War is Theft

The Rape of Ukraine

Jeremy Kuzmarov has an excellent article in Covert Action entitled: U.S. Corporate Land Grab in Ukraine Underlies War With Russia, which is based on a 2023 report by the Oakland Institute[— War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land— written by Frédéric Mousseau, a food security consultant, and Eve Devillers a PhD candidate at Cornell— and also on questions from Barbara Bonte, a Belgian member of the European Union parliament.

Mousseau and Devillers worry that US agribusiness is destroying Ukrainian agriculture and the culture that underlies it— not to mention the land itself. Bonte sees the massive sale of Ukrainian land to U.S. private equity firms including Cargill, ADM, BlackRock, Oaktree Capital Management and Bunge Limited, for instance, along with some Saudi businesses as undermining both European agriculture and European food security.

Bonte’s questions to the EU Commission on such matters?

1. What is the Commission’s assessment of the impact of this sell-off of European farmland to multinationals serving only U.S. interests on EU strategic food-supply dependence? How does the Commission intend to address that impact?”

2. This strongly suggests that the United States is seeking to recoup its military support for Ukraine, and ensure a geopolitical presence there in a post-war scenario through control over Ukrainian farmland and the profits it generates. How does the Commission intend to prevent the United States from cherry-picking in Ukraine and Europe from being left to deal with just the handicaps?

Obviously, the EU will do nothing-- at least, if recent history is an guide. It didn’t care that US policy was gutting European industry and access to energy - why should it worry about agriculture?

Kuzmarov points out….

Ukraine’s function as a “breadbasket of Europe” with its 33 million acres of arable land and “large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the world.

However, this notwithstanding, he concludes:

The Oakland Institute report compares the generous financing of multinational corporations and local oligarchs with the inability of Ukrainian small farmers to access loans and their being displaced from their land and plunged into poverty. Some have migrated to the U.S. to seek farm work in the U.S. Midwest, sending remittances back home.

Mousseau and Devillers wrote that “the Partial Credit Guarantee Fund established by the World Bank to support small farmers is only US$5.4 million, a negligible amount compared to the billions channeled to large agribusinesses.”

Mousseau and Devillers further emphasized that the billions in Western aid provided to Ukraine have been “conditioned to a drastic structural adjustment program, which includes austerity measures, cuts in social safety nets, and the privatization of key sectors of the economy. “

A central condition [of Western aid was “the creation of a land market, put into law in 2020 under President Zelensky, despite opposition from a majority of Ukrainians fearing that it will exacerbate corruption in the agricultural sector and reinforce its control by powerful interests”—which indeed it has.

Mousseau and Devillers suggest that international financial institutions, by supporting large agribusinesses, are “in effect subsidizing [with the concentration of land] an industrial model of agriculture based on the intensive use of synthetic inputs, fossil fuels, and large-scale monocropping—long shown to be environmentally and socially destructive.”

By contrast, small-scale farmers in Ukraine being driven off their land, “demonstrate resilience and a great potential for leading the expansion of a different production model based on agro-ecology, environmental sustainability, and the production of healthy food.”

At the end, “War and Theft” makes clear there are post-reconstruction plans for further land privatization that will benefit the same corporate investors who are already making a huge profit in Ukraine.

I have argued, along with many Russian commentators, such as Medvedev and others, that the SMO can only end on Russian terms—which would mean allowing Western Ukrainian oblasts the option of joining the Russian Federation, which immediately free them from financial obligations to Western companies and save the vast expanses of agricultural land West of the Dniepr.

Of course, the Americans want to “negotiate” — which really means to impose terms that will benefit American businesses and their ongoing commercial conquest and rape of Ukraine. War is indeed “theft”. But can have theft without war —far-reaching and destructive exploitation and abuse.

Zelensky and his oligarchic friends who fund the neo-Nazis have been only too willing to pimp Ukraine to the financial predators.

However, if the Russians get an unconditional surrender in Ukraine as the Americans did in Japan, Ukraine will have options — become part of Russia, become a “Union State” like Belarus, or become a neutered rump state, cut off from the NATO and the US and dependent on Russian good will. Russia cannot guarantee its own security without somehow cutting off Ukraine from a declining empire bent on destroying it. It cannot compromise. It cannot bargain the lives of an entire people away.

Half of those Ukrainians who flee abroad will not return. Certainly, the elites will not. That leaves ordinary people who need a future. Those people must be protected.

While Blackrock, Cargill and their ilk in the financial Mafia offer them nothing but penury and pain, Western Ukraine is indeed a breadbasket — if its people own the land and its resource. This generation has suffered. The next must not.

As Russia has shown in the last few years, stocks and bonds are not wealth, nor currencies — but food and energy are good as gold.

Chappy Adjusts…

Chappy is adjusting gradually. He is still hiding during the day— but this afternoon, he came a little out of hiding to play with a toy on a string at the end of a stick.

He is very timid — but he couldn’t resist. Ichi was watching…. still wary of the newcomer. It takes time — but he will be just fine!

In the meantime, I am making very good progress on the Special Articles, still researching Putin’s background and history and that of Xi Jinping. And reading Otto Rank, Dabrowski and Maslow in psychology, plus European philosophy— and re-reading Taleb’s Anti-Fragility. Oh, and thinking about a little Mencius.

Each has something to say — things I both agree and disagree with. The challenge is how to make this stuff relevant to you and I today.

Yes, it will be TWO special articles!

Please buy Ichi and Chappy and their humble servant coffees to get on the mailing list for this article and any previous articles.

I will celebrate Xmas when I finish!

PS. I am replying to everyone who buys coffee. That takes a little time too thanks to my long, rambling messages!