International
Bill Gates Enchanted by the GMO Idol
Published October 27, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
I wrote last week about the Gates Foundation's efforts to help improve agricultural systems in the developing world. Gates's conclusion: the Foundation's investment should empower poor farmers to grow more crops and get them to market, which will help them pull themselves out of poverty.
Sounds like a plan, right? Not so fast, says alert reader and fellow blogger Greg Plotkin, who pointed out an important thread underlying the story: "Gates is hoping to prompt a second Green Revolution and has shown very little concern about the potential negative impacts that [genetically modified (GM)] crops could bring."
This is a crucial point to bring to light, not least because the architect of the Gates Foundation's plans, Rajiv Shah, is now a part of the Obama Adminstration. In April, he became Under Secretary of Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist at the USDA, a position in which he can work to entrench this particular "green revolution" agenda into national policy priorities.
Border Patrol Plans To Erode the Rio Grande's Banks
Published July 07, 2009 @ 09:52PM PT
Anyway, that's what the headline of this story should read, though the editors chose the following instead:
Border Agents to Dump Agent Orange-Like Chemical to Kill All Plant Life Among U.S.-Mexico Border
From the article:
(NaturalNews) The Border Patrol has temporarily postponed -- but refused to cancel -- plans to use helicopters to spray herbicide along the banks of the Rio Grande between the cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in order to kill a fast-growing river cane that provides cover for undocumented migrants, smugglers and other border crossers. ...
What happens when you completely defoliate river banks, perhaps with something like a broad-spectrum herbicide, is that the banks themselves start rapidly eroding, which silts up the river, which increases the chance that a freak storm, or one of the Gulf of Mexico's occasional hurricanes, will overrun those banks.
Now granted, we are talking about a river that's so extensively drawn down for irrigation that it doesn't reach the Gulf of Mexico all the time. But sometimes, even on the Texas/Mexico border, it does rain.
As to the particular herbicide planned for use, imazapyr, both Mexico and the European Union consider it more toxic than does the US EPA. The EU has gone so far as to ban it.
I wonder when we'll hear the Border Patrol planning to do something this stupid along the Canadian border. Oh wait, right, that'll be never.
Can't we just take it as a compliment that people want to come to our country looking for new opportunities? We should be flattered. Especially if they're looking for work, because every country needs good workers and hardly anyone can better prove their chutzpah than someone who's willing to come to a whole other nation where the customs are different and they stick out in a crowd.
No sense to be made of any of it.
World According to Monsanto, pt 9, Contamination
Published July 02, 2009 @ 08:30AM PT
A traditional Mexican corn farmer speaks in this portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary about the transgenic corn conquest of the ancient home of corn and the center of its greatest biodiversity: "... If they succeed, we'll be dependent on multinationals. We'll be forced to buy the fertilizer and insecticides they sell, because without them, their corn won't grow. Whereas the local corn grows very well without fertilizer or herbicide. Look at it, it's very beautiful. ..."
Now that NAFTA has made import controls on artificially cheap US corn difficult, and as much US corn contains transgenic traits, it's been impossible to keep contamination of this wind-pollinated plant at bay. Even in fields where farmers have been saving their own seed and sharing only with neighbors who do the same for centuries.
The Fertilizer Divide
Published July 01, 2009 @ 12:19PM PT
While plant breeding has done its part, and irrigation a lion's share, in bringing global crop productivity up over this last century, synthetic and mineral fertilizers sealed the deal.
Plants need more than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N-P-K), but an abundance of those three key, limiting nutrients will get them growing well, usually even if there are micronutrient deficiencies. So the prominent N-P-K listings on fertilizer bags are generally most crucial, and arguably the most critical of these is nitrogen.
While the Green Revolution is attributed in large part to hybrid crop varieties, these do poorly when not supplied with the abundant irrigation and nutrient resources provided through the industrial agriculture system. As much as the biotech industry claims to be overcoming these input requirements, they have yet to do so, and hope is not a plan.
Industrial agriculture uses fertilizer synthesized from natural gas, which is running into price and availability constraints similar to that found with other fossil fuels. Further, using nitrogen fertilizer in excess of what can be absorbed by plants and organisms residing in the soil are a significant source of water pollution and the formation of nitrous oxides, which are powerful greenhouse gases.
Now, a new study has quantified the global fertilizer use divide, with the not-too-surprising findings that industrialized countries use too much and African agriculture may be in need of a lot more. From the press release:
Beetles and Monoculture
Published June 30, 2009 @ 07:39PM PT
Julian Siddle of the BBC doesn't seem aware that a pine beetle infestation has already spread to the United States, devastating forests all the way into southern California, but nonetheless provided some interesting reporting on how Canada is addressing the pine beetle decimation of their forests and the environmental circumstances shaping their thinking on the matter:
... Cold winters usually kill off the beetle larvae, but the region has been warmer than usual in recent years.
... Without interference from man, mature lodge pole pine would be regularly destroyed by forest fires. But, [Staffan Lindgren, professor of entomology at the University of Northern British Columbia,] explained, the species has evolved to use fire to aid regeneration.
... The damage caused by the beetle, combined with the downturn in the demand for wood due to the global recession, has brought about a rethink on forest policy in British Columbia.
Mixed forests, rather than monocultures, are now seen as healthier both for the trees and other plant and animal life - even though a lack of uniformity makes them more difficult to harvest. ...
First, warming temperatures have helped pests proliferate. Not only would a sufficiently cold winter kill more beetles off, but as we've covered before, insect life cycles are governed by what are called degree days. That is, they need a certain minimum heat input within their tolerable range before they can progress to the next stage of their life or reproduce. It's a fascinating biological clock mechanism that allows them to be very responsive to limiting environmental constraints.
Second, the natural cycle of ecosystem renewal and regeneration has been disrupted without adequate replacement. Having spread ourselves out so widely, and having such rigorous fire supression knowledge, we left the trees without a means to clear out the competition and literal dead wood so that new, healthy seedlings could periodically get a decent chance to establish themselves.
Third, human ecosystem management techniques have decreased biodiversity. If even one pest organism can take advantage of a fatal flaw in the dominant species, the monoculture ecosystem can collapse.
Making ecosystems work properly is hard. We don't always understand all the necessary inputs and interactions.
Though we do know of a few surefire ways to break an ecosystem, some of which we might be directly or indirectly responsible for. Global warming and the monoculture are our fault, and these stressors give an opportunistic organism like the pine beetle the chance to take over and do its worst.
In this case, it's why the western portion of North America is increasingly covered in large stands of dead kindling. In the case of our artificial agricultural ecosystems, it's why when a pest develops resistance to whatever method we're using to combat it, it can devastate food production across a wide region.
Hard to create, easier to destroy. It's going to be true of any complex system, and certainly the living systems we depend on for life support. Though we can learn to interact positively with our environment, we tamper at our peril.
(Photo credit: tomsaint11 on Flickr.)
World According to Monsanto, pt 8, Control
Published June 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This installment starts off talking to a pair of Indian cotton farmers explaining that not only does Monsanto's Bt cotton still need to be sprayed, they can no longer find non-Bt cotton to buy. The narrator sums up:
"Today in India, Monsanto controls nearly all of the cotton seed market, forcing the locals to buy its seeds at prices four times higher than conventional varieties. Small farmers must turn to money lenders, who charge high interest rates. If the harvest is poor, it means bankruptcy."
The entire microcredit movement, started by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, tried to fix the exploitive finance infrastructure available to the poor, who tend not to have collateral or cash reserves that traditional banks are interested in. Yet even microcredit has run into trouble, as noted at Yunus' website:
BALI, July 28 - In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding microfinance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders. To manage the effort, a new self-monitoring organization, MicroFinance Transparency, is being set up as the industry's policeman. The goal is to prevent companies from taking advantage of poor people with high interest rates and misleading credit offers.
The initiative was announced on July 28 at a microcredit conference in Bali by Chuck Waterfield, a professor at Columbia University who spearheaded the initiative, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who launched the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh 30 years ago with his Grameen Bank. "Microfinance emerged as a struggle against loan sharks, so we don't want to see new loan sharks created in the name of microcredit," Yunus tells BusinessWeek.
If the industry doesn't curtail abuses and confusion, it faces the prospect of government crackdowns and donor funds drying up. Since Yunus pioneered the idea of lending small amounts of money to poor people without demanding collateral, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. These days, thousands of organizations are making loans to tens of millions of borrowers—usually to help them set up or expand small businesses. ...
As the video segment goes on to note, the introduction of patented seeds sent farmer suicide numbers way up. In an interview with Navdanya founder, Vandana Shiva, she points out that the biotech firms are looking to introduce patented genes into all the seeds they sell, getting everyone used to the idea that companies can have total control over the food supply.
Shiva says, I believe rightly, that control over the food supply is more powerful than guns.
The global poor, who also grow quite a bit of its food, are squeezed by both finance systems that abandon them to loan sharks and corporations who want to be able to charge every year for what farmers used to be able (at least sometimes, if they wanted or needed) to provide for themselves.
I don't even have to stretch my imagination to posit some dire result. The suicide rate among Indian farmers has already increased dramatically.
In response, Monsanto has a very cheery and inclusive mission statement. But you know what they say about good intentions.
Michelle Obama Linking Food and Health
Published June 20, 2009 @ 03:06PM PT
Via Obamafoodorama, the First Lady talks about food and health outcomes at the White House garden harvest celebration:
Michelle Obama: ... But unfortunately, for too many families, limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet. In so many of our communities, particularly in poorer and more isolated communities, fresh, healthy food is simply out of reach. With few grocery stores in their neighborhoods, residents are forced to rely on convenience stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, drug stores and even gas stations for their groceries.
These food deserts leave too many families stranded and without enough choices when it comes to nourishing their loved ones. And sadly, this is the case in many large cities and rural communities all across this nation. So we need to do more to address the fact that so many of our citizens live in areas where access to healthy food, and thus a healthy future, is simply out of reach. ...
It's a resonant message, one that people across the country have been coming to independently, as evidenced by the spread of urban rooftop gardening and edible landscaping. (It's even spread beyond our borders, with Britain's Queen Elizabeth joining the kitchen garden movement.)
Even the American Medical Association, staunch opponents of serious health coverage reform otherwise, are saying that we need to reform food policy.
Indeed, money spent on good food policy now is far less expensive than treating diet-related diseases later.
We are what we eat, as much as we ever were. Why not take it seriously?
