Defining Agricultural Terrorism

Defining Agricultural Terrorism

by Michelle Gale-Sinex

Editors note: With the recent increase in civil disobedience related to 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 (SANET) tries to shed some light who the real "agricultural terrorists" are. This is one posting.

For more information or to participate in future discussions, go to SANET's archives at click on SANET on the left of your screen.

Can you define "agricultural terrorism"?

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

Or when the corporations of one nation seek to replace the indigenous/landrace crops of another nation's 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?

Perhaps agricultural terrorism is the corporations and policy-makers of a 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?

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?

By "agricultural terrorism" do you mean tinkering with the genomic base of life on earth?

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, their farms and their families?

Or perhaps agricultural terrorism is 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 of 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 a definition of the term — deriving from government and corporate interests — which means things like a handful of activists uprooting a few test plots of genetically modified organisms, 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 you referring to?