sábado, agosto 31, 2013

Golden Rice no solution

http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4777-golden-rice-is-no-solution-to-malnutrition

August 29 2013


GM crops are no solution to malnutrition!
Groups in Asia support Filipino farmers' uprooting of Golden Rice
PRESS RELEASE
August 29, 2013
On August 8, 2013 more than 400 farmers, church people, students, academics and consumers uprooted a field trial of genetically modified (GM) rice that was nearly ready for harvest in Pili, Camarines Sur, Philippines. This courageous action undertaken by the Peasant Movement of Bicol and the Sikwal-GMO alliance was necessary to prevent the contamination of Asia's most important food crop by GMOs.
Field trials of Golden Rice, one in

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viernes, agosto 30, 2013

Letter to Scientific American


Scientific American magazine has just come out against GMO labels:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=labels-for-gmo-foods-are-a-bad-idea



“Labels for GMO Foods Are a Bad Idea” (The Editors, September 1, 2013) reads like talking points from the pesticide industry.
Genetic engineering is fundamentally different than traditional breeding because it mixes genes between organisms (like bacteria and corn) that would never breed in nature. Pesticide use has skyrocketed with GE crops, because most are herbicide-resistant varieties that promote more spraying of the weed-killers that comprise two-thirds of U.S. pesticide use as well as rapid evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds.  GE crops do not boost yields and do not feed the poor.  GE cotton has not increased yields in IndiaGE crops do not reduce water use. Most GE crops are corn and soybeans grown by farmers to feed animals and fuel cars in rich countries.  
Labeling will not cost consumers $400 per year. A study by the non-biased Emory University argues the costs are negligible. The discussion of safety is simply a red herring. We don’t label foods that are proven unsafe, we remove them from markets. Labels provide consumers with information and a choice. In light of the adverse impacts noted above and lack of consumer benefit, Europeans have utilized labels to make a rational choice against GE foods and the unsustainable practices that produce them.  
This is not “scientific advancement versus luddites.”  It’s about pulling back the curtain on a biotech industry that makes billions selling patented seeds and chemicals but have delivered on none of their promised benefits.


Bill Freese
Science Policy Analyst, Center for Food Safety

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jueves, agosto 29, 2013

Robi Gris le canta a la UPR


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miércoles, agosto 28, 2013

The CIA and the Iranian coup

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/08/26/a-cia-hand-in-an-american-coup/

Consortiumnews


A CIA Hand in an American ‘Coup’?

August 26, 2013
Special Report: The U.S. government decries leaks, but the other side of the story is that key chapters of American history are hidden from the public for decades and maybe forever. The CIA has just admitted its 1953 Iran coup and may never acknowledge a role in ousting Jimmy Carter in 1980, Robert Parry reports.

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lunes, agosto 26, 2013

"La lucha es vida toda" -Oscar López Rivera

domingo, agosto 25, 2013

Dos minutos de pasion, Maria Alvarado

jueves, agosto 22, 2013

Our seed, our sovereignty - seed law victory in Indonesia

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.grain.org/bulletin_board/entries/4774-our-seed-our-sovereignty-seed-law-victory-in-indonesia

 
We don’t want to live as second class citizens anymore. We have always been discriminated against, but we are legal citizens of this country.
 
We had to breed our local seeds in hiding, since if government knew about this we wouldn't get any support from government.
 
This victory at the constitutional court gives us back our Dignity. Recognition and openness to continue our creativity is the dignity for farmers and breeders.
 
- Joharipin, a breeder from Indramayu , Kertasemaya, Indonesia)
 

Between 2005 and 2010, more than a dozen farmers from Kediri and Nganjuk regencies in East Java were prosecuted after seed companies accused them of stealing seed. But a judicial review by Indonesia's constitutional court has found several key articles of the legislation used to go after the farmers are unconstitutional.

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miércoles, agosto 21, 2013

Los transgénicos: Una amenaza para el agro boricua

Por Ian Pagán Roig
Frente de Rescate Agrícola

Muy lejos del cumplimiento de uno de los grandes mitos de la industria de los transgénicos en la que sus proponentes prometían que los cultivos genéticamente modificados reducirían la aplicación de plaguicidas y promoverían la sustentabilidad en la agricultura; la presencia de las compañías dedicadas a la biotecnología agrícola han representado todo lo contrario para la agricultura puertorriqueña.
Las compañías dedicadas a la experimentación con transgénicos ocupan miles de cuerdas de las tierras más fértiles de Puerto Rico. De hecho, la mayor concentración de estas compañías se encuentra en el sur de la isla en la región de Juana Díaz a Salinas en el mismo lugar donde se radican cientos de agricultores puertorriqueños que se dedican a la producción de vegetales y frutas.

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martes, agosto 20, 2013

Tres agriculturas

TRES AGRICULTURAS:
KEYNESIANA, NEOLIBERAL Y ECOLOGICA



Carmelo Ruiz Marrero
Proyecto de Bioseguridad de Puerto Rico
3 de agosto 2013



TABLA DE CONTENIDOS:


0. Introducción
1. Raíces keynesianas
2. Una revolución agrícola mundial
3. Fracasa la revolución verde
4. Llega el neoliberalismo agrícola transgénico
5. La alternativa agroecológica



0. Introducción


El incesante conflicto entre la visión económica keynesiana y el liberalismo económico permea gran parte de la política y economía de los siglos XX y XXI. Y la agricultura no ha sido ajena a esta disputa. Argumentaré en este texto que la revolución verde, nombre dado a la mundialización del modelo agrícola industrial de Estados Unidos, fue una extensión de las políticas agrarias keynesianas del presidente Franklin D. Roosevelt y que ha sido devorada y asimilada por la agricultura neoliberal, representada por los cultivos transgénicos, semillas patentadas y el protagonismo de megacorporaciones de “ciencias de la vida”. Como conclusión, planteo que ninguno de estos dos modelos agrícolas son viables, y que la agroecología es la alternativa correcta ante las fallas de los modelos económico-agrícola keynesiano y neoliberal.

PARA LEER EL RESTO: http://alainet.org/active/66229&lang=es

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domingo, agosto 18, 2013

A Nuclear Submariner Challenges a Pro-Nuclear Film

Thanks to Paul Hawken for sharing this on social media.

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/a-nuclear-submariner-challenges-a-pro-nuclear-film/?smid=go-share&_r=1&

John Dudley Miller, a former nuclear engineering officer in the Navy with a doctorate in social psychology and a long career in journalism, sent this “Your Dot” critique of “Pandora’s Promise,” the new documentary defending nuclear power, and the more recent videotaped discussion of nuclear energy by the climate scientist and campaigner James E. Hansen [Updated, 12:27 p.m. |Hansen has responded below.]:
When I saw “Pandora’s Promise,” I didn’t believe a word of it. I served as a submarine nuclear engineering officer for my four-year stint in the Navy years ago. I qualified as an Engineering Officer of the Watch (a guy who’s in charge of the plant and its other technicians during four-hour shifts) on two different sub reactors. I know the truth about reactors, and the movie replaces it with the demonstrably false Nuclear Dream, a just-so mythical story claiming that nukes are safe, clean and cheap.


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sábado, agosto 17, 2013

Chile sí, Monsanto no!


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Este domingo en el mercado agrícola de la Placita Roosevelt

GMO risk assessment

http://genok.com/capacity-building/risk-assessments/

Risk Assessments

Ask us about risk assessments and regulation of GMOs


As a part of the biosafety capacity building programme, financed by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), GenØk gives advice to representatives from ODA-countries on various aspects related to the evaluation of information used in regulatory approval of GMOs, including environmental and socioeconomic risk assessments, risk management strategies and environmental monitoring, on a case by case basis.
We kindly ask you to download and use this form when contacting our advisory department: Request form
If you have any questions, please contact the advisory department at advisory@genok.no
- See more at: http://genok.com/capacity-building/risk-assessments/#sthash.N38EKTUf.mILHO9BK.dpuf

About genøk

2007_0207FP0028GenØk – Centre for Biosafety was founded in 1998 and is a non-commercial foundation located in the research environment at the University of Tromsø and Forskningsparken (the Science Park).
GenØk vision is safer use of biotechnology. The Foundation conducts research on environmental, health and social consequences of genetic engineering and genetic modification. GenØk also conducts information activities and consulting within their area of competence.
The institute has approx. 35 employees. Our closest partners are TWN (Third World Network) and the University of Tromsø.
In 2007 GenØk was appointed national competence in biosafety.
- See more at:http://genok.com/about-genok/#sthash.TF81hl3K.dpuf

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Video: Chile contra la ley Monsanto

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viernes, agosto 16, 2013

Vaclav Smil on renewable energy

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/a-skeptic-looks-at-alternative-energy

A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy

It takes several lifetimes to put a new energy system into place, and wishful thinking can’t speed things along


EXCERPT:

...turning around the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy system is a truly gargantuan task. That system now has an annual throughput of more than 7 billion metric tons of hard coal and lignite, about 4 billion metric tons of crude oil, and more than 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. This adds up to 14 trillion watts of power. And its infrastructure—coal mines, oil and gas fields, refineries, pipelines, trains, trucks, tankers, filling stations, power plants, transformers, transmission and distribution lines, and hundreds of millions of gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and fuel oil engines—constitutes the costliest and most extensive set of installations, networks, and machines that the world has ever built, one that has taken generations and tens of trillions of dollars to put in place.
It is impossible to displace this supersystem in a decade or two—or five, for that matter. Replacing it with an equally extensive and reliable alternative based on renewable energy flows is a task that will require decades of expensive commitment. It is the work of generations of engineers.

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Patzek: The Earth's plants produce exactly what others eat

by Tad Patzek, originally published by Life Itself 


TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-03/the-earth-s-plants-produce-exactly-what-others-eat


I would like to remind those readers who might be scientifically-challenged that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are called "laws," because we, scientists, have found no exceptions to them in as many experiments as have been carried out for as long as these laws have been on the books.  I repeat: As opposed to legal laws, the laws of nature do not allow exceptions, no matter how much money and effort is spent by the corrupt corporations, corrupt academics, clueless reporters, and other drug dealers to hide this fact from the society.

Just like ignorance of the law cannot be a legal excuse, ignorance of the laws of nature is a crime, not an oops. But, because most societies do not care much about nature, this crime generally goes unpunished by human laws.  In the long run, however, trespassing against the laws of nature has only one outcome: We perish by one means or another.  Since this perishing is distributed over space and time, most people do not make the connection.  So think about all the cancer cases among the people you knew and remember.  Or all the ADD or autistic children you know or have met.  Or all the diabetics you know or have met. Did you notice how many people have rampant allergies? How much do you know about the Roundup-resistant super-weeds that crop up everywhere? How many people die in hospitals from deadly infections caused by the methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) superbug? What do you know about giant pig farms and cow feedlots? And so on...


June 22, 2013: This suffocating haze in Singapore is caused by the runaway fires devouring the tropical forest and peat in the neighboring Indonesia.  The vast swaths of natural forest in Indonesia have been burned illegally by investors mostly from Singapore and Malaysia to establish the giant plantations of oil palms for biodiesel, food, and cosmetics.  Cumulatively over 10 million hectares of the pristine tropical forest have been eliminated in Indonesia. The carbon dioxide emissions from burning forests in Indonesia alone rival all of the emissions from all of the sources on the entire Earth.  Of course, agrofuel advocates talk incessantly about the huge reductions of gas emissions from burning biofuels.

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Bosque Escuela La Olimpia

jueves, agosto 15, 2013

Nace un nuevo bosque!

Patzek: Where do you think you're going, humanity?

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/where-do-you-think-youre-going-humanity.html

Where do you think you're going, humanity?


TAD PATZEK

Monsanto's model of agriculture is one of a giant, super-efficient machine that uses nature as an invisible substrate for the carefully engineered plants.  Monsanto researchers are playing God with nature.  Nature of course runs circles around Monsanto's technocrats, who are dripping with hubris.  Bacteria, fungi, viruses, phages, weeds, worms, and insects will inevitably have the last laugh at Monsanto's clumsy attempts to control them while ignoring nature. But when they all dance on Monsanto's cold dark grave, you and I and our children will be the collateral damage.

******

When we think about machines, most people envision the fossil-fuel-driven motors, cars, and such.  These machines are quite efficient. So when agriculture is thought about as a machine, by extension we endow it with a similar efficiency.  Because of many complex factors, this notion of efficient agriculture ordering nature to give us energy is false. In truth, agriculture is a pitifully inefficient means of converting solar energy, carbon dioxide, inorganic nutrients, and water into biomass. What agriculture lacks in efficiency it makes up by taking over the giant swaths of the formerly most nutritious Earth.   


Hill slope erosion.

Is it possible to switch to a more sustainable agriculture?  Yes.  And that agriculture would have to span much smaller scales and have people, animals, and small infrastructure intermixed with it.  For the time being, as you watch your favorite TV distraction, or focus on the Royal Baby, this life-giving planet of yours is being trashed in front of your eyes wide-shut.

If you want to see what is in store for our children, observe the Middle East and North Africa, the harbingers of things to come for most of us. Also, parts of north and northeast China are becoming hellish polluted deserts, where no one lives too long.

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Tara Firma farms

miércoles, agosto 14, 2013

Tad Patzek on industrial ag

To read the full article:
http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-last-chapter-industrial-agriculture.html

The last chapter: Industrial agriculture


Tad Patzek

As I have argued in the previous three blogs, industrial agriculture is the largest human project that impacts the Earth more broadly than any other human activity.  One needs to keep in mind that compared with the global environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, a Macondo well-like blowout is a child's play.  I know it, because I co-wrote a book on this subject with the famous historian and archeologist, Joe Tainter.  For example, in the Amazon forest the underbrush fires set by humans affect 3 million square kilometers, an area of India.  See NASA for a summary of this global catastrophe.

Researchers for the first time mapped the extent and frequency of understory fires across a study area (green) spanning 1.2 million square miles (3 million square kilometers) in the southern Amazon forest. Fires were widespread across the forest frontier during the study period from 1999-2010. Recurrent fires, however, are concentrated in areas favored by the confluence of climate conditions suitable for burning and ignition sources from humans (who were burning the forest for soybean or sugarcane plantations). Image credit: NASA's Earth Observatory.
From an ecological point of view, industrial agriculture creates open, permanently immature ecosystems, most of which are reset by humans each year. To make things worse, the simplified single-plant species agricultural ecosystems are doomed to fall prey to the ever-evolving pests and weeds.   One can prove this gaping vulnerability using thermodynamics, regardless of what Monsanto claims. Because agriculture usually creates baby, mostly bare ecosystems, agriculture is subject to huge soil erosion rates. Soil then becomes yet another depletable fossil resource. In a previous blog, I told you that industrial agriculture cannot be sustainable, because it is continuously subsidized with depleting fossil resources, including fossil water. If you want to check what we are doing with water, go no further thanAustralia.

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From business executive to organic farmer

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/garden/life-on-the-farm-e-i-e-i-oh.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

Life on the Farm: E-I-E-I ...Oh?

Boardroom to Barnyard: Tara Smith, a California business woman, traded in her plush city life for the hard work of starting a farm from scratch.
Petaluma, Calif. — Tara Smith does not mind squealing on herself about the mistakes she has made since becoming a farmer at 47.
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Clockwise from top left, biodynamic pigs, chicks, laying hens and cattle raised on Tara Smith's 300-acre spread in Sonoma County, Calif. More Photos »

Readers’ Comments


Early on, she kept the runts of a litter of pigs, not realizing they could not survive beyond a few months, even with all her nurturing. And at day’s end, utterly spent, she would scramble around like a madwoman trying to catch the chickens to get them safely inside their hilltop shelters, a frantic dance that did not stop until a neighboring farmer patiently explained that they would go in on their own once the sun set.
Spend time on her 300-acre spread here in Sonoma County — an old dairy farm with an 1860s farmhouse — and the former marketing and sales executive will confide in her rambling but charming way that, yes, farming is hard, but it can be awe-inspiring, too.

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jueves, agosto 08, 2013

Actividades en conmemoración de la batalla de Asomante dedicadas a Raúl Noriega

Raúl fue agricultor orgánico, independentista del corazón del rollo, productor y animador del programa televisivo "Comentario", cooperativista de toda la vida, miembro de la junta directiva de la Coop Agrocomercial y miembro fundador de la Coop Orgánica Madre Tierra, y miembro también del Taller Educativo Aiboniteño Filiberto Ojeda Ríos (TEAFOR).

Fue Raúl quien concibió la idea de hacer vigilias mensuales por la dignidad en todos los pueblos del país tras el asesinato de Ojeda. Por eso la primera vigilia fue en Aibonito en octubre de 2005. El asistió a todas las vigilias que pudo, mientras su salud se lo permitió.

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Hambre, transgénicos y la izquierda


DOCUMENTO DEL FRENTE SOCIALISTA DE PUERTO RICO, JULIO 2013



sobre el Hambre,  transgénicos y la izquierda

Puerto Rico desempeña un importante -y por eso poco conocido- rol para las compañías transnacionales de biotecnología agrícola como finca de experimentación y plataforma para la propagación y diseminación de semillas transgénicas (1). Tan temprano como en la década de los 1980, cuando los cultivos y alimentos transgénicos aún no habían sido aprobados para siembra comercial o consumo humano, ya se estaban probando en terrenos puertorriqueños siembras transgénicas resistentes a herbicida.
Hoy día, agroempresas semilleras como Monsanto, Pioneer y Syngenta utilizan a Puerto Rico para criar y propagar semillas transgénicas que son enviadas a Estados Unidos y otros lugares del mundo. Según datos del propio ministerio de agricultura de Estados Unidos (USDA), Puerto Rico contiene la mayor concentración por kilómetro cuadrado de cultivos transgénicos experimentales dentro del territorio nacional de EEUU, con la posible excepción de Hawaii. Y casi toda esta experimentación toma lugar en solo cinco municipios en el sur y noroeste de la isla grande de Puerto Rico. Lo que es peor aún, las semillas de estas corporaciones son todas patentadas, son la vanguardia de una agricultura neoliberal la cual va encaminada a crear un mundo en el que los agricultores del mundo serán requeridos a pagar regalías por patentes para poder sembrar. 
Y todo esto, mientras los estudios de alimentación de animales de laboratorio que no son financiados por la industria de biotecnología, por científicos de renombre como G. Seralini, I. Ermakova, A. Carrasco y A. Pusztai, han encontrado consistentemente que los alimentos transgénicos causan serios daños a la salud, incluyendo alergias y cáncer (2). 

Los y las socialistas sabemos que el hambre no es causada por falta de tecnología ni por una supuesta falta de productividad sino por la desigualdad económica, por la naturaleza excluyente y depredadora del sistema capitalista, por medidas neoliberales que destruyen los apoyos públicos a la agricultura, por la terrible combinación de dumping, subsidios y proteccionismo de Europa y Estados Unidos, por la concentración de la tierra en manos de oligarquías terratenientes, y -especialmente hoy día- por el capitalismo desregulado que ha provocado una especulación y acaparamiento de productos agrícolas sin precedente (3).
Para erradicar el hambre en el planeta es indispensable la redistribución de la riqueza y de los medios de producción, como el acceso y manejo de la tierra, y por lo tanto debemos recordar que el proceso tecnológico capitalista nunca debe ser un sustituto para la lucha contra la desigualdad, pues bajo el capitalismo las teconologías sirven para acrecentar el control de unos pocos, en detrimento de los muchos.
Esto presenta un formidable reto a la izquierda. No es que debamos oponernos al avance científico y la innovación tecnólogica, nuestro deber es enfrentar los retos del cambio climático, el cénit petrolero, y las crisis financiera y alimentaria sin perder nuestra orientación revolucionaria y sin recurrir a paradigmas obsoletos o remiendos tecnológicos como los transgénicos, que si bien son tentadores definitivamente NO son parte de la solución, si no elemento bien cosustancial al problema. No nos confundamos: los transgénicos no se desarrollaron para mejorar la agricultura, si no para facilitar la conversión del suelo en fábrica de mercancía vendible en las grandes cadenas. La izquierda debe evitar caer en el engaño de su retórica científica, que viene del mismo saco de promesas de que el DDT eliminaría las plagas de la agricultura, el ALCA sería la autopista para la prosperidad hemisférica, que las soluciones a lo Menem en Argentina enderezarían las finanzas o que las alternativas pinochetistas traerían estabilidad… ¡Vamos!
NO necesitamos transgénicos para alimentar el mundo; eso es un dato. Y las supuestas ventajas de estos cultivos de la biotecnología son ficciones bien vendidas. Se puede alimentar al mundo, afirmar la soberanía de las naciones y a la vez proteger el ambiente gracias a las alternativas que ofrece la soberanía alimentaria y la agroecología (4).
La propuesta de la izquierda continental NO puede ser reproducir modelos fallidos con leves mejoras en la distribución de los beneficios. Respetemos y defendamos las sabidurías de nuestros pueblos como fuente de ciencia frente a las justificaciones agroterroristas de las Monsantos. 

   ¡NO a los transgénicos! 

¡NO a las patentes sobre semillas! 

1) Carmelo Ruiz Marrero “Más transgénicos en Puerto Rico” http://www.80grados.net/mas-transgenicos-en-puerto-rico-%C2%BFdebemos-preocuparnos/
2) Carmelo Ruiz Marrero “Transgénicos? No Gracias” http://www.ciudadccs.info/?p=290298
3) Carmelo Ruiz Marrero “Especulando con el Hambre”. http://www.80grados.net/especulando-con-el-hambre/
4) Miguel Altieri y Clara Nicholls “Agroecologia: Única esperanza para la soberania alimentaria y la resiliencia climatica”. http://www.agroeco.org/socla/archivos_documentos_claves/SOCLA-Rio+20-espanol.pdf
Miguel Altieri habla sobre la agroecologia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAV-RlDDirI

Documento de trabajo del Frente Socialista de Puerto Rico
Responsable principal: Carmelo Ruiz Marrero

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