Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Eric Draitser
Published on May 2, 2016
Eric Draitser of http://StopImperialism.org provides his analysis (May 1, 2016) of the ongoing destabilization of Latin America by right wing forces and their patrons in the US. Draitser provides the important background on the soft coup in Brazil, and how it is connected to finance capital whose puppet in Argentina, Mauricio Macri, is acting as de facto representative of Wall Street in Latin America. Want to know how Hillary Clinton, Wall Street, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are connected to the developments in Latin America? Listen to Eric's hour long conversation with broadcaster Don DeBare.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
BRIC´s bank
BEIJING—
In July 2014, nations known as the “BRICS,” Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, announced the creation of a new, $100 billion development bank (NDB). The project is aimed at lending money to developing nations for investments, much like how the American and European-backed International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank operate.
Liu Haifang, a professor at Peking University’s Center for African Studies, said the bank will provide developing countries with more options for financing.
BRICs Bank To Rival World Bank and IMF and Challenge Dollar Dominance
Outgoing President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, after just three days ago dismissing the idea of a BRICs created, new global multi lateral bank, has come around and endorsed a BRICs bank in an interview with the FT.
Zoellick had initially said that a BRICs bank and potential rival to the western and U.S. dominated IMF and World Bank, would be difficult to implement given competing BRIC interests.
He acknowledged that a BRICs bank was being created and said that the World Bank supported such a bank. He said that not having Russia and China as part of "the World Bank system" would be a “mistake of historic proportions”.
Leaders of the BRICS nations meeting in India appear to have made much progress in creating a new global bank as the emerging economies seek to convert their growing economic might into collective diplomatic influence.
The five countries now account for nearly 28% of the global economy, a figure that is expected to continue to grow.
On Thursday morning, President Hu Jintao of China, President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia , President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India shook hands at the start of the one day meeting in New Delhi.
Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-04-02/markets/31272774_1_gold-prices-world-gold-council-world-bank#ixzz1ra85vRk9
Sunday, November 24, 2013
NSA spying
20 November 2013
Between 2004 and 2007 the Labour government gave the US National Security Agency permission to use information on innocent British people collected in the process of spying on actual targets.
According to a top secret memo I have seen, from within the NSA and dated June 2007, Britain agreed the Americans could "unminimise" British landline numbers as early as 2004. That means they were not obliged to delete them, and could now use their systems to analyse them.
By 2004 the Americans had clear reasons to be concerned about UK citizens and terror. Shoe bomber Richard Reid was in a US jail; there were nine Brits in Guantanamo.
These two documents are the first proof in black and white that an agreement exists between Britain and the USA on the targeting of each other's citizens (on the assumption, not confirmed, that Britain gained the reciprocal right to use data collected on Americans in the 2007 agreement).
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
the national debt
Government debt (also known as public debt, national debt)[1][2] is the debt owed by a central government. (In the U.S. and other federal states, "government debt" may also refer to the debt of a state or provincial government, municipal or local government.) By contrast, the annual "government deficit" refers to the difference between government receipts and spending in a single year, that is, the increase of debt over a particular year.
Government debt is one method of financing government operations, but it is not the only method. Governments can also create money to monetizetheir debts, thereby removing the need to pay interest. But this practice simply reduces government interest costs rather than truly canceling government debt.[3]
Governments usually borrow by issuing securities, government bonds and bills. Less creditworthy countries sometimes borrow directly from asupranational organization (e.g. the World Bank) or international financial institutions.
As the government draws its income from much of the population, government debt is an indirect debt of the taxpayers. Government debt can be categorized as internal debt (owed to lenders within the country) and external debt (owed to foreign lenders). Sovereign debt usually refers to government debt that has been issued in a foreign currency. Another common division of government debt is by duration until repayment is due. Short term debt is generally considered to be for one year or less, long term is for more than ten years. Medium term debt falls between these two boundaries. A broader definition of government debt may consider all government liabilities, including future pension payments and payments for goods and services the government has contracted but not yet paid.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
perfectly logical but totally insane
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
—Lawrence Summers
The Summers memo was a 1991 memo on trade liberalization that was written by Lant Pritchett and signed by Lawrence Summers while the latter was Chief Economist of the World Bank. It included a section that both Summers and Pritchett say was sarcastic that suggested dumping toxic waste in third-world countries for perceived economic benefits.[1]
After the material was leaked, Pritchett (who worked under Summers) stated that he had written the memo and Summers had only signed it, and that it was intended to be "sarcastic".[2] According to Pritchett, the memo as leaked was doctored to remove context and intended irony, and was "a deliberate fraud and forgery to discredit Larry and the World Bank."[3] This interpretation is strengthened by the final sentence of the leaked excerpt, which points out that "The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs... could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization." That is, it appears to be a Reductio ad absurdum of the arguments of orthodox free-market economists that were in vogue at the time the memo was written.
Daniel Hausman and Michael McPherson have argued that the satirical section might seem to be based in economics as a science, but in fact contains strong moral premises which cannot be removed and still leave the argument intact.[4] Brazilian Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenberger argued that it demonstrated "the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in."
Postscript
After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil's then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote back to Summers:"Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said... the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear."Sadly, Mr. Lutzenburger was fired shortly after writing this letter.
Mr. Summers, on the other hand, was appointed the U.S. Treasury Secretary on July 2nd, 1999, and served through the remainder of the Clinton Admistration. Afterwards, he was named president of Harvard University.
Friday, June 29, 2012
managing the genetic mix of the population
Population Control, Nazis, and the U.N!
by Anton Chaitkin
ROCKEFELLER AND MASS MURDER
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to the manipulation of human populations.[2][3] The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance, and the theories of August Weismann.[4] Historically, many of the practitioners of eugenics viewed eugenics as a science, not necessarily restricted to human populations; this embraced the views of Darwinism and Social Darwinism.
Eugenics was widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century.[5] The First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912 was supported by many prominent persons, including: its president Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin; honorary vice-president Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; Auguste Forel, famous Swiss pathologist; Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone; among other prominent people.[6]
Eugenics was a controversial concept even shortly after its creation.[7] The first major challenge to eugenics was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan, who demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the birth of a fruit fly with white eyes from a family and ancestry of the red-eyed Drosophila melanogaster species of fruit fly.[8] Morgan claimed that this demonstrated that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance and that the concept of eugenics based upon genetic inheritance was severely flawed.[8]
By the mid-20th century eugenics had fallen into disfavor, having become associated with Nazi Germany. This country's approach to genetics and eugenics was focused on Eugen Fischer's concept of phenogenetics[9] and the Nazi twin study methods of Fischer and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Both the public and some elements of the scientific community have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced "racial hygiene", human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups. However, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised many new questions and concerns about the meaning of eugenics and its ethical and moral status in the modern era, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in eugenics.
One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry, in his lecture Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race presented to the National Academy of Sciences on 13 November 1883.[71][72] However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan's Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of the American Breeders Association. The committee unequivocally extended the principle to man.[73]
Another scientist considered the "father of the American eugenics movement" was Charles Benedict Davenport.[74] In 1904 he secured funding for the The Station for Experimental Evolution, later renamed the Carnegie Department of Genetics. It was also around that time that Davenport became actively involved with the American Breeders' Association (ABA). This led to Davenport's first eugenics text, "The science of human improvement by better breeding", one of the first papers to connect agriculture and human heredity.[74] Davenport later went on to set up a Eugenics Record Office (ERO), collecting hundreds of thousands of medical histories from Americans, which many considered having a racist and anti- immigration agenda.[74] Davenport and his views were supported at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as late as 1963, when his views began to be de-emphasized (racism was no longer popular). Davenport was ultimately replaced as the head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1969 by James D. Watson, who himself was removed in 2007 as a consequence of his racist remarks.
As the science continued in the 20th century, researchers interested in familial mental disorders conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century. All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized.
In 1907 Indiana became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals.[76] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,[77] the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.[78]
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. In 1898 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent American biologist, began as director of a biological research station based in Cold Spring Harbor where he experimented with evolution in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from the Carnegie Institution to found the Station for Experimental Evolution. The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) opened in 1910 while Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics.[79]
The Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock through procreation. They lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants, based on the belief that literacy rates were low among "inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by Presidents in 1897, 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917. Membership in the League included: A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College, James T. Young, director of Wharton School and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. The League allied themselves with the American Breeder's Association to gain influence and further its goals and in 1909 established a eugenics committee chaired by David Starr Jordan with members Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, Vernon Kellogg, Luther Burbank, William Earnest Castle, Adolf Meyer, H. J. Webber and Friedrich Woods.[80] The ABA's immigration legislation committee, formed in 1911 and headed by League's founder Prescott F. Hall, formalized the committee's already strong relationship with the Immigration Restriction League.[80]
In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard and the conservationist Madison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the "unfit". (Davenport favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in his The Kallikak Family; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.)[81] Though their methodology and research methods are now understood as highly flawed, at the time this was seen as legitimate scientific research.[82] It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably, Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself.[83]
Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.[84] A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.
There are direct links between progressive American eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger and Harry H. Laughlin and racial oppression in the US and in Europe. Harry H. Laughlin wrote the Virginia model statute [85] that was the basis for the Nazi Ernst Rudin's Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. Laughlin's assistance to Adolf Hitler's cause resulted in an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936.[86] Ernst Rudin also wrote articles on eugenics for Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review. Sanger stated during work related to her "Negro Project", "The minister's work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."[87] While there are two alternatives as to the interpretation of that quotation, Margaret Sanger not only attended, but actually spoke at a New Jersey meeting of the Ku Klux Klan auxiliary.[88]
Such legislation was passed in the U.S. because of widespread public acceptance of the eugenics movement, spearheaded by efforts of progressive reformers.[89] Over 19 million people attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, open for 10 months from February 20 to December 4, 1915.[90] The PPIE was a fair devoted to extolling the virtues of a rapidly progressing nation, featuring new developments in science, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. A subject that received a large amount of time and space was that of the developments concerning health and disease, particularly the areas of tropical medicine and race betterment (tropical medicine being the combined study of bacteriology, parasitology and entomology while racial betterment being the promotion of eugenic studies). Having these areas so closely intertwined, it seemed that they were both categorized in the main theme of the fair, the advancement of civilization. Thus in the public eye, the seemingly contradictory areas of study were both represented under progressive banners of improvement and were made to seem like plausible courses of action to better American society.[91]
The state of California was at the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 up until the 1960s.[90] By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation. The American Breeder's Association was the first eugenic body in the U.S., established in 1906 under the direction of biologist Charles B. Davenport. The ABA was formed specifically to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood". Membership included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank.[92]
When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration.[75] The Nazis had claimed American eugenicists inspired and supported Hitler's racial purification laws, and failed to understand the connection between those policies and the eventual genocide of the Holocaust.
The idea of "genius" and "talent" is also considered by William Graham Sumner, a founder of the American Sociological Society (now called the American Sociological Association). He maintained that if the government did not meddle with the social policy of laissez-faire, a class of genius would rise to the top of the system of social stratification, followed by a class of talent. Most of the rest of society would fit into the class of mediocrity. Those who were considered to be defective (mentally retarded, handicapped, etc.) had a negative effect on social progress by draining off necessary resources. They should be left on their own to sink or swim. But those in the class of delinquent (criminals, deviants, etc.) should be eliminated from society ("Folkways", 1907). (Compare to ideals in Plato's Republic.)
However, methods of eugenics were applied to reformulate more restrictive definitions of white racial purity in existing state laws banning interracial marriage: the so-called anti-miscegenation laws. The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti-miscegenation" legislation was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this law in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe.[94] This reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to 15 percent from previous years, to control the number of "unfit"[citation needed] individuals entering the country. While eugenicists did support the act, the most important backers were union leaders like Samuel Gompers[95] The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the "Nordic race" (a form of white supremacy), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race-mixing.[96] Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the U.S. and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws.
Stephen Jay Gould asserted that restrictions on immigration passed in the United States during the 1920s (and overhauled in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act) were motivated by the goals of eugenics. During the early 20th century, the United States and Canada began to receive far higher numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Influential eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and Harry Laughlin (who was appointed as an expert witness for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920) presented arguments they would pollute the national gene pool if their numbers went unrestricted.[citation needed] It has been argued that this stirred both Canada and the United States into passing laws creating a hierarchy of nationalities, rating them from the most desirable Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were almost completely banned from entering the country.[98]
However, several people, in particular Franz Samelson, Mark Snyderman and Richard Herrnstein, have argued, based on their examination of the records of the congressional debates over immigration policy, Congress gave virtually no consideration to these factors. According to these authors, the restrictions were motivated primarily by a desire to maintain the country's cultural integrity against the heavy influx of foreigners.[99]
In the USA, eugenic supporters included Theodore Roosevelt,[100] Research was funded by distinguished philanthropies and carried out at prestigious universities.[101] It was taught in college and high school classrooms.[102] Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood of America to urge the legalization of contraception for poor, immigrant women.[103] In its time eugenics was touted by some as scientific and progressive,[89] the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the realization of death camps in World War II, the idea that eugenics would lead to genocide was not taken seriously by the average American.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the work of the Rockefeller Foundation was decisive for the implementation of public health initiatives in Brazil, especially in the so-called public health movement. At that time, Brazilian eugenics was the same as public health, as expressed in the maxim "to sanitize is to eugenize"
by Anton Chaitkin
ROCKEFELLER AND MASS MURDER
The Rockefeller Foundation is the prime sponsor of public relations
for the United Nations' drastic depopulation program. Evidence
in the possession of a growing number of researchers in America,
England, and Germany demonstrates that the Foundation and its corporate,
medical, and political associates organized the racial mass murder
program of Nazi Germany.
These globalists, who function as a conduit for British Empire
geopolitics, were not stopped after World War II. This United Nations
alliance of the old Nazi right, with the new left, poses an even
graver danger to the world today than it did in 1941.
Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller
Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of
the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of
New Jersey (now called ``Exxon'') to the account of the Foundation.
The Foundation's money created the medical specialty known as
Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation
reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth
continuously directing the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry''
and the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and
Human Heredity.'' The Rockefellers' chief executive of these institutions
was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his
proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.
In 1932, the British-led ``Eugenics'' movement designated the
Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics
Federation. The movement called for the killing or sterilization
of people whose heredity made them a public burden.
- The Racial Laws -
A few months later, Hitler took over Germany and the Rockefeller-Rudin
apparatus became a section of the Nazi state. The regime appointed
Rudin head of the Racial Hygiene Society. Rudin and his staff,
as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts chaired by SS chief
Heinrich Himmler, drew up the sterilization law. Described as an
American Model law, it was adopted in July 1933 and proudly printed
in the September 1933 Eugenical News (USA) with Hitler's signature.
The Rockefeller group drew up other race laws, also based on existing
Virginia statutes. Otmar Verschuer and his assistant Josef Mengele
together wrote reports for special courts which enforced
Rudin's racial purity law against cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans.
The ``T4'' unit of the Hitler Chancery, based on psychiatrists
led by Rudin and his staff, cooperated in creating propaganda films
to sell mercy killing (euthanasia) to German citizens. The
public reacted antagonistically: Hitler had to withdraw a tear-jerker
right-to-die film from the movie theaters. The proper groundwork
had not yet been laid.
Under the Nazis, the German chemical company I.G. Farben and Rockefeller's
Standard Oil of New Jersey were effectively a single firm, merged
in hundreds of cartel arrangements. I.G. Farben was led, up until
1937, by the Warburg family, Rockefeller's partner in banking and
in the design of Nazi German eugenics. Following the German invasion
of Poland in 1939, Standard Oil pledged to keep the merger with
I.G. Farben going even if the U.S. entered the war. This was exposed
in 1942 by Sen. Harry Truman's investigating committee, and President
Roosevelt took hundreds of legal measures during the war to stop
the Standard-I.G. Farben cartel from supplying the enemy war machine.
In 1940-41, I.G. Farben built a gigantic factory at Auschwitz
in Poland, to utilize the Standard Oil/I.G. Farben patents with
concentration camp slave labor to make gasoline from coal. The
SS was assigned to guard the Jewish and other inmates and select
for killing those who were unfit for I.G. Farben slave labor. Standard-Germany
president Emil Helfferich testified after the war that Standard
Oil funds helped pay for SS guards at Auschwitz.
In 1940, six months after the notorious Standard-I.G. meeting,
European Rockefeller Foundation official Daniel O'Brian wrote to
the Foundation's chief medical officer Alan Gregg that ``it would
be unfortunate if it was chosen to stop research which has no relation
to war issues''--so the Foundation continued financing Nazi ``psychiatric
research'' during the war.
In 1936, Rockefeller's Dr. Franz Kallmann interrupted his study
of hereditary degeneracy and emigrated to America because he was
half-Jewish. Kallmann went to New York and established the Medical
Genetics Department of the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry published Kallman's study of over
1,000 cases of schizophrenia, which tried to prove its hereditary
basis. In the book, Kallmann thanked his long-time boss and mentor
Rudin. Kallmann's book, published in 1938 in the USA and
Nazi Germany, was used by the T4 unit as a rationalization to begin
in 1939 the murder of mental patients and various ``defective''
people, perhaps most of them children. Gas and lethal injections
were used to kill 250,000 under this program, in which the staffs
for a broader murder program were desensitized and trained.
- Dr. Mengele... -
In 1943, Otmar Verschuer's assistant Josef Mengele was made medical
commandant of Auschwitz. As wartime director of Rockefeller's Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity
in Berlin, Verschuer secured funds for Mengele's experiments at
Auschwitz from the German Research Council. Verschuer wrote a progress
report to the Council: ``My co-researcher in this research is my
assistant the anthropologist and physician Mengele. He is serving
as Hauptstuermfuehrer and camp doctor in the concentration camp
Auschwitz.... With the permission of the Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler,
anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial
groups in the concentration camps and blood samples will be sent
to my laboratory for investigation.''
Mengele prowled the railroad lines leading into Auschwitz, looking
for twins--a favorite subject of psychiatric geneticists. On arrival
at Mengele's experimental station, twins filled out ``a detailed
questionnaire from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.'' There were daily
drawings of blood for Verschuer's ``specific protein'' research.
Needles were injected into eyes for work on eye color. There were
experimental blood transfusions and infections. Organs and limbs
were removed, sometimes without anesthetics. Sex changes were attempted.
Females were sterilized, males were castrated. Thousands were murdered
and their organs, eyeballs, heads, and limbs were sent to Verschuer
and the Rockefeller group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
In 1946, Verschuer wrote to the Bureau of Human Heredity in London,
asking for help in continuing his ``scientific research.''
- Facelift -
In 1947, the Bureau of Human Heredity moved from London to Copenhagen.
The new Danish building for this was built with Rockefeller money.
The first International Congress in Human Genetics following World
War II was held at this Danish institute in 1956. By that time,
Verschuer was a member of the American Eugenics Society, then indistinguishable
from Rockefeller's Population Council.
Dr. Kallmann helped save Verschuer by testifying in his denazification
proceedings. Dr. Kallmann created the American Society of Human
Genetics, which organized the ``Human Genome Project''--a current
$3 billion physical multiculturalism effort. Kallmann was a director
of the American Eugenics Society in 1952 and from 1954 to 1965.
In the 1950s, the Rockefellers reorganized the U.S. eugenics movement
in their own family offices, with spinoff population-control and
abortion groups. The Eugenics Society changed its name to the Society
for the Study of Social Biology, its current name.
The Rockefeller Foundation had long financed the eugenics movement
in England, apparently repaying Britain for the fact that British
capital and an Englishman-partner had started old John D. Rockefeller
out in his Oil Trust. In the 1960s, the Eugenics Society of England
adopted what they called Crypto-eugenics, stating in their official
reports that they would do eugenics through means and instruments
not labeled as eugenics.
With support from the Rockefellers, the Eugenics Society (England)
set up a sub-committee called the International Planned Parenthood
Federation, which for 12 years had no other address than the Eugenics
Society. This, then, is the private, international apparatus which
has set the world up for a global holocaust, under the UN flag.
[For more information about the Planned Parenthood and Rockefeller
connection to AIDS and disinformation campaigns, read the book "Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola--Nature,
Accident or Intentional?" by Dr. Leonard Horowitz (Tetrahedron,
LLC Press, 1996).]
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to the manipulation of human populations.[2][3] The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance, and the theories of August Weismann.[4] Historically, many of the practitioners of eugenics viewed eugenics as a science, not necessarily restricted to human populations; this embraced the views of Darwinism and Social Darwinism.
Eugenics was widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century.[5] The First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912 was supported by many prominent persons, including: its president Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin; honorary vice-president Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; Auguste Forel, famous Swiss pathologist; Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone; among other prominent people.[6]
Eugenics was a controversial concept even shortly after its creation.[7] The first major challenge to eugenics was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan, who demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the birth of a fruit fly with white eyes from a family and ancestry of the red-eyed Drosophila melanogaster species of fruit fly.[8] Morgan claimed that this demonstrated that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance and that the concept of eugenics based upon genetic inheritance was severely flawed.[8]
By the mid-20th century eugenics had fallen into disfavor, having become associated with Nazi Germany. This country's approach to genetics and eugenics was focused on Eugen Fischer's concept of phenogenetics[9] and the Nazi twin study methods of Fischer and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Both the public and some elements of the scientific community have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced "racial hygiene", human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups. However, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised many new questions and concerns about the meaning of eugenics and its ethical and moral status in the modern era, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in eugenics.
One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry, in his lecture Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race presented to the National Academy of Sciences on 13 November 1883.[71][72] However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan's Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of the American Breeders Association. The committee unequivocally extended the principle to man.[73]
Another scientist considered the "father of the American eugenics movement" was Charles Benedict Davenport.[74] In 1904 he secured funding for the The Station for Experimental Evolution, later renamed the Carnegie Department of Genetics. It was also around that time that Davenport became actively involved with the American Breeders' Association (ABA). This led to Davenport's first eugenics text, "The science of human improvement by better breeding", one of the first papers to connect agriculture and human heredity.[74] Davenport later went on to set up a Eugenics Record Office (ERO), collecting hundreds of thousands of medical histories from Americans, which many considered having a racist and anti- immigration agenda.[74] Davenport and his views were supported at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as late as 1963, when his views began to be de-emphasized (racism was no longer popular). Davenport was ultimately replaced as the head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1969 by James D. Watson, who himself was removed in 2007 as a consequence of his racist remarks.
As the science continued in the 20th century, researchers interested in familial mental disorders conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century. All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized.
In 1907 Indiana became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals.[76] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,[77] the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.[78]
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. In 1898 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent American biologist, began as director of a biological research station based in Cold Spring Harbor where he experimented with evolution in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from the Carnegie Institution to found the Station for Experimental Evolution. The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) opened in 1910 while Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics.[79]
The Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock through procreation. They lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants, based on the belief that literacy rates were low among "inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by Presidents in 1897, 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917. Membership in the League included: A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College, James T. Young, director of Wharton School and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. The League allied themselves with the American Breeder's Association to gain influence and further its goals and in 1909 established a eugenics committee chaired by David Starr Jordan with members Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, Vernon Kellogg, Luther Burbank, William Earnest Castle, Adolf Meyer, H. J. Webber and Friedrich Woods.[80] The ABA's immigration legislation committee, formed in 1911 and headed by League's founder Prescott F. Hall, formalized the committee's already strong relationship with the Immigration Restriction League.[80]
In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard and the conservationist Madison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the "unfit". (Davenport favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in his The Kallikak Family; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.)[81] Though their methodology and research methods are now understood as highly flawed, at the time this was seen as legitimate scientific research.[82] It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably, Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself.[83]
Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.[84] A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.
There are direct links between progressive American eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger and Harry H. Laughlin and racial oppression in the US and in Europe. Harry H. Laughlin wrote the Virginia model statute [85] that was the basis for the Nazi Ernst Rudin's Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. Laughlin's assistance to Adolf Hitler's cause resulted in an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936.[86] Ernst Rudin also wrote articles on eugenics for Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review. Sanger stated during work related to her "Negro Project", "The minister's work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."[87] While there are two alternatives as to the interpretation of that quotation, Margaret Sanger not only attended, but actually spoke at a New Jersey meeting of the Ku Klux Klan auxiliary.[88]
Such legislation was passed in the U.S. because of widespread public acceptance of the eugenics movement, spearheaded by efforts of progressive reformers.[89] Over 19 million people attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, open for 10 months from February 20 to December 4, 1915.[90] The PPIE was a fair devoted to extolling the virtues of a rapidly progressing nation, featuring new developments in science, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. A subject that received a large amount of time and space was that of the developments concerning health and disease, particularly the areas of tropical medicine and race betterment (tropical medicine being the combined study of bacteriology, parasitology and entomology while racial betterment being the promotion of eugenic studies). Having these areas so closely intertwined, it seemed that they were both categorized in the main theme of the fair, the advancement of civilization. Thus in the public eye, the seemingly contradictory areas of study were both represented under progressive banners of improvement and were made to seem like plausible courses of action to better American society.[91]
The state of California was at the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 up until the 1960s.[90] By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation. The American Breeder's Association was the first eugenic body in the U.S., established in 1906 under the direction of biologist Charles B. Davenport. The ABA was formed specifically to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood". Membership included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank.[92]
When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration.[75] The Nazis had claimed American eugenicists inspired and supported Hitler's racial purification laws, and failed to understand the connection between those policies and the eventual genocide of the Holocaust.
The idea of "genius" and "talent" is also considered by William Graham Sumner, a founder of the American Sociological Society (now called the American Sociological Association). He maintained that if the government did not meddle with the social policy of laissez-faire, a class of genius would rise to the top of the system of social stratification, followed by a class of talent. Most of the rest of society would fit into the class of mediocrity. Those who were considered to be defective (mentally retarded, handicapped, etc.) had a negative effect on social progress by draining off necessary resources. They should be left on their own to sink or swim. But those in the class of delinquent (criminals, deviants, etc.) should be eliminated from society ("Folkways", 1907). (Compare to ideals in Plato's Republic.)
However, methods of eugenics were applied to reformulate more restrictive definitions of white racial purity in existing state laws banning interracial marriage: the so-called anti-miscegenation laws. The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti-miscegenation" legislation was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this law in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe.[94] This reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to 15 percent from previous years, to control the number of "unfit"[citation needed] individuals entering the country. While eugenicists did support the act, the most important backers were union leaders like Samuel Gompers[95] The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the "Nordic race" (a form of white supremacy), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race-mixing.[96] Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the U.S. and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws.
Stephen Jay Gould asserted that restrictions on immigration passed in the United States during the 1920s (and overhauled in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act) were motivated by the goals of eugenics. During the early 20th century, the United States and Canada began to receive far higher numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Influential eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and Harry Laughlin (who was appointed as an expert witness for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920) presented arguments they would pollute the national gene pool if their numbers went unrestricted.[citation needed] It has been argued that this stirred both Canada and the United States into passing laws creating a hierarchy of nationalities, rating them from the most desirable Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were almost completely banned from entering the country.[98]
However, several people, in particular Franz Samelson, Mark Snyderman and Richard Herrnstein, have argued, based on their examination of the records of the congressional debates over immigration policy, Congress gave virtually no consideration to these factors. According to these authors, the restrictions were motivated primarily by a desire to maintain the country's cultural integrity against the heavy influx of foreigners.[99]
In the USA, eugenic supporters included Theodore Roosevelt,[100] Research was funded by distinguished philanthropies and carried out at prestigious universities.[101] It was taught in college and high school classrooms.[102] Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood of America to urge the legalization of contraception for poor, immigrant women.[103] In its time eugenics was touted by some as scientific and progressive,[89] the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the realization of death camps in World War II, the idea that eugenics would lead to genocide was not taken seriously by the average American.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the work of the Rockefeller Foundation was decisive for the implementation of public health initiatives in Brazil, especially in the so-called public health movement. At that time, Brazilian eugenics was the same as public health, as expressed in the maxim "to sanitize is to eugenize"
Monday, June 18, 2012
Mexico’s economy grew faster than Brazil’s
World Leaders Meet In "A Mexico" Now Giving Brazil a Run For Their Money
Last year, Mexico’s economy grew faster than Brazil’s, and it looks set to outpace its larger Latin rival again in 2012.
Brazil’s slowdown can be attributed partly to debt-burdened consumers and the erosion of industrial production, which is tied to the recent strength of Brazil’s currency, the real. On top of that, slowing global growth, particularly in China, has pushed down prices of the commodities that Brazil exports.
Meanwhile, Mexican factories are exporting record quantities of televisions, cars, computers and appliances, replacing some Chinese imports in the United States and fueling a modest expansion.
Economically, Mexico does not appear as grim a place anymore.
“The best way to improve your image is G.D.P. growth,” said Luis de la Calle, a former Mexican trade negotiator and an economic analyst here.
Mexico’s strengthening economy underlies the glossy veneer on display as President Felipe Calderón hosts the Group of 20 leaders of major industrialized and emerging economies at the luxury beach resort of Los Cabos on Monday and Tuesday.
In contrast to the widening crisis in the euro zone, which will be the focus of the talks, Mexico will be able to point to 17 years of macroeconomic stability, low inflation, manageable debt, an open economy and increasing competitiveness. The gross domestic product expanded 3.9 percent last year, ahead of Brazil’s growth of 2.7 percent.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Brazil's economic links with China
URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.
Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times
A new railroad line in Uruaçu, Brazil, will carry soybeans to a port for shipping to China. Brazil's economic links with China have helped it prosper, but Brazil is selling mostly raw materials.
Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China.
“They need the soy more than anyone,” said Edimilson Santana, a farmer in the small town of Uruaçu. “This could be a new beginning for farmers here.”
The $7 billion agreement signed last month — to produce six million tons of soybeans a year — is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.
Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves, taking their nation’s fervor for agricultural self-sufficiency overseas.
“They are moving in,” said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries. “They are looking for land, looking for reliable partners. But what they would like to do is run the show alone.”
While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them — and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy.
“One thing the world can be sure of: there is no going back,” Mr. da Silva said while visiting Beijing in 2009.
China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, buying ever increasing volumes of soybeans and iron ore, while investing billions in Brazil’s energy sector. The demand has helped fuel an economic boom here that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability to a country accustomed to periodic crises.
Yet some experts say the partnership has devolved into a classic neo-colonial relationship in which China has the upper hand. Nearly 84 percent of Brazil’s exports to China last year were raw materials, up from 68 percent in 2000. But about 98 percent of China’s exports to Brazil are manufactured products — including the latest, low-priced cars for Brazil’s emerging middle class — that are beating down Brazil’s industrial sector.
“The relationship has been very unbalanced,” said Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian diplomat and finance minister. “There has been a clear lack of strategy on the Brazilian side.”
While visiting China last month, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, emphasized the need to sell higher-value products to China, and she has edged closer to the United States. “It is not by accident that there is a sort of effort to revalue the relationship with the United States,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “China exposes Brazil’s vulnerabilities more than any other country in the world.”
China’s moves to buy land have made officials nervous. Last August, Luís Inácio Adams, Brazil’s attorney general, reinterpreted a 1971 law, making it significantly harder for foreigners to buy land in Brazil. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, followed suit last month, sending a law to Congress limiting the size and concentration of rural land foreigners could own.
Mr. Adams said his decision was not a direct result of land-buying by China, but he noted that huge “land grabs” in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including China’s attempt to lease about three million acres in the Philippines, had alarmed Brazilian officials.
“Nothing is preventing investment from happening, but it will be regulated,” Mr. Adams said.
A World Bank study last year said that volatile food prices had brought a “rising tide” of large-scale farmland purchases in developing nations, and that China was among a small group of countries making most of the purchases.
Foreigners own an estimated 11 percent of productive land in Argentina, according to the Argentine Agriculture Federation. In Brazil, one government study estimated that foreigners owned land equivalent to about 20 percent of São Paulo State.
International investors have criticized the restrictions. At least $15 billion in farming and forestry projects in Brazil have been suspended since the government’s limits, according to Agroconsult, a Brazilian agricultural consultancy.
“The tightening of land purchases by foreigners is really a step backwards into a Jurassic mentality of counterproductive nationalism,” said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce, saying that American farmers had bought sizable plots in Brazil in recent years, with little uproar.
Responding to the criticism, Brazil’s agriculture minister said this month that Brazil might start leasing farmland to foreigners, given the barriers to ownership.
China itself does not allow private ownership of farmland, and it cautioned local governments against granting large-scale or long-term leases to companies in a 2001 directive. China also bans foreign companies from buying mines and oil fields.
But as more of its people eat meat, China is expected to increase its soybean imports, mostly for animal feed, by more than 50 percent by 2020, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last month, Chongqing Grains signed a $2.5 billion agreement to produce soybeans in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Last October, a Chinese group agreed to develop about 500,000 acres of farmland in Río Negro Province in Argentina.
In both cases, Chinese officials proposed buying large tracts of land before local officials steered them toward production agreements.
“We are never going to sell the land,” said Juan Manuel Accatino, the minister of production in Río Negro.
Brian Willott, an American farmer who came to Brazil in 2003, said Chinese interest in buying farms had not abated. “Everywhere you go to look at a farm they say, ‘We are considering selling to the Chinese,’ ” he said.
In Goiás State, nearly 70 percent of the soy grown went to the Chinese last year, and the Chinese are seeking to use about 20 million acres of pastureland that has not been cultivated for decades.
“For them, the faster the better,” said Antônio de Lima, Goiás’ agriculture minister.
Farmers here say they share Chinese officials’ goal of breaking the stranglehold of international trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
But Tan Lin, a manager at the Chinese company involved in Goiás, said he doubted Chinese companies were ready to replace them.
“I don’t see that the Chinese companies working here have that expertise yet,” Mr. Tan said. But “if you can do that, it is good, of course.”
“They need the soy more than anyone,” said Edimilson Santana, a farmer in the small town of Uruaçu. “This could be a new beginning for farmers here.”
The $7 billion agreement signed last month — to produce six million tons of soybeans a year — is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.
Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves, taking their nation’s fervor for agricultural self-sufficiency overseas.
“They are moving in,” said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries. “They are looking for land, looking for reliable partners. But what they would like to do is run the show alone.”
While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them — and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy.
“One thing the world can be sure of: there is no going back,” Mr. da Silva said while visiting Beijing in 2009.
China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, buying ever increasing volumes of soybeans and iron ore, while investing billions in Brazil’s energy sector. The demand has helped fuel an economic boom here that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability to a country accustomed to periodic crises.
Yet some experts say the partnership has devolved into a classic neo-colonial relationship in which China has the upper hand. Nearly 84 percent of Brazil’s exports to China last year were raw materials, up from 68 percent in 2000. But about 98 percent of China’s exports to Brazil are manufactured products — including the latest, low-priced cars for Brazil’s emerging middle class — that are beating down Brazil’s industrial sector.
“The relationship has been very unbalanced,” said Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian diplomat and finance minister. “There has been a clear lack of strategy on the Brazilian side.”
While visiting China last month, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, emphasized the need to sell higher-value products to China, and she has edged closer to the United States. “It is not by accident that there is a sort of effort to revalue the relationship with the United States,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “China exposes Brazil’s vulnerabilities more than any other country in the world.”
China’s moves to buy land have made officials nervous. Last August, Luís Inácio Adams, Brazil’s attorney general, reinterpreted a 1971 law, making it significantly harder for foreigners to buy land in Brazil. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, followed suit last month, sending a law to Congress limiting the size and concentration of rural land foreigners could own.
Mr. Adams said his decision was not a direct result of land-buying by China, but he noted that huge “land grabs” in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including China’s attempt to lease about three million acres in the Philippines, had alarmed Brazilian officials.
“Nothing is preventing investment from happening, but it will be regulated,” Mr. Adams said.
A World Bank study last year said that volatile food prices had brought a “rising tide” of large-scale farmland purchases in developing nations, and that China was among a small group of countries making most of the purchases.
Foreigners own an estimated 11 percent of productive land in Argentina, according to the Argentine Agriculture Federation. In Brazil, one government study estimated that foreigners owned land equivalent to about 20 percent of São Paulo State.
International investors have criticized the restrictions. At least $15 billion in farming and forestry projects in Brazil have been suspended since the government’s limits, according to Agroconsult, a Brazilian agricultural consultancy.
“The tightening of land purchases by foreigners is really a step backwards into a Jurassic mentality of counterproductive nationalism,” said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce, saying that American farmers had bought sizable plots in Brazil in recent years, with little uproar.
Responding to the criticism, Brazil’s agriculture minister said this month that Brazil might start leasing farmland to foreigners, given the barriers to ownership.
China itself does not allow private ownership of farmland, and it cautioned local governments against granting large-scale or long-term leases to companies in a 2001 directive. China also bans foreign companies from buying mines and oil fields.
But as more of its people eat meat, China is expected to increase its soybean imports, mostly for animal feed, by more than 50 percent by 2020, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last month, Chongqing Grains signed a $2.5 billion agreement to produce soybeans in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Last October, a Chinese group agreed to develop about 500,000 acres of farmland in Río Negro Province in Argentina.
In both cases, Chinese officials proposed buying large tracts of land before local officials steered them toward production agreements.
“We are never going to sell the land,” said Juan Manuel Accatino, the minister of production in Río Negro.
Brian Willott, an American farmer who came to Brazil in 2003, said Chinese interest in buying farms had not abated. “Everywhere you go to look at a farm they say, ‘We are considering selling to the Chinese,’ ” he said.
In Goiás State, nearly 70 percent of the soy grown went to the Chinese last year, and the Chinese are seeking to use about 20 million acres of pastureland that has not been cultivated for decades.
“For them, the faster the better,” said Antônio de Lima, Goiás’ agriculture minister.
Farmers here say they share Chinese officials’ goal of breaking the stranglehold of international trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
But Tan Lin, a manager at the Chinese company involved in Goiás, said he doubted Chinese companies were ready to replace them.
“I don’t see that the Chinese companies working here have that expertise yet,” Mr. Tan said. But “if you can do that, it is good, of course.”
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