Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. For example, “farmers in northeastern Ghana have been cultivating the cowpea—a protein-rich legume that North Americans know as the black-eyed pea—since the Bronze Age. How was it possible that people continuing to farm in that lineage, some 5,000 years later, could face 15 years in prison for infringing property claims on crop varieties based on the local original?” “We can’t accept this law,” said Faustina Banakwoyem, a 35-year-old soya and pepper farmer and the only woman in the Paga group. ...

“‘The world still has plenty of superrich people. Indeed, overall, the superrich are likely to emerge from the crisis in better financial shape than anyone else.’ Therefore, crucially, ‘the reservoir of wealth to fund philanthrocapitalism is still there.’ This self-fulfilling cycle—capitalism creates wealth, and thereby inequality, and thereby the conditions for the rich to spend surplus money on helping the poor, without ever alleviating poverty—dates back (Bishop points out) to the Renaissance, when both capitalism and philanthropy were born.” Charitable giving among the super-rich has one goal, and it isn't to change the world

On the pandemic and the vaccine