Gilbert Doctorow — Sanctions Have Failed. 'Buy Russian' Is Working

It is now more than a year that Russia imposed its food embargo on the EU and other states which had applied sanctions to it over its absorption of Crimea and intervention in southeastern Ukraine. The results of the change-over in overseas suppliers and rising import substitution through the efforts of domestic producers have now become fairly clear.

In this brief report based on visits to retail outlets ranging from convenience stores and market stalls to hypermarkets and from the St Petersburg city center to hamlets 80 km away in the hinterland, I will try to make some sense of what has occurred, how Russians’ shopping basket has changed so far and where the trend lines are leading. Put another way, I will start with a number of small and specific observations and end with some generalizations and forecasts of what broad processes are underway and how they can affect the global food trade.…

Sanctions are helping Russia to restructure its economy, avoid Dutch disease, and become more competitive as a food exporter.

Russia Insider
Sanctions Have Failed. 'Buy Russian' Is Working
Gilbert Doctorow

Alexander Mercouris — Putin Talks Agriculture, Confirms EU Food Import Ban Is Here to Stay

Those who hope Russia will lift its counter sanctions soon are going to be disappointed. The Russians have accepted the trade-off of a period of higher food prices in return for more food output and a stronger agricultural sector over the long term.…

Behind this focus on food production is an awareness of Russian agriculture’s vast potential. Despite sometimes difficult climatic and soil conditions the sheer size of the country means it has the economies of scale to join North America as the world’s breadbasket. More immediately, the government also knows how food shortages undermined the morale of Soviet society and exposed the country to US pressure through its reliance on food imports.

The Russian government is clearly determined both that that danger will be extinguished and that the full potential of Russian agriculture will finally be realised.

When Putin says that sanctions are blessing in disguise, it is not kidding. He has acknowledged that diversifying the Russia away from natural resources would have been difficult to impossible otherwise. He has no intention of turning back now. Russia has turned the corner.

Russia Insider

Putin Talks Agriculture, Confirms EU Food Import Ban Is Here to Stay
Alexander Mercouris

Martin Kirk and Frederic Mousseau — The hidden hands behind East-West tug of war in Ukraine

Confirms what Michael Hudson has been saying about the not so hidden neoliberal agenda. 

News from Brussels on July 28 and from Washington on July 29 that both the EU and US are stepping up sanctions on Russia have been met with a general "it's about time" from the world. Nobody outside Russia, it seems, has trouble roundly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin for fuelling this terrible conflict, or approving of punitive western responses.

And whereas there may be blame to lay at Putin's feet, to think that western leaders are now reacting simply because they are outraged by the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 or what they see as Russian expansionist tendencies per se, misses a very big piece of the puzzle. On both sides of the Atlantic, leaders are playing out a strategy in league with two powerful actors who they have managed to keep quietly in the background so far - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The World Bank and the IMF's primary interest in Ukraine is the agricultural sector. Sometimes referred to as the breadbasket of Europe, Ukraine's ample fields of rich black soil allow for such high production volumes of cereals and grain that it is the world's third-largest exporter of corn and fifth of wheat.

It is a very big prize for whoever ends up with control. The IMF and World Bank are clear they are on the side of the West, a club that includes western agricultural corporations. The Bank and the IMF have a long history of pressuring economies the world over to make themselves into more profitable environments for large corporations; it is essentially their one-size-fits-all model for development. Ukraine is just their latest target, and their fingerprints are all over this crisis…

Move along. Nothing to see here.

So when we read the headlines and grand rhetoric about Russian aggression and human rights abuses, we should remember that what is being fought for in Ukraine is the ability for western leaders and institutions to impose the neoliberal trickle-down economic model. A model that has proved to devastate small businesses and farms, fuel inequality all over the world and concentrate wealth and power in ever fewer hands.

The aspect that the authors don't mention is the thinly disguised manufactured coup that ousted a democratically elected president when he chose a better deal from Russia than the neoliberals in the West here willing to cut.

Al Jazzera
The hidden hands behind East-West tug of war in Ukraine

Martin Kirk, Global Campaigns Director for /The Rules, a new a new global campaign fighting against inequality and poverty, with a specific aim of highlighting the systemic damage caused by tax havens around the world, and Frederic Mousseau, Policy Directory of the Oakland Institute and co-author of the report Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict.

Republicans attack food stamps, but dole out billions to wealthy farmers

Sasha Breger — How Big Finance is Eating the World’s Lunch Agricultural Wealth

If you hear a kind of whooshing, rushing noise, don’t worry—it’s not US jobs moving to China. Today’s great sucking sound is the sound of agricultural wealth being siphoned off into the global financial system. Dragging poverty and insecurity in its wake, this broad movement of wealth from agriculture into finance is enriching and empowering finance capital at the expense of farmers, traders, consumers, rural communities and the earth. In fact, that sucking sound is really the sound of injustice.

Finance capital globally deploys a huge variety of methods and techniques that generally serve to redistribute wealth from agriculture to finance. These include debt, farmland acquisition, commodity hoarding, and derivative and insurance markets. In the following posts, I outline the wealth transfer mechanism in each of these contexts, focusing largely on new data and evidence from the past several years.

Naked Capitalism
Sasha Breger: How Big Finance is Eating the World’s Lunch Agricultural Wealth

Steven Wishnia — Hemp Is Harmless, a Potential Economic Miracle, and Still Illegal in America -- But the Tide Seems to Be Turning

This is a big deal in farm country. Hemp products are a fad now to some degree, due association with to cannabis, but it is potentially a significant cash crop, as it used to be at one time before the crazy.

Alternet
Hemp Is Harmless, a Potential Economic Miracle, and Still Illegal in America -- But the Tide Seems to Be Turning
Steven Wishnia