Not only that, but there are plenty of highly productive areas in places like Guatemala, for example, where US and other international interests, own a large percentage of the arable land and use it to ship food back to the G20 countries so that we can have cheap oranges and bananas year round.

The company I work for is an importer of food ingredients, and it is not cheap. The only reason we buy foodstuffs overseas rather than from the US & canadian crops is because even with duties and freight charges, the profit margins are greater than buying say, beet sugar from michigan, or soy meal from canada. That chicken that was raised in california was raised on soy meal from china, and the quinoa from an american or canadian milling company (we deal with most of the organic mills I’ve seen on store shelves) is from bolivia. The sugar in some locally produced foodstuffs isn’t sourced from say, a local michigan beet sugar company, but it’s from Brazil.

We move this food all over the world because privilege + money enables it. It has got to stop.

I double dog dare you to change your profile pic to your one of your vagina…though I’m not sure it would actually result in an overall decrease in creep traffic.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6421/

Genocide means any of the following acts committed to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

This is definitely number 4, and could also be 2 and 3.

Scary how in discussions of reproductive rights, when the discussion centres on women in “developing” (don’t like the word for obvious reasons) nations, it’s all about, how can we educate them to use contraception and have fewer kids.

Yet you see all types of “fantastic empowered women” articles about women entrepreneurs working into their 70s, with glorious stories of their wonderful and numerous grandchildren, and how they’ve got so much more to offer them cause they’ve, I don’t know, had zillions of expensive holidays in other people’s misery and lots of money to buy treats.

I get creeped out in the UK (perhaps Ruth can corroborate this) by the coverage of stories about children – not only do only the cute, blonde crime victims get picked for coverage, but the tabloids are all “look at the beautiful child”, which instantly says to me, “look at the quality genetic material we lost!”. Not only is it scandalous that no one is interested in the thousands of kids who disappear every year that, maybe, have less blonde or cute genetic material, but the kid himself doesn’t deserve that. I’d hate to be a kid watching the news now: you’re either a ten-year-old murderer, an eight-year-old murder victim, you’ve vanished, or you’re invisible, or if you’re not white you’re probably a knife-crime victim in a seedy part of a big city – all the emotions and reactionary attitudes of adults being projected onto you, must be really scary.

You talked about the issue of “developing” the land as well, it’s horrifying that things as precious as land, people, culture, geography, are valued as commodities rather than for what they really are.

Another interesting note, anon, was that the effects of contraceptives in water was actually discussed. A woman who works with dolphins and endocrines noted that the effect of contraceptives in the water system is producing devistating results on most ecosystems and pointed out that she wasn’t really sure how that would help–the main panalist guy was like–ah, yes, good point. But we have to do something. Or something.

I’m like–how about we *start* with cleaning up all the devistation we have committed world wide on our ecosystems–and maybe, just maybe, those ecosystems could actually provide enough food/resources for the population as it exists? I mean, I hate to be all, NO NO TO CONTRACEPTIVES, because when women have access, they use them, and I in NO way want to deny women the right to contraceptives–but why are these discussions on the environment ALWAYS centered on the bodies of third world/developing world? It’s the mexicans fault that the desert is being destroyed (nothing to do with the massive fence being built across that same desert, see community news) or the brown women who won’t stop having babies, or the brown women who want to use tampons instead of moon cups or what the fuck ever.

Never *ever* do does the U.S. ever have to interrogate *its* culpability in this freaking mess?