted public applause through pretending to declare a certain level of opposition to first generation GMO.

Joining forces with peasants, as has happened in France, India, South America, Poland, Romania, Turkey and all across the world, helps form a powerful alliance against these forces of sterility and destruction. Indigenous farmers often have very little contact with the outside world and easily become victimised by smooth talking seed salesmen and government primed subsidies. Civilian activists, who have been resolutely defending the
future of GM free “Real Food”, can offer crucial support to peasant farmers; not least by informing them of the tactics of predatory transnationals and helping to link them in to the international resistance movement. Via Campesina has set an excellent example in this field, but much more can be done and needs to be done by a wide cross section of NGO’s.

In Poland, The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and the Coalition for a GMO Free Poland are jointly engaged in confronting government and corporate covert – and sometimes overt – attempts to slip GM seeds and plants into the system under the cover of darkness. The current Polish administration is playing with adopting classic EU ‘co-existence’ rules of the game. Faced with a Commission fine for failing to lift the
current GM seed ban, introduced by the previous administration in 2006, the Polish government’s Environmental and Agricultural ministers are juggling consumer resistance with corporate and Brussels based pressures to accept the ludicrously described “safe” adoption of barrier zones that, it is claimed, would prevent cross pollination between GM and non GM crops. All this, long after science and common sense have shown that pollen travels hundreds of kilometres on the wind and via bees, insects, birds, human feet
and lorries.

Poland’s 1.5 million small scale peasant farmers are only dimly aware of the battle going on above their heads, including a call upon the Black Madonna, made at a conference (April 24th) organised by the Coalition for a GMO Free Poland in the famous shrine at Jasna Gora, to (once again) support the cause of the defence of Poland against the forces of repression. The conference was presided over by a Franciscan Father and marked what we hope may be a more open intervention by the Church in what is clearly a critical test of
the fortitude of classic Judeo Christian moral and ethical beliefs. So far,signs of solidarity from the church have been few and far between, but how can sentient human beings, who also claim religious guidance, ignore the fate of the gene pool which is our common inheritance and whose health and welfare is our incontrovertible collective responsibility?

As we all battle on to expose the grinding poverty being exerted upon the world’s food producers by the GM monoliths, cotton farmers in the Indian province of the Punjab and elsewhere on the continent have been taking their lives, tragically unable to cope with the repeated failure of their much hyped (Monsanto) GM Bt cotton crops to produce a viable harvest. Left with no home saved seeds to fall back on, these farmers have been exposed to the ultimate betrayal of their human dignity and right to life. Their death constitutes a direct ‘crime against humanity’ perpetrated, as it has been, upon innocent farmers struggling to earn just enough income to support their families from day to day.

How much worse does it need to get before the ‘passive’ resistance finally rises up to join the fight for the freedom of mankind and our liberation from the forces of global repression?

Julian Rose (President, The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside)

July 2008