Obama: I will press Congress to pass Colombia FTA http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/8168-obama-to-pressure-us-congress-for-fta-with-colombia.html

U.S. President Barack Obama said he is a "fierce defender" of the free market and will press Congress to pass a free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia this year.In an interview with Business Week, Obama spoke of increasing U.S. exports and said he was keen for FTAs with South Korea, Panama and Colombia to go ahead.The U.S. president mentioned that “different glitches” would first have to be negotiated with each country.http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-11/obama-says-he-s-fierce-free-market-advocate-rejects-critics.html

comment-glitches lol he calls gross human rights violations,extrajudicial killings,(colombia's world capital)of assasinations of union trade leaders,rise in  rightwing paramilitary groups,war crimes,mass graves,genocide,forced displacement of 2.5 million people,gov collusion in narco trafficking,deathsquads ''glitches''...

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Food sovereignty: The wisdom of the uncivilised crowds http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/62196

Agriculture as it was practiced in India over centuries relied and depended on nature’s forces, writes Suraj Kumar. But with the advent of colonialism and a surge in the country’s population, the adoption of new methods of farming have lead to widespread soil degradation across the country. As multinational companies offer genetically modified seeds as the solution to hunger, Kumar calls on his fellow countrymen to use locally produced food and native seeds and help preserve Indian wisdom.

Then came along the colonialists. We all kinda know what happened. I'd just like to place an exerpt from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2 Feb 1835 (quoted elsewhere in various contexts on the web – typically nationalistic sounding ones). I first found it in Amartya Sen's book ‘The Argumentative Indian’: http://tinyurl.com/ycn2q2n

‘I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.’

Several things changed after the advent of the colonialists. Some for ‘our’ good, one could argue. For instance, the colonialists left at the end of a major war. (One of the root-causes was colonisation itself!) India was freed, right? The specific form of exploiting of India's resources changed from that of direct occupation to a more subtle and effective form called ‘free trade’.

The Bretton Woods system ratified all capitalist nations' interests in continued exploitation of natural resources by the still-ruling powers of the world (namely the US, Britain, France, etc.). Free trade, in other words, is a system of exploitation of a so-called Third World nation's resources by someone with Little Green Pieces of Paper on the lines of, ‘If you let me take your stuff, you'll get these little green pieces of paper with which you can buy the finished goods I produce using your nation's resources.’