Opit's LinkFest!: 15 April

Thursday, April 15, 2010

15 April - First Op-Eds

Iraq vet denounces war crimes : "We fired on buses full of civilians"
Seven years on after the second US invasion of Iraq, the Americans continue slaughtering civilians, now in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Recently, the video of the massacre of 12-15 Iraqis by an US helicopter gunship in 2007 began making the rounds thanks to WikiLeaks.org. Episodes like what is shown in that video have been denounced by Iraq veterans against the war for years now.

On March 20, thousands of people marched on the streets of Los Angeles to denounce the criminal US wars around the world. Among the protesters, many Iraq military vets with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) came out to tell their stories of the carnage of US wars.

As far as I can tell,Iraq Body Count itself is 'sanitizing' of the horror by minimizing it. From Opit'sLinkFest! Links at My Opera Community

Deaths from military actions

A Soldier’s Handbook to Iraq– “FOUO [For Official Use Only]“
http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/document-friday-a-soldiers-handbook-to-iraq-fouo-for-official-use-only/#comment-442
In addition to providing a useful primer on Iraq, the Handbook also anticipated the problems of occupation. The Handbook relies heavily on generalizations for its depiction of Iraq.
But despite its inherent ethnocentrism*, the Handbook succeeded in giving soldiers a roughly accurate and clear-eyed presentation of the tremendous difficulties they would face during their invasion and occupation of Iraq. It’s a shame copies weren’t distributed to American politicians.
( *Prejudice )

IPS
Farmers on Fringe of Intl Agriculture Policy?
By Stephen Leahy

MONTPELLIER, France, Apr 14, 2010 (IPS) - How's this for short-sighted: A billion people go hungry every day, food prices have climbed 30 to 40 percent, climate change is reducing agricultural production - and for the past two decades, the world has slashed investments in publicly-funded agriculture until it is a pittance in most countries.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51036
500 million dollars of public funds for international agricultural research carried out by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an alliance comprising some 8,000 researchers in 100 countries.

For the past year, a global consultation process involving over 2,000 stakeholders from 200 countries has produced a draft plan for reform that promises to meet the needs of the world's 500 million poor small farmers who feed the two billion poorest people.
Critics say it resembles little more than a passionate shuffling of the status quo. As the French say like to say: "Plus ça change; plus c'est la même chose" (the more things change, the more they stay the same).

"Researchers want to solve their problems, not the small farmers' problems," said Edward Kateiya, representing the Kenya National Federation of Agricultural Producers.

"They are not addressing our needs here. Farmer empowerment is the key and what we really need," Kateiya told IPS.

Small farmers and their organisations were noticeably absent. La Via Campesina, likely the world's largest small-farmer coalition representing more 148 organisations in 69 countries, had no official role in the conference. Although the organisation has a strong presence in France, only one or two members were able to attend due to admission restrictions.

"When I asked if GCARD could do research on how to prevent small-scale farmers from being expelled from their lands by land-grabbing investors, they said it was not their concern," Jacques Debarros, of the Confédération Paysanne, France told IPS through a translator.

"But when the representative of the U.S. government said GMO (genetically modified) crops could reduce hunger around the world if there were less restrictive regulations in other countries, it was very much their concern," Debarros said.

"Should we understand that the agricultural model promoted by GCARD is a model that works without any farmers?" he asked.

"We already produce more food than we need but there still a billion hungry. That reality is not being addressed here," said Herren, a research scientist long involved in CGIAR, the World Food Prize winner in 1995, and is credited with implementing a biological control programme that saved the African cassava crop, averting a food crisis.

"Agricultural subsidies amount to one billion dollars a day in OECD countries," said Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) since 1994.

"We need fair trade. Unless we solve this problem we will continue to have more hungry people," he said.