Just another move in the chess game by Big Money to lock up the world’s food supply:
Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton made an unsolicited $38.6 billion offer for the world’s largest fertilizer producer, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc., in an aggressive wager that developing economies will drive up demand for the world’s food supply.
Potash is an important nutrient that replenishes soil and increases farmland’s crop yield. Global potash supplies are relatively limited, and Potash Corp., based in the prairies of central Canada, controls approximately 20% of the supply.
The offer is likely to set off a long struggle for the fate of the Canadian company, a crown jewel of the country’s natural-resources-based economy.
I’ve heard some strange rumor about a company trying to patent the DNA of wild rice.
I also heard a rumor about a group trying to declare Madeline Island GMO- free, to grow aboriginal food crops.
If your means of growing plants is per Big Agro, throwing massive amounts of chemicals derived from mining (potash, phosphorous rock), on otherwise sterile and worm-free dirt, where you basically use the land as a chemistry set, then you make a move such as BHP Billiton.
But if you raise plants sustainably, then you are far more interested in making compost, using bonemeal, etc. As the Archdruid, John Michael Greer noted in a recent column, somehow prior to the Industrial Revolution green plants managed to grow for three-quarters of a billion years making use of very low concentration nutrient sources long before anybody ever opened a phosphate rock or potash mine.
Phosphate and potassium “shortages” are only a problem if Big Agro supplies all your food.
Believe it or not, I actually care about the rest of the world, too.
I know you do. You know what I think? I think that the character Rosalind Russell played in “His Girl Friday” – Hildy Johnson – got reincarnated.
And writes a blog somewhere in the Philadelphia area. Something about a “Guerrilla”.
russ and susie, you are speaking a language that I don’t understand. You both just went beyond my pay-grade. What am I missing?
People who can afford to eat organically-grown food are a fairly small percentage these days. Most people HAVE to eat the chemically goosed crops.
Oh yes, I see. So true. That’s some messed up system though.