A Good Without Light - Sustainability's seamy underbelly

A permie friend e-mailed me the following essay, and I was riveted.
The author covers what I have always considered to be the deepest conversations that we choose not to have.
The ones that stand in the way of achieving our dreams, ideals, and fullest potential. The ones that we pretend do not exist, because they are overwhelming and force a level of introspection that even the most well-intended person is often not comfortable enough with to intentionally witness.
In short, the ones that may hold the answers we find so elusive.

From:
http://tinhouse.com/mag/issue_current/current_nonfiction_white.htm

A GOOD WITHOUT LIGHT (complete essay)
by CURTIS WHITE

Sustainability's seamy underbelly

“As so often happens in disasters, the best course always seemed the one for which it was now too late.” - Tacitus, The Histories

For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is “sustainable.” Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities. Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways. It’s not, really. The great unspoken assumption of the sustainability movement is the idea that although the economic, political, and social systems that have produced our current environmental calamity are bad, they do not need to be entirely replaced. In fact, the point of sustainability often seems to be to preserve—not overthrow—the economic and social status quo.

This should not be surprising. Sustainability is, after all, a mainstream response to environmental crisis. It may want change, but it does not want what would amount to a fundamental self-confrontation. While it wants to modify existing models of production and consumption, especially of energy, it does not want to abandon what it calls “freedom,” especially the freedom to own and use large accumulations of private property. And certainly it does not want to ask, “What went wrong in the great Western experiment with freedom? Why do we seem to be mostly free to destroy ourselves?”

What no one is allowed to consider is the distressing possibility that no amount of tinkering and changing and greening and teaching the kindergartners to plant trees and recycle Dad’s beer cans will ever really matter if our assumptions about what it means to be prosperous, what it means to be “developed,” what it means to live in “progress,” and what it means to be “free” remain what they have been for the last four hundred years under the evergrowing weight of capitalist markets and capitalist social relations. As Marx put it, under capitalism we carry our relation to others in our pockets. Marx would now have to add, sadly, that those “others” must now include the animals of the field and the birds of the sky (Daniel, 2:38) as well as the fields and sky themselves.1 But such a line of thought is not tolerated because the very word “capitalism” (not to mention “Marx”) is a fighting word.2 (Or, worse, it is a sort of faux pas to speak of “capitalism” at all; you’d be better off saying “the economy,” just as if you were a slave asked to refer to your master as your employment counselor.) Unfortunately, in banishing this word we eliminate from the conversation the very thing we came together to discuss. We can talk about our plans to save the world, but we can’t talk about the economic system that put it in jeopardy in the first place. That’s off the table.

But I do not believe that capitalism is somehow singularly at fault. I don’t even think that it is necessarily bad. It is too reductive to say simply that there are cruel and greedy and violent people among us (capitalists), and that we need somehow to confront them and assert the good in ourselves. The truer problem is that the people who are destructive honestly believe that they are doing good. They are more often than not, or more often than any of us should be comfortable with, an expression of the virtues of what I call the Barbaric Heart.

This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that, in fact, prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do.



My reader may wonder how I can yoke together virtue and violence. To which I would reply, “How can one remove the claim of virtue from the behavior that is most habitual to a people?” The artful (if ruthless) use of violence is obviously something that we admire in those sectors of the culture that we most associate with success: athletics, the military, entertainment (especially that arena of the armchair warrior, Grand Theft Auto), the frightening world of financial markets (where, as the Economist put it, there are “barbarians at the vaults”), and the rapacious world we blandly call real estate development. Instead of being “shocked, just shocked” by it, instead of living in bad faith, let’s just say that violence (especially competent violence, violence that has a skill set and a certain virtuosity) is something that we’re rather pleased with ourselves about. As ever, artful violence is the marker of an elite (whether the Persian “Immortals,” the Spartan 300, the Praetorian Guard, the United States Marines, or the Redeem Team of men’s basketball at the 2008 Beijing Olympics).3

Violence is an ethical construction that we forward to the rest of the world as an image of our virtue. The idea that we can “move mountains” is an expression of admiration. When it is done with mammoth machines provided by the Caterpillar Company of Peoria, Illinois, it is also a form of violence (as the sheered mountain tops of West Virginia confirm). To any complaints about the disheartening destruction and injustice that comes with such power, the Barbaric Heart need only reply: the strong have always dominated the weak and then instructed them. That is how great civilizations have always been made, from the ancient Egyptians to the British in India to Karl Rove and George Bush.

When Scipio Africanus looked over the army of Hannibal in the deciding battle of the second Punic War, he saw not only another long day’s work in the phalanx worrying about being stepped on by the Carthaginian elephants. He also saw the end of any limitation on Roman power. One last concerted act of violence and Rome would be history’s lone actor for the next five hundred years. As the historian Polybius described it, “The effect of their victory would be not only to make them complete masters of Libya, but to give them and their country the supremacy and undisputed lordship of the world” (302). This is how the American government felt as the Berlin Wall fell: Carthage is no more. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Karl Roves of the world (those who soak themselves in the blood of the Barbaric Heart as if it were a marinade) understood that they could use violence any time it was in their interest to do so, and they believed that was a good, if bloody, thing.



The question becomes, if this is our moral context, violence masquerading as virtue, how is this thing we call sustainability going to work? Sustainability presents itself as a kind of wisdom. It argues that it can reach an understanding, an accommodation with our destructive virtues and our faithfulness to capitalism. The wisdom of the sustainability movement (especially in its most visible activities through the United Nations and NGOs) is that it can make the Barbarian play nice. (“Attila, this is a tea cup. It’s fragile. No! Okay, here’s another one, now . . . Oh!” And so on.)

But I want to be quite uncompromising in saying that the logic of sustainability is also a sort of thoughtlessness. It is not really opposed to the Barbaric Heart. In fact, it participates in the yearning and willfulness of the Barbaric Heart in spite of itself. In spite of the fact that it can feel that this Heart is grasping, pitiful, and a danger to itself and others. The logic of sustainability provides a sort of program of carefully calibrated amendment (“Sure! We can make coal clean and still maintain our lifestyle”). But in the end, it is not an answer to our problems but a surrender to them. Its virtues are dependent on its sins. It is, as Simone Weil put it, a “good without light.”

What is most menacing about the logic of sustainability is evident to anyone who wishes to look into its language. It will “operationalize” sustainability. It will create metrics and indices. It will create “life-cycle assessments.” It will create a sustainability index. It will institute a “global reporting initiative.” It will imagine something called “industrial ecology” and not laugh. Most famously, it will measure ecological footprints. What the so-called sustainability movement has accomplished is the creation of “metrics,” ways of measuring. It may not have had much impact on the natural world, but it has guaranteed that, for the moment, thinking will remain only technical interpretation. In short, it has brought calipers to the head of a songbird.

But what is most thoughtless about the logic of sustainability, especially as it has emerged through the Kyoto and Bali international agreements and protocols, is the assumption that it should allow for continued economic growth and development. In short, sustainability assumes that the reasoning of economics—of economics as a form of reason—must continue to provide the most telling analyses of and prescriptions for any future model for the relationship between human beings and the natural world. But what if the assumptions of economics are nothing more than a form of thoughtlessness? And what if that thoughtlessness’s purpose is nothing more than to allow—oh, tragically, we’ll all say—the very activities and, more importantly, the very habits of mind that over the last two centuries of industrialization have brought us to this sorry pass? In short, what if the thinking of economics is merely another vestment for the Barbaric Heart?

The idea that economics will aid us in thinking through the problem of the destruction of the natural world, will aid us in managing the earth’s “carrying capacity,” commits us to the assumption that our world ought to be governed and guided by technicians. It is part of the thinking that says, “If only the politicians would listen to what we scientists have to say! Listen to what the climatologists have to say about the sources and consequences of global warming! The scientists will save us if only we’d listen to them, respect their authority, follow their instructions.” They can maintain this while gloriously ignoring the fact that the world we presently inhabit was conceived by science, designed by engineers, and implemented by technicians. It starts with the rapidly beating heart of the four-stroke engine inside your automobile, and then radiates out in what is laughably called urban planning, the world as designed for the convenience of the automobile, the sterility of the interstate highway, and the fantastic waste and increasingly fascistic experience of jet travel. Of course, behind all this there is the global energy infrastructure, burning off methane waste, spilling its toxic cargo on land and shore, and destroying the people who have been cursed with “oil wealth.” Looming over everything, guaranteeing it, is the grim visage of the warrior, the global oil police known as the military. In short, looming over all this is the Barbaric Heart.



What I want to suggest, not to put too fine a point on it, is that the act of trusting these experts—whether economists or scientists— to provide us with a sustainable future of ever-growing capitalist enterprise is not to place faith in the subtle capacities of the engineer but to indulge in the primitive longing of the barbarian in his moment of despair. After a period of truly grand slaughter and plunder, the barbarian discovers with an audible “uh-oh” that the legions have regrouped, they’re moving forward in an orderly and powerful way, and it’s going to be murder and mayhem in the barbarian camp for a while. The barbarian sees that his willfulness and violence has become the equivalent of self-defeat. That is his inescapable reality, even if it’s one he is constitutionally incapable of understanding. (Rising oceans may make Manhattan the next fabled city of Atlantis. Get that?)

What science should be saying now is not, “Why were we not listened to, respected, followed?” but, “We have wittingly taken common cause with the barbarians and participated in the making of this world, and it is clear now that this making was also our collective unmaking.” In other words, science should be looking to something other than science, and certainly something other than barbarians, for ideas that will be a truer response to the disasters it has helped create. This looking elsewhere is not something science is particularly good at, if for no other reason than because, as intellectual victor for the last two centuries, it has contempt for those religious, philosophical, and artistic “elsewheres.”

For instance, at the Ecocity World Summit in San Francisco in 2008, climatologist Stephen Schneider commented that science could only demonstrate the “preponderance of evidence” and make suggestions about risk management and the investment of resources. (You see how comfortable science is in the garments of economics?) But it cannot make decisions that depend upon what Schneider called “value judgments.” In other words, science can tell you that global warming puts the polar bear at risk, but it can’t tell you why you should care.4 It’s as if Schneider were saying that we should take that issue up with the Pope. And maybe what I’m saying is: that’s exactly right. We need a common language, not arrogance and then a punt.

The irony here, and it seems to be mostly lost on Schneider, is that nothing has been more destructive of value than Western science. It has contempt for the truth claims of religion, obviously, but also the arts and even the so-called “soft” or social sciences. So just where, one might ask, does Schneider expect these “values” to come from when in fact science has done all it could to use its social prestige and intellectual authority to destroy all non-scientific systems of value?

From the point of view of the Barbaric Heart, this is all good news. Until science can manage to join its habits of mind to a way of thinking that is genuinely dedicated to the cultivation of value (i.e. a whole, thriving human culture and not the shards that science leaves to us), the Barbaric Heart will only hear in what science says that it can continue to be barbaric, if under a somewhat chastened model. Endless, profligate energy consumption, yes, but we’ll pump the CO2 back into the ground. How about that? That should fix it. That’s sustainable, ain’t it? For the barbarian, so long as someone suggests to him that he can continue to be violent and willful but mitigate the self-destructive consequences if he’s shrewd about it, well, he’s more than willing to listen and believe. And that is what the logic of sustainability does. “Let us mitigate your violence,” it tells the barbarian, “so that your heart may retain all those barbaric qualities that have become the envy of the world.” 5

As the Romans knew, empire and wealth attract envy, but in the end it is envy not of some sort of civilized superiority but of the freedom to behave like barbarians without the consequences.



But, perhaps we should say with a breezy sigh, “Thus has it ever been.” What makes such breeziness untenable is the newfound understanding, for which the term “Global Warming” has become a sort of shorthand, that as we pursue our own venal ends, heedless of the consequences that pursuit will have on others, we are “sacking,” in the barbarian vernacular, ourselves. We are like the barbarians described so aptly by Edward Gibbon in that we are not much conscious of the fact that our energetic pursuit of our own interests has a “blowback” factor (as the CIA puts it). Our pursuit of what we want makes us blind to how that pursuit is actually destroying ourselves. In the midst of its murderous pillaging, the Barbaric Heart discovers with a cry of surprise and animal anguish that it has dug its own grave. This self-defeat is true of our international bungling in places like Iraq, but it is most dramatically true in relation to the destruction of our own environment. Ask the people of New Orleans, or all of the places from Southern Europe to Africa to Australia to Malibu that have been visited by “once in a century” droughts, or places like Shanghai or Mumbai or the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, all of which are about to have the unique opportunity of seeing what it’s like to live underwater. The future and its consequences is obviously now.

Which makes it a little easier to see why I would say that we are a culture dominated by a rationality that is the equivalent of thoughtlessness. We are dominated by a form of logical intelligibility (science) that insists that what is not intelligible to it is not intelligible at all. Strangely, what is most dramatically unintelligible to science is itself. Especially hidden to it is the degree to which its own habit of logical orderliness prepares the way for the progress of the Barbaric, just as Rome’s system of roads proved a great convenience not only to its own legions but to the barbaric armies that for once didn’t need to “swarm” but could proceed in an orderly and direct fashion to their bloody destination: the final sacking of Rome.

To say that we live in thoughtlessness is really no more than to say that for the moment the Barbaric Heart is very comfortable. It does not feel threatened except distantly by things like Islamic terror, which it understands very well since that violence is little more than a reflection of its own conduct. And nothing is working persuasively with it, suggesting that it ought not to be what it is. (The intellectual disdain of science keeps all those voices at a distance in their respective communities: the university, the church, the museum, or the downtown art scene.) Rather, it hears only the narcissistic self-congratulation from the “experts” it hires to describe its triumphs and its benevolence on cable news programs. We are not quite yet at the point where the orderly rhythm of violence and plunder have no choice but to stop.

“And why should we stop?” you might ask. After all, the Barbaric Heart produces certain sweet and pleasurable things that we know quite well. The food is abundant, sex is everywhere, and the spectacles are spectacular.6 (Always a sufficient argument for the populus Romanus.) But these sweet things are all produced by procedures that we do not see and do not understand, like the black boxes that run our cars or televisions or computers or, well, our lives. We know the benefits of these things but not their origin and not their procedures and not their ultimate purpose. The finely marbled filet at the supermarket meat counter is shrink-wrapped and looks as if it has been produced by an algorithm. It looks as if it were the Platonic idea of meat and not something hacked from a cow, not something produced by poor people standing in blood. At the far end of a gallon of gasoline is a Marine rolling a hand grenade into a living room in Haditha, Iraq. At the far end of the purchase of a plastic gizmo at Walmart is a Chinese industry dependent on the oil produced by a genocidal regime in Sudan. How that changes the look of the delightfully cheap gizmo! It is steeped in blood!





************





1 In China and India, the commitment to capitalist development has become an international scandal and tragedy. The unthinkable has become commonplace. China seeks to triple the size of its economy by 2020. Expanding cities and industry claim rural areas, and farmers in turn claim ever more animal and plant habitat. At present, nearly 40 percent of all mammal species are endangered. For plants, 70 percent of non-flowering and 86 percent of flowering species are threatened. What the situation will be in 2020, that golden time of universal prosperity, is horrifying to imagine. (NYT A1, December 5, 2007)

2 I once gave a talk at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle and during the Q&A was asked, “Did you say you were a Marxist?” I could feel the room lift in anticipation of the wrong answer (“Yes”), as if they were already halfway out of their seats and through the door. I almost had to laugh. They had come expecting a little good-humored and satirical lambasting of the current state of capitalism, but praise Marx? And this was in Seattle!

3 As Freud put it presciently in Moses and Monotheism, the inclination to violence is “usually found where athletic development becomes the ideal of the people.” (182) Or, as Hank Williams Jr. likes to sing on Monday nights, “Are you ready for some football!? ”

4 In fact, Schneider commented that the polar bear is already “functionally extinct” because its ecosystem is extinct. The polar bear will survive only in a sort of great northern zoo. The species is sufficiently generalist to scavenge an existence from a variety of food sources, many of which will depend on humans. In short, the polar bear is becoming a big, white, house sparrow.

5 As eco-architect Richard S. Levine has explained, less dramatically, “To the extent that sustainable development agents move from crisis to crisis, using technological fixes to patch up larger structural problems, they tend to strengthen the systematic relations supporting unsustainability— especially when such ‘band-aid’ solutions lead to instances where these deeper problems fall below the threshold of public attention and the political momentum for more fundamental change dissipates.” (Richard S. Levine, “Sustainable Development,” in Christopher Canfield, ed., Ecocity Conference 1990: Report of the First International Ecocity Conference, (Urban Ecology, 1990), pg. 24.)

6 The Persian poet Hafiz (1320-1389), one of whose early English translators was Emerson, wrote, “You have built, with so much care, / Such a great brothel / To house all of your pleasures. / You have even surrounded the whole damn place / With armed guards and vicious dogs / To protect your desires / So that you can sneak away / From time to time / And try to squeeze light / Into your parched being / From a source as fruitful / As a dried date pit / That even a bird / Is wise enough to spit out.” (5)

The Cuba diet: What will you be eating when the revolution comes?

From:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/04/0080501

The Cuba diet:
What will you be eating when the revolution comes?
By Bill McKibben

The pictures hanging in Havana's Museum of the Revolution document the rise (or, depending on your perspective, the fall) of Cuba in the years after Castro's revolt, in 1959. On my visit there last summer, I walked through gallery after gallery, gazing upon the stock images of socialist glory: “anti-imperialist volunteers” fighting in Angola, Cuban boxers winning Olympic medals, five patients at a time undergoing eye surgery using a “method created by Soviet academician Fyodorov.” Mostly, though, I saw pictures of farm equipment. “Manual operation is replaced by mechanized processes,” read the caption under a picture of some heavy Marxist metal cruising a vast field. Another caption boasted that by 1990, seven bulk sugar terminals had been built, each with a shipping capacity of 75,000 tons a day. In true Soviet style, the Cubans were demonstrating a deeply held (and to our eyes now almost kitschy) socialist belief that salvation lay in the size of harvests, in the number of tractors, and in the glorious heroic machinery that would straighten the tired backs of an oppressed peasantry—and so I learned that day that within thirty years of the people's uprising, the sugarcane industry alone employed 2,850 sugarcane lifting machines, 12,278 tractors, 29,857 carts, and 4,277 combines.

Such was communism. But then I turned a corner and the pictures changed. The sharply focused shots of combines and Olympians now were muddied, as if Cubans had forgotten how to print photos or, as was more likely the case, had run short of darkroom chemicals. I had reached the gallery of the “Special Period.” That is to say, I had reached the point in Cuban history where everything came undone. With the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba fell off a cliff of its own. All those carts and combines had been the products of an insane “economics” underwritten by the Eastern bloc for ideological purposes. Castro spent three decades growing sugar and shipping it to Russia and East Germany, both of which paid a price well above the world level, and both of which sent the ships back to Havana filled with wheat, rice, and more tractors. When all that disappeared, literally almost overnight,
Cuba had nowhere to turn. The United States, Cuba's closest neighbor, enforced a strict trade embargo (which it strengthened in 1992, and again in 1996) and Cuba had next to no foreign exchange with anyone else—certainly the new Russia no longer wanted to pay a premium on Cuban sugar for the simple glory of supporting a tropical version of its Leninist past.

In other words, Cuba became an island. Not just a real island, surrounded by water, but something much rarer: an island outside the international economic system, a moon base whose supply ships had suddenly stopped coming. There were other deeply isolated places on the planet—North Korea, say, or Burma—but not many. And so most observers waited impatiently for the country to collapse. No island is an island, after all, not in a global world. The New York Times ran a story in its Sunday magazine titled “The Last Days of Castro's Cuba”; in its editorial column, the paper opined that “the Cuban dictator has painted himself into his own corner. Fidel Castro's reign deserves to end in home-grown failure.” Without oil, even public transportation shut down—for many, going to work meant a two-hour bike trip. Television shut off early in the evening to save electricity; movie theaters went dark. People tried to improvise their ways around shortages. “For drinking glasses we'd get beer bottles and cut the necks off with wire,” one professor told me. “We didn't have razor blades, till someone in the city came up with a way to resharpen old ones.”

But it's hard to improvise food. So much of what Cubans had eaten had come straight from Eastern Europe, and most of the rest was grown industrial-style on big state farms. All those combines needed fuel and spare parts, and all those big rows of grain and vegetables needed pesticides and fertilizer—none of which were available. In 1989, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the average Cuban was eating 3,000 calories per day. Four years later that figure had fallen to 1,900. It was as if they suddenly had to skip one meal a day, every day, week after month after year. The host of one cooking show on the shortened TV schedule urged Cubans to fry up “steaks” made from grapefruit peels covered in bread crumbs. “I lost twenty pounds myself,” said Fernando Funes, a government agronomist.

Now, just by looking across the table, I saw that Fernando Funes had since gained the twenty pounds back. In fact, he had a little paunch, as do many Cuban men of a certain age. What happened was simple, if unexpected. Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, the combination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They're still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal—they've gotten that meal back.
In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth. They import some of their food from abroad—a certain amount of rice from Vietnam, even some apples and beef and such from the United States. But mostly they grow their own, and with less ecological disruption than in most places. In recent years organic farmers have visited the island in increasing numbers and celebrated its accomplishment. As early as 1999 the Swedish parliament awarded the Organic Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styled the “alternative Nobel,” and Peter Rosset, the former executive director of the American advocacy group Food First, heralded the “potentially enormous implications” of Cuba's new agricultural system.

The island's success may not carry any larger lesson. Cuban agriculture isn't economically competitive with the industrial farming exemplified by a massive food producer across the Caribbean, mostly because it is highly labor-intensive. Moreover, Cuba is a one-party police state filled with political prisons, which may have some slight effect on its ability to mobilize its people—in any case, hardly an “advantage” one would want to emulate elsewhere.

There's always at least the possibility, however, that larger sections of the world might be in for “Special Periods” of their own. Climate change, or the end of cheap oil, or the depletion of irrigation water, or the chaos of really widespread terrorism, or some other malign force might begin to make us pay more attention to the absolute bottom-line question of how we get our dinner (a question that only a very few people, for a very short period of time, have ever been able to ignore). No one's predicting a collapse like the one Cuba endured—probably no modern economy has ever undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? After all, our planet is an island, too. It's somehow useful to know that someone has already run the experiment.

Villa Alamar was a planned community built outside Havana at the height of the Soviet glory days; its crumbling, precast-concrete apartments would look at home (though less mildewed) in Ljubljana or Omsk. Even the names there speak of the past: a central square, for instance, is called Parque Hanoi. But right next to the Parque Hanoi is the Vivero Organopónico Alamar.
Organopónico is the Cuban term for any urban garden. (It seems that before the special period began, the country had a few demonstration hydroponic gardens, much bragged about in official propaganda and quickly abandoned when the crisis hit. The high-tech-sounding name stuck, however, recycled to reflect the new, humbler reality.) There are thousands of organopónicos in Cuba, more than 200 in the Havana area alone, but the Vivero Organopónico Alamar is especially beautiful: a few acres of vegetables attached to a shady yard packed with potted plants for sale, birds in wicker cages, a cafeteria, and a small market where a steady line of local people come to buy tomatoes, lettuce, oregano, potatoes—twenty-five crops were listed on the blackboard the day I visited—for their supper. Sixty-four people farm this tiny spread. Their chief is Miguel Salcines López, a tall, middle-aged, intense, and quite delightful man.

“This land was slated for a hospital and sports complex,” he said, leading me quickly through his tiny empire. “But when the food crisis came, the government decided this was more important,” and they let Salcines begin his cooperative. “I was an agronomic engineer before that,” he said. “I was fat, a functionary. I was a bureaucrat.” Now he is not. Most of his farm is what we would call organic—indeed, Salcines showed off a pyramidal mini-greenhouse in which he raises seedlings, in the belief that its shape “focuses energy.” Magnets on his irrigation lines, he believes, help “reduce the surface tension” of the water—give him a ponytail and he'd fit right in at the Marin farmers' market. Taking a more “traditional” organic approach, Salcines has also planted basil and marigolds at the row ends to attract beneficial insects, and he rotates sweet potato through the rows every few plantings to cleanse the soil; he's even got neem trees to supply natural pesticides. But Salcines is not obsessive even about organicity. Like gardeners everywhere, he has trouble with potato bugs, and he doesn't hesitate to use man-made pesticide to fight them. He doesn't use artificial fertilizer, both because it is expensive and because he doesn't need it—indeed, the garden makes money selling its own compost, produced with the help of millions of worms (“California Reds”) in a long series of shaded trenches.

While we ate rice and beans and salad and a little chicken, Salcines laid out the finances of his cooperative farm. For the last six months, he said, the government demanded that the organopónico produce 835,000 pesos' worth of food. They actually produced more than a million pesos' worth. Writing quickly on a piece of scrap paper, Salcines predicted that the profit for the whole year would be 393,000 pesos. Half of that he would reinvest in enlarging the farm; the rest would go into a profit-sharing plan. It's not an immense sum when divided among sixty-four workers—about $150—but for Cuban workers this is considered a good job indeed. A blackboard above the lunch line reminded employees what their monthly share of the profit would be: depending on how long they'd been at the farm, and how well they produced, they would get 291 pesos this month, almost doubling their base salary. The people worked hard, and if they didn't their colleagues didn't tolerate them.

What is happening at the Vivero Organopónico Alamar certainly isn't unfettered capitalism, but it's not exactly collective farming either. Mostly it's incredibly productive—sixty-four people earn a reasonable living on this small site, and the surrounding neighbors get an awful lot of their diet from its carefully tended rows. You see the same kind of production all over the city—every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems to be a small farm. The city grew 300,000 tons of food last year, nearly its entire vegetable supply and more than a token amount of its rice and meat, said Egidio Páez Medina, who oversees the organopónicos from a small office on a highway at the edge of town. “Tens of thousands of people are employed. And they get good money, as much as a thousand pesos a month. When I'm done with this job I'm going to start farming myself—my pay will double.” On average, Páez said, each square meter of urban farm produces five kilograms of food a year. That's a lot. (And it's not just cabbage and spinach; each farm also seems to have at least one row of spearmint, an essential ingredient for the mojito.)

So Cuba—happy healthy miracle. Of course, Human Rights Watch, in its most recent report, notes that the government “restricts nearly all avenues of political dissent,” “severely curtails basic rights to free expression,” and that “the government's intolerance of dissenting voices intensified considerably in 2003.” It's as if you went to Whole Foods and noticed a guy over by the soymilk with a truncheon. Cuba is a weird political system all its own, one that's been headed by the same guy for forty-five years. And the nature of that system, and that guy, had something to do with the way the country responded to its crisis.

For one thing, Castro's Cuba was so rigidly (and unproductively) socialist that simply by slightly loosening the screws on free enterprise it was able to liberate all kinds of pent-up energy. Philip Peters, a Cuba analyst at the conservative Lexington Institute, has documented how the country redistributed as much as two thirds of state lands to cooperatives and individual farmers and, as with the organopónico in Alamar, let them sell their surplus above a certain quota. There's no obvious name for this system. It's a lot like sharecropping, and it shares certain key features with, say, serfdom, not to mention high feudalism. It is not free in any of the ways we use the word—who the hell wants to say thank you to the government for “allowing” you to sell your “surplus”? But it's also different from monolithic state communism.

In 1995, as the program geared up, the markets were selling 390 million pounds of produce; sales volume tripled in the next three years. Now the markets bustle, stacked deep with shiny heaps of bananas and dried beans, mangos and tomatoes. But the prices, though they've dropped over the years, are still beyond the reach of the poorest Cubans. And the government, which still sells every citizen a basic monthly food ration for just a few pesos, has also tried to reregulate some of the trade at the farmers' markets, fearing they were creating a two-tier system. “It's not reform like you've seen in China, where they're devolving a lot of economic decision making out to the private sector,” Peters said. “They made a decision to graft some market mechanisms onto what remains a fairly statist model. It could work better. But it has worked.”
Fidel Castro, as even his fiercest opponents would admit, has almost from the day he took power spent lavishly on the country's educational system. Cuba's ratio of teachers to students is akin to Sweden's; people who want to go to college go to college. Which turns out to be important, because farming, especially organic farming, especially when you're not used to doing it, is no simple task. You don't just tear down the fence around the vacant lot and hand someone a hoe, quoting him some Maoist couplet about the inevitable victory of the worker. The soil's no good at first, the bugs can't wait to attack. You need information to make a go of it. To a very large extent, the rise of Cuba's semi-organic agriculture is almost as much an invention of science and technology as the high-input tractor farming it replaced, which is another thing that makes this story so odd.

“I came to Havana at the time of the revolution, in 1960, to start university,” said Fernando Funes, who now leads the national Pasture and Forage Research Unit. “We went from 18,000 university students before the revolution to 200,000 after, and a big proportion were in agricultural careers. People specialized in soil fertility, or they specialized in pesticides. They were very specialized. Probably too specialized. But yields were going up.” Yields were going up because of the wildly high-input farming. In the town of Nuevo Gerona, for instance, there is a statue of a cow named White Udder, descended from a line of Canadian Holsteins. In the early 1980s she was the most productive cow on the face of the earth, giving 110 liters of milk a day, 27,000 liters in a single lactation. Guinness certified her geysers of milk. Fidel journeyed out to the countryside to lovingly stroke her hide. She was a paragon of scientific management, with a carefully controlled diet of grain concentrates. Most of that grain, however, came from abroad (“this is too hot to be good grain country,” Funes said). White Udder was a kept woman. To anyone with a ledger book her copious flow was entirely uneconomic, a testimony to the kinky economics of farm subsidies.

“In that old system, it took ten or fifteen or twenty units of energy to produce one unit of food energy,” Funes said. “At first we didn't care so much about economics—we had to produce no matter what.” Even in the salad days of Soviet-backed agriculture, however, some of the local agronomists were beginning to think the whole system was slightly insane. “We were realizing just how inefficient it was. So a few of us were looking for other ways. In cattle we began to look at things like using legumes to fix nitrogen in the pasture so we could cut down on fertilizer,” Funes said. And Cuba was inefficient in more than its use of energy. Out at the Agrarian University of Havana on the city's outskirts, agriculture professor Nilda Pérez Consuegra remembers how a few of her colleagues began as early as the 1970s to notice that the massive “calendar spraying” of pesticides was breeding insect resistance. They began working on developing strains of bacteria and experimenting with raising beneficial insects.
They could do nothing to forestall the collapse of the early 1990s, though. White Udder's descendants simply died in the fields, unable to survive on the tropical grasses that had once sustained the native cattle. “We lost tens of thousands of animals. And even if they survived, they couldn't produce anything like the same kind of milk once there was no more grain—seven or eight liters a day if we were lucky,” Funes said. Fairly quickly, however, the agricultural scientists began fanning out around the country to help organize a recovery. They worked without much in the way of resources, but they found ways.

One afternoon, near an organopónico in central Havana, I knocked on the door of a small two-room office, the local Center for Reproduction of Entomophages and Entomopathogens. There are 280 such offices spread around the country, each manned by one or two agronomists. Here, Jorge Padrón, a heavyset and earnest fellow, was working with an ancient Soviet refrigerator and autoclave (the writing on the gauges was in Cyrillic) and perhaps three hundred glass beakers with cotton gauze stoppers. Farmers and backyard gardeners from around the district would bring him sick plants, and he'd look at them under the microscope and tell them what to do. Perhaps he'd hand them a test tube full of a trichoderma fungus, which he'd grown on a medium of residue from sugarcane processing, and tell them to germinate the seed in a dilute solution; maybe he'd pull a vial of some natural bacteria—verticillium lecanii or beauveria bassiana—from a rusty coffee can. “It is easier to use chemicals. You see some trouble in your tomatoes, and chemicals take care of it right away,” he said. Over the long run, though, thinking about the whole system yields real benefits. “Our work is really about preparing the fields so plants will be stronger. But it works.” It is the reverse, that is, of the Green Revolution that spread across the globe in the 1960s, an industrialization of the food system that relied on irrigation, oil (both for shipping and fertilization), and the massive application of chemicals to counter every problem.

The localized application of research practiced in Cuba has fallen by the wayside in countries where corporate agriculture holds sway. I remember visiting a man in New Hampshire who was raising organic apples for his cider mill. Apples are host to a wide variety of pests and blights, and if you want advice about what chemical to spray on them, the local agricultural extension agent has one pamphlet after another with the answers, at least in part, because pesticide companies like Monsanto fund huge amounts of the research that goes on at the land-grant universities. But no one could tell my poor orchardist anything about how to organically control the pests on his apples, even though there must have been a huge body of such knowledge once upon a time, and he ended up relying on a beautifully illustrated volume published in the 1890s. In Cuba, however, all the equivalents of Texas A&M or the University of Nebraska are filled with students looking at antagonist fungi, lion-ant production for sweet potato weevil control, how to intercrop tomatoes and sesame to control the tobacco whitefly, how much yield grows when you mix green beans and cassava in the same rows (60 percent), what happens to plantain production when you cut back on the fertilizer and substitute a natural bacterium called A. chroococcum (it stays the same), how much you can reduce fertilizer on potatoes if you grow a rotation of jack beans to fix nitrogen (75 percent), and on and on and on. “At first we had all kinds of problems,” said a Japanese-Cuban organoponicist named Olga Oye Gómez, who grows two acres of specialty crops that Cubans are only now starting to eat: broccoli, cauliflower, and the like. “We lost lots of harvests. But the engineers came and showed us the right biopesticides. Every year we get a little better.”

Not every problem requires a Ph.D. I visited Olga's farm in midsummer, when her rows were under siege from slugs, a problem for which the Cuban solution is the same as in my own New England tomato patch: a saucer full of beer. In fact, since the pressure is always on to reduce the use of expensive techniques, there's a premium on old-fashioned answers. Consider the question of how you plow a field when the tractor that you used to use requires oil you can't afford and spare parts you can't obtain. Cuba—which in the 1980s had more tractors per hectare than California, according to Nilda Pérez—suddenly found itself relying on the very oxen it once had scorned as emblems of its peasant past. There were perhaps 50,000 teams of the animals left in Cuba in 1990, and maybe that many farmers who still knew how to use them. “None of the large state farms or even the mechanized cooperatives had the necessary infrastructure to incorporate animal traction,” wrote Arcadio Ríos, of the Agricultural Mechanization Research Institute, in a volume titled Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance. “Pasture and feed production did not exist on site; and at first there were problems of feed transportation.” Veterinarians were not up on their oxen therapy.

But that changed. Ríos's institute developed a new multi-plow for plowing, harrowing, riding, and tilling, specially designed not “to invert the topsoil layer” and decrease fertility. Harness shops were set up to start producing reins and yokes, and the number of blacksmith shops quintupled. The ministry of agriculture stopped slaughtering oxen for food, and “essentially all the bulls in good physical condition were selected and delivered to cooperative and state farms.” Oxen demonstrations were held across the country. (The socialist love of exact statistics has not waned, so it can be said that in 1997 alone, 2,344 oxen events took place, drawing 64,279 participants.) By the millennium there were 400,000 oxen teams plying the country's fields. And one big result, according to a score of Ph.D. theses, is a dramatic reduction in soil compaction, as hooves replaced tires. “Across the country we see dry soils turning healthier, loamier,” Professor Pérez said. Soon an ambitious young Cuban will be able to get a master's degree in oxen management.

One question is: How resilient is the new Cuban agriculture? Despite ever tougher restrictions on U.S. travel and remittances from relatives, the country has managed to patch together a pretty robust tourist industry in recent years: Havana's private restaurants fill nightly with Canadians and Germans. The government's investment in the pharmaceutical industry appears to be paying off, too, and now people who are fed by ox teams are producing genetically engineered medicines at some of the world's more advanced labs. Foreign exchange is beginning to flow once more; already many of the bicycles in the streets have been replaced by buses and motorbikes and Renaults. Cuba is still the most unconsumer place I've ever been—there's even less to buy than in the old Soviet Union—but sooner or later Castro will die. What then?

Most of the farmers and agronomists I interviewed professed conviction that the agricultural changes ran so deep they would never be eroded. Pérez, however, did allow that there were a lot of younger oxen drivers who yearned to return to the cockpits of big tractors, and according to news reports some of the country's genetic engineers are trying to clone White Udder herself from leftover tissue. If Cuba simply opens to the world economy—if Castro gets his professed wish and the U.S. embargo simply disappears, replaced by a free-trade regime—it's very hard to see how the sustainable farming would survive for long. We use pesticides and fertilizers because they make for incredibly cheap food. None of that dipping the seedling roots in some bacillus solution, or creeping along the tomato rows looking for aphids, or taking the oxen off to be shoed. Our industrial agriculture—at least as heavily subsidized by Washington as Cuba's farming once was subsidized by Moscow—simply overwhelms its neighbors. For instance, consider Mexico and corn. Not long ago the journalist Michael Pollan told the story of what happened when NAFTA opened that country's markets to a flood of cheap, heavily subsidized U.S. maize: the price fell by half, and 1.3 million small farmers were put out of business, forced to sell their land to larger, more corporate farms that could hope to compete by mechanizing (and lobbying for subsidies of their own). A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace enumerated the environmental costs: fertilizer runoff suffocating the Sea of Cortéz, water shortages getting worse as large-scale irrigation booms. Genetically modified corn varieties from the United States are contaminating the original strains of the crop, which began in southern Mexico.

Cuba already buys a certain amount of food from the United States, under an exemption from the embargo passed during the Clinton Administration. So far, though, the buying is mostly strategic, spread around the country in an effort to build political support for a total end to the embargo. No one ever accused the Cubans of being dumb, said Peters of the Lexington Institute. “They know the congressional district that every apple, every chicken leg, every grain of wheat, comes from.” But that trickle, in a free-trading, post-Castro Cuba, would likely become, as in Mexico and virtually every other country on earth, a torrent, and one that would wash away much of the country's agricultural experiment.

You can also ask the question in reverse, though: Does the Cuban experiment mean anything for the rest of the world? An agronomist would call the country's farming “low-input,” the reverse of the Green Revolution model, with its reliance on irrigation, oil, and chemistry. If we're running out of water in lots of places (the water table beneath China and India's grain-growing plains is reportedly dropping by meters every year), and if the oil and natural gas used to make fertilizer and run our megafarms are changing the climate (or running out), and if the pesticides are poisoning farmers and killing other organisms, and if everything at the Stop & Shop has traveled across a continent to get there and tastes pretty much like crap, might there be some real future for low-input farming for the rest of us? Or are its yields simply too low? Would we all starve without the supermarket and the corporate farm?

It's not a question academics have devoted a great deal of attention to—who would pay to sponsor the research? And some clearly think the question isn't even worth raising. Dennis Avery, director of global-food issues at the conservative Hudson Institute, compared Cuba with China during the Great Leap Forward: “Instead of building fertilizer factories, Mao told farmers to go get leaves and branches from the hillsides to mulch the rice paddies. It produced the worst soil erosion China has seen.” Raising the planet's crops organically would mean “you'd need the manure from seven or eight billion cattle; you'd lose most of the world's wildlife because you'd have to clear all the forests.”

But strict organic agriculture isn't what the Cubans practice (remember those pesticides for the potato bugs). “If you're going to grow irrigated rice, you'll almost always need some fertilizer,” said Jules Pretty, a professor at the University of Essex's Department of Biological Sciences, who has looked at sustainable agriculture in fields around the world. “The problem is being judicious and careful.” It's very clear, he added, “that Cuba is not an anomaly. All around the world small-scale successes are being scaled up to regional level.” Farmers in northeast Thailand, for instance, suffered when their rice markets disappeared in the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. “They'd borrowed money to invest in ‘modern agriculture,’ but they couldn't get the price they needed. A movement emerged, farmers saying, ‘Maybe we should just concentrate on local markets, and not grow for Bangkok, not for other countries.’ They've started using a wide range of sustainability approaches—polyculture, tree crops and agroforestry, fish ponds. One hundred and fifty thousand farmers have made the shift in the last three years.”

Almost certainly, he said, such schemes are as productive as the monocultures they replaced. “Rice production goes down, but the production of all sorts of other things, like leafy vegetables, goes up.” And simply cutting way down on the costs of pesticides turns many bankrupt peasants solvent. “The farmer field schools began in Indonesia, with rice growers showing one another how to manage their paddies to look after beneficial insects,” just the kinds of predators the Cubans were growing in their low-tech labs. “There's been a huge decrease in costs and not much of a change in yields.”

And what about the heartlands of industrial agriculture, the U.S. plains, for instance? “So much depends on how you measure efficiency,” Pretty said. “You don't get something for nothing.” Cheap fertilizer and pesticide displace more expensive labor and knowledge—that's why 219 American farms have gone under every day for the last fifty years and yet we're producing ever more grain and a loaf of bread might as well be free. On the other hand, there are those bereft Midwest counties. And the plumes of pesticide poison spreading through groundwater. And the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico into which the tide of nitrogen washes each planting season. And the cloud of carbon dioxide that puffs out from the top of the fertilizer factories. If you took those things seriously, you might decide that having one percent of your population farming was not such a wondrous feat after all.

The American model of agriculture is pretty much what people mean when they talk about the Green Revolution: high-yielding crop varieties, planted in large monocultures, bathed in the nurturing flow of petrochemicals, often supported by government subsidy, designed to offer low-priced food in sufficient quantity to feed billions. Despite its friendly moniker, many environmentalists and development activists around the planet have grown to despair about everything the Green Revolution stands for. Like Pretty, they propose a lowercase greener counterrevolution: endlessly diverse, employing the insights of ecology instead of the brute force of chemistry, designed to feed people but also keep them on the land. And they have some allies even in the rich countries—that's who fills the stalls at the farmers' markets blooming across North America.

But those farmers' markets are still a minuscule leaf on the giant stalk of corporate agribusiness, and it's not clear that, for all the paeans to the savor of a local tomato, they'll ever amount to much more. Such efforts are easily co-opted—when organic produce started to take off, for instance, industrial growers soon took over much of the business, planting endless monoculture rows of organic lettuce that in every respect, save the lack of pesticides, mirrored all the flaws of conventional agriculture. (By some calculations, the average bite of organic food at your supermarket has traveled even farther than the 1,500-mile journey taken by the average bite of conventional produce.) That is to say, in a world where we're eager for the lowest possible price, it's extremely difficult to do anything unconventional on a scale large enough to matter.

And it might be just as hard in Cuba were Cuba free. I mean, would Salcines be able to pay sixty-four people to man his farm or would he have to replace most of them with chemicals? If he didn't, would his customers pay higher prices for his produce or would they prefer lower-cost lettuce arriving from California's Imperial Valley? Would he be able to hold on to his land or would there be some more profitable use for it? For that matter, would many people want to work on his farm if they had a real range of options? In a free political system, would the power of, say, pesticide suppliers endanger the government subsidy for producing predatory insects in local labs? Would Cuba not, in a matter of several growing seasons, look a lot like the rest of the world? Does an organopónico depend on a fixed ballot?

There's clearly something inherently destructive about an authoritarian society—it's soul-destroying, if nothing else. Although many of the Cubans I met were in some sense proud of having stood up to the Yanquis for four decades, Cuba was not an overwhelmingly happy place. Weary, I'd say. Waiting for a more normal place in the world. And poor, much too poor. Is it also possible, though, that there's something inherently destructive about a globalized free-market society—that the eternal race for efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages the environment, and perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of a carrot? Is it possible that markets, at least for food, may work better when they're smaller and more isolated? The next few decades may be about answering that question. It's already been engaged in Europe, where people are really debating subsidies for small farmers, and whether or not they want the next, genetically modified, stage of the Green Revolution, and how much it's worth paying for Slow Food. It's been engaged in parts of the Third World, where in India peasants threw out the country's most aggressive free-marketeers in the last election, sensing that the shape of their lives was under assault. Not everyone is happy with the set of possibilities that the multinational corporate world provides. People are beginning to feel around for other choices. The world isn't going to look like Cuba—Cuba won't look like Cuba once Cubans have some say in the matter. But it may not necessarily look like Nebraska either.

The choices are about values,” Pretty said. Which is true, at least for us, at least for the moment. And when the choices are about values, we generally pick the easiest and cheapest way, the one that requires thinking the least. Inertia is our value above all others. Inertia was the one option the Cubans didn't have; they needed that meal a day back, and given that Castro was unwilling to let loose the reins, they had a limited number of choices about how to get it. “In some ways the special period was a gift to us,” said Funes, the forage expert, the guy who lost twenty pounds, the guy who went from thinking about White Udder to thinking about oxen teams. “It made it easier because we had no choice. Or we did, but the choice was will we cry or will we work. There was a strong desire to lie down and cry, but we decided to do things instead.”

"Two-Fer" ALERT: Dole and Monsanto join forces to develop new breeds of veggies

Your Axis of Evil is right here, folks.

The issue is not so much the immediate vegetable consumption.
It is the same issue as with GMO's: seed-tampering and the spreading of these seeds to good, organic crops rendering them useless, and also demanding payment for the "use of the patented seeds!".
Start googling crop contamination by genetically modified seeds and you'll start to see a pattern.

So... if you now say that the seeds are not genetically modified, but only BRED...
How does that now allow you to play with words to achieve the same outcome?

Just ask yourself WHY these companies would start breeding NOW, instead of having done it a long time ago, saving billions of dollars in the Research and Development of the gentetically modified varieties, the resulting bad press, etc.

I smell a large, foul turd on the horizon.

Here's the article:

From: http://naturalfoodsmerchandiser.com/tabId/119/itemId/3982/Dole-and-Monsanto-join-forces-to-develop-new-breed.aspx

Dole and Monsanto join forces to develop new breeds of veggies
July 07,2009
By: Angela Cortez

In a new collaboration between the Monsanto Company and Dole Fresh Vegetables, Inc., plant breeding will be used to enhance the look, aroma, texture and taste of certain vegetables, but some natural food advocates say such "tinkering" is not necessary.

The five-year collaboration will focus on broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and spinach. The breeding is also expected to improve the vegetables' nutritional value, according to the companies.
"I'm skeptical," said Bill Freese, science and policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety. "Especially with spinach and broccoli, they are already chock-full with nutrients. We don't need to tinker with them to make them more nutritious. What we need is more diverse diets."
Monsanto spokeswoman Riddhi Trivedi-St. Clair said no genetic engineering will be used in this collaboration between Dole and Monsanto, the makers of RoundUp, who also develop genetically-engineered crops to resist the herbicide.

"This collaboration is based on development through breeding, as opposed to genetic modification. It's very basic. Farmers have done it for centuries," she said. "There may be biotechnology with vegetables, eventually, but this collaboration won't have any genetic engineering."

The enhancements will be done through molecular marker assisted breeding. Basically, by hybridizing, Monsanto will study the genes through use of monecular markers to determine what makes vegetables taste better, look better, have better texture or contain the most nutrients. Plants with desirable qualities will be selected and bred until researchers find the right combination of characteristics.

Freese agrees the technique is nothing new, but basically a process that involves looking at the full set of genes associated with a crop and finding certain traits that can be used in the breeding process, but he still questions Monsanto's motives.

"When you have big, industrialized agri-business promising to produce more flavor and more nutrients, it goes against the entire history of food industrialization," he said. "The industry's tasteless tomato was bred to withstand longer transport and shelf life, not for taste or nutrition. Historically, that is not where their interests have been."

Freese added that Monsanto has promised super crops in the past, but has only produced crops that can tolerate herbicide and resistant pests.

But with its collaboration with Dole, the two companies say they will produce better tasting and more nutritional food that will strengthen the American diet. The companies joined forces because Dole is a large producer of fruits and vegetables and Monsanto brings a lot to the table in terms of research and development, Trivedi-St. Clair said.

USDA Poised to Approve Widespread, Risky Field Trial of GE Trees

From: The True Food Network

The biotechnology firm ArborGen has asked the USDA for permission to conduct 29 field trials of genetically engineered "cold tolerant" eucalyptus trees in the U.S. For the first time in history, this massive experiment, which is on the verge of being green-lighted, will literally be using nature as the laboratory to test more than 260,000 genetically engineered trees. Scientists across the U.S. are voicing concerns over this proposal.

As it did with GE alfalfa, USDA failed to conduct and prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to comprehensively address all the relevant issues related to the proposed eucalyptus field trials. Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina have created pollen models that show tree pollen traveling from a forest in North Carolina for over 1,000 kilometers northward into eastern Canada. A study published in the New Physiologist found pine pollen 600 kilometers from the nearest pines. Scientists researching sterility in trees have admitted that 100 percent guaranteed sterility in GE trees is impossible. This evidence implies that if GE trees are released into the environment, widespread and irreversible contamination of native forests cannot be prevented.

Contamination of natural trees by GE eucalyptus could pose a severe environmental threat. Eucalyptus grow well in warm climates, so engineering them to tolerate cold temperatures removes the only barrier to their unrestricted spread. In some places where eucalyptus have been introduced, they are well known for escaping and colonizing native ecosystems. For example, eucalyptus is listed as an invasive species and a costly plant pest in California. The spread of these plants into the wild through seeds and plant matter is highly likely, and the impacts on native ecosystems from this invader are largely unknown. Additionally, one of the experimental GE tree varieties is a known host for cryptococcus gatti, a fatal fungal pathogen whose spores cause meningitis in people and animals.

Despite recent federal court decisions that USDA failed to address the risk of contamination and other environmental risks from genetically engineered plants, like GE bentgrass and alfalfa, USDA seems poised to push ahead with this dangerous proposal.

A public comment period is open until July 6th, 2009 - please send your comment to USDA APHIS opposing this risky proposal today!

Click HERE to send your comment!

Organic Farms/West Nile Spraying in Southeastern, PA

Some food for thought:
I saw a sign the other day that said "Organic Farm: DO NOT SPRAY!".
This was because local officials are going nuts over West Nile virus, and implementing mandatory spraying. If you live in Southeast PA, chances are, your township, or one within 5 minutes of you was the subject of aerial spraying recently.

Aerial spraying that gave less than 24 hours notice!

While I was pondering covering my garden, I hadn't thought about the FARMS. I buy produce every Sat. at the farmer's market.
What about THEIR "gardens"?
Oh, Snap!
What any ingenius way to put organic alternatives out of business. Why hasn't Monsanto thought of this? Or did they?
Here is a very informative note from a local organic farms' newsletter I receive, that explains it in detail.
Please take action. It's your CHOICE.
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West Nile Virus Spraying

As many of you may know, areas within Southeastern, PA, including Montgomery County, have recently undergone spraying in an effort to help control the mosquito population due to the West Nile Virus. Two things have come to light through such spraying:

1 - Public notification of such spraying

2 - Type of Pesticides being used & their impact on the environment

The County implemented Aerial spraying of Resmethrin, a synthetic pyrethroid product, and also ground spraying. Many of our customers have asked us about the spraying and have expressed great concern.

Our farm is Certified Organic through the National Organic Program, and IF our township had been sprayed, all of our current crops would not be able to be sold, labeled, or represented as organic until the next harvest. Obviously, very troubling!! We take great pride in caring for our farm according to the National Organic Standards, only using approved materials through the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI), so for a government agency to possibly fly overhead and take that away is a bit frustrating, to say the least!

But the heart of the matter for us is simply, we know better. There are alternatives to synthetic pesticides, and even the pyrethroid product that they are using, we use a natural version for sprays on our farm! (I'm still investigating to see if the spray we use has an aerosolized version, capable for aerial sprays.) We understand that West Nile Virus is a serious insect-borne illness, but Lyme Disease is a much greater threat, with similarly devastating manifestations, and thousands of reported cases in PA every year, and planes aren't flying overhead for Lyme...so what's the criteria for such sprays?? And from an environmental perspective, is widespread spraying a truly effective measure of protection?

We feel their needs to be a dialog for the public to understand the threat, and we agree that we should use our tax dollars to respond appropriately to maximally protect health and property, but we believe that natural and organic compounds should be a big part of the discussion.

I would encourage everyone to contact their legislators, visit the PA West Nile website for more information, and if you live locally to attend a Town Hall Meeting held by State Representative, Jay Moyer, this evening, Thursday, Sept. 4th, 7:00 P.M.-8:30 P.M.at Worcester Community Hall on 1031 Valley Forge Rd.

We have been advised by our Certifying agency to act proactively to protect our farm from future sprays by seeking an exemption. So we are asking for your support to sign a petition the next time you are in the market to protect Willow Creek Orchards from synthetic pesticide spraying. We are the only Certified Organic Fruit and Vegetable Farm in Montgomery County, PA and we want to safeguard our land for you!!

Africa in danger of losing sustainable farming

This is SO IMPORTANT!!!!
In this moment, there is the chance to avoid what will be a grave disaster.
If you've ever cared at all about saving indigenous culture, sustainable farming, or have understood how Africa's been shafted into the barren war-zone it has become, then you must find a way to support those resisting this project.
As soon as I find action items, I will post them here.
Thanks.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200801281056.html?viewall=1

'New Project Will Worsen Poverty'

The Herald (Harare)

OPINION
28 January 2008
Posted to the web 28 January 2008

By Sifelani Tsiko
Harare

The introduction of the new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa will have serious social, economic and agricultural implications on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers who are the majority in Africa, development experts have warned.

Agronomists, agro-ecologists, environmentalists and development experts who met in Mali at a conference on Climate Change, Agriculture, Fisheries and Pastoralism in Africa, urged African governments to reject this project which got US$150 million funding from its main handlers -- the Rockerfeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve African seed and distribution over the next five years.

"AGRA ignores the many successful agro-ecological and non-corporate approaches to agricultural development," said Eric Holt-Gimenez of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, commonly known as Food First.

"AGRA will undermine Africa's food sovereignty and kill its cultural diversity and agriculture."

AGRA was unveiled on September 12, 2006, by the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations to improve seed hybrids, inorganic fertilizers, water management and agricultural extension services in Africa.

The goal of this new agricultural project is to develop 100 new varieties in 5 years focusing on at least 10 different staple crops, which include maize, cassava, sorghum and millet.

AGRA's programmes are administered through the Programs for a Green Revolution in Africa which got an initial grant of close to US$30 million for selected countries in East, Southern and West Africa.

Mariam Mayet of the African Centre for Biosafety said the officers of AGRA and ProGRA will initially be key senior staff from the Rockefeller Foundation who will be based in Nairobi, Kenya.

The first major initiative of ProGRA, she said, is the Programme for Africa's Seed System intended to operate in 20 African countries. PASS will focus primarily on improvement and distribution of copy varieties, training of a new generation of plant breeders, seed distribution through seed companies, public community seed systems and public extension.

Provision of credit and training for small "middle men" agro-dealers for distribution of seeds, chemical and fertilizers will also be done.

Agricultural experts say a "green revolution" merely includes efforts aimed at increasing productivity of major food crops by incorporating scientific advances in plant breeding, development or expansion of supportive technologies and implementation of various reforms.

They say large-scale investment in irrigation, application of chemical fertilizers and other inputs and farm equipment all make up a "green revolution."

Proponents of AGRA say Africa "missed the first Green Revolution" and hence the need to embrace this new alliance project. They feel strongly that Africa missed out on the Green Revolutions that took place in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

They suggest that efforts aimed at improving food crop varieties through the use of fertilizers, irrigation and farm equipment failed in Africa hence it is important for the continent to support this project to fight hunger and poverty.

AGRA is joining other multilateral institutions, G8 and other donor countries, international foundations and multinationals to invest in African agriculture.

African scientists, agricultural specialists, farmers' organization and civil society activists are calling for a total rejection of AGRA as they cite several key concerns.

They argue that the growing influence of powerful multinationals such as Monsanto, Bayer, DuPont, Dow Chemical Company, BASF and Syngenta will lead to an extensive investment in genetically modified hybrids and "suicide" seeds, which make farmers lose their indigenous and affordable seeds.

Monsanto, for example, controls 88 percent of global transgenic seed production. "There is not any other reality," said Holt-Gimenez.

"This new Green Revolution is meant to perpetuate slavery and dependence on the major US seed companies. A new AGRA project in Africa means a new market for their seed."

"These multinationals are only speaking about profits and poisons. They are not speaking about the culture and needs of the Global South farmers," he said. "The wisdom of all farmers in the Global South and indigenous communities is not taken into account. They are promoting mono-cropping at the expense of promoting agro-biodiversity," he added.

Added Renato T Salazar, a South East Asia Regional Initiative for Community Empowerment senior fellow: "We must come out strongly and inform the political side and farmers about the badness of AGRA in Africa. The Green Revolutions that were implemented in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s had disastrous effects."

"Prescription from AGRA will not work. The simplest solution to this project is to reject it," said Dr Regassa Feyissa, a veteran Ethiopian plant researcher.

Opponents say, beyond the yield gains from Green Revolution projects, there are many costs -- economic, agricultural and social. The use of large amounts of water, fertilizers and chemicals impoverishes the soil, leaving it less fertile and heavily polluted. Apart from health hazards, there are also human health implications.

The biodiversity kept by farmers for ages is lost and this forces farmers to depend heavily on pesticides and seed supplied by multinationals.

"The profound cultural and economic changes wrought by the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s produced a massive rural exodus and with it, a profound loss of traditional knowledge and skills," Grain, a Food First publication reported.

"The Green Revolution is based on a scientific reductionism, which has resulted in monocultures, the use of chemicals, fertilizers and inappropriate mechanization. This is alien to Africa's peasant farming systems which pursues a more holistic approach to agriculture in which crops are combined with livestock, organic manure is used, soils are looked after and there is a deep respect for the wider environment."

There are so many questions that need to be asked. How will AGRA address the lessons learned from the last Green Revolution in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s? Who sets the agenda for AGRA? Is accountable to African farmers and does it place their interest first? Will this project benefit African farmers or big multinationals, who will benefit most?

"The Green Revolution is a serious threat to the continent's peasants, seeds and livelihoods," said Diamantino Nhampossa of Mozambique's National Peasants Union and Via Campensina in Africa. "Instead of recognising the rich knowledge that peasant women and men have managed for millennia, the introduction of hybrid seeds and technological packages will further damage the peasants own production systems."

The winner of the Green Revolution projects from 1970-1990 is the US, which got revenue amounting to US$10,2 billion through seed and chemical sales by its multinationals.

Opponents say the biggest loser was the environment.

They say two-thirds of agricultural land worldwide has been affected by soil erosion, the green revolution has led to the salification of 70 million acres of land and the creation of Dead Zones in the Gulf of Mexico and Israel and other parts of the world.

Salazar said in Asia, the negative effects of the Green Revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s included the loss of indigenous rice landraces, dependence on external inputs, loss of control of indigenous agricultural science and technology, increased pests resistance, loss of genetic diversity and loss of farmers' innovation using indigenous knowledge systems passed on from one generation to the other.

"We need to learn from each other. The learning process is the one that empowers and can help us to promote and rehabilitate alternative approaches which farmers in the Global South have," he said. Renowned Ethiopian geneticist Dr Melaku Worede said: "There's so much potential with seeds in Africa that is not being explored. It's being undermined by outside solutions. Rather than the industrial agriculture model, we should support more holistic approaches to agriculture. Farmer-led programmes tend to look at more than just yields. There are about raising productivity without losing biodiversity."

Opponents of AGRA say African farmers have sophisticated crop and livestock breeding and ecosystem technologies and their own research networks. They argue that only farmer-led agricultural and rural development initiatives that build upon existing working systems can lead to real improvement. In the end, the issue is not so much about what can be introduced into Africa but about what needs to be done to strengthen the continent's resilient food production and ecosystem methods. Money, resources, new technologies and new imported projects alone cannot be a panacea to hunger and poverty in Africa.

There is a complex interaction of various factors that have to be taken into account to improve food security and food sovereignty in Africa.

And as Dr Melaku Worede rightly puts says: "We need to build from the strengths of the farmers. Our work shows that farmers are the best breeders and the best judges of new agricultural projects."


And HERE:
http://onthecommons.org/node/1190
is a link to a play-by-play of the plan, and debated issues in further depth between interested parties at the conference.

Attention Organic And Local Food Consumers, Livestock And Horse Owners:

I am posting here straight from StopAnimalID.org, because this issue is so important, and I don't want to miss anything.
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The USDA plans to make every owner of even one horse, cow, pig, goat, sheep, chicken, or pigeon register in a government database and subject their property and animals to constant federal and state government surveillance, and the animal owner will have to PAY for the privilege of owning animals!

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The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is a national program to identify and track livestock animals, including poultry, horses, cattle, goats and sheep for the purpose of disease containment. NAIS plans to use RFID and GPS technology to track animals, and requires every farm or “premises” be registered with government agencies, even if that premises houses a single animal. While NAIS’s purported goal of disease containment appears to be beneficial, the requirement for American citizens to register privately-owned property for tracking and monitoring purposes has very serious implications for our privacy, rights and freedoms.

StopAnimalID.org is the online manifestation of a grass roots refusal to submit to the latest grasping for control of what was once a government of We The People, but has now become a government of Them, The Agri-Conglomerates. This website is a means for like-minded individuals to band together and discover they are not alone in opposing this abuse of privacy and property rights.

Our agenda, perhaps obviously enough, is to stop the National Animal Identification System. We hope to do this by first raising awareness among the public. To do this we will compile a wealth of data regarding the NAIS in an easy to peruse format online. We will also provide printable materials to put the basics of this issue and what it means into places where it will count most, such as feedstores, farm supply stores, farm auctions, etc.

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