Showing posts with label Agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agriculture. Show all posts
Saturday, August 13, 2022
Monday, February 26, 2018
Ranchers set to fight back against vegetarian 'fake meat'
Jaden Urbi, CNBC
15 seconds ago
Companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are combining plant-based ingredients and science, rather than animals, to create fake-meat burgers and other products that taste like the real thing.
The Impossible Burger aims to combat climate change by alleviating the agricultural footprint of traditional meat and dairy production.
Impossible Foods, Inc.
Now U.S. Cattlemen's Association is looking to draw a line in the sand.
The association launched what could be the first salvo in a long battle against plant-based foods. Earlier this month, the association filed a 15-page petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling for an official definition for the term "beef," and more broadly, "meat."
"While at this time alternative protein sources are not a direct threat to the beef industry, we do see improper labeling of these products as misleading," said Lia Biondo, the association's policy and outreach director. "Our goal is to head off the problem before it becomes a larger issue."
Starting a national dialogue
Not everyone sees it that way. Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, said consumers already know what they're looking for when they're browsing the grocery store aisles. But he doesn't necessarily see the petition as a bad thing.
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Zimbabwe threatens to seize farms of party defectors
JOAO SILVA/NEW YORK TIMES
A worker shucked corn on a farm in Zimbabwe that may be seized because its owner opposes the rule of Robert Mugabe.
By Norimitsu Onishi
NEW YORK TIMES AUGUST 27, 2016
BINDURA, Zimbabwe — Dozens of angry young men jumped off a truck in front of Agrippah Mutambara’s gate, shouting obscenities and threatening to seize his 530-acre farm in the name of Zimbabwe’s president. They tried to scale the fence, scattering only when he raised and cocked his gun.
Zimbabwe made international headlines when it started seizing white-owned farms in 2000. But Mutambara is not a white farmer. Far from it, he is a hero of this country’s war of liberation who served as Zimbabwe’s ambassador to three nations over two decades.
But when he defected from President Robert Mugabe’s party to join the opposition a few months ago, he immediately put his farm at risk.
“When it was happening to the whites, we thought we were redressing colonial wrongs,” said Mutambara, 64, who got his farm after it had been seized from a white farmer. “But now we realize it’s also coming back to us. It’s also haunting us.”
Zimbabwe is suffering one of its worst economic crises in years. Banks have run out of cash. The government is struggling to pay its workers.
Public protests, including one in July that shut down the capital and a united show of force by the nation’s biggest opposition figures on Friday, have rattled Mugabe’s government.
Desperately seeking loans, Zimbabwean officials have visited Washington and European capitals in recent months, swallowing years of resentment toward the West to promise economic and political reforms, including ending the history of farm seizures.
Even Mugabe, now 92 years old and increasingly frail, has pledged to compensate white farmers.
But despite the promises, prized farms are at the center of heated political infighting in Zimbabwe. As the battle to succeed Mugabe intensifies, dozens of political figures who have fallen out of favor, like Mutambara, are facing the seizure of their farms.
With the economy in peril and the governing party split in a scramble for power, land is being used as a vital tool in the struggle for control.
“No one is safe,” said Temba Mliswa, 44, who was chairman of the governing party’s chapter in Mashonaland West province before his expulsion from the party in 2014.
Mliswa got a 2,000-acre farm belonging to a white Zimbabwean in 2005. When he took possession, Mliswa said, police officers beat the white farmer and his workers.
But last year, Mliswa said, hundreds of youths sent by the governing party invaded the farm again, destroying property and beating his workers. They eventually left, but one of Mugabe’s ministers recently held a rally in which he threatened to take Mliswa’s farm unless he stopped criticizing the president’s party.
“They use the land to control you,” Mliswa said.
Zimbabwe’s political uncertainty has weakened the economy, already hit hard by a severe drought and a fall in global commodity prices.
People have been hoarding cash — Zimbabwe adopted the American dollar in 2009 — and taking it out of the country, leaving bank ATMs empty.
Mugabe’s “Look East” campaign, which focused on attracting China as a counterweight to Western influence, has suffered from China’s economic slowdown and recent disagreements over economic policy, though billboards still laud China as Zimbabwe’s “all-weather friend.”
With few other options left, Mugabe’s government has turned to the International Monetary Fund, an organization he vilified in the past as an instrument of colonial domination.
In talks with the fund, the government has agreed to reforms in the hope that it will qualify for loans for the first time since 1999.
The fund has sent positive signals about government steps in areas like curbing the size of the public workforce and cleaning up the banking sector.
But significant hurdles remain. The Zimbabwean government must clear $1.8 billion it owes to the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. It must also convince the IMF, where a skeptical United States holds the most votes, that it is committed to change.
Resolving the land issue is central to reviving the country’s economy and reestablishing ties with Western governments.
Under a program financed by the European Union and the United Nations, the government has begun mapping the more than 6,000 commercial farms that have been seized.
For the first time, the government recently held a workshop on the compensation of white farmers. But compensation is another matter, and some analysts doubt that will happen while Mugabe is alive.
Beyond pride, settling land ownership could strip Mugabe of an important tool he has wielded over the political class.
Dozens are believed to be facing threats of losing their farms, according to former governing party members and the local news media.
Many were expelled from the governing party, ZANU-PF, in the past year because they were considered close to Joice Mujuru, a former vice president who was once regarded as Mugabe’s likely successor but was purged by Zimbabwe’s powerful first lady, Grace Mugabe.
And for all the talk of compensating white farmers, politically connected Zimbabweans are continuing to grab white-owned farms.
This year, a white Zimbabwean couple were expelled by police officers from their 2,000-acre tobacco farm. The new owner was a Zimbabwean medical doctor living in England; the media uncovered photographs showing the doctor and his wife with Grace Mugabe.
In 2000, two decades after Zimbabwe’s independence, the country’s best farmland remained in the hands of descendants of white settlers. Mugabe’s government forcibly removed white Zimbabweans from their farms, which were supposed to be distributed equitably to black Zimbabweans.
Thousands of poor black farmers suddenly got access to land, often small plots, bringing them into the economy and spreading the profits from crops like tobacco to a much broader share of Zimbabwe’s population.
But high-ranking officials in the governing party received the best farms. Or, like Mutambara, the former ambassador, they were given the best tracts of a large farm, usually with the main farmhouse and farming equipment.
“Contrary to what we had expected, some people because of their position in government have gone on to acquire multiple farms, huge farms,” Mutambara said.
Chinamasa, the finance minister, denied that some members of the political elite were violating the government’s policy by owning more than a single farm. He said members of one family could each own a farm, creating the impression that they owned multiple farms.
“We have a policy that it was one person, one piece of land,” Chinamasa said. “The policy is clear. It’s not a problem.”
But if Mugabe’s government can reward loyalists with prime land, it can also easily take it back, especially with the lack of deeds or long-term leases.
Mliswa said he received his farm when his uncle headed the lands ministry. Once considered Mugabe’s right-hand man, the uncle was also expelled from the governing party in 2014 and now risks losing his farm, too, Mliswa said.
“There was blood spilt on my farm, there was violence, which I really, really, really, really regret,” he said of the seizure of his farm from its white owner in 2005. “I apologize profusely, but it was because of the system I was involved in. I belonged to a party whose culture is violence.”
BINDURA, Zimbabwe — Dozens of angry young men jumped off a truck in front of Agrippah Mutambara’s gate, shouting obscenities and threatening to seize his 530-acre farm in the name of Zimbabwe’s president. They tried to scale the fence, scattering only when he raised and cocked his gun.
Zimbabwe made international headlines when it started seizing white-owned farms in 2000. But Mutambara is not a white farmer. Far from it, he is a hero of this country’s war of liberation who served as Zimbabwe’s ambassador to three nations over two decades.
But when he defected from President Robert Mugabe’s party to join the opposition a few months ago, he immediately put his farm at risk.
“When it was happening to the whites, we thought we were redressing colonial wrongs,” said Mutambara, 64, who got his farm after it had been seized from a white farmer. “But now we realize it’s also coming back to us. It’s also haunting us.”
Zimbabwe is suffering one of its worst economic crises in years. Banks have run out of cash. The government is struggling to pay its workers.
Public protests, including one in July that shut down the capital and a united show of force by the nation’s biggest opposition figures on Friday, have rattled Mugabe’s government.
Desperately seeking loans, Zimbabwean officials have visited Washington and European capitals in recent months, swallowing years of resentment toward the West to promise economic and political reforms, including ending the history of farm seizures.
Even Mugabe, now 92 years old and increasingly frail, has pledged to compensate white farmers.
But despite the promises, prized farms are at the center of heated political infighting in Zimbabwe. As the battle to succeed Mugabe intensifies, dozens of political figures who have fallen out of favor, like Mutambara, are facing the seizure of their farms.
With the economy in peril and the governing party split in a scramble for power, land is being used as a vital tool in the struggle for control.
“No one is safe,” said Temba Mliswa, 44, who was chairman of the governing party’s chapter in Mashonaland West province before his expulsion from the party in 2014.
Mliswa got a 2,000-acre farm belonging to a white Zimbabwean in 2005. When he took possession, Mliswa said, police officers beat the white farmer and his workers.
But last year, Mliswa said, hundreds of youths sent by the governing party invaded the farm again, destroying property and beating his workers. They eventually left, but one of Mugabe’s ministers recently held a rally in which he threatened to take Mliswa’s farm unless he stopped criticizing the president’s party.
“They use the land to control you,” Mliswa said.
Zimbabwe’s political uncertainty has weakened the economy, already hit hard by a severe drought and a fall in global commodity prices.
People have been hoarding cash — Zimbabwe adopted the American dollar in 2009 — and taking it out of the country, leaving bank ATMs empty.
Mugabe’s “Look East” campaign, which focused on attracting China as a counterweight to Western influence, has suffered from China’s economic slowdown and recent disagreements over economic policy, though billboards still laud China as Zimbabwe’s “all-weather friend.”
With few other options left, Mugabe’s government has turned to the International Monetary Fund, an organization he vilified in the past as an instrument of colonial domination.
In talks with the fund, the government has agreed to reforms in the hope that it will qualify for loans for the first time since 1999.
The fund has sent positive signals about government steps in areas like curbing the size of the public workforce and cleaning up the banking sector.
But significant hurdles remain. The Zimbabwean government must clear $1.8 billion it owes to the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. It must also convince the IMF, where a skeptical United States holds the most votes, that it is committed to change.
Resolving the land issue is central to reviving the country’s economy and reestablishing ties with Western governments.
Under a program financed by the European Union and the United Nations, the government has begun mapping the more than 6,000 commercial farms that have been seized.
For the first time, the government recently held a workshop on the compensation of white farmers. But compensation is another matter, and some analysts doubt that will happen while Mugabe is alive.
Beyond pride, settling land ownership could strip Mugabe of an important tool he has wielded over the political class.
Dozens are believed to be facing threats of losing their farms, according to former governing party members and the local news media.
Many were expelled from the governing party, ZANU-PF, in the past year because they were considered close to Joice Mujuru, a former vice president who was once regarded as Mugabe’s likely successor but was purged by Zimbabwe’s powerful first lady, Grace Mugabe.
And for all the talk of compensating white farmers, politically connected Zimbabweans are continuing to grab white-owned farms.
This year, a white Zimbabwean couple were expelled by police officers from their 2,000-acre tobacco farm. The new owner was a Zimbabwean medical doctor living in England; the media uncovered photographs showing the doctor and his wife with Grace Mugabe.
In 2000, two decades after Zimbabwe’s independence, the country’s best farmland remained in the hands of descendants of white settlers. Mugabe’s government forcibly removed white Zimbabweans from their farms, which were supposed to be distributed equitably to black Zimbabweans.
Thousands of poor black farmers suddenly got access to land, often small plots, bringing them into the economy and spreading the profits from crops like tobacco to a much broader share of Zimbabwe’s population.
But high-ranking officials in the governing party received the best farms. Or, like Mutambara, the former ambassador, they were given the best tracts of a large farm, usually with the main farmhouse and farming equipment.
“Contrary to what we had expected, some people because of their position in government have gone on to acquire multiple farms, huge farms,” Mutambara said.
Chinamasa, the finance minister, denied that some members of the political elite were violating the government’s policy by owning more than a single farm. He said members of one family could each own a farm, creating the impression that they owned multiple farms.
“We have a policy that it was one person, one piece of land,” Chinamasa said. “The policy is clear. It’s not a problem.”
But if Mugabe’s government can reward loyalists with prime land, it can also easily take it back, especially with the lack of deeds or long-term leases.
Mliswa said he received his farm when his uncle headed the lands ministry. Once considered Mugabe’s right-hand man, the uncle was also expelled from the governing party in 2014 and now risks losing his farm, too, Mliswa said.
“There was blood spilt on my farm, there was violence, which I really, really, really, really regret,” he said of the seizure of his farm from its white owner in 2005. “I apologize profusely, but it was because of the system I was involved in. I belonged to a party whose culture is violence.”
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Venezuelans are going hungry. But the country’s Olympians will get free housing and cash.
WorldViews
August 22
August 22
As a young man, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro played electric guitar, not sports. But like the men who mentored him, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the late Hugo Chávez, he views the country’s Olympic achievements as a validation of his economic and social policies. Also, he is fond of wearing track suits in the colors of the national flag.
It’s perhaps understandable, then, that Maduro was in a generous mood Monday when he welcomed home the 87 members of his country’s Olympic team with the announcement that they would all receive free houses and cash.
To be sure, plenty of Olympic athletes around the world reap material rewards from their governments and sponsors for their athletic feats. But in Venezuela, a country where you can spend more time waiting in a supermarket line than it takes to run a marathon, cash is perhaps the last thing the government has to give away.
Amid economic hard times, Venezuelans turn to city farming
Play Video1:53
Facing a national food crisis, Venezuela's pumpkin-growing socialist president is exhorting compatriots to grow fruit and vegetables on balconies and roofs and in barracks across the country. (Reuters)
Maduro called it an “extra incentive” for the country’s athletes, who also learned they would not have to worry about the country’s rapidly depreciating currency, the bolívar. The athletes and their coaches will receive the cash in U.S. dollars, Maduro said, without specifying how much their rewards would be.
For Maduro, the Rio Games have provided a much needed national distraction from months of unrelenting bad news about the economy.
Venezuela faces a 10 percent economic contraction this year and is considered the world’s leader in inflation. Maduro’s gesture came on the same day economists announced that the cost of basic goods last month had increased 773 percent since July 2015.
Maduro ordered a 50 percent increase in the minimum wage last month, but the latest studies show that salaries still fall far short of the amount needed to obtain basic household goods and food. The government’s slow-footed economic interventions are being outpaced by Venezuela’s Olympic-level inflation.
Despite facing the oil-exporting country’s worst crisis in history, the Venezuelan president said he has also ordered a 50 percent increase in spending on high-performance athletics in preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games, a move that would benefit more than 1,000 Venezuelan Olympic hopefuls.
Venezuela’s most decorated Olympian, triple jumper Yulimar Rojas, received a car earlier this year from Maduro. She won silver in Rio, “thanks to the Bolivarian revolution, our commander Chávez and the athletic revolution,” Maduro said.
The “Bolivarian revolution” refers broadly to the socialist-inspired system implemented by Chávez from his inauguration as president in 1999 to his death in 2013.
One of the most visible members of the country’s Olympic team, fencing competitor and former sports minister Alejandra Benítez, 36, wore symbolic tributes to Chávez on her uniform and recorded pro-government videos from Rio. She appeared at Maduro’s side during Monday’s ceremony.
The Venezuelan team also won a bronze medal in boxing, and another bronze in BMX cycling. The country finished 65th in Olympic rankings, tied with Bulgaria.
Source
Monday, June 24, 2013
The Forced Depopulation of America’s Rural Areas
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Dave Hodges
Activist Post
Agenda 21 policy calls for dramatically increasing urbanization and forcing indigenous populations out of rural areas and into densely populated stack-and pack micro apartments controlled by technocrats with the ability to control every aspect of one’s life. When completed, this lifestyle will be a hell on earth.
In Part One, I detailed how the Chinese government, under the direction of global corporations like Goldman Sachs, is instituting a mass relocation of its population from rural to urban. At the point of a gun, the Chinese military is forcibly removing one million Chinese farmers per month from their rural homes and forcing them into the massive ghost cities from which China has spent nearly $3 trillion to construct.
The Chinese government, Hank Paulson and other globalists falsely claim that the mass relocation of Chinese farmers is necessary to fuel the Chinese economy. Yet, there are no jobs available to these Chinese farmers when they arrive in the ghost cities. Strong industry and the need to fill positions is what drew Americans into the cities during our industrial revolution, not the other way around as the globalists are claiming is the case in China. What we are witnessing in China is the beginning of the implementation of the Agenda 21 creation of massive megacities complete with stack-and-pack micro apartments.
As in China, there is a decided plot to move American farmers off their land and into urban areas; this plot commenced nearly two decades ago and is currently picking up momentum. The American and Chinese methods for depopulating rural areas are different, but the net effect is exactly the same.
Can you imagine if the US military, as is happening in China, were to forcibly relocate American farmers to urban areas under the threat of violence from the military? The US would witness the outbreak of widespread violence. Unlike the Chinese farmers who are being forced by gunpoint off their land. American farmers are being nudged off their land by market forces created by covert government policy.
When both countries achieve virtual depopulation of the rural areas of their respective countries, only the government subsidized corporate farms will remain. Local communities and their individual citizens will lose total control over all food, which is a prescription for disaster.
I will determine what and how much you may drink - Mayor BloombergIf you wonder why New York City Mayor Bloomberg and Michelle Obama have been trying to control the size of sodas, the amount of salt one can use and are dictating what school children will eat for lunch, the answer is that they are conditioning the American public that the government controls all food intake. The reasons for these new controls over diet will become painfully clear after reading the following paragraphs.
Rural Flight In the United States
I know that this will come as a shock to many reading this article because they did not learn of these events from FOX or CNN. However, in actuality, the process of moving the United States towards a complete Agenda 21-style of total urbanization has already commenced, and it began nearly 20 years ago.
In 1994, the US became official participants in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was a ‘liberalized’ trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Under NAFTA, farmers’ income in all three countries has plummeted and millions of small farmers have lost their land, while agribusiness corporations (i.e. large government subsidized corporate farms) have reaped huge profits.
NAFTA has had three dramatic effects on farmers in North America and all three effects further cause dense urbanization as outlined in Agenda 21 documents.
The Roots of Illegal Immigration
The first notable effect of NAFTA is that it immediately bankrupted over three million farmers in northern Mexico and this group became the vanguard of millions of Mexicans illegally entering the US in search for subsistence work of any type.
Depopulating Rural Areas By Bankrupting US Farmers
The second dramatic impact of NAFTA lies in the fact that it has had catastrophic consequences for US farmers, as a record number of small farmers have lost their farms and have gone through foreclosure while the government subsidized corporate farms have thrived. Since NAFTA, the average annual growth of the US trade deficit has been 45% higher. Since NAFTA took effect, about 170,000 small family farms have gone bankrupt which represents a decline of 21% of family farms in the US. The 21% of America small farmers who have been bankrupted since the advent of NAFTA, represents a higher percentage of displaced American farmers than what is happening with forced relocation of Chinese farmers to the ghost cities. And what happens to American small farmers who have lost their livelihood? They either work on their former competitors' corporate farms as hired hands, or they relocate to urban areas in search of employment.
American Farmers: Death By a Thousand Cuts
If it is not the EPA enforcing its Agenda 21 wetlands regulations with devastating consequences on farmers, it is the FDA harassing farmers for pursuing time-honored farm-related industries such as the raw milk industry. Congress is plotting new attacks on the US farmer as I write these words. Even Amish farmers have felt the wrath of the federal government. Average, everyday Americans are being arrested for merely growing their own food.
Whether it is China or the US, Agenda 21 urbanization policies are designed for the purpose of herding people into dense urban areas for reasons of control; and the primary method of control has to do with controlling food production.
The US Government Is Gaining Control Over All Food
The Chinese government is working to control all food in order to control the people. On an ever-increasing basis, NAFTA is providing the US government with the exact same ability. Therefore, the third draconian impact of NAFTA is that it has led to even more nefarious free trade agreements which has led to the loss of control for local communities over their own food supply.
Underlying the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is the philosophy that all food (i.e. from basic grains, meat, fruits and vegetables) should be exclusively produced for international export. This is a drastic departure from the time-honored practice where each country produced the majority of food its citizens needed on local, small farms and only traded in certain products that could not be successfully grown locally. If anyone wonders where this is headed, we only have to look to Africa for the answer.
The very first great wave of a NAFTA style of globalization in agriculture took place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as global corporations forced local farmers to give up local food production, and shifted production to plantations using enslaved Indigenous and African labor to grow the luxury crops of coffee, sugar, bananas, and cocoa for export to the colonizing countries.
The lesson here is, if the government controls the food, the government controls the people.
Starvation Will Be Used to Enforce the Agenda 21 Depopulation of Rural Areas
The use of food by the U.S. government has been a matter of official U.S. governmental covert policy since 1974-1975.
In December, 1974, National Security Council directed by Henry Kissinger completed a classified study entitled, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study was based upon the unproven claims that population growth in Lesser Developed Countries (LDC) constituted a serious risk to America’s national security.
In November 1975 President Ford, based upon the tenets of NSSM 200 outlined a classified plan to forcibly reduce population growth in LDC countries through birth control, war and famine. Ford’s new national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, in conjunction with CIA Director, George H. W. Bush, were tasked with implementing the plan and the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture assisted in the implementation of these insane genocidal plans.
NSSM 200 formally raised the question, "Would food be considered an instrument of national power? … Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?” Kissinger has answered these questions when he stated that he was predicting a series of contrived famines, created by mandatory programs and this would make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary in this modern day application of eugenics in a scheme that would allow Henry to have his cake and eat it too in that the world would finally be rid of the “useless eaters!”
Third world population control, using food as one of the primary weapons, has long been a matter of official covert national policy and a portion of President Obama’s Executive Order (EO 13603), National Defense Resources Preparedness is a continuation of that policy. Only now, the intended target are not the LDC’s but, instead, the American people.
With the stroke of his pen, Obama has total and absolute control over all food where his EO states:
e) “Food resources” means all commodities and products, (simple, mixed, or compound), or complements to such commodities or products, that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals, irrespective of other uses to which such commodities or products may be put, at all stages of processing from the raw commodity to the products thereof in vendible form for human or animal consumption. “Food resources” also means potable water packaged in commercially marketable containers, all starches, sugars, vegetable and animal or marine fats and oils, seed, cotton, hemp, and flax fiber, but does not mean any such material after it loses its identity as an agricultural commodity or agricultural product.
(f) “Food resource facilities” means plants, machinery, vehicles (including on farm), and other facilities required for the production, processing, distribution, and storage (including cold storage) of food resources, and for the domestic distribution of farm equipment and fertilizer…NAFTA was merely the opening artillery bombardment against the American farmer and the ultimate depopulation of rural areas. The death of the American farmer will ultimately come at the hands of EO 13603 and I believe this will be fully implemented when Obama declares martial law.
Activist Post
Agenda 21 policy calls for dramatically increasing urbanization and forcing indigenous populations out of rural areas and into densely populated stack-and pack micro apartments controlled by technocrats with the ability to control every aspect of one’s life. When completed, this lifestyle will be a hell on earth.
In Part One, I detailed how the Chinese government, under the direction of global corporations like Goldman Sachs, is instituting a mass relocation of its population from rural to urban. At the point of a gun, the Chinese military is forcibly removing one million Chinese farmers per month from their rural homes and forcing them into the massive ghost cities from which China has spent nearly $3 trillion to construct.
The Chinese government, Hank Paulson and other globalists falsely claim that the mass relocation of Chinese farmers is necessary to fuel the Chinese economy. Yet, there are no jobs available to these Chinese farmers when they arrive in the ghost cities. Strong industry and the need to fill positions is what drew Americans into the cities during our industrial revolution, not the other way around as the globalists are claiming is the case in China. What we are witnessing in China is the beginning of the implementation of the Agenda 21 creation of massive megacities complete with stack-and-pack micro apartments.
As in China, there is a decided plot to move American farmers off their land and into urban areas; this plot commenced nearly two decades ago and is currently picking up momentum. The American and Chinese methods for depopulating rural areas are different, but the net effect is exactly the same.
Can you imagine if the US military, as is happening in China, were to forcibly relocate American farmers to urban areas under the threat of violence from the military? The US would witness the outbreak of widespread violence. Unlike the Chinese farmers who are being forced by gunpoint off their land. American farmers are being nudged off their land by market forces created by covert government policy.
When both countries achieve virtual depopulation of the rural areas of their respective countries, only the government subsidized corporate farms will remain. Local communities and their individual citizens will lose total control over all food, which is a prescription for disaster.
I will determine what and how much you may drink - Mayor BloombergIf you wonder why New York City Mayor Bloomberg and Michelle Obama have been trying to control the size of sodas, the amount of salt one can use and are dictating what school children will eat for lunch, the answer is that they are conditioning the American public that the government controls all food intake. The reasons for these new controls over diet will become painfully clear after reading the following paragraphs.
Rural Flight In the United States
I know that this will come as a shock to many reading this article because they did not learn of these events from FOX or CNN. However, in actuality, the process of moving the United States towards a complete Agenda 21-style of total urbanization has already commenced, and it began nearly 20 years ago.
In 1994, the US became official participants in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was a ‘liberalized’ trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Under NAFTA, farmers’ income in all three countries has plummeted and millions of small farmers have lost their land, while agribusiness corporations (i.e. large government subsidized corporate farms) have reaped huge profits.
NAFTA has had three dramatic effects on farmers in North America and all three effects further cause dense urbanization as outlined in Agenda 21 documents.
The Roots of Illegal Immigration
The first notable effect of NAFTA is that it immediately bankrupted over three million farmers in northern Mexico and this group became the vanguard of millions of Mexicans illegally entering the US in search for subsistence work of any type.
Depopulating Rural Areas By Bankrupting US Farmers
The second dramatic impact of NAFTA lies in the fact that it has had catastrophic consequences for US farmers, as a record number of small farmers have lost their farms and have gone through foreclosure while the government subsidized corporate farms have thrived. Since NAFTA, the average annual growth of the US trade deficit has been 45% higher. Since NAFTA took effect, about 170,000 small family farms have gone bankrupt which represents a decline of 21% of family farms in the US. The 21% of America small farmers who have been bankrupted since the advent of NAFTA, represents a higher percentage of displaced American farmers than what is happening with forced relocation of Chinese farmers to the ghost cities. And what happens to American small farmers who have lost their livelihood? They either work on their former competitors' corporate farms as hired hands, or they relocate to urban areas in search of employment.
American Farmers: Death By a Thousand Cuts
If it is not the EPA enforcing its Agenda 21 wetlands regulations with devastating consequences on farmers, it is the FDA harassing farmers for pursuing time-honored farm-related industries such as the raw milk industry. Congress is plotting new attacks on the US farmer as I write these words. Even Amish farmers have felt the wrath of the federal government. Average, everyday Americans are being arrested for merely growing their own food.
Whether it is China or the US, Agenda 21 urbanization policies are designed for the purpose of herding people into dense urban areas for reasons of control; and the primary method of control has to do with controlling food production.
The US Government Is Gaining Control Over All Food
The Chinese government is working to control all food in order to control the people. On an ever-increasing basis, NAFTA is providing the US government with the exact same ability. Therefore, the third draconian impact of NAFTA is that it has led to even more nefarious free trade agreements which has led to the loss of control for local communities over their own food supply.
Underlying the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is the philosophy that all food (i.e. from basic grains, meat, fruits and vegetables) should be exclusively produced for international export. This is a drastic departure from the time-honored practice where each country produced the majority of food its citizens needed on local, small farms and only traded in certain products that could not be successfully grown locally. If anyone wonders where this is headed, we only have to look to Africa for the answer.
The very first great wave of a NAFTA style of globalization in agriculture took place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as global corporations forced local farmers to give up local food production, and shifted production to plantations using enslaved Indigenous and African labor to grow the luxury crops of coffee, sugar, bananas, and cocoa for export to the colonizing countries.
The lesson here is, if the government controls the food, the government controls the people.
Starvation Will Be Used to Enforce the Agenda 21 Depopulation of Rural Areas
The use of food by the U.S. government has been a matter of official U.S. governmental covert policy since 1974-1975.
In December, 1974, National Security Council directed by Henry Kissinger completed a classified study entitled, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study was based upon the unproven claims that population growth in Lesser Developed Countries (LDC) constituted a serious risk to America’s national security.
In November 1975 President Ford, based upon the tenets of NSSM 200 outlined a classified plan to forcibly reduce population growth in LDC countries through birth control, war and famine. Ford’s new national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, in conjunction with CIA Director, George H. W. Bush, were tasked with implementing the plan and the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture assisted in the implementation of these insane genocidal plans.
NSSM 200 formally raised the question, "Would food be considered an instrument of national power? … Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?” Kissinger has answered these questions when he stated that he was predicting a series of contrived famines, created by mandatory programs and this would make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary in this modern day application of eugenics in a scheme that would allow Henry to have his cake and eat it too in that the world would finally be rid of the “useless eaters!”
Third world population control, using food as one of the primary weapons, has long been a matter of official covert national policy and a portion of President Obama’s Executive Order (EO 13603), National Defense Resources Preparedness is a continuation of that policy. Only now, the intended target are not the LDC’s but, instead, the American people.
With the stroke of his pen, Obama has total and absolute control over all food where his EO states:
e) “Food resources” means all commodities and products, (simple, mixed, or compound), or complements to such commodities or products, that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals, irrespective of other uses to which such commodities or products may be put, at all stages of processing from the raw commodity to the products thereof in vendible form for human or animal consumption. “Food resources” also means potable water packaged in commercially marketable containers, all starches, sugars, vegetable and animal or marine fats and oils, seed, cotton, hemp, and flax fiber, but does not mean any such material after it loses its identity as an agricultural commodity or agricultural product.
(f) “Food resource facilities” means plants, machinery, vehicles (including on farm), and other facilities required for the production, processing, distribution, and storage (including cold storage) of food resources, and for the domestic distribution of farm equipment and fertilizer…NAFTA was merely the opening artillery bombardment against the American farmer and the ultimate depopulation of rural areas. The death of the American farmer will ultimately come at the hands of EO 13603 and I believe this will be fully implemented when Obama declares martial law.
Put this map into your GPS, it will tell where you soon cannot go.
Do you think that you and your family are actually safe from the ravages of depopulating the rural areas through economic blackmail and ultimate starvation? Think again! Unless you presently live in the core inner city and occupy less than 500 square feet of living space, your government, as I write these words, is actively plotting to get you out of the suburbs and into densely populated urban areas. This will be fully exposed in Part three of this series.
Part One
Do you think that you and your family are actually safe from the ravages of depopulating the rural areas through economic blackmail and ultimate starvation? Think again! Unless you presently live in the core inner city and occupy less than 500 square feet of living space, your government, as I write these words, is actively plotting to get you out of the suburbs and into densely populated urban areas. This will be fully exposed in Part three of this series.
Part One
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
US Drought to Intensify Threat to Western Crops
Tuesday, 17 Jul 2012 01:23 PM
"The rains will be too late for corn but it will help soybeans. We see upwards of an inch to 1-1/2 inches (of rain) this week and again next week for Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky," said Don Keeney, meteorologist for MDA EarthSat Weather.
However, the drought is spreading into the western and northwestern crop belt, leading to further stress and more crop losses.
Keeney said hot, dry weather would remain the norm for the next two weeks in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and southern Wisconsin.
"Temperatures will get up to 100 today in Chicago and 102 in St. Louis," he said. Cooler temperatures in the 80s and 90s are expected by the weekend, but hotter weather is likely to return next week.
The expanding drought, now considered the worst in over a half century, punished the U.S. corn crop last week.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its weekly crop progress report on Monday, said just 31 percent of the corn crop was in good to excellent shape, down from 40 percent a week earlier and below analysts' average estimate of 35 percent.
Soybean conditions fell to 34 percent from 40 percent in the good to excellent category, below estimates for 35 percent.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report Monday that based on the Palmer Drought Index, 55 percent of the contiguous United States was under moderate to extreme drought in June. That is the largest land area in the United States to be affected by a drought since December 1956.
Commodity Weather Group (CWG) on Tuesday said over half of the Midwest would continue with severe moisture deficits and plenty of heat, particularly in the western corn belt.
"Late pollinating and filling corn and pod-setting soybeans will see yields fall further," said CWG meteorologist Joel Widenor.
"Showers may scatter into the south and east Midwest, but relief for the belt as a whole would still be limited."
Chicago Board of Trade corn prices have soared more than 40 percent in only six weeks as crop prospects have plunged.
Source
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
'Radical' changes needed to meet rising food demands: UN
A new United Nations report calls for a 'green revolution' in agriculture, saying farmers must increase food production by as much as 100 percent by 2050.
A farmer spreads fertilizer in a paddy field at Traouri village, located in the northern Indian state of Haryana on July 5.
Ajay Verma/Reuters
By Patrick Wall, Contributor / July 6, 2011
New York
The global food system is environmentally destructive and requires “radical” changes if it is to meet rising food demands, says a new United Nations report.
Current farming practices degrade the environment and contribute to global warming, which in turn reduces food production, according to the report. To feed a growing population, farmers around the world must increase food production by up to 100 percent by 2050 – but do so using sustainable methods, with a focus on small farming.
“The world now needs a truly green revolution in agriculture,” says the UN’s annual World Economic and Social Survey, which was released Tuesday.
Recent food shortages and price spikes highlight “deep structural problems” in the global food system, according to the report. Modern agriculture is plagued by over-cultivation, deforestation, and water pollution, the study says, which results in low crop yields.
These practices, combined with climate change and government polices, threaten almost two dozen nations with a “protracted food security crisis.” Worldwide, some 925 million people are undernourished, the report says, with the vast majority living in developing countries.
Meanwhile, the governments in these countries have done little to support the world’s 1.5 billion small farmers, who dominate agriculture in developing nations.
“There have been decades of underinvestment by the public sector,” says Manuel Montes, a UN economist and one of the survey authors. “Agricultural investment has to be revived in order to meet the demands of food production.”
Governments should improve infrastructure, such as roads and water systems, and provide credit and technical support to small farmers, according to the report. Nonprofit organizations and philanthropies can fund research and provide training to farm workers.
The report says the goal should be to provide small farmers with the skills and resources needed to increase food production without harming the environment.
“Small farm holders are at the heart of the food security challenge,” says the report, which cites estimates that up to 90 percent of staple foods are produced locally. “It is at this level that most gains in terms of both sustainable productivity increases and rural poverty reduction can be achieved.”
Small farmers can choose from a variety of eco-friendly agricultural practices, including crop rotation, rainwater harvesting, and organic fertilizing. They can also learn to properly store and preserve the food they grow – about a third of which is lost before consumption, according to a May UN report.
The Global Service Corps, a nonprofit founded in 1993, is one of many organizations that train rural farmers to use sustainable practices.
Volunteers in the group’s Tanzania program teach small farmers how to store grains, vaccinate chickens and use “bio-intensive” farming methods, such as composting. The training enables farmers with limited access to chemical fertilizers and fresh water to grow more food at a lower cost – which the UN report says is critical.
So far, most of the farmers have been eager to try the new techniques, says Global Service Corps founder, Rick Lathrop.
“They can see that the corn in our plot is eight feet high, and the corn in the conventional plot is only four feet,” says Mr. Lathrop. “All they have to do is see it.”
Source
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A farmer spreads fertilizer in a paddy field at Traouri village, located in the northern Indian state of Haryana on July 5.Ajay Verma/Reuters
By Patrick Wall, Contributor / July 6, 2011
New York
The global food system is environmentally destructive and requires “radical” changes if it is to meet rising food demands, says a new United Nations report.
Current farming practices degrade the environment and contribute to global warming, which in turn reduces food production, according to the report. To feed a growing population, farmers around the world must increase food production by up to 100 percent by 2050 – but do so using sustainable methods, with a focus on small farming.
“The world now needs a truly green revolution in agriculture,” says the UN’s annual World Economic and Social Survey, which was released Tuesday.
Recent food shortages and price spikes highlight “deep structural problems” in the global food system, according to the report. Modern agriculture is plagued by over-cultivation, deforestation, and water pollution, the study says, which results in low crop yields.
These practices, combined with climate change and government polices, threaten almost two dozen nations with a “protracted food security crisis.” Worldwide, some 925 million people are undernourished, the report says, with the vast majority living in developing countries.
Meanwhile, the governments in these countries have done little to support the world’s 1.5 billion small farmers, who dominate agriculture in developing nations.
“There have been decades of underinvestment by the public sector,” says Manuel Montes, a UN economist and one of the survey authors. “Agricultural investment has to be revived in order to meet the demands of food production.”
Governments should improve infrastructure, such as roads and water systems, and provide credit and technical support to small farmers, according to the report. Nonprofit organizations and philanthropies can fund research and provide training to farm workers.
The report says the goal should be to provide small farmers with the skills and resources needed to increase food production without harming the environment.
“Small farm holders are at the heart of the food security challenge,” says the report, which cites estimates that up to 90 percent of staple foods are produced locally. “It is at this level that most gains in terms of both sustainable productivity increases and rural poverty reduction can be achieved.”
Small farmers can choose from a variety of eco-friendly agricultural practices, including crop rotation, rainwater harvesting, and organic fertilizing. They can also learn to properly store and preserve the food they grow – about a third of which is lost before consumption, according to a May UN report.
The Global Service Corps, a nonprofit founded in 1993, is one of many organizations that train rural farmers to use sustainable practices.
Volunteers in the group’s Tanzania program teach small farmers how to store grains, vaccinate chickens and use “bio-intensive” farming methods, such as composting. The training enables farmers with limited access to chemical fertilizers and fresh water to grow more food at a lower cost – which the UN report says is critical.
So far, most of the farmers have been eager to try the new techniques, says Global Service Corps founder, Rick Lathrop.
“They can see that the corn in our plot is eight feet high, and the corn in the conventional plot is only four feet,” says Mr. Lathrop. “All they have to do is see it.”
Source
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Tuesday, July 05, 2011
High and volatile food prices are here to stay
“Measures to regulate commodity markets, stem the diversion of food into biofuels, and scale up food reserves in poor countries are essential." - Mark Fried
7 June 2011
7 June 2011
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today announced that cereal prices are 69 percent higher than a year ago and that high and volatile agricultural commodity prices are likely to prevail for the rest of this year and into 2012.
"Rising food prices are very bad news for the world's poorest people,” said Mark Fried, policy coordinator for Oxfam Canada. “They spend up to 80 percent of their income on food. Prices have been rising month after month, with no end in sight."
Oxfam called on G20 Agriculture Ministers meeting in France at the end of June to take urgent steps to rein in food prices. “Measures to regulate commodity markets, stem the diversion of food into biofuels, and scale up food reserves in poor countries are essential,” Fried said.
The FAO also reported that despite record harvests, food supply is expected only to barely meet demand this year, putting added pressure on prices. Recently published research by Oxfam shows that global food prices could more than double in the next 20 years unless governments act now.
Fried said: "Canada wisely broke with the do-nothing policies of the last few years when it began putting significant aid money into helping small-scale farmers, many of them women. The 500 million smallholders in developing countries offer the greatest potential for increasing global food production.
“Sadly, it will take several years for such investment to pay off. Canada also needs to help build countries’ capacity to respond to food emergencies, which are bound to become more frequent and severe. The G20 proposal to help poor countries scale up their food reserves is something Canada ought to champion.”
Oxfam's global Grow Campaign is calling for a transformation in the way we grow and share food so that everyone always has enough to eat. For more information please visit www.oxfam.ca/grow.
Latest data on global food prices is available on the FAO website at: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/
"Rising food prices are very bad news for the world's poorest people,” said Mark Fried, policy coordinator for Oxfam Canada. “They spend up to 80 percent of their income on food. Prices have been rising month after month, with no end in sight."
Oxfam called on G20 Agriculture Ministers meeting in France at the end of June to take urgent steps to rein in food prices. “Measures to regulate commodity markets, stem the diversion of food into biofuels, and scale up food reserves in poor countries are essential,” Fried said.
The FAO also reported that despite record harvests, food supply is expected only to barely meet demand this year, putting added pressure on prices. Recently published research by Oxfam shows that global food prices could more than double in the next 20 years unless governments act now.
Fried said: "Canada wisely broke with the do-nothing policies of the last few years when it began putting significant aid money into helping small-scale farmers, many of them women. The 500 million smallholders in developing countries offer the greatest potential for increasing global food production.
“Sadly, it will take several years for such investment to pay off. Canada also needs to help build countries’ capacity to respond to food emergencies, which are bound to become more frequent and severe. The G20 proposal to help poor countries scale up their food reserves is something Canada ought to champion.”
Oxfam's global Grow Campaign is calling for a transformation in the way we grow and share food so that everyone always has enough to eat. For more information please visit www.oxfam.ca/grow.
Latest data on global food prices is available on the FAO website at: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Global corn supply tightens as U.S. grows less
Reuters Jun 9, 2011 – 1:40 PM ET
Global corn supplies will be much tighter next year than predicted a month ago, the U.S. government said on Thursday as it unexpectedly cut its estimate for the U.S. crop and forecast a jump in demand from China.
Chicago corn futures briefly spiked to an all-time high after the Agriculture Department said rains and floods prevented farmers from planting all the corn they had intended, cutting the likely size of the crop by 2 percent, an unusual revision just weeks ahead of its annual June survey.
That revision, in a monthly report that otherwise made few changes to the domestic crop view, reduced USDA’s forecast for U.S. ending stockpile as of September 2012 by 205 million bushels from the May report. The so-called carry-over stocks would edge near their tightest levels since the mid-1930s for a second year running.
Analysts had expected USDA to predict a smaller 129 million-bushel reduction in end stocks. By the end of next summer, the United States — which grows 40 percent of the world’s corn, more than a third of it used to make ethanol — would have less than a three-week supply on hand. The stocks-to-use ratio, a gauge of supplies, would be 5.2 percent. The lowest in modern times was 5 percent in 1995/96.
The global outlook grew even tighter due to a forecast 13 percent surge in Chinese consumption over this year and next, much more than earlier forecast. China will draw down its large inventories to meet the higher demand, the USDA said, cutting its estimate of China’s domestic stocks by 12 million tonnes. Corn is needed for livestock feed and to make industrial products like starch.
“What has impact on the world market is the U.S. drop” in production, projected for 5 million tonnes, said USDA analyst Jerry Norton. China was unlikely to import corn and, with a preference for large supplies, would not sell corn either.
Wheat, rice and feed (coarse) grains stockpiles are forecast to fall in the coming year at a time when rising crop prices are fueling inflation around the globe, and threatening to revive fears over world food security.
Although the USDA provided some relief on the outlook for wheat — with U.S. stockpiles expected to rise over the coming year by more than traders had anticipated — traders focused on corn, which has led price gains for most of the past year as relentless feed, fuel and food demand strains supply.
Chicago corn futures shot to a record high of $7.93 a bushel at the Chicago Board of Trade on Thursday. Prices later pared gains, but are still up 130 percent from a year ago. Wheat futures fell, and are down 15 percent from their peak in February and almost half their 2008 all-time high.
The USDA said corn plantings would fall 1.5 million acres below the 92.2 million acres planned by growers as heavy rainfall delayed sowing. The harvested area will drop even more sharply, by 2.2 percent, due to losses from floods along the Missouri River and the lower Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
“Planting delays through early June in the eastern Corn Belt and northern Plains are expected to reduce planted area, more than offsetting likely gains in the western Corn Belt and central Plains where planting was ahead of normal by mid-May,” said USDA.
While traders had already factored in some reduction in what was initially forecast to have been the second-highest corn plantings since 1944, it is rare for the USDA to adjust corn area early in the growing season.
The decision stands out all the more because USDA will report on June 30 on its annual survey crop planting, when it contacts 80,000 growers as well as making field surveys.
Besides plaguing the eastern Corn Belt, rains and floods have slashed the rice crop by 5.5 percent since May, USDA said. Drought in the Southwest would reduce the cotton crop by 1 million bales, or nearly 6 percent, to 17 million bales, and the rice crop, at 199.5 million hundredweight, would be the smallest in four years.
While USDA reduced its estimate of corn planting, it did not increase plantings for crops considered likely alternatives, such as soybeans. In the last couple of weeks, agricultural economists have debated if farmers could make more money by filing a prevented planting claim with crop insurers, which would mean leaving fields fallow, than plant a fall-back crop with a lower yield.
“USDA must feel comfortable we are going to lose acres, based on satellite (imagery),” said Jack Scoville, analyst for The Price Group. “We know we’re going to lose the acres; it just depends how much. They didn’t put them in beans.”
Joe Glauber, USDA chief economist, said the soybean planting season was still open.
USDA estimated the winter wheat crop at 1.45 billion bushels, up 2 percent from May. Traders expected a 2 percent drop. “Improved weather conditions during the past month in the upper Great Plains resulted in higher forecasted yields,” said USDA.
© Thomson Reuters 2011
Source
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
The fight over the future of food
A worker collects rice at a plantation in Belcreda Gambolo, 30 km (20 miles) southwest of Milan in northern Italy November 6, 2009.REUTERS/Alessandro Garofalo
By Claudia Parsons, Russell Blinch and Svetlana Kovalyova
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON/MILAN (Reuters) - At first glance, Giuseppe Oglio's farm near Milan looks like it's suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop.
Oglio, a third generation farmer eschews modern farming techniques -- chemicals, fertilizers, heavy machinery -- in favor of a purely natural approach. It is not just ecological, he says, but profitable, and he believes his system can be replicated in starving regions of the globe.
Nearly 5,000 miles away, in laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world's biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world, only their tools of choice are laser beams and petri dishes.
Monsanto, a leader in agricultural biotechnology, spends about $2 million a day on scientific research that aims to improve on Mother Nature, and is positioning itself as a key player in the fight against hunger.
The Italian farmer and the U.S. multinational represent the two extremes in an increasingly acrimonious debate over the future of food.
Everybody wants to end hunger, but just how to do so is a divisive question that pits environmentalists against anti-poverty campaigners, big business against consumers and rich countries against poor.
The food fight takes place at a time when experts on both sides agree on one thing -- the number of empty bellies around the world will only grow unless there is major intervention now.
A combination of the food crisis and the global economic downturn has catapulted the number of hungry people in the world to more than 1 billion. The United Nations says world food output must grow by 70 percent over the next four decades to feed a projected extra 2.3 billion people by 2050.
International leaders are gathering in Rome next week for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's World Summit on Food Security and will hear competing arguments over how best to tackle the problem. One of the fiercest disputes will be over the relative importance of science versus social and economic reforms to empower small farmers to grow more with existing technology.
"LISTEN TO NATURE"
Much of Europe has moved away from an agricultural system of small farms to mass commercial farming, but Italy still retains a base of family farmers who produce everything from olives to mozzarella cheese.
Oglio is one of them. A charismatic 40-year-old, he dropped out of an agricultural school after growing disillusioned with the farming methods being taught there. Today, he lets nature run its course as he grows cereals and legumes on his small family farm in Belcreda di Gambolo, about 20 miles southwest of Milan.
He does not use any chemical, or even natural fertilizers or pesticides. He does not weed his fields. "All you need to do is observe nature, listen to it, do what nature suggests and it will take care of everything," he said.
His fields, in a low-lying plain that has a long history of growing rice used for risotto, replicate patterns found in nature. For example, clover and millet grow together, feeding each other with necessary minerals.
Oglio said his farm is eco-sustainable. He has slashed operating costs by eliminating expensive commercial products like herbicides and by reducing the use of agricultural machinery to a minimum. Such cheap and low-maintenance farming could be adopted in Africa and other regions hit by poverty and hunger, he said.
"Natural farming will not save the world. But it can feed poor families," he said.
But it's unlikely it can do so on the scale that most experts believe is necessary. And therein lies the rub. Affluent consumers may prefer the Oglios of the world to the Monsantos, but their skittishness about high-tech agriculture is making it more difficult to grapple with the mounting crisis over the lack of food.
LEARNING FROM THE PAST
The last time the world faced such dire predictions of famine was before the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when countries like India and China transformed their agricultural systems to become self-sufficient in food. They did so by harnessing plant-breeding technology to raise yields on rice, wheat and other staple crops.
Through massive state investment in hybrid rice, China, the world's most populous country, raised its yields from two tons per hectare in the 1960s to more than 10 tons per hectare by 2004. Chinese scientists seek further gains -- 13.5 tons per hectare by 2015, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which cites China's rice program as one of the true success stories in agricultural development in a study out this week (November 12) called "Millions Fed."
To be sure, the Green Revolution had its downsides -- environmental damage, to name one. In India, for example, water tables are drying up and the soil has been degraded by pesticide and fertilizers. The movement also contributed to the rise of big commercial farms at the expense of small holders, fueling resentment from its early days at what critics see as the "corporatization" of food.
But millions of people were saved from starvation, and the movement's architect, Norman Borlaug, received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.
With their populations soaring, however, India and China -- not to mention most of Africa -- still face challenges, especially as climate change exacerbates environmental problems that have already slowed growth in food production.
IFPRI, part of a global network of agricultural research centers, said last month lower yields due to climate change would cut "calorie availability" for the average consumer in a developing country in 2050 by 7 percent, compared with 2000.
Higher temperatures reduce crop yields while encouraging pests and plant diseases. For almost all crops, South Asia would experience the largest declines in yields. IFPRI said rice output in the region would be 14 percent lower than if there were no climate change.
"India sorely needs another Green Revolution," said Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, joint managing director of Bajaj Hinduthan, India's top sugar producer, which is importing raw sugar after a drought hit the domestic cane crop.
But a second green revolution would face a strong counterinsurgency, even in a place like India that benefited so profoundly from the first one.
"The point is that chemicals destroy the sustainability of productivity in the long run ... Yes, a second green revolution is indeed very essential -- the very need of the hour. But it should not be the same kind of green revolution that the first was," said P.C. Kesavan, a fellow at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, set up by the father of India's Green Revolution.
Economists and scientists in India are demanding a raft of policy initiatives, including allowing genetic engineering, which its proponents argue does the same job as traditional plant hybridization, only quicker and more efficiently.
India has so far allowed GM seeds only for cotton, which has boosted productivity, but suggestions of allowing such seeds for edible crops have always evoked strong protests.
CRADLE OF CORN
It's a similar story in Mexico, where Borlaug started his pioneering research in the 1940s at the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program. Mexico issued permits last month for the first time for farmers to grow genetically modified corn.
Considered by many the cradle of corn, Mexico is home to more than 10,000 varieties, used to make the classic tortilla, a staple of the Mexican diet. Corn was first planted in Mexico as many as 9,000 years ago and the grain was adapted by Spanish conquerors in the early 1500s and eventually spread to the rest of the world.
Mexico faces the same dilemmas over GM corn as do many developing countries -- balancing consumer fears with the need to grow more food.
"We see corn as our cultural heritage, our legacy. For us it's not just a question of food, but about conserving our traditions," said Celerino Tlacotempa, who works for an organization of native Nahuatl farmers in the southern mountains of Guerrero state.
"With genetically modified seeds we will lose our varieties of colored corn. There will be no more purple corn, black corn, white corn," Tlacotempa said. "Above all, we will be condemned to buy seeds from companies like Monsanto. It's not sustainable. It's a real risk for the wellbeing of these communities."
At the same time, other Mexican farmers in the north of the country have been cultivating GM seeds smuggled over the border from the United States for some time, attracted by the crops' greater resilience to drought and pests and higher yields.
Tomas Lumpkin, director of CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center that Borlaug started in Mexico, said the country now imports about half of the corn it consumes. With climate change and other pressures, he said, it was vital to raise production using all tools available.
"It is a much more complex and difficult world than Borlaug faced, but we have much more powerful tools than he had, and we need to start testing those and deploying those," he said.
"GMOs are just another set of tools in the toolbox, but we need to be able to use those tools," Lumpkin said. "If we could deploy those varieties so that the farmer in the developing world has the same powerful seed as the farmer in Iowa, why should they be handicapped?"
RICH CONSUMERS RESIST GM
Monsanto launched the world's first genetically modified crop in 1996 and GM crops are now grown in countries ranging from Australia to South Africa, the Philippines and Brazil.
Up to 85 percent of the massive U.S. corn crop is genetically engineered, as well as up 91 percent of soybeans and 88 percent of cotton, according to U.S. data.
As ingrained as GM crops may seem, a backlash against the technology appears to be growing.
Opposition to genetic modification of seeds has long been strongest in Europe. The European Union severely restricts use of GM seeds on its territory, as well as imports of products containing GM-derived food. Individual countries including Germany ban even GM seeds that are authorized, such as an insect-resistant maize type, MON 810, developed by Monsanto.
Now consumer resistance to what British tabloids long ago dubbed "Frankenfood" is taking root in the United States too.
With North America's industrial farming system, consumers who buy packaged goods from grocery stores are likely eating GM products without even knowing it, according to environmental group the Center for Food Safety. The group, which was involved in a successful court battle to stop introduction of Monsanto's genetically engineered alfalfa seed, also contends that up to 70 percent of soda, soup, crackers and other processed goods sold under major household brands are GM derived.
"There really is no human health analysis of GM crops," said William Freese, science policy analyst for the center. "It's a real result of the policy that our government has put in place, which is basically a presumption of innocence."
A banner issue for U.S. anti-GM crusaders is genetically engineered growth hormones for dairy cows, known as rBGH. Introduced in the United States in 1994, rBGH is a drug to extend milk production after a cow gives birth. It was developed by Monsanto but recently sold to Eli Lilly and Co.
Health Care Without Harm, a global coalition of hospitals and other health groups, believes the drug is dangerous because it increases the likelihood of infection in the cow's udder, which leads to greater antibiotic use in the animals. That contributes to antibiotic-resistance in humans, they argue.
Other critics say it may be linked to cancer in humans, despite U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals.
Proponents have won over a string of big names to reject the drug, including the big yogurt makers Yoplait and Dannon, and have also lobbied coffee chain Starbucks to oppose rBGH.
A Starbucks spokesman said the firm's entire core dairy supply comes from suppliers that do not use the hormone.
"Our core products, coffee and tea, are not genetically modified," the spokesman said in a statement. "We have no plans to purchase coffee or tea that is derived from GM sources, now or in the future."
The industry notes that GM research is supported by a number of august groups, including the Royal Society of Britain and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Keywords: FOOD/
"IDEOLOGICAL WEDGE"
For those seeking to end global hunger, rather than just satisfy rich consumers' craving for cappuccino, Africa presents the greatest challenges.
Monsanto, together with corporate rivals, is working with poor countries and charitable groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, set up by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and his wife.
At the annual World Food Prize forum last month, Gates warned that the fight to end hunger was being hurt by environmentalists who insist that genetically modified crops should not be used in Africa. He said it was vital to help small farmers there boost production by all means, including GM crops, fertilizer and chemicals.
"This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two," Gates said at the forum for the prize, which was created by Borlaug, who died in September at the age of 95.
"Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment," Gates said. "They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it."
Rajul Pandya-Lorch, who has worked for the IFPRI thinktank on food for 22 years, summed it up like this: "I'm a Kenyan. I resent very much people telling us in Africa 'OK, this biotechnology is not good for you.' Well, we have different problems than you do, and if it helps us to solve a problem, we should try it."
Yet, even in Africa, there is suspicion of GM technology. Many countries there, such as Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania, do not allow GM seeds.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a Kenya-based group set up in 2006 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation, targets its programs specifically at small-scale farmers.
Three-quarters of the world's poorest billion people live in rural areas, dependent on farming for their livelihoods.
AGRA's Program for Africa's Seed Systems uses conventional breeding to develop new varieties of maize, cassava, beans, rice, sorghum, and other crops resistant to diseases and pests. The goal is to develop and release more than 1,000 improved crop varieties over the next 10 years.
"We've adopted a small grant mechanism that gets money out to plant breeders on the ground, so that they can, over a period of years, and selections and lots of consultations with local farmers, and access to the world's gene banks, come up with something that's truly novel, much higher yielding and resistant to local diseases and with the taste and texture that local people want," said Joseph DeVries, director of PASS.
"To leap to the GM model at this stage, just seems like it's ignoring a lot of the things that make sense locally, that people can do locally without it," he said.
Kostas Stamoulis, director of the FAO's Agricultural Development Economics Division, said only a few food crops are in wide use in genetically modified forms, and most are not well adapted to the varied and often extreme environmental conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa has eight or more staple crops that are grown in a wide variety of climates and conditions, making it far more of a challenge than in Asia, where single staple crops, such as rice, are grown in relatively homogenous conditions over wide areas. Stamoulis emphasized the need for all kinds of technology, including traditional plant breeding.
He said there should be a balance between "people that, in my view, make the extraordinarily dangerous proposition that you can feed the world with organics, which is absolutely crazy, and those who are fanatic about GMOs without looking at the full balance of options."
WHERE'S THE MONEY?
The FAO said last month the world needs to invest $83 billion a year in agriculture in developing countries to feed a predicted population of 9.1 billion people in 2050.
To achieve that, both public and private investment on a grand scale is needed, but the trend on the public side has been discouraging. Official development assistance to agriculture plunged 58 percent in real terms from 1980 to 2005, dropping from 17 percent of total aid to 3.8 percent over that period. It now stands at about 5 percent, the FAO said.
Yet, the payoff from agricultural investment, particularly by governments, can be seen in Brazil, a case study in how the Green Revolution transformed a developing country.
Within a few decades it developed from a producer of a handful of cash crops into one of the world's largest producers of food stuffs, with an agriculture business worth nearly 300 billion reais ($172 billion) in annual sales.
Brazil began its Green Revolution in the mid-1970s, with the creation of the government farm research firm Embrapa, which resulted in increased diversification and productivity of crops as well as the expansion of cropland.
Each year Embrapa measures the return to society from research in agriculture. Latest figures show that each dollar spent on agriculture research generates a return of $13.50.
Last year's food crisis, when fears of food shortages gripped grain markets -- sending wheat and rice prices soaring to record highs and sparking hoarding and riots -- was a wake-up call, one that experts hope will translate into sustained investment.
The unrest was a powerful reminder of the risks of food insecurity and helped spur the world's richest nations to promise to spend $20 billion over three years to help small, subsistence farmers improve their productivity.
U.S. President Barack Obama has launched a $3.5 billion hunger and food security initiative focused on agriculture.
Back on the farm in Italy, Oglio said an operation like his can be run on a shoe-string budget, without the sort of subsidies that prop up agriculture, even in the wealthy European Union.
The 87-acre (35-hectare) farm that his parents used to run in a conventional way was on the edge of bankruptcy 20 years ago, burdened by high operating costs and competition in the changing economy of Europe.
With his back-to-nature methods, Oglio turned the farm around and now makes profits.
But that is a very European story. His customers, he admits, are willing to pay more for his healthful products because many of them are environmentalists.
The world's poorest people -- 1 billion of them -- may not have the luxury of making that choice.
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON/MILAN (Reuters) - At first glance, Giuseppe Oglio's farm near Milan looks like it's suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop.
Oglio, a third generation farmer eschews modern farming techniques -- chemicals, fertilizers, heavy machinery -- in favor of a purely natural approach. It is not just ecological, he says, but profitable, and he believes his system can be replicated in starving regions of the globe.
Nearly 5,000 miles away, in laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world's biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world, only their tools of choice are laser beams and petri dishes.
Monsanto, a leader in agricultural biotechnology, spends about $2 million a day on scientific research that aims to improve on Mother Nature, and is positioning itself as a key player in the fight against hunger.
The Italian farmer and the U.S. multinational represent the two extremes in an increasingly acrimonious debate over the future of food.
Everybody wants to end hunger, but just how to do so is a divisive question that pits environmentalists against anti-poverty campaigners, big business against consumers and rich countries against poor.
The food fight takes place at a time when experts on both sides agree on one thing -- the number of empty bellies around the world will only grow unless there is major intervention now.
A combination of the food crisis and the global economic downturn has catapulted the number of hungry people in the world to more than 1 billion. The United Nations says world food output must grow by 70 percent over the next four decades to feed a projected extra 2.3 billion people by 2050.
International leaders are gathering in Rome next week for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's World Summit on Food Security and will hear competing arguments over how best to tackle the problem. One of the fiercest disputes will be over the relative importance of science versus social and economic reforms to empower small farmers to grow more with existing technology.
"LISTEN TO NATURE"
Much of Europe has moved away from an agricultural system of small farms to mass commercial farming, but Italy still retains a base of family farmers who produce everything from olives to mozzarella cheese.
Oglio is one of them. A charismatic 40-year-old, he dropped out of an agricultural school after growing disillusioned with the farming methods being taught there. Today, he lets nature run its course as he grows cereals and legumes on his small family farm in Belcreda di Gambolo, about 20 miles southwest of Milan.
He does not use any chemical, or even natural fertilizers or pesticides. He does not weed his fields. "All you need to do is observe nature, listen to it, do what nature suggests and it will take care of everything," he said.
His fields, in a low-lying plain that has a long history of growing rice used for risotto, replicate patterns found in nature. For example, clover and millet grow together, feeding each other with necessary minerals.
Oglio said his farm is eco-sustainable. He has slashed operating costs by eliminating expensive commercial products like herbicides and by reducing the use of agricultural machinery to a minimum. Such cheap and low-maintenance farming could be adopted in Africa and other regions hit by poverty and hunger, he said.
"Natural farming will not save the world. But it can feed poor families," he said.
But it's unlikely it can do so on the scale that most experts believe is necessary. And therein lies the rub. Affluent consumers may prefer the Oglios of the world to the Monsantos, but their skittishness about high-tech agriculture is making it more difficult to grapple with the mounting crisis over the lack of food.
LEARNING FROM THE PAST
The last time the world faced such dire predictions of famine was before the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when countries like India and China transformed their agricultural systems to become self-sufficient in food. They did so by harnessing plant-breeding technology to raise yields on rice, wheat and other staple crops.
Through massive state investment in hybrid rice, China, the world's most populous country, raised its yields from two tons per hectare in the 1960s to more than 10 tons per hectare by 2004. Chinese scientists seek further gains -- 13.5 tons per hectare by 2015, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which cites China's rice program as one of the true success stories in agricultural development in a study out this week (November 12) called "Millions Fed."
To be sure, the Green Revolution had its downsides -- environmental damage, to name one. In India, for example, water tables are drying up and the soil has been degraded by pesticide and fertilizers. The movement also contributed to the rise of big commercial farms at the expense of small holders, fueling resentment from its early days at what critics see as the "corporatization" of food.
But millions of people were saved from starvation, and the movement's architect, Norman Borlaug, received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.
With their populations soaring, however, India and China -- not to mention most of Africa -- still face challenges, especially as climate change exacerbates environmental problems that have already slowed growth in food production.
IFPRI, part of a global network of agricultural research centers, said last month lower yields due to climate change would cut "calorie availability" for the average consumer in a developing country in 2050 by 7 percent, compared with 2000.
Higher temperatures reduce crop yields while encouraging pests and plant diseases. For almost all crops, South Asia would experience the largest declines in yields. IFPRI said rice output in the region would be 14 percent lower than if there were no climate change.
"India sorely needs another Green Revolution," said Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, joint managing director of Bajaj Hinduthan, India's top sugar producer, which is importing raw sugar after a drought hit the domestic cane crop.
But a second green revolution would face a strong counterinsurgency, even in a place like India that benefited so profoundly from the first one.
"The point is that chemicals destroy the sustainability of productivity in the long run ... Yes, a second green revolution is indeed very essential -- the very need of the hour. But it should not be the same kind of green revolution that the first was," said P.C. Kesavan, a fellow at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, set up by the father of India's Green Revolution.
Economists and scientists in India are demanding a raft of policy initiatives, including allowing genetic engineering, which its proponents argue does the same job as traditional plant hybridization, only quicker and more efficiently.
India has so far allowed GM seeds only for cotton, which has boosted productivity, but suggestions of allowing such seeds for edible crops have always evoked strong protests.
CRADLE OF CORN
It's a similar story in Mexico, where Borlaug started his pioneering research in the 1940s at the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program. Mexico issued permits last month for the first time for farmers to grow genetically modified corn.
Considered by many the cradle of corn, Mexico is home to more than 10,000 varieties, used to make the classic tortilla, a staple of the Mexican diet. Corn was first planted in Mexico as many as 9,000 years ago and the grain was adapted by Spanish conquerors in the early 1500s and eventually spread to the rest of the world.
Mexico faces the same dilemmas over GM corn as do many developing countries -- balancing consumer fears with the need to grow more food.
"We see corn as our cultural heritage, our legacy. For us it's not just a question of food, but about conserving our traditions," said Celerino Tlacotempa, who works for an organization of native Nahuatl farmers in the southern mountains of Guerrero state.
"With genetically modified seeds we will lose our varieties of colored corn. There will be no more purple corn, black corn, white corn," Tlacotempa said. "Above all, we will be condemned to buy seeds from companies like Monsanto. It's not sustainable. It's a real risk for the wellbeing of these communities."
At the same time, other Mexican farmers in the north of the country have been cultivating GM seeds smuggled over the border from the United States for some time, attracted by the crops' greater resilience to drought and pests and higher yields.
Tomas Lumpkin, director of CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center that Borlaug started in Mexico, said the country now imports about half of the corn it consumes. With climate change and other pressures, he said, it was vital to raise production using all tools available.
"It is a much more complex and difficult world than Borlaug faced, but we have much more powerful tools than he had, and we need to start testing those and deploying those," he said.
"GMOs are just another set of tools in the toolbox, but we need to be able to use those tools," Lumpkin said. "If we could deploy those varieties so that the farmer in the developing world has the same powerful seed as the farmer in Iowa, why should they be handicapped?"
RICH CONSUMERS RESIST GM
Monsanto launched the world's first genetically modified crop in 1996 and GM crops are now grown in countries ranging from Australia to South Africa, the Philippines and Brazil.
Up to 85 percent of the massive U.S. corn crop is genetically engineered, as well as up 91 percent of soybeans and 88 percent of cotton, according to U.S. data.
As ingrained as GM crops may seem, a backlash against the technology appears to be growing.
Opposition to genetic modification of seeds has long been strongest in Europe. The European Union severely restricts use of GM seeds on its territory, as well as imports of products containing GM-derived food. Individual countries including Germany ban even GM seeds that are authorized, such as an insect-resistant maize type, MON 810, developed by Monsanto.
Now consumer resistance to what British tabloids long ago dubbed "Frankenfood" is taking root in the United States too.
With North America's industrial farming system, consumers who buy packaged goods from grocery stores are likely eating GM products without even knowing it, according to environmental group the Center for Food Safety. The group, which was involved in a successful court battle to stop introduction of Monsanto's genetically engineered alfalfa seed, also contends that up to 70 percent of soda, soup, crackers and other processed goods sold under major household brands are GM derived.
"There really is no human health analysis of GM crops," said William Freese, science policy analyst for the center. "It's a real result of the policy that our government has put in place, which is basically a presumption of innocence."
A banner issue for U.S. anti-GM crusaders is genetically engineered growth hormones for dairy cows, known as rBGH. Introduced in the United States in 1994, rBGH is a drug to extend milk production after a cow gives birth. It was developed by Monsanto but recently sold to Eli Lilly and Co.
Health Care Without Harm, a global coalition of hospitals and other health groups, believes the drug is dangerous because it increases the likelihood of infection in the cow's udder, which leads to greater antibiotic use in the animals. That contributes to antibiotic-resistance in humans, they argue.
Other critics say it may be linked to cancer in humans, despite U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals.
Proponents have won over a string of big names to reject the drug, including the big yogurt makers Yoplait and Dannon, and have also lobbied coffee chain Starbucks to oppose rBGH.
A Starbucks spokesman said the firm's entire core dairy supply comes from suppliers that do not use the hormone.
"Our core products, coffee and tea, are not genetically modified," the spokesman said in a statement. "We have no plans to purchase coffee or tea that is derived from GM sources, now or in the future."
The industry notes that GM research is supported by a number of august groups, including the Royal Society of Britain and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Keywords: FOOD/
"IDEOLOGICAL WEDGE"
For those seeking to end global hunger, rather than just satisfy rich consumers' craving for cappuccino, Africa presents the greatest challenges.
Monsanto, together with corporate rivals, is working with poor countries and charitable groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, set up by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and his wife.
At the annual World Food Prize forum last month, Gates warned that the fight to end hunger was being hurt by environmentalists who insist that genetically modified crops should not be used in Africa. He said it was vital to help small farmers there boost production by all means, including GM crops, fertilizer and chemicals.
"This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two," Gates said at the forum for the prize, which was created by Borlaug, who died in September at the age of 95.
"Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment," Gates said. "They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it."
Rajul Pandya-Lorch, who has worked for the IFPRI thinktank on food for 22 years, summed it up like this: "I'm a Kenyan. I resent very much people telling us in Africa 'OK, this biotechnology is not good for you.' Well, we have different problems than you do, and if it helps us to solve a problem, we should try it."
Yet, even in Africa, there is suspicion of GM technology. Many countries there, such as Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania, do not allow GM seeds.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a Kenya-based group set up in 2006 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation, targets its programs specifically at small-scale farmers.
Three-quarters of the world's poorest billion people live in rural areas, dependent on farming for their livelihoods.
AGRA's Program for Africa's Seed Systems uses conventional breeding to develop new varieties of maize, cassava, beans, rice, sorghum, and other crops resistant to diseases and pests. The goal is to develop and release more than 1,000 improved crop varieties over the next 10 years.
"We've adopted a small grant mechanism that gets money out to plant breeders on the ground, so that they can, over a period of years, and selections and lots of consultations with local farmers, and access to the world's gene banks, come up with something that's truly novel, much higher yielding and resistant to local diseases and with the taste and texture that local people want," said Joseph DeVries, director of PASS.
"To leap to the GM model at this stage, just seems like it's ignoring a lot of the things that make sense locally, that people can do locally without it," he said.
Kostas Stamoulis, director of the FAO's Agricultural Development Economics Division, said only a few food crops are in wide use in genetically modified forms, and most are not well adapted to the varied and often extreme environmental conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa has eight or more staple crops that are grown in a wide variety of climates and conditions, making it far more of a challenge than in Asia, where single staple crops, such as rice, are grown in relatively homogenous conditions over wide areas. Stamoulis emphasized the need for all kinds of technology, including traditional plant breeding.
He said there should be a balance between "people that, in my view, make the extraordinarily dangerous proposition that you can feed the world with organics, which is absolutely crazy, and those who are fanatic about GMOs without looking at the full balance of options."
WHERE'S THE MONEY?
The FAO said last month the world needs to invest $83 billion a year in agriculture in developing countries to feed a predicted population of 9.1 billion people in 2050.
To achieve that, both public and private investment on a grand scale is needed, but the trend on the public side has been discouraging. Official development assistance to agriculture plunged 58 percent in real terms from 1980 to 2005, dropping from 17 percent of total aid to 3.8 percent over that period. It now stands at about 5 percent, the FAO said.
Yet, the payoff from agricultural investment, particularly by governments, can be seen in Brazil, a case study in how the Green Revolution transformed a developing country.
Within a few decades it developed from a producer of a handful of cash crops into one of the world's largest producers of food stuffs, with an agriculture business worth nearly 300 billion reais ($172 billion) in annual sales.
Brazil began its Green Revolution in the mid-1970s, with the creation of the government farm research firm Embrapa, which resulted in increased diversification and productivity of crops as well as the expansion of cropland.
Each year Embrapa measures the return to society from research in agriculture. Latest figures show that each dollar spent on agriculture research generates a return of $13.50.
Last year's food crisis, when fears of food shortages gripped grain markets -- sending wheat and rice prices soaring to record highs and sparking hoarding and riots -- was a wake-up call, one that experts hope will translate into sustained investment.
The unrest was a powerful reminder of the risks of food insecurity and helped spur the world's richest nations to promise to spend $20 billion over three years to help small, subsistence farmers improve their productivity.
U.S. President Barack Obama has launched a $3.5 billion hunger and food security initiative focused on agriculture.
Back on the farm in Italy, Oglio said an operation like his can be run on a shoe-string budget, without the sort of subsidies that prop up agriculture, even in the wealthy European Union.
The 87-acre (35-hectare) farm that his parents used to run in a conventional way was on the edge of bankruptcy 20 years ago, burdened by high operating costs and competition in the changing economy of Europe.
With his back-to-nature methods, Oglio turned the farm around and now makes profits.
But that is a very European story. His customers, he admits, are willing to pay more for his healthful products because many of them are environmentalists.
The world's poorest people -- 1 billion of them -- may not have the luxury of making that choice.
For graphics to illustrate this report see: here here (Additional reporting by Carey Gillam, Himangshu Watts, Raymond Colitt, Mica Rosenberg and Ed Cropley; editing by Jim Impoco and Walter Bagley)
.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods
Monday, 5 October 2009, 1:17 pm
Press Release: Robt Mann
Commentary on Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods
September 2, 2009
GBC News Sep 1, 2009 http://gbcghana.com/news/27886detail.html
By Edem Srem
Sad to say, Genetically Modified foods have been introduced to the African Market. It is now up to African consumers to reject them. This will save lives and cost for the treatment of the side effects of consuming Genetically Modified foods.*
*The history of controlling the food industry in the world by the then American Government in 1973 under President Nixon started by introducing the "Food for Peace" programme which was led by Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser.*
According to the New African Magazine, Kissinger controlled absolutely the US foreign policy and summarized his activities as "Control oil and you control nations, control food and you control the people". His idea of capturing the worldwide food industry started with the introduction of what was termed as the gene revolution.
The revolution did not succeed until 1990. a member of the South African consumer movement, Andrew Taynton explains that whereas natural breeding techniques select plants or animals with desirable traits and cross breed within a species to create better crops or animals, genetically modified are developed in laboratories by splicing genes from unrelated species into the host organism.
For instance, bacterial genes can be spliced into food crops and it will reproduce itself in each cell in the plants. Also scientists are now transferring anti-freeze genes from fish to tomatoes to keep it longer in the cold. There is also the splicing of pig genes into rice and daffodils to corn. All these have devastating effects, because of its imprecise processes.
The main effects of consuming genetically modified foods includes; allergies, new toxins, new diseases, antibiotic resistance and change in nutritional values. One other thing which needs to be mentioned is the "V Gurts" Varietal Genetic Use Restriction Technology which is popularly called the "Suicide Seeds" or terminator technology.
One expert believes Africa is in great danger now as genetically modified seeds are made in forms of herbicides and pesticides. These are normally exported to Africa and the Caribbean. The centre for Disease Control of the United States says that at lease 80% of food related illnesses are cause by viruses or pathogens that scientist cannot even identify.
Prince Charles, the heir to the British Throne, was once reported to have stated that "growing genetically modified crops in the developing world represents the biggest environmental disaster of all time".
With the realities of climate change, it is just an option to reject these kinds of foods on the market. More revelations have been made by Dr. Arpad Pusztai, when he found out that rat fed on genetically modified potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains.
It was also revealed that their immune systems have been damaged with a lot of structural changes in their white blood cells, making them vulnerable to infections and other diseases as compared to rats which were fed on normal organic foods. The same changes occur in humans who also take genetically modified foods.
Thus, the whole world could be exterminated if nothing is done to stop it. We have all become lab rats in mass human experiment with huge risks. The risks will be too late to detect and save the world especially Africa because it will take longer times to find the antidotes. By then the genetically modified companies would have made their money.
Apart from South Africa which has started growing genetically modified crops, the remaining African countries must reject and fight against governments who want to adopt the technology. Ghana should also try to establish strict checks on imported foods, seeds, herbicides and pesticides to control, if not to stop the spread of the genetically modified crops in the country.
The solution is to accept nuclear foods which are done through induced mutations. World examples of induced mutations include; Tek Bankye which has been developed by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in collaboration with the IAEA. The Biotechnology and Nuclear Agricultural Research Institute has carried out researches that show that the Tek bankye yields as high as 17.84 tons per acre.
Kenya has also developed a high yielding and drought resistant wheat. Hopefully all Africans, especially, Ghanaians would reject genetically modified foods for a sustainable environment and good health.
ENDS
Press Release: Robt Mann
Commentary on Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods
September 2, 2009
GBC News Sep 1, 2009 http://gbcghana.com/news/27886detail.html
By Edem Srem
Sad to say, Genetically Modified foods have been introduced to the African Market. It is now up to African consumers to reject them. This will save lives and cost for the treatment of the side effects of consuming Genetically Modified foods.*
*The history of controlling the food industry in the world by the then American Government in 1973 under President Nixon started by introducing the "Food for Peace" programme which was led by Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser.*
According to the New African Magazine, Kissinger controlled absolutely the US foreign policy and summarized his activities as "Control oil and you control nations, control food and you control the people". His idea of capturing the worldwide food industry started with the introduction of what was termed as the gene revolution.
The revolution did not succeed until 1990. a member of the South African consumer movement, Andrew Taynton explains that whereas natural breeding techniques select plants or animals with desirable traits and cross breed within a species to create better crops or animals, genetically modified are developed in laboratories by splicing genes from unrelated species into the host organism.
For instance, bacterial genes can be spliced into food crops and it will reproduce itself in each cell in the plants. Also scientists are now transferring anti-freeze genes from fish to tomatoes to keep it longer in the cold. There is also the splicing of pig genes into rice and daffodils to corn. All these have devastating effects, because of its imprecise processes.
The main effects of consuming genetically modified foods includes; allergies, new toxins, new diseases, antibiotic resistance and change in nutritional values. One other thing which needs to be mentioned is the "V Gurts" Varietal Genetic Use Restriction Technology which is popularly called the "Suicide Seeds" or terminator technology.
One expert believes Africa is in great danger now as genetically modified seeds are made in forms of herbicides and pesticides. These are normally exported to Africa and the Caribbean. The centre for Disease Control of the United States says that at lease 80% of food related illnesses are cause by viruses or pathogens that scientist cannot even identify.
Prince Charles, the heir to the British Throne, was once reported to have stated that "growing genetically modified crops in the developing world represents the biggest environmental disaster of all time".
With the realities of climate change, it is just an option to reject these kinds of foods on the market. More revelations have been made by Dr. Arpad Pusztai, when he found out that rat fed on genetically modified potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains.
It was also revealed that their immune systems have been damaged with a lot of structural changes in their white blood cells, making them vulnerable to infections and other diseases as compared to rats which were fed on normal organic foods. The same changes occur in humans who also take genetically modified foods.
Thus, the whole world could be exterminated if nothing is done to stop it. We have all become lab rats in mass human experiment with huge risks. The risks will be too late to detect and save the world especially Africa because it will take longer times to find the antidotes. By then the genetically modified companies would have made their money.
Apart from South Africa which has started growing genetically modified crops, the remaining African countries must reject and fight against governments who want to adopt the technology. Ghana should also try to establish strict checks on imported foods, seeds, herbicides and pesticides to control, if not to stop the spread of the genetically modified crops in the country.
The solution is to accept nuclear foods which are done through induced mutations. World examples of induced mutations include; Tek Bankye which has been developed by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in collaboration with the IAEA. The Biotechnology and Nuclear Agricultural Research Institute has carried out researches that show that the Tek bankye yields as high as 17.84 tons per acre.
Kenya has also developed a high yielding and drought resistant wheat. Hopefully all Africans, especially, Ghanaians would reject genetically modified foods for a sustainable environment and good health.
ENDS
.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Feeding a More Diverse Market
Aaron Houston for The New York Times
FLAVORS OF HOME Evergreen Farm, owned by Sun Yi and Chong Il Kim, grows Korean pears on trees supported by trellises.
FLAVORS OF HOME Evergreen Farm, owned by Sun Yi and Chong Il Kim, grows Korean pears on trees supported by trellises.
By KEVIN COYNE
Published: August 21, 2009
Hamilton Township
Aaron Houston for The New York Times
Aaron Houston for The New York Times
It also produces white peaches.
THE pear trees are trained to grow up and over the long rows of trellises that stretch across this old soybean farm near Trenton, and as they have matured in the dozen years since Chong Il Kim planted them, they have formed a leafy arch just tall enough to let his maroon Ford pickup pass beneath.
Mr. Kim, 59, bounced gently along behind the wheel one recent morning, the shady aisle reaching ahead of him like the nave of a church. The round, green Korean pears he was inspecting were approaching the size of tennis balls. In a matter of weeks, they would be worth as much as $3 apiece to fans of Asian fruit, who find nothing to match their flavor in domestic varieties.
“Looks good so far,” Mr. Kim said, and when he reached the end of one corridor of pears, he turned and drove slowly down another, enveloped by his crop. From the distance beyond a tall tree line rose a steady hum: the river of traffic along the New Jersey Turnpike, which marks the western border of his 140-acre orchard. “This is good here, better than California.”
Elsewhere on Evergreen Farm, other fruits were ripening, too. The plums were ready to pick, and the season’s first customers had arrived for them the previous Sunday. The peaches would soon be ripe, then the grapes and the apples. But the pears are the marquee fruit here — covering about 70 percent of the orchard and, since it opened to the public three years ago, luring a steady stream of mostly Asian customers with the chance to pick for themselves a taste of their old home.
“When someone’s going to eat one for the first time, I say, ‘Just close your eyes and imagine you’re tasting a melon from another planet,’” said Dan Ward, a fruit specialist with the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. “‘Sprightly’ is the word I sometimes use to describe the sensation of that first bite. It releases a lot of juice in your mouth.”
Korean pears are rounder, greener, crisper, sweeter, juicier (“sparkly” is another adjective Mr. Ward likes) than the more familiar varieties, and closer in texture to an apple. They are also much costlier: a serve-to-guests luxury, not a brown-bag-lunch commodity, the kind of specialty crop for a specialty market that has altered New Jersey’s agricultural landscape in recent years.
Every license plate in New Jersey is a reminder of the state’s historical role as the market garden for New York and Philadelphia, before suburbanization gobbled up the fields, and refrigerated transport allowed produce to travel here from distant locations. Sweet corn and tomatoes still define summer in the state, but they have been joined by cilantro, bok choy, calabaza, jalapeños and Mr. Kim’s pears.
“Those are the kind of crops that really are well suited to New Jersey,” Mr. Ward said. “Niche-marketed crops with high value that really have an advantage in being produced locally.”
As the state’s population has diversified, so has its diet and its produce-buying, according to a three-year federally funded study about ethnic agriculture by a group of Rutgers researchers. “One of the surprising results of our survey was that the four key groups, which represent several million people on the East Coast, spend much more of their food dollar on fresh produce compared to the average American,” said Bill Sciarappa, a Rutgers extension agent in Monmouth County, referring to the shopping habits of those with Puerto Rican, Mexican, Asian Indian and Chinese ancestry.
And they’ll go farther to get it. “They’ll travel 20 miles to get their specific fruit or vegetable,” Mr. Sciarappa said.
When the pears are ready at Evergreen Farm, by early to mid September, the customers soon follow, Korean and Chinese mostly, from as far as Virginia and Connecticut. Asked how many pears the farm sells in a year, the general manager, Alexander Joo, said, “That’s confidential.”
“A lot of people come,” said Mr. Joo, 39, a former Seventh-day Adventist minister. (Mr. Kim is also a Seventh-day Adventist, so the farm is closed on Saturdays, the denomination’s Sabbath.) “They come a long way to be here, so they bring food, have picnics.”
Mr. Kim grew up on his father’s orchard an hour south of Seoul, and came to the United States in 1986 in search of more land and new markets. “Too cold,” he said of the first place he tried, Middletown, N.Y. “For Korean pears, it can’t be too cold.”
Shamong, in Burlington County, was more hospitable. Mr. Kim and his wife, Sun Yi, spent 10 years on 10 acres there, planting some of the first Korean pear trees in the state, before shifting the operation to this Mercer County community in 1997. New Jersey no longer budgets enough to fund comprehensive crop counts, but Mr. Ward of Rutgers estimates that there are 200 acres of Asian pear in the state, with more than half of them at Evergreen, the largest grower and — on Sundays in the last weeks of summer and the first of fall, when the cars and buses start streaming in from the neighboring Turnpike — certainly the busiest.
“Almost harvest time,” Mr. Kim said as he bumped slowly beneath another verdant arbor of pears, and the river of traffic rolled by in the distance.
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A sampling of farms that grow produce favored by different ethnic groups and that allow customers to pick their own. Always call ahead to see what’s ready.
EVERGREEN FARM
1023 Yardville-Allentown Road, Hamilton Township; evergreenfarm.us; (609) 259-0029. Closed Saturdays.
Korean pears, Korean peaches and grapes, Chinese cabbage, jujube fruit.
DEWOLF’S FARM
58 West Colliers Mill Road, New Egypt; (609) 758-2424.
Bitter melons, cilantro, Asian long beans, Thai peppers, jute leaves, Thai eggplants, bitter balls (African eggplant), sweet potato leaves.
HALLOCK’S U-PICK FARM
38 Fischer Road, New Egypt; http://www.hallocksupick.com/; (609) 758-8847.
Jamaican hot peppers, bitter balls, kittley (Jamaican eggplant), water greens, sweet potato leaves, jute leaves.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/nyregion/23dinenj.html
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Monday, August 03, 2009
Brasher: House bill's land use unsettles farming, food costs
by PHILIP BRASHER • pbrasher@dmreg.com • August 2, 2009
Washington, D.C. - Forget the food-vs.-fuel debate for a while. The new issue is carbon vs. food.
How this debate plays out could go a long way to deciding the fate of the Obama administration's effort to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
The debate over a House-passed climate bill has focused on how much it will raise energy costs, including the cost of farming. When the Senate returns this fall to write its version of the bill, attention will turn to the impact on food prices.
This became clear at the Senate Agriculture Committee's first hearing on the climate issue. Senators from both parties demanded to know what impact a cap-and-trade system would have on land use and food costs. Economists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are working to learn the answers.
The issue is simple: A cap-and-trade program, such as the one approved by the House, would allow utilities and other polluters to comply with caps on greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing credits from landowners who plant trees on their property.
The question is how much land that's now in crops or pasture is likely to be converted to forests.
Quite a bit, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's analysis of the House-passed bill. The analysis predicted there would be less cropland as a result of the bill because acreage would be converted to trees to earn carbon credits.
Reducing the amount of available cropland likely would raise the price of commodities such as corn and soybeans, increasing feed costs and eventually food prices.
Estimate of affected acres
But the environmental analysis, based on work done at Texas A&M University, didn't say how land conversion would take place, and agency administrator Lisa Jackson, hasn't clarified the issue.
She told the Senate committee she had no idea how many acres of cropland would be affected.
Enter the American Farm Bureau Federation. The group, which flatly opposes the cap-and-trade program, came up with an estimate that 40 million acres could be lost to agricultural production. Some 320 million acres nationwide were planted to crops this year.
Senate Republicans seized on the Farm Bureau figures and used it to attack the House bill.
But Farm Bureau economists said the number is at best a guess. The number is based on the environmental agency estimate of the amount of emissions reduction that would be achieved through agriculture and forestry under the House's cap-and-trade program.
However, most of the emission reduction in the early years would come through improvements in managing existing forests - not through planting trees on land that's now in grass or crops.
Vilsack weighs in
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the lost acreage, however much it is, isn't likely to be good cropland, and farmers can make up for it with higher yielding crop varieties and more efficient feed use.
"I'm not willing to concede that (cap-and-trade) will necessarily result in an acre-for-acre reduction" in cropland, Vilsack said.
But without more economic analysis, Vilsack is trying to sell the climate bill on a "hope and a prayer," said Sen. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican and former agriculture secretary.
A leading farm-state Democrat, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, told Vilsack and Jackson she needs to know more about the potential impact of the legislation on food prices.
In a first step to getting the answer, Agriculture Department economists huddled for two days recently with counterparts at Texas A&M who developed the environmental agency's analysis.
The issues the Agriculture Department economists have to sort through are complex and not unrelated to the food-vs.-fuel issue.
Biofuels mandates, for example, encourage crop residue to be used for ethanol, not left in the soil where the plant carbon can reduce greenhouse gas emissions - and earn carbon credits.
Mandates for energy
Then there's the issue of a new mandate for renewable electricity. Will that encourage land to be converted from food crops to switchgrass to fuel power plants?
If so, that could mean higher food prices, too.
The economists' goal is to come up with estimates of how much cropland and acreage will be converted to trees, not just nationwide but by region and commodity.
"If you can start doing that on a regional basis and commodity basis, you can get a little more complete story," said Joe Glauber, the Agriculture Department's chief economist.
How this debate plays out could go a long way to deciding the fate of the Obama administration's effort to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
The debate over a House-passed climate bill has focused on how much it will raise energy costs, including the cost of farming. When the Senate returns this fall to write its version of the bill, attention will turn to the impact on food prices.
This became clear at the Senate Agriculture Committee's first hearing on the climate issue. Senators from both parties demanded to know what impact a cap-and-trade system would have on land use and food costs. Economists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are working to learn the answers.
The issue is simple: A cap-and-trade program, such as the one approved by the House, would allow utilities and other polluters to comply with caps on greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing credits from landowners who plant trees on their property.
The question is how much land that's now in crops or pasture is likely to be converted to forests.
Quite a bit, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's analysis of the House-passed bill. The analysis predicted there would be less cropland as a result of the bill because acreage would be converted to trees to earn carbon credits.
Reducing the amount of available cropland likely would raise the price of commodities such as corn and soybeans, increasing feed costs and eventually food prices.
Estimate of affected acres
But the environmental analysis, based on work done at Texas A&M University, didn't say how land conversion would take place, and agency administrator Lisa Jackson, hasn't clarified the issue.
She told the Senate committee she had no idea how many acres of cropland would be affected.
Enter the American Farm Bureau Federation. The group, which flatly opposes the cap-and-trade program, came up with an estimate that 40 million acres could be lost to agricultural production. Some 320 million acres nationwide were planted to crops this year.
Senate Republicans seized on the Farm Bureau figures and used it to attack the House bill.
But Farm Bureau economists said the number is at best a guess. The number is based on the environmental agency estimate of the amount of emissions reduction that would be achieved through agriculture and forestry under the House's cap-and-trade program.
However, most of the emission reduction in the early years would come through improvements in managing existing forests - not through planting trees on land that's now in grass or crops.
Vilsack weighs in
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the lost acreage, however much it is, isn't likely to be good cropland, and farmers can make up for it with higher yielding crop varieties and more efficient feed use.
"I'm not willing to concede that (cap-and-trade) will necessarily result in an acre-for-acre reduction" in cropland, Vilsack said.
But without more economic analysis, Vilsack is trying to sell the climate bill on a "hope and a prayer," said Sen. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican and former agriculture secretary.
A leading farm-state Democrat, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, told Vilsack and Jackson she needs to know more about the potential impact of the legislation on food prices.
In a first step to getting the answer, Agriculture Department economists huddled for two days recently with counterparts at Texas A&M who developed the environmental agency's analysis.
The issues the Agriculture Department economists have to sort through are complex and not unrelated to the food-vs.-fuel issue.
Biofuels mandates, for example, encourage crop residue to be used for ethanol, not left in the soil where the plant carbon can reduce greenhouse gas emissions - and earn carbon credits.
Mandates for energy
Then there's the issue of a new mandate for renewable electricity. Will that encourage land to be converted from food crops to switchgrass to fuel power plants?
If so, that could mean higher food prices, too.
The economists' goal is to come up with estimates of how much cropland and acreage will be converted to trees, not just nationwide but by region and commodity.
"If you can start doing that on a regional basis and commodity basis, you can get a little more complete story," said Joe Glauber, the Agriculture Department's chief economist.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Raul Castro to Cubans: Return to the Land
July 26, 2009 4:39 PM
Raul Castro to Cubans: Return to the Land
Posted by Portia Siegelbaum Cuban President Raul Castro was short on details as he implied difficult economic times were still here for Cubans. The world economic crisis, and particularly a reduction in income from exports, means Cuba cannot meet its projected growth index, Castro told an early Sunday morning rally in the eastern Cuban city of Holguin.
The growth forecast has already been cut from 6% to 2.5%, according to government sources.
On Tuesday, he said, the Council of Ministers would be meeting to discuss a second adjustment in the nation's spending plan. The next day, a plenary of the Communist Party Central Committee will also take place.
And, Castro said, the National Assembly or parliament (that normally meets in July before recessing for the summer) will gather on August 1 to discuss, among other issues, the Contraloria, the body that oversees all spending and management by government agencies.
Raul Castro to Cubans: Return to the Land
Posted by Portia Siegelbaum Cuban President Raul Castro was short on details as he implied difficult economic times were still here for Cubans. The world economic crisis, and particularly a reduction in income from exports, means Cuba cannot meet its projected growth index, Castro told an early Sunday morning rally in the eastern Cuban city of Holguin.
The growth forecast has already been cut from 6% to 2.5%, according to government sources.
On Tuesday, he said, the Council of Ministers would be meeting to discuss a second adjustment in the nation's spending plan. The next day, a plenary of the Communist Party Central Committee will also take place.
And, Castro said, the National Assembly or parliament (that normally meets in July before recessing for the summer) will gather on August 1 to discuss, among other issues, the Contraloria, the body that oversees all spending and management by government agencies.
(AP Photo/Javier Galeano)
(Left: Demonstrators at a rally marking Cuba's Day of National Rebellion in Holguin, Sunday, July 26, 2009.)
In his short, 34-minute speech at the traditional July 26 rally marking Cuba's Day of National Rebellion (the 1953 armed uprising against the Batista dictatorship that six years later brought his older brother Fidel to power), Raul Castro reiterated the urgent need to increase agricultural production to replace food imports. At present, Cuba buys 80% of the food it consumes from international suppliers.
Castro, who stepped in to run the country when Fidel Castro was sidelined by illness in 2006, reiterated his call for more people to return to the land. On July 26, 2007, he had announced a plan to provide free leases to land parcels to those interested in growing fruits and vegetables. That program, he told rally participants, is moving along "satisfactorily."
"Eight-two thousand requests for land have been approved," he said. But now the issue is to work "more efficiently."
He described growing what is now "costing us hundreds of millions of dollars to import" a top priority task.
"The land is here, the Cubans are here and the land is waiting for us," he said.
There were some 1.69 million hectares of state land lying fallow before the land lease program got underway.
Three devastating hurricanes last year destroyed homes and agriculture across the island with losses put at $10 billion. That combined with the global economic crunch has drastically reduced the island's liquidity.
The government has already taken measures ranging from scheduled power blackouts to limiting the use of air conditioners at state offices, schools and shops to just three hours a day (from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.). Public transportation has been cut back and selective factory and workplace closedowns are being implemented. Foreign businesses operating on the island have found their bank accounts frozen (a policy that apparently has been slightly tempered in recent days), and some individuals say they have had trouble cashing checks or making hard currency withdrawals from their private bank accounts.
Caridad Fuente, a married retiree with one grown-up son, listened to the speech with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she sees belt tightening is in order; but on the other, she says, "It's a good thing the government is organizing the economy on a more realistic basis."
One thing is clear, Fuente says: "We will have to work more and more efficiently."
And as Cuba's population ages there are efforts underway to bring younger generations into the work force earlier.
The Ministry of Higher Education recently took the decision to send first- and second-year university students to work in agriculture for at least one month during the school year, and third- and fourth-year students will be sent to work in areas related to their fields of study for the same period of time.
Carlos Alzucaray, a researcher at the Center for Studies of the United States, said there were two things that particularly struck him about Raul Castro's speech: First, that he announced the upcoming meetings of the Council of State and the Communist Party plenary. "These kinds of meetings are not usually spoken about publicly. I think this reflects a new openness and reinforces Raul's insistence on institutions and organization," he said.
Secondly, "Raul focused only on domestic issues with only the briefest mention of his recent trip to Africa and the global economic crisis. He didn't even mention Honduras."
Unlike previous July 26 speeches, there was no long list of achievements in Castro's speech, noted Alzucaray. Even more importantly, he said, Castro only referred to the U.S. embargo in an aside. "Instead of blaming the embargo for our problems, he talked about what we have to do to overcome its impact," noted Alzucaray, who has written extensively on U.S.-Cuba relations. "I think that's a good thing."
By CBS News producer Portia Siegelbaum reporting from Havana
Castro, who stepped in to run the country when Fidel Castro was sidelined by illness in 2006, reiterated his call for more people to return to the land. On July 26, 2007, he had announced a plan to provide free leases to land parcels to those interested in growing fruits and vegetables. That program, he told rally participants, is moving along "satisfactorily."
"Eight-two thousand requests for land have been approved," he said. But now the issue is to work "more efficiently."
He described growing what is now "costing us hundreds of millions of dollars to import" a top priority task.
"The land is here, the Cubans are here and the land is waiting for us," he said.
There were some 1.69 million hectares of state land lying fallow before the land lease program got underway.
Three devastating hurricanes last year destroyed homes and agriculture across the island with losses put at $10 billion. That combined with the global economic crunch has drastically reduced the island's liquidity.
The government has already taken measures ranging from scheduled power blackouts to limiting the use of air conditioners at state offices, schools and shops to just three hours a day (from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.). Public transportation has been cut back and selective factory and workplace closedowns are being implemented. Foreign businesses operating on the island have found their bank accounts frozen (a policy that apparently has been slightly tempered in recent days), and some individuals say they have had trouble cashing checks or making hard currency withdrawals from their private bank accounts.
Caridad Fuente, a married retiree with one grown-up son, listened to the speech with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she sees belt tightening is in order; but on the other, she says, "It's a good thing the government is organizing the economy on a more realistic basis."
One thing is clear, Fuente says: "We will have to work more and more efficiently."
And as Cuba's population ages there are efforts underway to bring younger generations into the work force earlier.
The Ministry of Higher Education recently took the decision to send first- and second-year university students to work in agriculture for at least one month during the school year, and third- and fourth-year students will be sent to work in areas related to their fields of study for the same period of time.
Carlos Alzucaray, a researcher at the Center for Studies of the United States, said there were two things that particularly struck him about Raul Castro's speech: First, that he announced the upcoming meetings of the Council of State and the Communist Party plenary. "These kinds of meetings are not usually spoken about publicly. I think this reflects a new openness and reinforces Raul's insistence on institutions and organization," he said.
Secondly, "Raul focused only on domestic issues with only the briefest mention of his recent trip to Africa and the global economic crisis. He didn't even mention Honduras."
Unlike previous July 26 speeches, there was no long list of achievements in Castro's speech, noted Alzucaray. Even more importantly, he said, Castro only referred to the U.S. embargo in an aside. "Instead of blaming the embargo for our problems, he talked about what we have to do to overcome its impact," noted Alzucaray, who has written extensively on U.S.-Cuba relations. "I think that's a good thing."
By CBS News producer Portia Siegelbaum reporting from Havana
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Thursday, June 25, 2009
Work the Cities from Outposts
Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. 2 Cor. 6:17.
As God's commandment-keeping people, we must leave the cities. As did Enoch, we must work in the cities but not dwell in them. {Mar 184.1}
As far as possible, our institutions should be located away from the cities. . . . It is not God's will that His people shall settle in the cities, where there is constant turmoil and confusion. Their children should be spared this; for the whole system is demoralized by the hurry and rush and noise. The Lord desires His people to move into the country, where they can settle on the land, and raise their own fruit and vegetables, and where their children can be brought in direct contact with the works of God in nature. Take your families away from the cities is my message. {Mar 184.2}
The truth must be spoken, whether men will hear, or whether men will forbear. The cities are filled with temptation. We should plan our work in such a way as to keep our young people as far as possible from this contamination. {Mar 184.3}
The cities are to be worked from outposts. Said the messenger of God, "Shall not the cities be warned? Yes; not by God's people living in them, but by their visiting them, to warn them of what is coming upon the earth." {Mar 184.4}
When iniquity abounds in a nation, there is always to be heard some voice giving warning and instruction, as the voice of Lot was heard in Sodom. Yet Lot could have preserved his family from many evils had he not made his home in this wicked, polluted city. All that Lot and his family did in Sodom could have been done by them, even if they had lived in a place some distance away from the city. Enoch walked with God, and yet he did not live in the midst of any city polluted with every kind of violence and wickedness, as did Lot in Sodom. {Mar 184.5}
He [Enoch] did not make his abode with the wicked. . . . He placed himself and his family where the atmosphere would be as pure as possible. Then at times he went forth to the inhabitants of the world with his God-given message. . . . After proclaiming his message, he always took back with him to his place of retirement some who had received the warning. {Mar 184.6}
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Monday, June 15, 2009
Soil Not Oil (Excerpt)
Soil Not Oil
by Vandana Shiva South End Press, 2008,160 pages, $15.00
The following is an excerpt from the book:
The industrialized, globalized food system is based on oil. It is under threat because of the inevitability of "peak oil." It is also under threat because it is more vulnerable than traditional agriculture to climate change, to which it has contributed. Industrial agriculture is based on monocultures. Monocultures are highly vulnerable to changes in climate, and to diseases and pests.
Just the Facts :: When Corporations Rule Our Food
Hunger. Pollution. Instability. Obesity. The problem with corporate food—by the numbers.
Hunger. Pollution. Instability. Obesity. The problem with corporate food—by the numbers.
In 1970 and 1971, America's vast corn belt was attacked by a mysterious disease, later identified as ''race T" of the fungus Helminthosporium maydis, causing the southern corn leaf blight, as the epidemic was called. It left ravaged cornfields with withered plants, broken stalks, and malformed or completely rotten cobs. The strength and speed of the blight was a result of the uniformity of the hybrid corn, most of which had been derived from a single Texas male sterile line. The genetic makeup of the new hybrid corn, which was responsible for its rapid and large-scale breeding by seed companies, was also responsible for its vulnerability to disease. At least 80 percent of the hybrid corn in America in 1970 contained the Texas male sterile cytoplasm. As a University of Iowa pathologist wrote, "Such an extensive, homogenous acreage is like a tinder-dry prairie waiting for a spark to ignite it."
Industrial agriculture is dependent on chemical fertilizers. Chemically fertilized soils are low in organic matter. Organic matter helps conserve the soil and soil moisture, providing insurance against drought. Soils lacking organic matter are more vulnerable to drought and to climate change. Industrial agriculture is also more dependent on intensive irrigation. Since climate change is leading to the melting of glaciers that feed rivers, and in many regions of the world to the decline in precipitation and increased intensity of drought, the vulnerability of industrial agriculture will only increase. Finally, since the globalized food system is based on long-distance supply chains, it is vulnerable to breakdown in the context of extreme events of flooding, cyclones, and hurricanes. While aggravating climate change, fossil fuel-dependent industrialized, globalized agriculture is least able to adapt to the change.
We need an alternative. Biodiverse, organic farms and localized food systems offer us security in times of climate insecurity, while producing more food, producing better food, and creating more livelihoods. The industrialized, globalized food system is based on oil; biodiverse, organic, and local food systems are based on living soil. The industrialized system is based on creating waste and pollution; a living agriculture is based on no waste. The industrialized system is based on monocultures; sustainable systems are based on diversity.
Living SoilEvery step in building a living agriculture sustained by a living soil is a step toward both mitigating and adapting to climate change. Over the past 20 years, I have built Navdanya, India's biodiversity and organic-farming movement. We are increasingly realizing there is a convergence between the objectives of conserving biodiversity, reducing climate-change impact, and alleviating poverty.
Biodiverse, local, organic systems reduce water use and risks of crop failure due to climate change. Increasing the biodiversity of farming systems can reduce vulnerability to drought. Millet, which is far more nutritious than rice and wheat, uses only 200 to 300 millimeters of water, compared with the 2,500 millimeters needed for Green Revolution rice farming. India could grow four times the amount food it does now if it were to cultivate millet more widely. However, global trade is pushing agriculture toward GM monocultures of corn, soy, canola, and cotton, worsening the climate crisis.
6 Ideas for a Better Food System
Community-controlled irrigation, domestic Fair Trade, local food in supermarkets, and more …
Biodiversity offers resilience to recover from climate disasters. After the Orissa supercyclone of 1998, and the tsunami of 2004, Navdanya distributed seeds of saline-resistant rice varieties as "Seeds of Hope" to rejuvenate agriculture in lands that were salinated as a result of flooding from the sea. We are now creating seed banks of drought-resistant, flood-resistant, and saline-resistant seed varieties to respond to such extreme climate events. Climate chaos creates uncertainty. Diversity offers a cushion against both climate extremes and climate uncertainty. We need to move from the myopic obsession with monocultures and centralization to diversity and decentralization.
Diversity and decentralization are the dual principles needed to build economies beyond oil and to deal with the climate vulnerability that is the legacy of the age of oil. In addition to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience, biodiverse organic farming also produces more food and higher incomes. As David Pimentel has pointed out: "Organic farming approaches for maize and beans in the US not only use an average of 30% less fossil energy but also conserve more water in the soil, induce less erosion, maintain soil quality, and conserve more biological resources than conventional farming does."
After Hurricane Mitch struck Central America in 1998, farmers who practiced biodiverse organic farming found they had suffered less damage than those who practiced chemical agriculture. The ecologically farmed plots had on average more topsoil, greater soil moisture, and less erosion, and the farmers experienced less severe economic losses.
Fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture moves carbon from the soil to the atmosphere. Ecological agriculture takes carbon from the atmosphere and puts it back in the soil. If 10,000 medium-sized US farms converted to organic farming, the emissions reduction would be equivalent to removing over 1 million cars from the road. If all US croplands became organic it would increase soil-carbon storage by 367 million tons and would cut nitrogen oxide emissions dramatically. Organic agriculture contributes directly and indirectly to reducing CO2 emissions and mitigating the negative consequences of climate change.
Navdanya's work over the past 20 years has shown that we can grow more food and provide higher incomes to farmers without destroying the environment and killing peasants. We can lower the costs of production while increasing output. We have done this successfully on thousands of farms and have created a fair, just, and sustainable economy. The epidemic of farmer suicides in India is concentrated in regions where chemical intensification has increased costs of production. Farmers in these regions have become dependent on non-renewable seeds, and monoculture cash-crops are facing a decline in prices due to globalization. This is affecting farmers' incomes, leading to debt and suicides. High costs of production are the most significant reason for rural indebtedness.
Biodiverse organic farming creates a debt-free, suicide-free, productive alternative to industrialized corporate agriculture and brings about a number of benefits. It leads to increased farm productivity and farm incomes, while lowering costs of production. Pesticide-free and chemical-free production and processing bring safe and healthy food to consumers. We must protect the environment, farmers' livelihoods, public health, and people's right to food.
We do not need to go the Monsanto way. We can go the Navdanya way. We do not need to end up in food dictatorship and food slavery. We can create our food freedom. Biodiverse, organic, and local food systems help mitigate climate change by lowering greenhouse gas emissions and increasing absorption of CO2 by plants and by the soil.
Organic farming is based on the recycling of organic matter; industrial agriculture is based on chemical fertilizers that emit nitrous oxides. Industrial agriculture dispossesses small farmers and converts small farms to large holdings that need mechanization, which further contributes to CO2 emissions. Small, biodiverse, organic farms, especially in third world countries, can be totally fossil fuel-free. The energy for farming operations comes from animals.
Soil fertility is built by recycling organic matter to feed soil organisms. This reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Biodiverse systems are also more resilient to droughts and floods because they have a higher water-holding capacity, making them more adaptable to the effects of climate change. Navdanya's study on climate change and organic farming has indicated that organic farming increases carbon absorption by up to 55 percent and water-holding capacity by 10 percent.
The environmental advantages of small-scale, biodiverse organic farms do not come at the expense of food security. Biodiverse organic farms produce more food and higher incomes than industrial monocultures. Mitigating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and increasing food security go hand in hand.
The conventional measures of productivity focus on labor as the major input (and the direct labor on the farm at that) and externalize many energy and resource inputs. This biased productivity pushes farmers off the land and replaces them with chemicals and machines, which in turn contribute to greenhouse gases and climate change. Further, industrial agriculture focuses on producing a single crop that can be globally traded as a commodity. The focus on "yield" of individual commodities creates what I have called a "monoculture of the mind." The promotion of so-called high-yielding varieties leads to the displacement of biodiversity. It also destroys the ecological functions of biodiversity. The loss of diverse outputs is never taken into account by the one-dimensional calculus of productivity.
When the benefits of biodiversity are taken into account, biodiverse systems have higher output than monocultures. And organic farming is more beneficial for the farmers and the earth than chemical farming. When agro-forestry is included in farming systems, carbon absorption and carbon return increase dramatically. Date palm and neem increase the carbon density in the soil by 175 and 185 percent, respectively.
Studies carried out by the USDA's National Agroforestry Center suggest that soil carbon can be increased by 6.6 tons per hectare per year over a 15-year rotation and wood by 12.22 tons per hectare per year. Since both soil and biomass sequester carbon, this amounts to removing 18.87 tons of carbon per hectare per year from the atmosphere.
Soil and vegetation are our biggest carbon sinks. Industrial agriculture destroys both. By disrupting the cycle of returning organic matter to the soil, chemical agriculture depletes the soil carbon. Mechanization forces the cutting down of trees and hedgerows.
Organic manure is food for the community of living beings that depend on the soil. The alternatives to chemical fertilizers are many: green manures such as sesbania aculeata (dhencha), gliricidia, and sun hemp; legume crops such as pulses, which fix nitrogen through legume-rhizobium symbiosis; earthworms; cow dung; and composts. Farmyard manure encourages the buildup of earthworms by increasing their food supply. Soils treated with farmyard manure have from two to two and a half times as many earthworms as untreated soils. Earthworms contribute to soil fertility by maintaining soil structure, aeration, and drainage. They break down organic matter and incorporate it into the soil.
The work of earthworms in soil formation was Darwin's major concern in his later years. Of worms he wrote, "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of creatures." The little earthworm working invisibly in the soil is the tractor, the fertilizer factory, and the dam combined. Worm-worked soils are more water-stable than unworked soils, and worm-inhabited soils have considerably more organic carbon and nitrogen than the original soil. Their continuous movement forms channels that help in soil aeration. It is estimated that they increase the air volume of soil by up to 30 percent.
Soils with earthworms drain four to ten times faster than those without, and their water-holding capacity is higher by 20 percent. Earthworm castings, which can amount to 4 to 36 tons per acre per year, contain five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorus, three times more exchangeable magnesium, 11 times more potash, and one and a half times more calcium than soil. Their work on the soil promotes the microbial activity essential to the fertility of most soils.
At the Navdanya farm in Doon Valley, we have been feeding the soil organisms. They in turn feed us. We have been building soil and rejuvenating its life. The clay component on our farm is 41 percent higher than those of neighboring chemical farms, which indicates a higher water-holding capacity. There is 124 percent more organic-matter content in the soil on our farm than in soil samples from chemical farms. The nitrogen concentration is 85 percent higher, the phosphorus content 10 percent higher, and the available potassium 25 percent higher.
Our farm is also much richer in soil organisms such as mycorrhiza, which are fungi that bring nutrients to plants. Mycorrhizal association makes food material from the soil available to the plant. Our crops have no diseases, our soils are resilient to drought, and our food is delicious, as any visitors to our farm can vouch. Our farm is fossil fuel-free. Oxen plow the land and fertilize it.
By banning fossil fuels on our farm we have gained real energy—the energy of the mycorrhiza and the earthworm, of the plants and animals, all nourished by the energy of the sun.
This is an excpert from Vandana Shiva's latest book Soil Not Oil.
Vandana Shiva was interviewed in The New Economy, the Summer 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva is founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. Her other recent books inlcude Earth Democracy, Water Wars, and Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed.
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