Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Seeds of discontent documentary unveils how foreign investors fuel land grabs

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Seeds of discontent documentary unveils how foreign investors fuel land grabs

Click here to access article from Climate Connections.

A powerful new documentary film “Seeds of discontent” was launched this week to draw attention to the role of a Swedish investment firm, Dutch pension fund and Norwegian church endowment firm in land grabbing in Mozambique.

Here is the trailer for Seeds of Discontent that you can view now or after reading the article posted on Climate Connections about the film.

“Cases like this one are happening every day, all over the globe” argues Philip Seufert of FIAN International, member of the Hands off the Land Alliance. “Communities are confronted with investors who arrive and promise a lot to them: jobs, ‘development’, money, a bright future. But what really happens then is that communities find their valuable land no longer available for farming, people have to work under bad conditions for the investors, communities get divided against each other and all the nice promises turn out to be empty.

Of course, capitalists always promise "jobs" when they try to sell you on some project requiring a community's approval. Here in the US this lie seems to almost always work. But the reality under capitalism is that the last thing they want to promote are jobs. They, and their system, are all about profits. Jobs are cost items on their financial statements, and the way to create more profits is to eliminate as many jobs as possible.