Iraq
And so to the next step in the dance called occupation.
America has found a legal basis to keep their troops in control in Iraq.
UN Resolution 1511, approved by the Security Council in October last year, conferred the mandate for the American-led occupation. This, the hawks believe, can be used to provide legal justification for the American military command to hold the reigns until Dec. 31, 2005.
That is when, according to a timetable agreed on by Iraqi leaders, the final transition to an elected Iraqi government will take place.
Care to take bets on that ever happening?
Since civil unrest (preventing such a transition) would be in the best interest of the American occupiers, expect much of it in the coming period.
Brothers and sisters in Iraq, welcome to democracy and freedom.
The American brand.
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Iraq
And so to the next step in the dance called occupation.
America has found a legal basis to keep their troops in control in Iraq.
UN Resolution 1511, approved by the Security Council in October last year, conferred the mandate for the American-led occupation. This, the hawks believe, can be used to provide legal justification for the American military command to hold the reigns until Dec. 31, 2005.
That is when, according to a timetable agreed on by Iraqi leaders, the final transition to an elected Iraqi government will take place.
Care to take bets on that ever happening?
Since civil unrest (preventing such a transition) would be in the best interest of the American occupiers, expect much of it in the coming period.
Brothers and sisters in Iraq, welcome to democracy and freedom.
The American brand.
And so to the next step in the dance called occupation.
America has found a legal basis to keep their troops in control in Iraq.
UN Resolution 1511, approved by the Security Council in October last year, conferred the mandate for the American-led occupation. This, the hawks believe, can be used to provide legal justification for the American military command to hold the reigns until Dec. 31, 2005.
That is when, according to a timetable agreed on by Iraqi leaders, the final transition to an elected Iraqi government will take place.
Care to take bets on that ever happening?
Since civil unrest (preventing such a transition) would be in the best interest of the American occupiers, expect much of it in the coming period.
Brothers and sisters in Iraq, welcome to democracy and freedom.
The American brand.
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Exxon Valdez cleanup
The world's original worst slob, as a kid I always cleaned my rubbish a damn sight better than they did!
I should sic my mom on them...
Betrayed by an oil giant
15 years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, the coast remains polluted and compensation is unpaid
By Andrew Gumbel
25 March 2004
Shortly after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, a senior Exxon representative visited the devastated fishing communities of southern Alaska and promised them the company would do everything in its power to restore their livelihoods and "make them whole".
"We're Exxon, we do it right," is the slogan that has stuck in the mind of Dune Lankard, a local Native American activist.
But 15 years to the day since a drunken sea captain drove his oil tanker on to a reef in Prince William Sound, covering one of the world's most pristine stretches of coastline with at least 11 million gallons of crude, the feeling among fishermen, environmentalist activists and the lawyers representing them is that Exxon has not only broken its original promise but has gone out of its way to betray them in pursuit of broader corporate interests.
Exxon, whose net income for 2003 is expected to top $21bn, has not paid out a penny of the $5bn (£2.7bn) in damages originally awarded to the fishing communities a decade ago, launching appeal after appeal and deluging the courts with paperwork. Despite intensive clean-up efforts, Prince William Sound remains polluted by large oil deposits that have destroyed its herring fisheries and wreaked havoc with the once-flourishing wildlife.
The town of Cordova, whose fishermen could once count on earning $100,000 a season, has become an outpost of despair, where debt and destitution have given rise to alcoholism, drug abuse, broken marriages and numerous suicides. About 1,000 of the original 32,000 plaintiffs in the class-action suit against Exxon have died, many of them succumbing to respiratory illnesses, brain tumours and cancers that a growing body of scientific evidence has linked to the spill and the subsequent clean-up.
Of the survivors, many hang on, ever more despondently, for the Exxon settlement money to arrive. Others have been forced to sell up and move away, returning in the summer months to fish what they can from the Snake river as the debt on their boats and their once highly valuable fishing permits continues to accumulate.
"Exxon has dodged its responsibility every step of the way," Mr Lankard said. "The company had every opportunity to go beyond the call of duty. Instead, they've understood that their hand gets stronger the longer they wait. And in the meantime, people are dying."
Yesterday, a large delegation of Cordovans and their supporters were in Washington to lobby the Bush administration to reopen the federal government's own suit against Exxon and force the company to pay out an extra $100m in environmental damages. That extra money was written into the original 1991 settlement for environmental damages - worth $900m - in the event that oil damage proved more extensive than foreseen.
The fear of environmental activists, however, is that both the Bush administration and Alaska's leading elected officials would prefer to defer to the oil industry and let Exxon off the hook. Alaska's attorney general, Craig Tillery, has said it may be "premature" to present a case for the extra $100m, which must be claimed by 2006.
Among those in Washington was Kory Blake, a third-generation Cordovan known before the spill as a "highliner" because he was one of the most productive commercial fishermen pulling herring and salmon out of the Sound. He had about $500,000 invested in his boat and in three commercial licences when the disaster struck.
At first, he was kept busy with the clean-up, on which Exxon spent an initial $2bn. Exxon also voluntarily paid an initial $300m in compensation to 11,000 individuals. But then in the early 1990s, just when everyone expected to start fishing again, it became clear that the herring stocks had not returned and the price of salmon - also slow to recover - started to go through the floor as canneries turned to other sources in Chile and Norway. Mr Blake had to sell his home to meet the annual $50,000 payments on his boat, and moved his family to a suburb of Anchorage, where his wife got a job as a school administrator.
Exxon's stonewalling - or what one expert, Steve Picou, professor of sociology at the University of South Alabama, calls "adversarial legalism" - goes back to the earliest days of the legal battles in 1990, when a company lawyer argued that the crude oil was not a pollutant under the Clean Water Act since it was a valuable commodity, not a waste product. In the class-action suit, Exxon threw up so many obstacles after the initial $5bn judgment that the case generated more than 7,700 docket entries. In a letter written to the company in 1999 by the National Association of Attorneys General, the company was accused of actually profiting from the delay in payment because of the difference between the interest rate being charged by the courts and the much higher rate it enjoyed through its own internal financing systems. "Each year Exxon delays payment of its obligation," the letter said, "it earns an estimated $400m."
In 2001, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the damages award, prompting Cordova's mayor to kill himself. The award was largely reinstated a year later, but remains tied up in the appeals process for the foreseeable future.
Exxon's critics say the government missed several opportunities to pressure the company into settling, especially in 1999 when the Federal Trade Commission was considering Exxon's proposed merger with Mobil. The merger was approved without reference to the Exxon Valdez.
Exxon's attitude is that it has already done its duty. It strongly disputes suggestions that the spill involved significantly more than the acknowledged 11 million gallons, and has rebutted scientific evidence of continuing damage to marine and bird life with its own scientific studies demonstrating the opposite. "The environment in Prince William Sound is healthy, robust and thriving," a recent company statement said. "That's evident to anyone who's been there, and it is also the conclusion of many scientists who have done extensive studies of the Prince William Sound ecosystem."
Not only do the environmentalists strongly disagree, they see the events of the past 15 years as an ominous sign of how corporations will feel entitled to behave in future.
"They are making all these promises about treading with a light footprint and respecting the environment if they open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, yet they refuse to settle up on a mess they've already made," Dune Lankard said.
I should sic my mom on them...
Betrayed by an oil giant
15 years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, the coast remains polluted and compensation is unpaid
By Andrew Gumbel
25 March 2004
Shortly after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, a senior Exxon representative visited the devastated fishing communities of southern Alaska and promised them the company would do everything in its power to restore their livelihoods and "make them whole".
"We're Exxon, we do it right," is the slogan that has stuck in the mind of Dune Lankard, a local Native American activist.
But 15 years to the day since a drunken sea captain drove his oil tanker on to a reef in Prince William Sound, covering one of the world's most pristine stretches of coastline with at least 11 million gallons of crude, the feeling among fishermen, environmentalist activists and the lawyers representing them is that Exxon has not only broken its original promise but has gone out of its way to betray them in pursuit of broader corporate interests.
Exxon, whose net income for 2003 is expected to top $21bn, has not paid out a penny of the $5bn (£2.7bn) in damages originally awarded to the fishing communities a decade ago, launching appeal after appeal and deluging the courts with paperwork. Despite intensive clean-up efforts, Prince William Sound remains polluted by large oil deposits that have destroyed its herring fisheries and wreaked havoc with the once-flourishing wildlife.
The town of Cordova, whose fishermen could once count on earning $100,000 a season, has become an outpost of despair, where debt and destitution have given rise to alcoholism, drug abuse, broken marriages and numerous suicides. About 1,000 of the original 32,000 plaintiffs in the class-action suit against Exxon have died, many of them succumbing to respiratory illnesses, brain tumours and cancers that a growing body of scientific evidence has linked to the spill and the subsequent clean-up.
Of the survivors, many hang on, ever more despondently, for the Exxon settlement money to arrive. Others have been forced to sell up and move away, returning in the summer months to fish what they can from the Snake river as the debt on their boats and their once highly valuable fishing permits continues to accumulate.
"Exxon has dodged its responsibility every step of the way," Mr Lankard said. "The company had every opportunity to go beyond the call of duty. Instead, they've understood that their hand gets stronger the longer they wait. And in the meantime, people are dying."
Yesterday, a large delegation of Cordovans and their supporters were in Washington to lobby the Bush administration to reopen the federal government's own suit against Exxon and force the company to pay out an extra $100m in environmental damages. That extra money was written into the original 1991 settlement for environmental damages - worth $900m - in the event that oil damage proved more extensive than foreseen.
The fear of environmental activists, however, is that both the Bush administration and Alaska's leading elected officials would prefer to defer to the oil industry and let Exxon off the hook. Alaska's attorney general, Craig Tillery, has said it may be "premature" to present a case for the extra $100m, which must be claimed by 2006.
Among those in Washington was Kory Blake, a third-generation Cordovan known before the spill as a "highliner" because he was one of the most productive commercial fishermen pulling herring and salmon out of the Sound. He had about $500,000 invested in his boat and in three commercial licences when the disaster struck.
At first, he was kept busy with the clean-up, on which Exxon spent an initial $2bn. Exxon also voluntarily paid an initial $300m in compensation to 11,000 individuals. But then in the early 1990s, just when everyone expected to start fishing again, it became clear that the herring stocks had not returned and the price of salmon - also slow to recover - started to go through the floor as canneries turned to other sources in Chile and Norway. Mr Blake had to sell his home to meet the annual $50,000 payments on his boat, and moved his family to a suburb of Anchorage, where his wife got a job as a school administrator.
Exxon's stonewalling - or what one expert, Steve Picou, professor of sociology at the University of South Alabama, calls "adversarial legalism" - goes back to the earliest days of the legal battles in 1990, when a company lawyer argued that the crude oil was not a pollutant under the Clean Water Act since it was a valuable commodity, not a waste product. In the class-action suit, Exxon threw up so many obstacles after the initial $5bn judgment that the case generated more than 7,700 docket entries. In a letter written to the company in 1999 by the National Association of Attorneys General, the company was accused of actually profiting from the delay in payment because of the difference between the interest rate being charged by the courts and the much higher rate it enjoyed through its own internal financing systems. "Each year Exxon delays payment of its obligation," the letter said, "it earns an estimated $400m."
In 2001, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the damages award, prompting Cordova's mayor to kill himself. The award was largely reinstated a year later, but remains tied up in the appeals process for the foreseeable future.
Exxon's critics say the government missed several opportunities to pressure the company into settling, especially in 1999 when the Federal Trade Commission was considering Exxon's proposed merger with Mobil. The merger was approved without reference to the Exxon Valdez.
Exxon's attitude is that it has already done its duty. It strongly disputes suggestions that the spill involved significantly more than the acknowledged 11 million gallons, and has rebutted scientific evidence of continuing damage to marine and bird life with its own scientific studies demonstrating the opposite. "The environment in Prince William Sound is healthy, robust and thriving," a recent company statement said. "That's evident to anyone who's been there, and it is also the conclusion of many scientists who have done extensive studies of the Prince William Sound ecosystem."
Not only do the environmentalists strongly disagree, they see the events of the past 15 years as an ominous sign of how corporations will feel entitled to behave in future.
"They are making all these promises about treading with a light footprint and respecting the environment if they open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, yet they refuse to settle up on a mess they've already made," Dune Lankard said.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Israel
They did it. They actually went and did it.
The Israelis killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
How heroic: shoot three rockets off at a quadriplegic as he leaves his mosque in Gaza City after morning service, killing not only him but another 7 people around him and injuring at least 17 other bystanders.
This man was not hard to find, the Israelis had his home address. His routine was unvaried. They could have picked him up at any time, put him in front of a judge and sentenced him to jail. They did it once before, it's not all that difficult.
It seems all rule of law has left that region. This is no way for a government to act: I find it hard to separate terrorist actions from soldier actions here.
All this does is make matters worse, so much worse. Many more people will die.
A few quotes:
"Sharon has opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head."
Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh, "Words cannot describe the emotion of anger and hate inside our hearts."
Another Hamas statement: "The Zionists didn't carry out their operation without getting the consent of the terrorist American administration, and it must take responsibility for this crime"
I am so, so... aarrgghh. Without words. THIS is where attention should go, to defuse the anger and injustice carried out in this region. To have world peace, to have stability in the Middle East, THIS is where world attention should go.
They did it. They actually went and did it.
The Israelis killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
How heroic: shoot three rockets off at a quadriplegic as he leaves his mosque in Gaza City after morning service, killing not only him but another 7 people around him and injuring at least 17 other bystanders.
This man was not hard to find, the Israelis had his home address. His routine was unvaried. They could have picked him up at any time, put him in front of a judge and sentenced him to jail. They did it once before, it's not all that difficult.
It seems all rule of law has left that region. This is no way for a government to act: I find it hard to separate terrorist actions from soldier actions here.
All this does is make matters worse, so much worse. Many more people will die.
A few quotes:
"Sharon has opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head."
Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh, "Words cannot describe the emotion of anger and hate inside our hearts."
Another Hamas statement: "The Zionists didn't carry out their operation without getting the consent of the terrorist American administration, and it must take responsibility for this crime"
I am so, so... aarrgghh. Without words. THIS is where attention should go, to defuse the anger and injustice carried out in this region. To have world peace, to have stability in the Middle East, THIS is where world attention should go.
Israel
They did it. They actually went and did it.
The Israelis killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
How heroic: shoot three rockets off at a quadriplegic as he leaves his mosque in Gaza City after morning service, killing not only him but another 7 people around him and injuring at least 17 other bystanders.
This man was not hard to find, the Israelis had his home address. His routine was unvaried. They could have picked him up at any time, put him in front of a judge and sentenced him to jail. They did it once before, it's not all that difficult.
It seems all rule of law has left that region. This is no way for a government to act: I find it hard to separate terrorist actions from soldier actions here.
All this does is make matters worse, so much worse. Many more people will die.
A few quotes:
"Sharon has opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head."
Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh, "Words cannot describe the emotion of anger and hate inside our hearts."
Another Hamas statement: "The Zionists didn't carry out their operation without getting the consent of the terrorist American administration, and it must take responsibility for this crime"
I am so, so... aarrgghh. Without words. THIS is where attention should go, to defuse the anger and injustice carried out in this region. To have world peace, to have stability in the Middle East, THIS is where world attention should go.
They did it. They actually went and did it.
The Israelis killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
How heroic: shoot three rockets off at a quadriplegic as he leaves his mosque in Gaza City after morning service, killing not only him but another 7 people around him and injuring at least 17 other bystanders.
This man was not hard to find, the Israelis had his home address. His routine was unvaried. They could have picked him up at any time, put him in front of a judge and sentenced him to jail. They did it once before, it's not all that difficult.
It seems all rule of law has left that region. This is no way for a government to act: I find it hard to separate terrorist actions from soldier actions here.
All this does is make matters worse, so much worse. Many more people will die.
A few quotes:
"Sharon has opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head."
Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh, "Words cannot describe the emotion of anger and hate inside our hearts."
Another Hamas statement: "The Zionists didn't carry out their operation without getting the consent of the terrorist American administration, and it must take responsibility for this crime"
I am so, so... aarrgghh. Without words. THIS is where attention should go, to defuse the anger and injustice carried out in this region. To have world peace, to have stability in the Middle East, THIS is where world attention should go.
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Monbiot on GM foods
He's always worth the read!
Seeds of Distraction
The biotech companies want us to consider everything except their motives
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 9th March 2004
The question is as simple as this: do you want a few corporations to monopolise the global food supply? If the answer is yes, you should welcome the announcement the government is expected to make today, that the commercial planting of a GM crop in Britain can go ahead. If the answer is no, you should regret it. The principal promotional effort of the genetic engineering industry is to distract us from this question.
GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes which give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can't be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all.
No one in her right mind would welcome this, so the corporations must persuade us to focus on something else. At first they talked of enhancing consumer choice, but when the carrot failed, they switched to the stick. Now we are told that unless we support the deployment of GM crops in Britain, our science base will collapse. And that, by refusing to eat GM products in Europe, we are threatening the developing world with starvation. Both arguments are, shall we say, imaginative, but in public relations cogency counts for little. All that matters is that you spin the discussion out for long enough to achieve the necessary result. And that means recruiting eminent figures to make the case on your behalf.
Last October, 114 scientists, many of whom receive funding from the biotech industry, sent an open letter to the Prime Minister claiming that Britain's lack of enthusiasm for GM crops "will inhibit our ability to contribute to scientific knowledge internationally".1 Scientists specialising in this field, they claimed, were being forced to leave the country to find work elsewhere.
Now forgive me if you've heard this before, but it seems to need repeating. GM crops are not science. They are technological products of science. To claim, as Tony Blair and several senior scientists have done, that those who oppose GM are "anti-science" is like claiming that those who oppose chemical weapons are anti-chemistry. Scientists are under no greater obligation to defend GM food than they are to defend the manufacture of Barbie dolls.
This is not to say that the signatories were wrong to claim that some researchers, who have specialised in the development of engineered crops, are now leaving Britain to find work elsewhere. As the public has rejected their products, the biotech companies have begun withdrawing from this country, and they are taking their funding with them. But if scientists attach their livelihoods to the market, they can expect their livelihoods to be affected by market forces. The people who wrote to Blair seem to want it both ways: commercial funding, insulated from commercial decisions.
In truth, the biotech companies' contribution to research in Britain has been small. Far more money has come from the government. Its Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, for example, funds 26 projects on GM crops and just one on organic farming.2 If scientists want a source of funding that's unlikely to be jeopardised by public concern, they should lobby for this ratio to be reversed.
But the plight of the men in white coats isn't much of a tearjerker. A far more effective form of emotional blackmail is the one deployed in the Guardian last week by Lord Taverne, the founder of the Prima PR consultancy. "The strongest argument in favour of developing GM crops," he wrote, "is the contribution they can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease."3
There's little doubt that some GM crops produce higher yields than some conventional crops, or that they can be modified to contain more nutrients, though both of these developments have been over-hyped. Two projects have been cited everywhere: a sweet potato being engineered in Kenya to resist viruses, and vitamin A-enhanced rice. The first scheme has just collapsed. Despite $6m of funding from Monsanto, the World Bank and the US government, and endless hype in the press, it turns out to have produced no improvement in virus resistance, and a decrease in yield.4 Just over the border in Uganda, a far cheaper conventional breeding programme has almost doubled sweet potato yields. The other, never more than a concept, now turns out not to work even in theory: malnourished people appear not to be able to absorb vitamin A in this form.5 But none of this stops Lord Taverne, or George Bush, or the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, from citing them as miracle cures for global hunger.
But some trials of this kind are succeeding, improving both yield and nutritional content. Despite the best efforts of the industry's boosters to confuse the two ideas, however, this does not equate to feeding the world.
The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolised by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech industry is to capture and monopolise the sources of wealth and the means of production.
Now in some places governments or unselfish private researchers are producing GM crops which are free from patents and not dependent on the application of proprietary pesticides, and these could well be of benefit to small farmers in the developing world. But Taverne and the other propagandists are seeking to persuade us to approve a corporate model of GM development in the rich world, in the hope that this will somehow encourage the opposite model to develop in the poor world.
Indeed, it is hard to see what on earth the production of crops for local people in poor nations has to do with consumer preferences in Britain. Like the scientists who wrote to Blair, the emotional blackmailers want to have it both ways: these crops are being grown to feed starving people, but the starving people won't be able to eat them unless, er ... they can export this food to Britain.
And here we encounter the perpetually neglected truth about GM crops. The great majority are not being grown to feed local people. In fact, they are not being grown to feed people at all, but to feed livestock, whose meat, milk and eggs are then sold to the world's richer consumers. The GM maize the government is expected to approve today is no exception. If in the next 30 years there is a global food crisis, it will be because the arable land which should be producing food for humans is instead producing feed for animals.
The biotech companies are not interested in whether or not science is flourishing or people are starving. They simply want to make money. The best way to make money is to control the market. But before you can control the market, you must first convince the people that there's something else at stake.
www.monbiot.com
Seeds of Distraction
The biotech companies want us to consider everything except their motives
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 9th March 2004
The question is as simple as this: do you want a few corporations to monopolise the global food supply? If the answer is yes, you should welcome the announcement the government is expected to make today, that the commercial planting of a GM crop in Britain can go ahead. If the answer is no, you should regret it. The principal promotional effort of the genetic engineering industry is to distract us from this question.
GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes which give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can't be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all.
No one in her right mind would welcome this, so the corporations must persuade us to focus on something else. At first they talked of enhancing consumer choice, but when the carrot failed, they switched to the stick. Now we are told that unless we support the deployment of GM crops in Britain, our science base will collapse. And that, by refusing to eat GM products in Europe, we are threatening the developing world with starvation. Both arguments are, shall we say, imaginative, but in public relations cogency counts for little. All that matters is that you spin the discussion out for long enough to achieve the necessary result. And that means recruiting eminent figures to make the case on your behalf.
Last October, 114 scientists, many of whom receive funding from the biotech industry, sent an open letter to the Prime Minister claiming that Britain's lack of enthusiasm for GM crops "will inhibit our ability to contribute to scientific knowledge internationally".1 Scientists specialising in this field, they claimed, were being forced to leave the country to find work elsewhere.
Now forgive me if you've heard this before, but it seems to need repeating. GM crops are not science. They are technological products of science. To claim, as Tony Blair and several senior scientists have done, that those who oppose GM are "anti-science" is like claiming that those who oppose chemical weapons are anti-chemistry. Scientists are under no greater obligation to defend GM food than they are to defend the manufacture of Barbie dolls.
This is not to say that the signatories were wrong to claim that some researchers, who have specialised in the development of engineered crops, are now leaving Britain to find work elsewhere. As the public has rejected their products, the biotech companies have begun withdrawing from this country, and they are taking their funding with them. But if scientists attach their livelihoods to the market, they can expect their livelihoods to be affected by market forces. The people who wrote to Blair seem to want it both ways: commercial funding, insulated from commercial decisions.
In truth, the biotech companies' contribution to research in Britain has been small. Far more money has come from the government. Its Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, for example, funds 26 projects on GM crops and just one on organic farming.2 If scientists want a source of funding that's unlikely to be jeopardised by public concern, they should lobby for this ratio to be reversed.
But the plight of the men in white coats isn't much of a tearjerker. A far more effective form of emotional blackmail is the one deployed in the Guardian last week by Lord Taverne, the founder of the Prima PR consultancy. "The strongest argument in favour of developing GM crops," he wrote, "is the contribution they can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease."3
There's little doubt that some GM crops produce higher yields than some conventional crops, or that they can be modified to contain more nutrients, though both of these developments have been over-hyped. Two projects have been cited everywhere: a sweet potato being engineered in Kenya to resist viruses, and vitamin A-enhanced rice. The first scheme has just collapsed. Despite $6m of funding from Monsanto, the World Bank and the US government, and endless hype in the press, it turns out to have produced no improvement in virus resistance, and a decrease in yield.4 Just over the border in Uganda, a far cheaper conventional breeding programme has almost doubled sweet potato yields. The other, never more than a concept, now turns out not to work even in theory: malnourished people appear not to be able to absorb vitamin A in this form.5 But none of this stops Lord Taverne, or George Bush, or the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, from citing them as miracle cures for global hunger.
But some trials of this kind are succeeding, improving both yield and nutritional content. Despite the best efforts of the industry's boosters to confuse the two ideas, however, this does not equate to feeding the world.
The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolised by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech industry is to capture and monopolise the sources of wealth and the means of production.
Now in some places governments or unselfish private researchers are producing GM crops which are free from patents and not dependent on the application of proprietary pesticides, and these could well be of benefit to small farmers in the developing world. But Taverne and the other propagandists are seeking to persuade us to approve a corporate model of GM development in the rich world, in the hope that this will somehow encourage the opposite model to develop in the poor world.
Indeed, it is hard to see what on earth the production of crops for local people in poor nations has to do with consumer preferences in Britain. Like the scientists who wrote to Blair, the emotional blackmailers want to have it both ways: these crops are being grown to feed starving people, but the starving people won't be able to eat them unless, er ... they can export this food to Britain.
And here we encounter the perpetually neglected truth about GM crops. The great majority are not being grown to feed local people. In fact, they are not being grown to feed people at all, but to feed livestock, whose meat, milk and eggs are then sold to the world's richer consumers. The GM maize the government is expected to approve today is no exception. If in the next 30 years there is a global food crisis, it will be because the arable land which should be producing food for humans is instead producing feed for animals.
The biotech companies are not interested in whether or not science is flourishing or people are starving. They simply want to make money. The best way to make money is to control the market. But before you can control the market, you must first convince the people that there's something else at stake.
www.monbiot.com
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Madrid, Spain
To all of you, the owners of the thirteen pairs of hands that carried the bombs today:
When you carried your little surprises into the train station, did you brush against people, stand close behind someone and smell the perfume of their hair? Did you wonder if they would be blown up soon by your little surprise or if they would be on a "safe" train? Did that thought excite you or give you pause at all?
When you hid your packages on the trains, did you look up and see someone looking at you? Did you smile and say good morning? Did you make a silly comment about the weather? And did it for one moment give you pause in what you were doing? Did you look people in the eye and know this: you will be dead in an hour and I will be responsible for that? Did you, just for ONE short hiccup, think that this was wrong, WRONG!
To all of you, the owners of the thirteen pairs of hands that carried the bombs today:
When you carried your little surprises into the train station, did you brush against people, stand close behind someone and smell the perfume of their hair? Did you wonder if they would be blown up soon by your little surprise or if they would be on a "safe" train? Did that thought excite you or give you pause at all?
When you hid your packages on the trains, did you look up and see someone looking at you? Did you smile and say good morning? Did you make a silly comment about the weather? And did it for one moment give you pause in what you were doing? Did you look people in the eye and know this: you will be dead in an hour and I will be responsible for that? Did you, just for ONE short hiccup, think that this was wrong, WRONG!
Madrid, Spain
To all of you, the owners of the thirteen pairs of hands that carried the bombs today:
When you carried your little surprises into the train station, did you brush against people, stand close behind someone and smell the perfume of their hair? Did you wonder if they would be blown up soon by your little surprise or if they would be on a "safe" train? Did that thought excite you or give you pause at all?
When you hid your packages on the trains, did you look up and see someone looking at you? Did you smile and say good morning? Did you make a silly comment about the weather? And did it for one moment give you pause in what you were doing? Did you look people in the eye and know this: you will be dead in an hour and I will be responsible for that? Did you, just for ONE short hiccup, think that this was wrong, WRONG!
To all of you, the owners of the thirteen pairs of hands that carried the bombs today:
When you carried your little surprises into the train station, did you brush against people, stand close behind someone and smell the perfume of their hair? Did you wonder if they would be blown up soon by your little surprise or if they would be on a "safe" train? Did that thought excite you or give you pause at all?
When you hid your packages on the trains, did you look up and see someone looking at you? Did you smile and say good morning? Did you make a silly comment about the weather? And did it for one moment give you pause in what you were doing? Did you look people in the eye and know this: you will be dead in an hour and I will be responsible for that? Did you, just for ONE short hiccup, think that this was wrong, WRONG!
Sunday, March 07, 2004
GM contamination in the USA
Makes me wonder how on earth they still call some foods organic.
If you read this, you realise that it's quite unstoppable in the USA by now.
There's no turning back the clock...
Revealed: Shocking new evidence of the dangers of GM crops
Genetically modified strains have contaminated two-thirds of all crops in US
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 07 March 2004
More than two-thirds of conventional crops in the United States are now contaminated with genetically modified material - dooming organic agriculture and posing a severe future risk to health - a new report concludes.
The report - which comes as ministers are on the verge of approving the planting of Britain's first GM crop, maize - concludes that traditional varieties of seed are "pervasively contaminated" by genetically engineered DNA. The US biotech industry says it is "not surprised" by the findings.
Because of the contamination, the report says, farmers unwittingly plant billions of GM seeds a year, spreading genetic modification throughout US agriculture. This would be likely to lead to danger to health with the next generation of GM crops, bred to produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals - delivering "drug-laced cornflakes" to the breakfast table.
The report comes at the worst possible time for the Government, which is trying to overcome strong resistance from the Scottish and Welsh administrations to GM maize.
The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee drew attention to the problem in North America in a report published on Friday, and said the Government had not paid enough attention to it. The MPs concluded: "No decision to proceed with the commercial growing of GM crops [in Britain] should be made until thorough research into the experience with GM crops in North America has been completed and published". It would be "irresponsible" for ministers to give the green light to the maize without further tests.
Peter Ainsworth, the committee chairman, accuses the Cabinet of "great discourtesy" to Parliament by making its decision on the maize last Thursday, the day before the report came out, and plans to raise the issue with the Speaker of the House.
This week's statement by Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for the Environment, is expected to fall short of authorising immediate planting of the maize, and provide only a muted endorsement for the technology. She will make it clear that the Government wants the GM industry to compensate farmers whose crops are contaminated. This could make cultivation uncommercial. The US study will increase the pressure on her to be tough.
Under the auspices of the green-tinged Union of Concerned Scientists, two separate independent laboratories tested supposedly non-GM seeds "representing a substantial proportion of the traditional seed supply" for maize, soya and oilseed rape, the three crops whose modified equivalents are grown widely in the United States.
The test found that at "the most conservative expression", half the maize and soyabeans and 83 per cent of the oilseed rape were contaminated with GM genes - just eight years after the modified varieties were first cultivated on a large scale in the US.
The degree of contamination is thought to be at a relatively low level of about 0.5 to 1 per cent. The reports says that "contamination ... is endemic to the system". It adds: "Heedlessly allowing the contamination of traditional plant varieties with genetically engineered sequences amounts to a huge wager on our ability to understand a complicated technology that manipulates life at the most elemental level." There could be "serious risks to health" if drugs and industrial chemicals from the next generation of GM crops got into food.
Lisa Dry, of the US Biotechnology Industry Association, said that the industry was "not surprised by this report, knowing that pollen travels and commodity grains might co-mingle at various places".
If you read this, you realise that it's quite unstoppable in the USA by now.
There's no turning back the clock...
Revealed: Shocking new evidence of the dangers of GM crops
Genetically modified strains have contaminated two-thirds of all crops in US
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 07 March 2004
More than two-thirds of conventional crops in the United States are now contaminated with genetically modified material - dooming organic agriculture and posing a severe future risk to health - a new report concludes.
The report - which comes as ministers are on the verge of approving the planting of Britain's first GM crop, maize - concludes that traditional varieties of seed are "pervasively contaminated" by genetically engineered DNA. The US biotech industry says it is "not surprised" by the findings.
Because of the contamination, the report says, farmers unwittingly plant billions of GM seeds a year, spreading genetic modification throughout US agriculture. This would be likely to lead to danger to health with the next generation of GM crops, bred to produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals - delivering "drug-laced cornflakes" to the breakfast table.
The report comes at the worst possible time for the Government, which is trying to overcome strong resistance from the Scottish and Welsh administrations to GM maize.
The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee drew attention to the problem in North America in a report published on Friday, and said the Government had not paid enough attention to it. The MPs concluded: "No decision to proceed with the commercial growing of GM crops [in Britain] should be made until thorough research into the experience with GM crops in North America has been completed and published". It would be "irresponsible" for ministers to give the green light to the maize without further tests.
Peter Ainsworth, the committee chairman, accuses the Cabinet of "great discourtesy" to Parliament by making its decision on the maize last Thursday, the day before the report came out, and plans to raise the issue with the Speaker of the House.
This week's statement by Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for the Environment, is expected to fall short of authorising immediate planting of the maize, and provide only a muted endorsement for the technology. She will make it clear that the Government wants the GM industry to compensate farmers whose crops are contaminated. This could make cultivation uncommercial. The US study will increase the pressure on her to be tough.
Under the auspices of the green-tinged Union of Concerned Scientists, two separate independent laboratories tested supposedly non-GM seeds "representing a substantial proportion of the traditional seed supply" for maize, soya and oilseed rape, the three crops whose modified equivalents are grown widely in the United States.
The test found that at "the most conservative expression", half the maize and soyabeans and 83 per cent of the oilseed rape were contaminated with GM genes - just eight years after the modified varieties were first cultivated on a large scale in the US.
The degree of contamination is thought to be at a relatively low level of about 0.5 to 1 per cent. The reports says that "contamination ... is endemic to the system". It adds: "Heedlessly allowing the contamination of traditional plant varieties with genetically engineered sequences amounts to a huge wager on our ability to understand a complicated technology that manipulates life at the most elemental level." There could be "serious risks to health" if drugs and industrial chemicals from the next generation of GM crops got into food.
Lisa Dry, of the US Biotechnology Industry Association, said that the industry was "not surprised by this report, knowing that pollen travels and commodity grains might co-mingle at various places".
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