Originally posted on Pesticide Action Network's blog, Groundtruth.
What do an American businessman, Iowa State University and 162,000 refugees in Tanzania have in common?
Answer: they are all either directly involved in or soon-to-be impacted by a small group of U.S. investors' plans to acquire 800,000 acres (1,250 square miles) of land in Tanzania and transform it into large-scale industrial crop, beef and agrofuel production. They plan to use genetically engineered (GE) seed and other inputs supplied by Monsanto, Syngenta and other global agribusinesses.
As you might guess, not everyone is going to benefit from this mega-project! The deal, if it goes through, would force 162,000 former refugees from Burundi off land they have tended for the past 40 years, destroying their livelihoods and the communities they have built to give their children a future.
Originally posted on Pesticide Action Network's blog, Groundtruth.
Britain's Chief Scientist has come out trumpeting the need for genetically engineered (GE) crops to feed the world, and the UK media is falling all over itself with blaring headlines that echo this badly misinformed sentiment (see Guardian, Telegraph coverage).
The source of all the hullabaloo is the UK's release this week of its mammoth Foresight report, Global Food and Farming Futures. Using the occasion to espouse what seems to be his personal opinion, Sir John Beddington- the Chief Scientist in question, argues that "It is very hard to see how it would be remotely sensible to justify not using new technologies such as GM. Just look at the problems that the world faces: water shortages and salination of existing water supplies, for example. GM crops should be able to deal with that." "Should?" Is that the best you can do, Sir John?
The Corona mill isn't a grain mill, it's a corn mill. Got that? Catalog page circa 1929.
I'll admit it took me a long time to figure this out. I've been aware of these mills way back in the early 1970s when I used to subscribe to Mother Earth News magazine and dreamt of a life of subsistence farming to replace the suffocating suburban lifestyle of a twenty year old. Buy whole wheat in bulk and grind your own flour for pennies!
To this day, people buy these things and then complain at how totally useless it is for bread flour.
“I bought this for the sole purpose of making bread flour. I got it, set it up, put some wheat into it, tightened basically as far as it would go, and the berries came out almost exactly as they went in. Plus, there were little iron filings from the burrs mixed in. Great.”
(I've read parts of this book (it was a painful read) and I think this review is rather accurate - although far more polite than I would have been. The paper this book is printed on is not even fit for my compost bin. - promoted by Jill Richardson)
Or I should say, the attack of the misguided and dangerous beings who feed on those farmer's market favorites. As described by James McWilliams in his book "Just Food", there are people lurking among who us who pose a threat to our food supply. McWilliams has given them a name: Locavores. He helpfully describes their characteristics and behaviors so that we can be on the lookout.
At first, they sound harmless. According to McWilliams, they apparently like to "produce and consume locally grown food". They seem to gather at "local farmers's markets". As stated above they feed on "heirloom tomatoes and baby squash", but also on "Berkeley microgreens". They can be overheard speaking in code words such as "sustainability", "foodshed", "agroecology", and "carbon footprint". They seem to have allegiance to a leader they call "Alice Waters." Their social rituals are driven by a "fetish of localism". And they frequently dress as if were "Haight-Ashbury circa 1968".
A rant I wrote this morning on my blog with a link to an amzingly interesting interview with Jeffery Smith
I have a subscription to acres USA and in this month's issue is a chilling interview with Jeffery Smith, author of Seeds of Destruction. A book that takes on the lies of the biotech industry
Here I present to you in a format that allows you to read this interview in your web browser of this interview
After reading this I have decided I can no longer eat from the industrial food stream. I am lucky in that 85% to 90% of my diet is already local and organic (i.e. GMO free) so cutting out the monthly fast food trips won't be that hard to do (though eating at unenlightened friends' homes is another issue). Also I have long been a label reader and have been aware how pervasiveGMO's are in the conventional industrial food stream.
But what can you do? Start by buying more of your food from local sources. Find a farmers market or if you want to do more, join a CSA. I happen to know of one near Eaton, OH that is taking members right now-Boulder Belt Farm Share Initiative-that serves members in Dayton, Oxford, Fairfield/West Chester/Northern Cincy.
Read labels and if it has corn, coy, cotton seed or canola assume it has GMO ingredients. And learn what words mean such things are in the food. For example, lecithin means there is soy, vitamin C means corn, etc., etc.. Oh and if there are partially hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup (and Soda pop has both) do not eat it-this is poison they are serving us
Finally, don't be the victim-take back the responsibility from the corporations over what you put in your body. For too long we have allowed them to call the shots and they have returned the favor by serving us poisons that make us sick (but hey, that means big bucks for the drug industry), obese (big bucks for the weight loss industry) and now we are seeing that GMO's may well cause our kids to be sterile. So now is the time to stand up and just say no to GMO's
Can we feed the world in the future? Can sustainable Agriculture feed the world? Can peasant agriculture feed the world? Can industrial agriculture feed the world? Can GMO's feed the world?
It's easy to want to compete on these questions when small farms produce more per acre, (as Andrew Kimbell argued in Fresh) and organic farms produce more bushels (as the Rodale Institute has found in their long term studies).
Surely though, this is the wrong question.
I'm posting this as a separate diary, (rather than on Jill's diary here http://www.lavidalocavore.org/... since it is fundamental, a change of paradigm, and longer than most comments. I make other specific comments over there on Jill's article.
Good news the Gene Giants are having a pissing match.
* DuPont says Monsanto patents are invalid
* DuPont shares fall 2.3 pct, Monsanto down 3.9 pct (Adds Monsanto comment)
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chemicals maker DuPont launched a counter-lawsuit against rival seedmaker Monsanto Co Tuesday to force the company to allow it to sell its own products with Monsanto's genetically modified soybeans.
The lawsuit is the latest fight in the battle for the rights to new biotechnology that could be worth billions of dollars in sales to farmers worldwide who are seeking boost crop yields and profits.
DuPont's suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in St. Louis, comes a month after Monsanto sued DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred International business, contending it had breached its license to market Roundup Ready soybean and corn seeds that are modified to be more tolerant of herbicides.
In a statement, DuPont said it is allowed to combine, or "stack," the genetic traits of its Optimum GAT technology with Roundup Ready under its rights in a licensing agreement with Monsanto, and that Monsanto's patents around its soybean traits were invalid.
"Monsanto's lawsuit is another tactic used to restrict the availability of competitive products," DuPont Vice President James Borel said in a statement.
Monsanto, the world's biggest seedmaker, has said Pioneer has misused the Roundup Ready traits to mask problems with its own Optimum GAT technology.
"Rather than tell the truth about its failed product, DuPont improperly used Monsanto's proven technology to cover up the flaws of Optimum GAT. This is the real issue in the case," Scott Partridge, Monsanto's deputy general counsel, said in a statement in response to DuPont's claim.
Earlier this month, DuPont and Germany's BASF sued each other of claims of patent infringement for the technologies used in the DuPont's Optimum GAT.
On the New York Stock Exchange, Monsanto closed off 3.9 percent at $81.62 and DuPont fell 2.3 percent to 25.20.
The case is: Monsanto v Dupont, 09-cv-00686.
(Reporting by Matt Daily; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz, Richard Chang)
I just saw a show called EcoTech on Planet Green TV. It's pretty cool, one segment had a guy who made green mobile inventions. One was a giant big wheel with a solar panel on top, that could really move! I'm not down for the spinning it did though, I get sick on spinney amusement park rides. Another was a robot-sleigh that walked like a human.
In the segment before they told the story of how ethanol can be made from nonfood parts of plants, and fibrous waste. Turns out they can genetically modify e-coli to break down this fibrous waste. Using E-coli (enzymatic hydrolysis) is far more green than the previous method (chemical hydrolysis). This is GM I can support, it takes stress off commodity crops and the environment by making fuel from waste. It saves fossil fuels in production, and I don't have to eat it. It sounds like a winner.
Rice is daily food for half of the world's population. Genetically modified (GM) rice, on the other hand, is a threat to our agriculture, our biodiversity and a possible risk to our health.
At present, GM rice is not grown commercially anywhere in the world. But Bayer, the German chemical giant, has genetically manipulated rice to withstand higher doses of a toxic pesticide called glufosinate, which is considered to be so dangerous to humans and the environment that it will soon be banned from Europe.
In just a few weeks, the European Union will decide whether or not this GM rice can enter EU countries, appear on supermarket shelves and end up on our dinner plates. If the EU approves the import of Bayer GM rice, farmers in the US and elsewhere may soon start planting it.
In "Exposed", Mark Schapiro, Editorial Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, tells the tale of two continents and their approaches towards environmental regulation, and what that means for our health, American business and even relative global power.
Schapiro takes a look at each of the regulatory approaches favored by both the European Union and the United States when it comes to substances ranging from BPA to GMOs to the chemicals in children's toys and cosmetics and beyond, and concludes that, like it or not, product innovation necessitated by Europe's adoption of the precautionary principle leads to not only safer products for people in the European Union, but is also creating a significant competitive advantage for companies overseas over their American competitors, as more and more of the world simply refuses to take the same leap of faith Americans must unfortunately currently take when it comes to new chemicals and substances being rushed onto the market and introduced into our bodies without sufficient prior testing to ensure they won't harm us. For just one recent example, as we're all seeing with BPA now, it's becoming clearer by the day that the current American laissez-faire approach to environmental regulation does not, and will not, work.
Happy Seis de Mayo! Heh. There was a nice little festival set up for the weekend and until yesterday along the riverfront downtown, and I told myself since last week that I was gonna go check it out one of those days. Forgot all about it, even though I was downtown on Saturday! Of course, it was pouring buckets on Saturday so it's probably a good thing I didn't go that day. Still could have gone for some culture, entertainment and good Mexican street food, though. Maybe next year. Have a sampler platter, compliments of the chef...
Another victory for the precautionary principle - Monsanto has just lost a court ruling in Germany, in which they were attempting to overturn the country's ban on a variety of their genetically-modified corn.
In Poland, there were 1.1 million hog farmers in 1996. That number fell 56 percent by 2008, as the advent of modern farming methods transformed agriculture, according to the Polish National Agricultural Chamber.
[...]
The impact on the environment is even more marked. With almost 40 farms in western Romania, Smithfield has built enormous metal manure containers to inject waste into the soil. "We go crazy with the daily smell," said Aura Danielescu, the principal of a school in Masloc, who closes her windows tight.
But I think even fair-minded non-constituents would recognize the virtue in the projects for which she's secured funding.
In the media hysteria over earmarks, one should be forgiven for losing sight of these basic facts:
Earmarks are simply Congressionally directed appropriations. All other spending is directed by executive-branch agencies. And earmarks compromise only a tiny fraction of the federal budget.
Earmarks - like any other form of government action - can be good or bad, as President Obama has stated (even as he seeks to reform the process):
Done right, earmarks give legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects that benefit people in their district, and that's why I have opposed their outright elimination.
To paint them with a broad brush as inherently "evil" as Sen. McCain has done is just disingenuous.
Below, I'll show some of the great things that will be accomplished by earmarks in Hawai`i's 2nd Congressional District, thanks to Rep. Hirono and her colleagues in Congress, by fighting real problems, including those in the fields of environmental protection and local agriculture. I'll also provide some brief Hawai`i-related news on GMO legislation and Hawai`i blogs you should be reading.
I received this in the mail today and requested (& received) permission to post it here.
Please help spread this nationwide....Quickly!!
Good Folks,
The USDA is debating a proposed rule that would end all of the already too little testing conducted before new genetically modified crops (GMO's) are introduced. This would be the best thing to happen to Monsanto since Dan Quayle's committee decided that GMO crops should be assumed to be safe. GMO's have been proven to be unsafe, and the UDSA needs to hear from you to remind them of this. The health of our planet is at stake!
Take Action Now. Go to http://ga3.org/campaign/APHIS2 to tell the USDA that new GMO crops need more testing, not less!!!
