Biotech Activists wrote:
> Biotech Activists (biotech_activists@iatp.org) Posted: 04/17/2000 By mritchie@iatp.org
> ============================================================
>
> Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 12:36:25 -0400
>
> ALTERING A CROOKED FOOD CHAIN
>
> MICHELE LANDSBERG SUNDAY STAR MARCH26 '00 PAGE A2
>
> The beginning of a fine meal in a fancy restaurant : gleam of fresh
> table linen, tinkle of ice cubes in glasses. You pluck one pink prawn
> from the shrimp cocktail appetizer and sink your teeth into its plump
> flesh. If you thought long and hard about that shrimp, if you could
> follow it back to its source and calculate its true cost, you might well
> hit upon one of the most exciting movements in the world today--- the
> movement for Food Democracy.
>
> "It's gathering momentum," declared Vandana Shiva, one of the world's
> most admired crusading environmentalists, in an interview last week. "We
> saw its power in Seattle, we'll see busloads of youth at the
> Biodevastation protests in Boston this weekend, and next it will be
> Washington in April when the World Bank meets." Shiva believes that the
> revolt against "food dictatorship", in which a handful of monster
> corporations control the
> global food supply, is the springboard for ending globalization. Shiva
> is a one-woman answer to environmental despair and political paralysis.
> An Indian physicist, activist, world lecturer; a winner of the Right
> Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel; a steady voice
> raised up against biotech totalitarianism, she was in Toronto to lecture
> about her crisply written, information-packed little book Stolen
> Harvest,
> The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. (South End Press)
>
> In Stolen Harvest, Shiva illustrates her case with the example of the
> heavily-subsidized U.S. soy industry, and how it was able to
> "force-feed" India --- wiping out the age-old mustard-seed oil industry
> in a single year, displacing 750 million indigenous farmers, and
> imposing a costly monoculture of genetically altered soybean on one of
> the most
> biologically diverse countries in the world. Meanwhile, even as it
> pushed mustard
> seed close to extinction, a Monsanto-owned company quietly picked up a
> patent on
> that same mustard seed plant. If Indian farmers ever want to reclaim
> their beloved native crop, they'll have to pay through the nose.
>
> But about that shrimp. India has been the world's largest exporter of
> shrimp for 20 years. The traditional methods are ecologically sound and
> sustainable. Rice paddies, for example, might be flooded with seawater
> after the rice harvest, letting natural marine nutrients enrich the land
> and feed the trapped shrimp and prawns until they are harvested.
>
> The World Bank thought this was too "low yield" an approach. By the
> early '90s, the Indian government was pushing industrialized shrimp
> farms. Here are some of the results of that large-scale shrimp culture:
> trawlers wreck the sea bed and destroy thousands of sea turtles as they
> plunder marine stocks for millions of tons of wild fish to be ground
> into meal to feed the shrimp. Only 17 per cent of the fish meal is
> actually converted to
> shrimp mass; the rest becomes waste, heavily laced with antibiotics and
> pesticides, which pollutes groundwater. Local water tables are also
> contaminated by the large-scale pumping of sea water into the shrimp
> ponds, killing off local trees and crops. In some of the villages
> affected by salinization, women are working an extra four to six hours a
> day in pursuit of ever scarcer water and fuel. Shrimp ponds are also the
> chief destroyers
> of mangroves, which are vital to coastal ecologies. Do the
> transnationals and their global allies worry about the ecological
> devastation? Not at all. In Stolen Harvest, Shiva quotes an internal
> memo by the former chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers.
> "Just between you and me," Summers wrote, "shouldn't the World Bank be
> encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the less developed
> countries?...The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in
> the lowest wage countries in impeccable..." Summers noted that dumping
> of carcinogenic toxins shouldn't be a big concern in countries where
> people don't survive long enough to develop prostate cancer.
>
> Summers left the World Bank and is now chief of the U.S. Treasury
> Board. Although these havoc-wreaking trade imperialists seem to have
> supreme power, Shiva is calmly confident that a different power base is
> building and connecting geometrically. (Interestingly, many of the
> leaders are women, including Shiva herself, Maude Barlow of the Council
> of Canadians, Mae Wan Ho of World Scientists, Kenyan environmentalist
> Wangari Mathai, not to mention Canadian women scientists who blew the
> whistle on genetically modified foods and untested drugs, like Dr. Ann
> Clark of Guelph and
> Michelle Brill-Edwards, formerly of Canada's Health Protection Branch).
>
> Only a year ago, in India, Shiva helped found the Zones for Food
> Freedom, which has already mushroomed to include 4000 villages where
> local farmers pledge to reject chemicals, genetically modified seeds
> and life form patents. Her Navdanya group collects and conserves seeds
> of India's biodiversity; her global alliance of women's groups, called
> Diverse Women for Diversity, will link food security groups around the
> world. (Connect with any of these groups by writing Navdanya at
> Sectt.A-60, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110 016, fax 91-11-656-2093)
>
> Shiva's next project: to unmask the truth about the costs of genetically
> engineered crops. "We will knit the world together with this truth," she
> exclaimed, clasping her hands in illustration. "When small-scale farmers
> in North America and India see that big U.S. soya growers sell on the
> world market for $155 a ton, while receiving U.S. subsidies of $192 a
> ton on top of that, not to mention the export credits that agribusiness
> gets, they'll no longer believe in the supposed economic benefits of
> agricultural imperialism."
>
> Food may seem an odd starting point for changing the world ---but think
> about it. From France ("Let them eat cake") to America (the Boston Tea
> Party) to India ((the ill-fated British salt tax) to last year's food
> riots in Indonesia, many of the world-changing citizen uprisings in
> history have happened when arrogant power went too far with its
> manipulations of and profiteering from the stuff that sustains life.
>
> Mark Ritchie, President
> Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
> 2105 First Ave. South
> Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404 USA
> 612-870-3400 (phone) 612-870-4846 (fax)
> cell phone 612-385-7921
> mritchie@iatp.org www.iatp.org
>
> ============================================================
> How to Use this Mailing List
> ============================================================
>
> You received this e-mail as a result of your registration on the biotech_activists mailing list.
>
> To unsubscribe, please send an email to listserv@iatp.org. In the body of the message type:
> unsubscribe biotech_activists
>
> For a list of other commands and list options, please send email to listserv@iatp.org.
> In the body of the message type:
> help
>
> Please direct questions about this list to: mritchie@iatp.org
>
> Please direct technical questions about this service to: support@iatp.org
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".
All messages to sanet-mg are archived at:
http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 11 2000 - 22:02:09 EDT