Uitgegeven: 4 juli 2010 09:25
Laatst gewijzigd: 4 juli 2010 09:55
BRUSSEL - Europa exporteert naar Afrika ''behoorlijk wat'' voeding en chemische stoffen die voor Europeanen ongeschikt zijn.
Dat stelt Herman Koëter, voormalig bestuurder van het EU-agentschap voor veilige voeding EFSA en van de OESO, zondag tegen het ANP.
''DDT is een goed voorbeeld van een insectenbestrijdingsmiddel dat in Europa is verboden, maar vrolijk naar Afrika wordt geëxporteerd."
"Ook in de voeding zien we zaken die door herverpakking ineens niet langer 'over de houdbaarheidsdatum' zijn. Een partij vis met te veel kwik of dioxinen eindigt niet zelden in een ontwikkelingsland'', zegt Koëter.
Trainingen
De 62-jarige Nederlander geeft via zijn Brusselse non-profit organisatie Orange House Partnership trainingen aan toezichthouders in Afrika, China en andere niet-westerse landen over de risico's van voeding en chemische stoffen.
Net terug uit China en Uruguay, gaf hij vorige maand in Kameroen training aan toezichthouders. ''De autoriteiten in dat land krijgen wel aanvragen van fabrikanten om pesticiden toe te laten, maar missen de deskundigheid om de aanvraag te beoordelen."
"Als de fabrikant of een ander land zegt dat het goed spul is, lieten ze het toe'', aldus Koëter, die de toezichthouders nu zoveel kennis heeft bijgebracht dat ze in elk geval begrijpen wat de belangrijkste aspecten zijn om in de gaten te houden.
Vervuiling
Zijn indruk is wel dat voeding in Afrika, China en andere niet-westerse landen gestaag minder bacteriële en chemische vervuiling bevat. De kennis van de risico's en het toezicht komen langzaam op een hoger peil.
Maar er is nog veel onkunde, stelt de voedingswetenschapper. ''Veel boeren in Afrika hebben niet de notie dat je de sla niet met gif tegen slakken moet bespuiten een dag voor de oogst'', zegt Koëter.
''En om de sla wat frisser te maken voor de verkoop, door ze te besproeien met water. Dat water komt vaak wel uit een open riool, meestal vol met de e-coli bacteriën die buikvliesontsteking en diarree kunnen veroorzaken.''
Schandalen
Dat staat nog los van schandalen met besmettingen die bewust zijn veroorzaakt. China werd in 2008 getroffen door melk die opzettelijk vervuild bleek met de stof melamine: bijna duizend baby's moesten naar het ziekenhuis.
''Een dergelijke calamiteit kan ook in westerse landen gebeuren: kijk naar de hoge PCB gehaltes in Nederlandse chips een jaar of twee geleden. Gelukkig kon de Voedings- en Warenautoriteit (VWA) de oorzaak snel achterhalen, namelijk vervuild leemhoudend spoelwater uit Duitsland. In ontwikkelingslanden met slecht toezicht kan dit maanden of langer duren.''
© ANP
'Europa dumpt slechte voeding in Afrika' | nu.nl/buitenland | Het laatste nieuws het eerst op nu.nl (http://www.nu.nl/buitenland/2284604/europa-dumpt-slechte-voeding-in-afrika.html)
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typisch handelsgeest om alsnog afgedankte zaken elders te slijten. Deels ook de schuld van afrika die geen adequate toezicht kent en effectiefe voeding en warenwet. sterker, ze delen mee in deze crime.
DDT is een slecht voorbeeld. Europa heeft geen malaria. De communis opinio is vandaag de dag dat de voordelen van DDT-gebruik ruim opwegen tegen de nadelen.
DDT is een slecht voorbeeld. Europa heeft geen malaria.
Meer. Als ik me niet vergis kwam het in Vlaanderen 50 jaar geleden nog voor.
Ook een plaag in Siberië overigens. Tropische ziekte, weet je wel.
WHO is eindelijk, na miljoenen onnodige doden, inderdaad tot inzicht gekomen dat DDT - mits correct toegepast - bijzonder aan te raden is als bestrijdingsmiddel.
Meer. Als ik me niet vergis kwam het in Vlaanderen 50 jaar geleden nog voor.
Ook een plaag in Siberië overigens. Tropische ziekte, weet je wel.
WHO is eindelijk, na miljoenen onnodige doden, inderdaad tot inzicht gekomen dat DDT - mits correct toegepast - bijzonder aan te raden is als bestrijdingsmiddel.
Jaja, ik weet. Enfin van Vlaanderen niet :hihi: maar Frankrijk zeker wel.
How about this:
Johann Hari: How Goldman gambled on starvation
Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."
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Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. "My children stopped growing," a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. "I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."
Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors – like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price – made a contribution, but they aren't enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.
To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache – but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.
For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked.
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.
So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch – and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles's crop at all.
If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts – a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English." Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote "The Wasteland". Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand.
So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops – and the speculators drove the price through the roof.
Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose – which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.
When I asked Merrill Lynch's spokesman to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, he said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were more detailed, saying they sold their index in early 2007 and pointing out that "serious analyses ... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a statement by the OECD.
How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period – but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.
So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears that the Senate – drenched in speculator-donations – may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried that David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.
Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. The World Development Movement is launching a week of pressure this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 to find out what you can do.
The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please – make sure they never, never do that to us again."
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html
knuppeltje
05-07-10, 10:55
DDT is een slecht voorbeeld. Europa heeft geen malaria. De communis opinio is vandaag de dag dat de voordelen van DDT-gebruik ruim opwegen tegen de nadelen.
Toch is Nederland pas in 1970 endimische malaria vrij verklaard. In 1920 stierven er nog 10.000 mensen aan.
Als ik het goed heb, wanneer niet trouwens :ego:, vindt er hier nu door reizigersverkeer en import van goederen weer toename van malaria plaats.
Oeps, heb het maar gegoogled voor er weer iemand over mijn ego valt. :)