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Adhesiones

AVINA and Ashoka are two foundations linked to big business that promote an industrial agriculture model based on transgenic seeds, as well as the privatisation of common assets like water or forests, not to mention their close connections with the deadly asbestos industry.

Due to the growing tendency to privatize foreign aid, and the alliances between the business sector and governments (public-private partnership), the organizations signing this declaration wish to make it known that some of the foundations that use the excuse of “international cooperation” and other strategies, such as Corporative Social Responsibility, in reality are trying to legitimize forms of production that are extremely negative socially and environmentally. Some examples would be agricultural programs that seriously harm rural agriculture and increase food safety risks, water privatization projects, large-scale wood exploitation, the intensive use of toxic substances- such as pesticides, asbestos, mercury- and a long etcetera.

One of the most blatant examples is the AVINA foundation, founded by asbestos magnate, Stephan Schmidheiny, who amassed his fortune through the sale of the lethal mineral at the expense of the health and lives of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. In fact, the 13th of February 2012, he was convicted in Turin – together with Belgian Louis de Cartier, another of the asbestos magnates, to 16 years in prison and compensation payments totalling more than 100 million Euros. The crimes for which he was convicted are those of “permanent wilful environmental damage and intentional omission of protective measures on the job”. In fact, the fabrication of asbestos in the world is the worst industrial tragedy in history; therefore, the undersigning organizations wish to declare their clear support for the victims of this material and their families, as well as the worldwide prohibition of its use.

Furthermore, Schmidheiny has been on the board of directors of Nestlé, the Union of Swiss Banks, and ABS Brown, among other multi-national companies. The current president of AVINA, Brizio Biondi-Morra, was the manager of the multi-national chemical company Dupont, one of the global corporations that promote transgenic crops.

On the other hand, in places like the north of Brazil, the roofs of the buildings on the indigenous reserves are being replaced by asbestos tiles, using a process promoted and stimulated by governmental institutions, which at the same time are pressured by these industrial groups. Thus, ancestral knowledge about the use of straw, linked to the sustainable use of the forest, is lost, at the same time that this dangerous toxin is introduced in the villages.

In the case of Ashoka, the foundation is presided in Spain by an ex director of JP Morgan bank, one of the international Banks with the greatest responsibility in the current financial crisis and in speculation in agro-food markets. Other founders have been linked to the consulting firm
McKinsey&Co. or to General Electric.
Some of the activities of these foundations have to do with the development of the “green revolution” in the world, based on the abusive use of fertilizers and pesticides, in the expansion of destructive mono-crops, large estates and production for exportation. For example, among the most noteworthy partners of AVINA is the Argentinean Gustavo
Brobocopatel, one of the largest producers of transgenic soya, a crop with tragic socio-environmental consequences.

Ashoka, on the other hand, supports the AGRA program (Alliance of the Green Revolution in Africa). The AGRA program is headed by a group of large corporations and foundations like Gates or Rockefeller. Behind the million-dollar financing projects is hidden the promotion of a new “green revolution”, which generates debt and dependency on toxic agrochemicals, seeds subject to intellectual property rights, and genetically modified crops. This would displace rural communities and destroy local knowledge and seeds, producing greater hunger and poverty. It consists, definitively, in the propagation of a series of projects that will favour the installation of multi-national agro-businesses on the continent, among them Monsanto. The Gates Foundation has given 456 million dollars to AGRA, and in 2006 it hired Robert Horsch, executive at Monsanto for 25 years, to work on the project. For example, in Kenya around 70% of the projects financed by AGRA worked directly with Monsanto, and 80% of the Gates» financing in the country is related to genetic engineering.

In the growing tendency toward the privatization of foreign aid and the fusion of the business sector with governments, AGRA becomes a useful tool for the interests of private companies and western governments, anxious to privatize land and water for exportation crops, agro-fuels and the creation of carbon sinks.

Many of the strategies of foundations like AVINA and Ashoka are based on converting the negative environmental consequences of neoliberal policies into new “commodities”, that is, into goods and opportunities for new businesses, without dealing with the real reasons for these problems. They are a thread in a more extended and complex tapestry, with direct roots in the Cold War, but also earlier, especially in the anti-colonial battles.

For all of these reasons, the organizations that sign this manifesto defend Food Sovereignty and a fundamental change in long-term agricultural policies in order to recover local food economies. As far they can, they declare that they will continue to fight to defend local villagers» seeds from transgenic seeds. They will fight against the privatization of public assets, against the use of asbestos and in support of its victims, against transnational companies like Monsanto, against initiatives like AGRA, and against the foundations that support these initiatives in a more or less covert way, as in the case of AVINA and Ashoka.

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