Another interview I’ve translated between Daniel Mermet and Jean Ziegler. Ok it takes a little while to read (30 minutes at most), but I hope you will make the effort to read it, first because it is uplifting, intersting, and encouraging, and also because it was bloody hard work for me to translate this, so i hope it’s not wasted time :). I also recommend to view the documentary called We Feed the World, produced by Erwin Wagenhofer, an Austrian activist, of which this interview is about.

La-bas, si j’y suis. 2nd of February 2008.

Daniel Mermet: Pompous title! “United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food”...

Jean Ziegler laughs: Yes, completely!

Daniel Mermet: People like you are not welcome in these institutions, it’s a little miracle you have this position. You have a radical outlook…

Jean Ziegler: Yes, it’s a lot to do with luck… Kofi Annan, I’ve know him for a long time, this man has convictions, you know… I mean there is a hyper-diplomatic side to him, because he is from the generation born during the colonisation, in Ghana, so he always had to go through difficult and risky negociations, and he stays extremely prudent towards, you know… White people. But deep inside he feels humiliated, and he is determined… The US treated him like a slave from Alabama… I mean it was incredible… So I think because of this, he defended me for this position.

Daniel Mermet: You’re here to talk about the documentary We Feed the World and you take side in this film. But first I would like us to talk about your background… Activist? Do you agree if I call you an activist?

Jean Ziegler: Yes, it’s an honor, yes…

Daniel Mermet: I’ve heard it all started by meeting Che Guevara…

Jean Ziegler: Yes… I was part of the Union of Communist Students at the time, and we did a trip to Cuba in the early 60s. It was easy to meet the Che, the Castro brothers, etc, because it was only the begining of the revolution. Then back to Geneva I recieved a call from Prague (it was the only embassy they had at the time), saying that a delegation from Cuba would visit for the first important conference about sugar, in 1964, and asking me if I could help them with a bit of administration and transport, etc. Sugar trade was very important for them… 12 cubans arrived, led by the Che. And so I became the Che’s driver for 12 days. And on the last evening before they left, I told the Che I wanted to go fight the guerrilla on his side. He was hard, you know, and he had a cold personality, not at all like Fidel… It was late at night and we were overlooking Geneva, with all its lights and adverts… And he told me coldly: “You see this town… You’re born here, where the brain of the monster is. It is here that you must fight”. He turned around, and left.

Daniel Mermet laughs: And it’s what you did…!

Jean Ziegler: I was really hurt… I thought he thinks I’m a useless petty bourgeois, which was probably true. He was right… I mean if I had been one of those fighters… Militarily I wasn’t good, I would have been in a guerrilla in Guatemala or somewhere else. Whereas by staying, I was able to use institutions and parliaments, he did me a big favour actually.

From then on, I took the weapons I had, but not insurection weapons… I’ve been very privileged, you know, though I’ve been sued six times for 6.6 million francs, I’ve had death threats, parliamentary immunity removed, etc. But it’s strictly nothing compared to what tens of thousands of people live in nearby countries… You know, I am white, academic, from a bourgeois background so i’ve always had enough to eat, etc… I live in Geneva, a totally cynical and corrupt city… But at least here we have some rights… And I am your guest today, which is somehow a protection… [They laugh]

Daniel Mermet: So let’s talk about this documentary, We Feed the World, produced by Erwin Wagenhofer, and partly inspired by your book The Empire of Shame. Did you know him before making this film?

Jean Ziegler: No… But I had heard of him. He is part of an anti-fascist group in Austria (some nazis stayed there, you know)... This group demonstrated against Heider’s politics, raising awareness in Europe, and it helped put Heider’s right winged government on the side. Then in Vienna Wagenhofer was called a nation’s traitor, he was threatened, etc… So that’s how I heard of him. One day, he showed me some rough samples of his documentary, and I felt like he understood the book very well.

Daniel Mermet: So… He manages to freak us out with this film… On food, on agro-industry’s world domination by a handful of corporations, etc. I quote you in the documentary, you say: “There is no free trade, only the strongest rule”.

Jean Ziegler: Of course, these guys are warlords, Brabeck (CEO of Nestlé), all these guys… He asks why do people complain? We live longer than ever, life is more comfortable, etc. Ok in Rwanda, 5 years life expectancy drop in 10 years, etc. A white austrian lives to 76 years old, statistically. And in Rwanda, 39 years. He says “we” but who “we”? Life expectancy is longer for who?

Daniel Mermet: So, how did this phenomen occur? How did we get to this situation in the world, slowly, without always noticing it, or not daring to notice it?

Jean Ziegler: Well it’s one of the effects of what we call Globalisation. The power of the 5 biggest international corporations is tremendous, they dominate resources, raw agricultural materials, even before the food is produced… Until the “bi-polarity” of the world ended in 1991with the fall of communism (It was a good thing, you know, they were communist as much as I am buddist), the capitalist mode of production was limited in territory. Then it conquered the world in no time, by regulating the world market (the “invisible hand”), financial capital got independant from all other forms of capital, and it came to grips with the planet. On a productivity level, Globalisation actually works… International corporations can make incredible things, for example in the pharmaceutic industry a new molecule is discovered each day, in Wall Street a new financial tool appears each month, they can be incredibly creative, you know, from a technological point of view… A brutal conquest… So in the first decade of the Globalisation, from 1992 to 2002, the PNB (world product) doubled, and international trade more than tripled, crossing the famous line of $6,000 billion in traded goods, and energy consumption doubles every 4 years… Incredible wealth has been created, for the first time in history, statistically, mankind got out of the of the era of shortages to enter an era of abundance. Statistically.

According to the World Food Report, one human out of six is critically under fed, and the same report states the entire world’s agro-industry, in its current state, could feed 12 billions of humans (calculated considering 2500 calories per human). We are 6.2 billions, therefore starvation is an homicide. We are now really living in the kingdom of abundance. That’s why Neo-Liberal theories are triumphant. You cancel every counter power, unions, state sovereignty, etc, and if it is totally free, the capital will go where profits are higher.

Now the problem is we’re back to a feudal world, controled by a small group of capital oligarchies… They have an incredible power… Last year, out of the 85,000 UN registered corporations, the biggest 500 controlled more than 52% of the world’s raw product (all the wealth in capital, goods, patents, services, etc). They have a tremendous power that any king or emperor has never had, in the history of mankind. These economic warlords are the world’s rulers.

Daniel Mermet: We Feed the World, the title of the documentary, is also the catch phrase of Pioneer…

Jean Ziegler: Yes. Their ideology is incredible… “Thank us because we are here. We Nestlé, we Continental Grains, we Monsanto, we Pioneer, we feed the world”. They make critique meaningless by stating such lies and delusion.

Daniel Mermet: The film tries to link the victims in poor countries with the rich nations, starting in Vienna, showing huge amounts of wasted bread, then it’s about milk, fish, etc. We live in a time, we’re not sure of where the food comes from, how it was produced, and where it goes…

Jean Ziegler: I think what is very good in this film, it’s the quality of analysis. In my job, I witness how horrible the reality is… In Mongolia, in Guatemala, Bangladesh… Little kids, south of Ethiopia in UN’s feeding centers, close to death, they recieve therapeutic food, sometimes they survive… Terrible things like that… Wagenhofer could have shown images like this, but he doesn’t call for compassion, he doesn’t want to trigger emotions that viewers will clean of their mind anyway, but rather, he shows links of arguments, causes and effects that are devastating, to try and make public opinion’s conscience progress.

For example the sequence about Brazil. In the last 3 years, 16,000 hectares per year of the Amazone forest have been converted into soya plantations, for exportation. The soya is fed to battery farming poultry in Europe, in dreadful ways.

Daniel Mermet laughs: I don’t think anyone can still eat chiken after seeing this…

Jean Ziegler: Chikens are then killed and dismembered, the good bits (legs, wings, etc) go to Europe, and the rest of the carcass is frozen and sent in Cameroon, still by the same trusts, thrown in markets at dumping prices. The local farmers can’t compete, their families are ruined. So this is how European chikens destroy the amazon forest and the economic life of thousands of families in Cameroon, for example. All this, because of external debt. Brazil is the second most endebted country in the thirld world, $242 billion.

So, Brazil has quite a good president, democratically elected for the second time, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He used to be a metal worker, got a missing finger because of a work accident at the age of 14 (he was already working at this age, in a Volkswagen factory). He is a conviced worker, brotherly, clever… I mean, he didn’t change after becoming president, he didn’t change side. But this man is locked inside the terrible structural violence of external debt. To pay the debt, he must earn hard money, so he does it by exporting soya, he is forced to use this system. This is the most absurd and murdering aspect of global capitalism. Murdering, the numbers show it… And it kills without necessity.

Daniel Mermet: I know you’ve explained it many times, but how does the debt works?

Jean Ziegler: First, out of the 192 countries member of the UN, almost all the countries in the world except Vatican (but we’re fine without them), 122 countries are said to be “developping”. These 122 countries, all added, are indebted by $2,100 billion. The most indebted nation in the world is of course the US, but we don’t count them because they print themselves the “reserve money”, so it’s something else… Debt, originally, comes simply from the fact that there isn’t enough savings. Countries like Niger or Burkina Faso don’t have savings by the millions. In Switzerland, we are 7 million inhabitants, and we have 12 million savings accounts, there is a build up of savings, people earn enough money to save some. Well, plus also the capital of mafias is poured into Switzerland because of banking secrecy… And this money is then invested, via banks.

But originally, coming out from the darkness of colonisation, third world countries borrowed for infrasctucture investments, to build roads, energy and communication networks, etc. They had to, because they had no capital, there was no bourgeoisie, etc. The idea was that they would then pay back with produced goods. But very quickly this debt system got out of hand, they couldn’t pay interests, so they had to take more credits, increasing the risk for the bankers, who in turn increased their interest rates, until these countries were strangled, totally inslovent. These are triumphant moments for capitalism. Once you are insolvent, unable to pay your debt, the capitalist… Well to conclude quickly, big creditors of the Paris Club, or the IMF in Washington, arrive and say: “well… You can’t pay from November to April, so you’re going to sell this public service”.

I’ll take the Brazil example again, it is a powerful country, counts for half of South America, 181 million inhabitants, of which 44 million are critically under fed, according to officials. Brazil used to have a powerful public sector, communication networks, air planes industries, etc. And, little by little the IMF required privatisations, on scandalous conditions, in the hands of international corporations. And today, of all the Brazilian public sector, everything is gone in the hands of Spanish, French and American corporations, etc, the only thing left is Petrobras, because the president Lula said: “up till here but no further, oil supplies, drilling in Guanabara Bay, etc, won’t be sold to creditors”.

When you chat with a banker in Geneva… It’s a small town, you know, so we bump into each other, he totally agrees that thirld world countries debt is terrible, for it prevents them to invest in irrigation, fertilisers, schools, etc. But he’d say we can’t do anything about it, because if third world countries didn’t pay interests, the entire international banking system would collapse… It is totally false, it’s a lie. In terms of accounting it doesn’t count. For example, the financial crash of 1987. The sum of capital that was wiped out by shares going down was 8 times more important than the entire external debt of poor countries. At the time, stock markets went back to normal easily, internationally undamaged. So if we cancelled the debt, as many people are campaining for, there wouldn’t be any impact, no bank would go bankrupt, no European would loose their money, etc.

But debt is here to be used as a garrote, rich nations can tighten it a bit more if a country doesn’t want to negociate an oil contract (or a contract for nuts, or cotton) at a low price required by corporations… Or if one of these countries doesn’t want to vote for a decision in the World Trade Organization, or if this country sympathize with an activist liberation movement somewhere in the world, then we tighten the garrote. It is a subordination tool. So cancelling thirld world debt would be the most efficient weapon against feudal powers, against these international corporations that are ruling the world today.

Daniel Mermet: In We Feed the World, Wagenhofer also introduces people that are not necessarily ruthless, but are caught in a system they don’t approve of, more or less consciously. In the sequence on Romania, one of them is close to retire, and he whistle blows everything. Inside those organisations, inside the system of liberal globalisation, of modern capitalism, many people are conscious of what’s going on, they hesitate, and they suffer as well because they are dominated by the system…

Jean Ziegler: You are totally right. For example Brabeck, who is opposed to me in the film, is certainly a respectable person on a private level, I mean we don’t talk to each other, but I assume so. Though, it is a violent system. Violent by its stucture. It is this violence we must break. In my book I have this example, millions of coffee producers, farmers in south Ethiopia have been ruined. Because in the last 3 years, the five biggest coffee buyers, of which Neslté, speculated to lower prices. So the farmers can’t survive anymore, since they can’t pay for rice supplies, and they move to the cities, in slums where they live an extremely unhealthy life.

If Brabeck didn’t speculate to lower coffee prices, destroying the life of tens of thousands of Ethiopian families, his profits would drop and stock holders would get rid of him, he would not keep his seat for more than 3 months. Today, he earns €26 million per year, which is a motivation…

Daniel Mermet: Yeah… Not bad… Comfortable…

Jean Ziegler: But he must take into account what we call horribly “shareholder value”, and if he can’t increase by 15 or 20% this output each year, he looses his position as CEO of Nestlé. So Neo-Liberal theories carry on what actually is a criminal activity. But Brabeck says it’s the market’s laws, it’s natural.

Pierre Bourdieu always said: “Neo-Liberalism is like AIDS. It first destroys the immune system of its victims before finishing them”. That’s why we must fight, through radio, films and publications, to free the forces of resistance of men and women in democracies, where resisting is still possible, to explain people that there is nothing natural about the market. Market is a necessary tool, as financial credit is an important tool as well, but the social contract must be the number one priority. People request social justice on their territory, politics of solidarity, minimum wage for everybody… Once the social contract is completed, then OK the market can play, but within those limitations.

In China, Unions are banned… There are miserable wages in textile production factories, i saw them in Bangladesh, in Thailand, in Santo Domingo. Neo-Liberals say that’s why we must outsource, we must go where we can get maximum profits, even if people, there, are reduced to ghosts, frightened ghosts because they have kids and their life is precarious, they don’t know how they’ll eat the next day… There is no law of nature, but identifiable actors who must be subjected to a social contract.

Daniel Mermet: We must understand, you say it in your book and we feel it in this documentary, that wealth enrichment in the west is made at the expense of poor countries. Talking about outsourcing, we think that, at least, sacrificing our jobs in the west benefits poor countries, but it is absolutely false. I mean we’ll exploit a workforce in a third world country, but as soon as this workforce starts to organise a little and try only a little to obtain some rights, we relocate the workshops and factories somewhere else where poverty is even worse.

Jean Ziegler: Jobs in France or in Europe have been lost to Korea or Thailand, but then got lost to “free production zones” in China because wages are even lower there. What the French worker looses, the Korean worker or the Chinese worker don’t earn it. This is true. But at the same time, Globalistion increases the productivity of world ruling corporations, they are building up incredible profits by this mechanism.

Daniel Mermet: So what can we do about this? I’m sure all our listeners are asking themselves this question. Me, on my level, tomorrow, what can I do about this… Even today, right now.

Jean Ziegler: Of course this is the central question. We can do things, and we must do things. First, on a personal level, as a consumer, we must say no to Genetically Modified products (GMOs). Because these GMOs enable Monsanto, for example, to enslave farmers. For example we can farm a much more productive and resistant rice by inserting a tomato gene in it but we are using a patent. Farmers are then forced to sell parts of their harvests to pay for Monsanto’s patent.

Daniel Mermet: In the entire history of mankind, this is a new phonomenon…

Jean Ziegler: Yes, totally. José Bové* is fighting against GMOs. He says we must not allow GMOs in French supermarkets, we must not allow French farmers to cultivate them and we must not import them. Because GMOs are forcing farmer’s financial enslavement, and also they are a health hazard. The health debate on GMOs is entirely opened, and probably GMOs are very dangerous for public health. Today, in all European supermarkets, we apply the uncertainty principle, the precautionary principle… If there is GM products in a can of corn, it is labeled as such. So you must refuse to buy these products, you can do this from now on and right now.

Also, you must refuse non-seasonal fruits or vegetables. For example melons from Guatemala, grown on the pacific plain with its fertile black earth, in great parts trusted by US corporations, you see tens and tens of kilometers of melon plantations. Melon is grown in Europe as well, notably in Provence and elsewhere, when it’s the season. So we must first eat the seasonal products, from the territory we live in, and refuse all non-seasonal products. If you buy melons from Guatemala in the middle of winter, they have travelled thousands of kilometers and are produced by farmers who earn nothing, who are sick because of worms in their stomachs, they don’t have any schools for their children, and they die of the smallest infection for lack of health services. These melons are produced in horrible conditions, whithout any social contract, then are transported burning thousands of tons of jet fuel from the Pacific to Europe. Look, we must say no to this. We must eat local and seasonal products. So as a consumer, quietly, whithout deep conceptual analysis [hironically], you can change your behaviour to break those absurd, ravaging, and oppressing mechanisms.

The second thing we must do is organise resistance, mobilize civilians, forcing finance ministers and presidents to vote for debt cancellation of Honduras, of Bangladesh… Third world governments would then have a bit more money to invest in local subsistence farming, schools, hospitals… And I’m not saying that everybody must agree with the World Social Forum’s thesis, people can have different visions… But… There are those who live in the darkness, and those who live in the light. We don’t see those in the darkness.

Bernanos, a French writer, once said: “God doesn’t have any other hands than ours. Either we change our world, or nobody will”.

• José Bové is one of the leaders and founders of the Confederation Paysane, a French union of farmers that are quite radical. Fiercely against GMOs and industrial framing, they advocate local, organic, sustainable farming. José Bové even ended up in jail twice after trying to smash a Mc Donalds restaurant, and more recently for being part of a group of people that reap GMO fields illegally. Civilian Disobedience is obviously not very well understood by judges. You can find more details about José Bové on Wikipedia.

Thanks for reading this far! If you’d like more details on the these subjects, you can read my previous blog, another interview between Jean Ziegler and Daniel Mermet, on the current crisis about cereals price increase.