28.09.2015
In August, the Chamber of Agriculture launched its Smart Agriculture project. So, it’s not just “Smart cities” now, but also the same deceptive, little slogan for agriculture, too. And here, too, all sorts of ersatz ecology slogans are used.
The Chamber of Agriculture has invited planters, the Regulatory Authority, private laboratories, companies that do certification (especially for the EU market), researchers, NGOs and distributors of agricultural produce to come to discuss the four supposed pillars of the new project: the legal framework, training, certification and selling.
The project is supposed to aim to guide planters from the traditional phase of agriculture towards “sustainable” agriculture including ““bio”, “organic” ... to supposedly give a guarantee to consumers that products are genuinely bio (or supposedly genruinely bio) by means of this “certification”.
Why the Chamber of Agriculture?
What kind of take-over is this? Is it not perhaps more likely another attempt to facilitate the penetration of capital (even multi-nationals) into food production? Is it not just a way of capturing small planters and small animal rearers into a purely capitalist logic, in the context of falling profits for the big capitalists? When you look closely all the nice words about “certification”, “access to agricultural machinery”, “access to agronomists and vets”, bank loans”, “where to market your produce”, all of this means how capital (the private sector) will gain control over small planters and animal rearers.
And in order to do this, the Chamber of Agriculture makes use of the popularity of ecology – talking of sustainable agriculture, bio and organic produce. But under all the verbiage, it’s their penetration into food production.