Food as a weapon

[Baggywrinkle]

Are the banksters trying to create mass starvation again?

As the Northern hemisphere enters the crucial planting season many farmers are still having trouble getting bank loans to pay for fertilizer and other farm inputs. The financial mafia tried to create mass starvation last year by jacking up fertilizer prices and paying farmers to grow fuel instead of food. Also, as a result of a long term campaign to destroy family farms with unfair financial practices, much of US farmland is in the hands of corporations who are also able to create a food crisis at will. It seems the banksters will be saying “if you do not play ball with us we will cause starvation” at the G20.

The banksters need to realize that if they are caught deliberately creating mass starvation, they will be the first to die. The people of the world have a list of their names.

http://benjaminfulford.typepad.com/benjaminfulford/

[Baggywrinkle]

Coming Government Takeover of Food

Exclusive: Roger Hedgecock exposes plot to regulate American farms






March 30, 2009
World Net Daily

"Recession gardens" are springing up everywhere. There's always been a home gardening passion among many Americans, and farmer's markets are a familiar part of American life. However, this is something new.

In response to the soaring cost of food, more Americans are turning back to their roots – literally. Mail order seed giant Burpee Seeds reports record demand for garden vegetable seeds. Cable TV shows on home gardening are suddenly popular beyond the core of committed "grow your own" types. The healthy food movement has been lifted beyond its core of Agbiz rejectionists. Websites catering to those thirsting for basic knowledge on home gardening "how to" are flooded with new visitors.

The "recession garden" has arrived in your backyard (or one near you) echoing the "victory garden" of World War II.

Both big government and big business are alarmed – and both are working to control this phenomenon. What's in the works threatens a government definition of what is "food" and proposes regulations amounting to a government takeover of the production, transportation and sale of food in this country for the benefit of Big Ag.

First, Michelle Obama swings a shovel into action, tearing out the White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden. In response, politicians all over rush to show they are backyard farmers too.

Then the leftist think tanks swing into action. Building on the Salmonella outbreak linked to nine deaths from peanut products late last year, a study released last week by the Trust for America's Health (in conjunction with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) called food safety in the U.S. "plagued with problems." The study found that the American economy lost $44 billion in medical care and lost productivity because of unsafe food and called on the Obama administration to create a new Food Safety Administration and double (from $542 million in FY 2009) federal funding to insure food safety.

Not coincidentally, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., introduced HR 875 to establish a new Food Safety Administration to "protect the public health" and "ensure the safety of food." Rep. DeLauro believes that the FDA is not effective enough with the current laws governing food safety, so HR 875 grants broad new powers to the new FSA. DeLauro is a former chief of staff to Sen. Chris Dodd. Her husband, Stan Greenberg, is a leftist consultant whose corporate clients include Monsanto.

Photo: Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. speaks about salmonella poisoning during a news conference on Capitol Hill February 4, 2009 in Washington, DC. Rep. DeLauro is introducing food safety reform legislation which would modernize food safety laws and restructure food safety efforts by splitting the Food and Drug Administration into two separate agencies. DeLauro is also author of the controversial HR 875 bill that some see as another attempt to wipe out non-hybrid, open-pollinated seeds. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

This bill – if passed – would give FSA inspectors the right to enter, anywhere in the world, any premises of any food establishment to inspect and determine whether the product of that food establishment should be sold to American consumers.

And you and I say, "Great! Who wants to eat tainted food products whether from American or foreign sources?" Having established the always popular posture of the federal government protecting you against Big Food, the author of the bill hopes you read no further.

I did read further, and here's what I found.

HR 875 defines "food establishment" (among other things) as any "facility ... that processes food or a facility that hold, stores, or transports food or food ingredients." The bill also defines "food production facility" as "any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding facility." The bill empowers the new FSA to promulgate regulations further defining what "food" is, and regulating the manner of its growth, processing and delivery to the consumer.

The companion Senate Bill (SB 425) introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, sheds more light on the true goal of all this. Her bill requires "traceability" in these words:

The traceability system shall require each article of food ... to be identified in a manner that enables the Secretary to retrieve the history, use, and location of the article through a recordkeeping and audit system ...

Taken together, these bills envision federal government definition of what is "food" and the requirement that, if you produce this "food," you will have to provide the paperwork to document that you produced it according to the regulations of the FSA.

Basically, don't sell, or even give, the produce from your "recession garden" to anyone – or you're in a heap of trouble.

HR 875 provides a $1 million fine for each infraction of the "rules" or "orders" of the FSA for each day that such infractions are deemed by the FSA to exist. SB 425 provides a fine of $100,000 for each violation of any order or regulation of the FSA and for each day that such violation occurs.

Small farmers and food processors (jams and jelly folks, for example) would be out of business if these bills are passed into law. Ditto farmers' markets, and, potentially any individual who sells or even shares the bounty of a home garden.

If these bills pass into law, Big Ag Biz would increase its stranglehold on the food business, and big government would expand its swarm of officers bedeviling every private pursuit of happiness.

The M.O. for this government takeover of "food" for the benefit of bigger government and big business is certainly familiar – it is playing out in energy and health care, too.

As Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously admitted, there is no "crisis" that is not an opportunity to advance the agenda of bigger government.

So … what of the produce from the White House garden? Without an army of clerks and "traceable" paperwork, could the veggies from the White House even be given to the homeless shelter down the street? And what of the Obama voters in the "healthy food," back-to-the-Earth community? They will be collateral damage as the FSA takes over "food" for Monsanto. Is this the "change" they want us to believe in?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=93293

[Baggywrinkle]

Lose Your Property for Growing Food?

Big Brother legislation could mean prosecution, fines up to $1 million




March 16, 2009
By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Some small farms and organic food growers could be placed under direct supervision of the federal government under new legislation making its way through Congress.

Food Safety Modernization Act

House Resolution 875, or the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, was introduced by Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., in February. DeLauro's husband, Stanley Greenburg, works for Monsanto – the world's leading producer of herbicides and genetically engineered seed.

DeLauro's act has 39 co-sponsors and was referred to the House Agriculture Committee on Feb. 4. It calls for the creation of a Food Safety Administration to allow the government to regulate food production at all levels – and even mandates property seizure, fines of up to $1 million per offense and criminal prosecution for producers, manufacturers and distributors who fail to comply with regulations.

Michael Olson, host of the Food Chain radio show and author of "Metro Farm," told WND the government should focus on regulating food production in countries such as China and Mexico rather than burdening small and organic farmers in the U.S. with overreaching regulations.

"We need somebody to watch over us when we're eating food that comes from thousands and thousands of miles away. We need some help there," he said. "But when food comes from our neighbors or from farmers who we know, we don't need all of those rules. If your neighbor sells you something that is bad and you get sick, you are going to get your hands on that farmer, and that will be the end of it. It regulates itself."

The legislation would establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services "to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes."

Federal regulators will be tasked with ensuring that food producers, processors and distributors – both large and small – prevent and minimize food safety hazards such as food-borne illnesses and contaminants such as bacteria, chemicals, natural toxins or manufactured toxicants, viruses, parasites, prions, physical hazards or other human pathogens.

Under the legislation's broad wording, slaughterhouses, seafood processing plants, establishments that process, store, hold or transport all categories of food products prior to delivery for retail sale, farms, ranches, orchards, vineyards, aquaculture facilities and confined animal-feeding operations would be subject to strict government regulation.

Government inspectors would be required to visit and examine food production facilities, including small farms, to ensure compliance. They would review food safety records and conduct surveillance of animals, plants, products or the environment.

"What the government will do is bring in industry experts to tell them how to manage all this stuff," Olson said. "It's industry that's telling government how to set these things up. What it always boils down to is who can afford to have the most influence over the government. It would be those companies that have sufficient economies of scale to be able to afford the influence – which is, of course, industrial agriculture."

Farms and food producers would be forced to submit copies of all records to federal inspectors upon request to determine whether food is contaminated, to ensure they are in compliance with food safety laws and to maintain government tracking records. Refusal to register, permit inspector access or testing of food or equipment would be prohibited.

"What is going to happen is that local agriculture will end up suffering through some onerous protocols designed for international agriculture that they simply don't need," Olson said. "Thus, it will be a way for industrial agriculture to manage local agriculture."

Under the act, every food producer must have a written food safety plan describing likely hazards and preventative controls they have implemented and must abide by "minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water."

"That opens a whole can of worms," Olson said. "I think that's where people are starting to freak out about losing organic agriculture. Who is going to decide what the minimum standards are for fertilization or anything else? The government is going to bring in big industry and say we are setting up these protocols, so what do you think we should do? Who is it going to bring in to ask? The government will bring in people who have economies of scale who have that kind of influence."

DeLauro's act calls for the Food Safety Administration to create a "national traceability system" to retrieve history, use and location of each food product through all stages of production, processing and distribution.

Olson believes the regulations could create unjustifiable financial hardships for small farmers and run them out of business.

"That is often the purpose of rules and regulations: to get rid of your competition," he said. "Only people who are very, very large can afford to comply. They can hire one person to do paperwork. There's a specialization of labor there, and when you are very small, you can't afford to do all of these things."

Olson said despite good intentions behind the legislation, this act could devastate small U.S. farms.

"Every time we pass a rule or a law or a regulation to make the world a better place, it seems like what we do is subsidize production offshore," he said. "We tell farmers they can no longer drive diesel tractors because they make bad smoke. Well, essentially what we're doing is giving China a subsidy to grow our crops for us, or Mexico or anyone else."

Section 304 of the Food Safety Modernization Act establishes a group of "experts and stakeholders from Federal, State, and local food safety and health agencies, the food industry, consumer organizations, and academia" to make recommendations for improving food-borne illness surveillance.

According to the act, "Any person that commits an act that violates the food safety law … may be assessed a civil penalty by the Administrator of not more than $1,000,000 for each such act."

Each violation and each separate day the producer is in defiance of the law would be considered a separate offense and an additional penalty. The act suggests federal administrators consider the gravity of the violation, the degree of responsibility and the size and type of business when determining penalties.

Criminal sanctions may be imposed if contaminated food causes serious illness or death, and offenders may face fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

"It's just frightening what can happen with good intentions," Olson said. "It's probably the most radical notions on the face of this Earth, but local agriculture doesn't need government because it takes care of itself."

Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act

Another "food safety" bill that has organic and small farmers worried is Senate Bill 425, or the Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act, sponsored by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

Brown's bill is backed by lobbyists for Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson. It was introduced in September and has been referred to the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. Some say the legislation could also put small farmers out of business.

Like HR 875, the measure establishes a nationwide "traceability system" monitored by the Food and Drug Administration for all stages of manufacturing, processing, packaging and distribution of food. It would cost $40 million over three years.

"We must ensure that the federal government has the ability and authority to protect the public, given the global nature of the food supply," Brown said when he introduced the bill. He suggested the FDA and USDA have power to declare mandatory recalls.

The government would track food shipped in interstate commerce through a recordkeeping and audit system, a secure, online database
or registered identification. Each farmer or producer would be required to maintain records regarding the purchase, sale and identification of their products.

A 13-member advisory committee of food safety and tracking technology experts, representatives of the food industry, consumer advocates and government officials would assist in implementing the traceability system.

The bill calls for the committee to establish a national database or registry operated by the Food and Drug Administration. It also proposes an electronic records database to identify sales of food and its ingredients "establishing that the food and its ingredients were grown, prepared, handled, manufactured, processed, distributed, shipped, warehoused, imported, and conveyed under conditions that ensure the safety of the food."

It states, "The records should include an electronic statement with the date of, and the names and addresses of all parties to, each prior sale, purchase, or trade, and any other information as appropriate."

If government inspectors find that a food item is not in compliance, they may force producers to cease distribution, recall the item or confiscate it.

"If the postal service can track a package from my office in Washington to my office in Cincinnati, we should be able to do the same for food products," Sen. Brown said in a Sept. 4, 2008, statement. "Families that are struggling with the high cost of groceries should not also have to worry about the safety of their food. This legislation gives the government the resources it needs to protect the public."

Recalls of contaminated food are usually voluntary; however, in his weekly radio address on March 15, President Obama announced he's forming a Food Safety Working Group to propose new laws and stop corruption of the nation's food.

The group will review, update and enforce food safety laws, which Obama said "have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt."

The president said outbreaks from contaminated foods, such as a recent salmonella outbreak among consumers of peanut products, have occurred more frequently in recent years due to outdated regulations, fewer inspectors, scaled back inspections and a lack of information sharing between government agencies.

"In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president but as a parent," Obama said. "No parent should have to worry that their child is going to get sick from their lunch just as no family should have to worry that the medicines they buy will cause them harm."

The blogosphere is buzzing with comments on the legislation, including the following:

*


* Obama and his cronies or his puppetmasters are trying to take total control – nationalize everything, disarm the populace, control food, etc. We are seeing the formation of a total police state.

* * Well ... that's not very " green " of Obama. What's his real agenda?

* * This is getting way out of hand! Isn't it enough the FDA already allows poisons in our foods?

* * If you're starving, no number of guns will enable you to stay free. That's the whole idea behind this legislation. He who controls the food really makes the rules.

* * The government is terrified of the tax loss. Imagine all the tax dollars lost if people actually grew their own vegetables! Imagine if people actually coordinated their efforts with family, friends and neighbors. People could be in no time eating for the price of their own effort. ... Oh the horror of it all! The last thing the government wants is for us to be self-sufficient.

* * They want to make you dependent upon government. I say no way! already the government is giving away taxes from my great great grandchildren and now they want to take away my food, my semi-auto rifles, my right to alternative holistic medicine? We need a revolution, sheeple! Wake up! They want fascism ... can you not see that?

* * The screening processes will make it very expensive for smaller farmers, where bigger agriculture corporations can foot the bill.

* * If anything it just increases accountability, which is arguably a good thing. It pretty much says they'll only confiscate your property if there are questions of contamination and you don't comply with their inspections. I think the severity of this has been blown out of proportion by a lot of conjecture.

* * Don't waste your time calling the criminals in D.C. and begging them to act like humans. This will end with a bloody revolt.

* * The more I examine this (on the surface) seemingly innocuous bill the more I hate it. It is a coward's ploy to push out of business small farms and farmers markets without actually making them illegal because many will choose not to operate due to the compliance issue.


http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=92002

[Baggywrinkle]

Track back Bill Status

H.R. 875:
111th Congress

This is a bill in the U.S. Congress originating in the House of Representatives ("H.R."). A bill must be passed by both the House and Senate and then be signed by the President before it becomes law.

Bill numbers restart from 1 every two years. Each two-year cycle is called a session of Congress. This bill was created in the 111th Congress, in 2009-2010.

The titles of bills are written by the bill's sponsor and are a part of the legislation itself. GovTrack does not editorialize bill summaries.
2009-2010

Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009

To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-875

[Baggywrinkle]

Quotes About the 1933 Famine-Genocide in Soviet-Occupied Ukraine

"Food is a weapon."
Maxim Litvinov - Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs

"As many as 7 million Ukrainians were starved in Soviet Socialist dictator Joseph Stalin's artificial, forced famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. This is approximately the total population of Manitoba, Newfoundland, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island."
Inky Mark, M. P. Dauphin - Swan River House of Commons 2 June 1998

Sir Winston Churchill to Joseph Stalin:
"... Have the stresses of the war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of the Collective Farms?"

Stalin:
"Oh, no, the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle... Ten million [he said, holding up his hands]. It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary..."
Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959 p. 633

"...A famine that came about without drought and without war."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

"This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling powers. The savage combination of words for the designation of a crime - an artificial deliberately planned famine - is still incredible to many people throughout the world, but indicates the uniqueness of the tragedy of 1933, which is unparalleled, for a time of peace, in the number of victims it claimed.'
Wasyl Hryshko - Survivor The Ukrainian Holocaust, 1933

"Moscow employed the famine as a political weapon against the Ukrainians in the years 1932-1933. The famine was in its entirety artificially induced and organized."
F. M. Pigido - (an economist who lived and worked in Ukraine during the Famine of 1932-1933) Investigation of Communist Takeover and Occupation of the Non-Russian Nations of the U.S.S.R p. 35

"I can't give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers. "
Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers

"Farmers present by themselves the basic force of the national movement. Without farmers there can be no strong national movement. This is what we mean when we say that the nationalist question is, actually, the farmers' question."
Joseph Stalin, Marxist and the National-Colonial Question

"Famine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obligated to work on the conditions which the state may demand from them... This famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or such complete exhaustions of the country's resources in foreign and civil wars..."
William Henry Chamberlin - (Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor), Russia's Iron Age p.82

"... [Our reporting] served Moscow's purpose of smearing the facts out of recognition and declaring a situation which, had we reported simply and clearly, might have worked up enough public opinion abroad to force remedial measures. And every correspondent each in his own measure, was guilty of collaborating in this monstrous hoax on the world."
Eugene Lyons - (Moscow United Press correspondent from 1928 to 1934) Assignment in Utopia pp. 572-573

"... On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert."
Malcolm Muggeridge - British foreign correspondent, "War on the Peasants", Fortnightly Review, 1 May, 1933

" I saw ravages of the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine - hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment windows their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles."
Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed p. 68

"The child of a Ukrainian kulak deliberately starved to death by the Stalinist regime is worth no less than a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto starved to death by the Nazi regime."
Courtois, Stéphane. Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur et répression.

"And the peasant children! Have you ever seen the newspaper photographs of the children in the German camps? They were just like that, their heads like heavy balls on thin little necks, like storks, and one could see each bone of their arms and legs protruding from beneath the skin, how bones joined, and the entire skeleton was stretched over with skin that was like yellow gauze. And the children's faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by the spring they no longer had faces at all. Instead, they had bird-like heads with beaks, or frog heads - thin, wide lips - some of them resembled fish, mouths open. Not human faces!"
Vasily Grossman Forever Flowing pp. 156- 157

"Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see ... people eating butter stamped with a Soviet trade mark. Driving through the fields, I did not hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart. These people have forgotten how to sing! I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-smacking of the fat foreigners enjoying our butter..."
Victor Kravchenko - Former Soviet trade official and defector, I Chose Freedom

" Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles."
George Orwell - Commenting on the British attitude towards the Russians

"Yet it is well to remember, as Robert Conquest's powerful book obliges us to do, that the forced collectivization of agriculture decreed by the Soviet master and his party likely cost the lives of more people than perished in all countries as a result of the First World War."
Prof. Michael Marrus - Review of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow : Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Globe and Mail December 20, 1986

"Almost single-handedly did Duranty aid and abet one of the world's most prolific mass murderers, knowing all the while that was going on but refraining from saying precisely what he knew to be true. He had swallowed the ends-justifies-the-means-argument hook, line and sinker. When Stalin's atrocities were brought to light, Duranty loved to repeat ‘you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.' Those few "eggs" were the heads of men, women and children, and those "few" were merely tens of millions."
Mark Y. Herring - Review of S. J. Taylor's Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times Man in Moscow, "Contra Mundum" No. 15

"Imagine the Titanic sinking every day for thirteen years! Such were the losses from the 1933 Famine Genocide in Soviet Ukraine." [based on the minimum seven million.]

[Baggywrinkle]

Scorched Earth

Many countries have adopted a "scorched earth" policy (destroying anything that might be of use to an invading enemy) to prevent an invading army from living off the land. Both attackers and defenders in conventional wars and guerrilla struggles have used this strategy. During the U.S. Civil War, General William T. Sherman brought "total war" to the heart of the Confederacy by his infamous "March to the Sea" across Georgia and South Carolina, a scorched earth policy that is still debated as being barbarous or sound military strategy.

[Baggywrinkle]

Boer War

Lord Kitchener applied this policy during the later part of the Second Boer War (1899-1902) when the Boers, defeated on the battlefield, resorted to guerilla warfare. This took the form of the destruction of farms in order to prevent the fighting Boers from obtaining food and supplies. However, the destruction left women and children without means to survive since crops and livestock were also destroyed. [10]The British conceived concentration camps as a humanitarian measure, to care for displaced persons until the war was ended. Negligence, lack of planning and supplies and overcrowding led to much loss of life.[11] A decade after the war P.L.A. Goldman officially determined that an astonishing number of 27,927 Boers died in the concentration camps: 26,251 women and children (of whom more than 22,000 were under the age of 16), and 1,676 men over the age of 16, of whom 1,421 were aged persons.[12]

http://chessaleeinlondon.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/boer-war-scorced-earth.jpg

One British response to the guerrilla war was a 'scorched earth' policy to deny the guerillas supplies and refuge. In this image Boer civilians watch their house as it is burned.

Boers were given 10 minutes to gather belongings

http://www.erroluys.com/images/719px-LizzieVanZyl.jpg

Emily Hobhouse tells the story of the young Lizzie van Zyl who died in the Bloemfontein concentration camp: "She was a frail, weak little child in desperate need of good care. Yet, because her mother was one of the 'undesirables' due to the fact that her father neither surrendered nor betrayed his people, Lizzie was placed on the lowest rations and so perished with hunger that, after a month in the camp, she was transferred to the new small hospital. Here she was treated harshly. The English disposed doctor and his nurses did not understand her language and, as she could not speak English, labelled her an idiot although she was mentally fit and normal. One day she dejectedly started calling: "Mother! Mother! I want to go to my mother!" One Mrs Botha walked over to her to console her. She was just telling the child that she would soon see her mother again, when she was brusquely interrupted by one of the nurses who told her not to interfere with the child as she was a nuisance." Shortly afterwards, Lizzie van Zyl died.