Jimmy's GM food fight

Jimmy Doherty, pig farmer, one-time scientist and poster-boy for sustainable food production is on a mission to find out if GM crops really can feed the world.

We need to double the amount of food we produce in the next fifty years to feed the world's growing population. Are GM crops the answer? Or are they a dangerous Frankenstein technology that could start an environmental catastrophe?

To find the answers Jimmy is on a journey that will take him from the vast soya plantations of Argentina to the traditional Amish farms of Pennsylvania; and from the cutting-edge technology of the GM laboratories to the banana plantations of Uganda.
BBC

Sounds wonderful , right ? Sounds like Jimmy is taking the fight to the GM camp , had me fooled as well and so I spent an hour watching another campaign for Genetically Modified foods . Jimmy garbed like a real scientist pretends to ask questions about the validity of GM food , it's financial , environmental and ethical validity and surprise surprise , GM comes out with flying colors to each question . So vast monocultures in Argentine are definitely a good thing , the Amish are using it , so it must be a great thing and most importantly genetically modified food will be more nutritious and will save the world from hunger . Down the way he concludes that producing GM seed is just like the natural process, just speeded up and while there have been some allergies from GM food in lab experiments , it must be ok as the Americans have been eating it for ten years . What really peeved me up was his claim that by applying European standards of caution to GM food , we are effectively letting the poor Africans starve !! So my question is Jimmy , if GM food is not proven safe why do you think it is right for the Africans and the rest of the developing world eat it . Sure the Europeans need it to be tested on someone and it is ok to let the black man to be used as a guinea pig because they are going to die of starvation anyway .
And what about Monsanto , how can we talk about GM and not even mention Monsanto , the largest philanthropic organisation in the world , controlling 90% of the GM seed and on their to acquire a sizable amount non Gm seed . The GM ethics are very clearly enunciated in this article by Vandana Shiva .

An epidemic of farmers' suicides has spread across four Indian states -- Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Punjab -- over the last decade. According to official data, more than 160,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997.

These suicides are most frequent where farmers grow cotton, and appear directly linked to the presence of seed monopolies. For the supply of cotton seeds in India has increasingly slipped out of the hands of farmers and into the hands of global seed producers like Monsanto. These giant corporations have begun to control local seed companies through buyouts, joint ventures and licensing arrangements, leading to seed monopolies.

When this happens, seed is transformed from being a common good into being the "intellectual property" of companies such as Monsanto, for which the corporation can claim limitless profits through royalty payments. For farmers, this means deeper debt.

Vandana Shiva - Harvest of suicide

You can read an elaborate dissection of the documentary here . Another link that clears the myth of high productivity and less pesticide use being claimed for GM food .

Small farms give better bang for buck

According to the NYT small farms are more productive than large farms

Until now, food production has been controlled by Big Agriculture, with its macho fixation on “average tonnage” and “record harvests.” But there’s a cost to its breadbasket-to-the-world bragging rights. Like those big Industrial Age factories that once billowed black smoke, American agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in the energy it takes to process it.

For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?

Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.

In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.

More in a similar vein Organic farming can feed the world .

Carbon Offsets : More snake oil

Saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient truth the other day . The film is quite
convincing to somebody who doesn't need convincing , it just reaffirms one's faith in reducing one's footprint on planet earth . I believe it is
also quite convincing to the skeptics that one needs to take action. I
heard my boss spewing the need to go green . And what better way to be
green than to buy green !! I mentioned this need to buy green in a
previous blog. Coming back to the movie , the
movie suggests to take action and sends you to Climate Crisis to learn more
about global warming and action we as individuals can take. I agree
with everything in varying degrees to what the site promotes until it
comes to the point of carbon offsets/credits . The site points to the Cool driver site that allows you
to clean your conscience . It proclaims at the top of the site "You do
not have to stop driving to fight global warming "


The idea is that you clean your conscience by buying green credits that go towards seting up green energy like wind power , planting trees etc , very much akin to
absolving yourself of your sins by giving to the temple/priest/poor . I
understand the logic of carbon credits and I am for it but when somebody
starts promoting it as a tool to take care of one's sins , it really
gets my goat .
Rather than promoting a lifestyle that involves reduction of consumption
and using a car only when necessary it says , go and drive and we will
clean up the mess afterwards which is a lot of bull !!
The argument advanced by the likes of SinksWatch, Carbon Trade Watch or The Corner House is that such schemes fail to address (or, worse, deliberately disguise) the fact that the real problem is our excessive burning of fossil fuels. The Corner House’s uncompromising position is that “the only realistic approach to the dangers of climate change is to stop production of coal, oil and gas as soon as possible, leaving the great bulk of fossil fuels safely underground”.
Offsetting, in this view, merely salves consciences, while creating the
illusion that consumption (cheap air travel being a prime example) and
production patterns in the richer countries can be maintained without
harming the climate . Businesses offer the option to neutralize
everything from buying a plane ticket or cars by buying equivalent green
credits with ready calculators online .
The subtext that
these adverts forget to write is " We are a corporation that makes money doing green power
projects and we use suckers to pay for it . "

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Links
http://www.greenfutures.org.uk/features/default.asp?id=2599
http://www.newint.org/features/2006/07/01/keynote/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/selling-indulgences/

Biodiesel : Snake oil ?

Wikipedia defines Biodiesel as

Biodiesel refers to a diesel-equivalent, processed fuel derived from biological sources. ...biodiesel refers to alkyl esters made from the transesterification of both vegetable oils and/or animal fats. Biodiesel is biodegradable and non-toxic, and has significantly fewer emissions than petroleum-based diesel when burned. Biodiesel functions in current diesel engines, and could in theory supplement fossil fuels as the world's primary transport energy source.

Which loosely translated means that biodiesel is a fuel from vegetable/animal sources that does not need to be taken out from the earth's crust , is less polluting and since it is not extracted from beneath the surface , it doesn't add to the carbon in the system . And so it is being touted as the next saviour in our effort against global warming . Biodiesel can be synthesised from waste vegetable oils , vegetable oils , animal fat , waste agricultural produce and algae . So theoretically one can pop over to the local felafel/fish 'n chips shop , get all the waste oil which needs to be disposed off and through a simple process make it ready to be poured into the car !! Alternatively you can buy a load of oil from the supermarket . So if we shifted to biodiesel we would be doing a lot of good to the environment .

Wikipedia defines Snake oil as

a traditional Chinese medicine used for joint pain. However, the most common usage of the words is as a derogatory term for medicines to imply that they are fake, fraudulent, and usually ineffective. The expression is also applied metaphorically to any product with exaggerated marketing but questionable or unverifiable quality. In short, it refers to a product sold as part of a hoax.

As the title suggests I am pointing out to the discrepancies in the theory .

• The local felafel shops can provide a very limited quantity of waste oil that can be used as a fuel .


• If biodiesel is to be used extensively one needs to grow oil producing crops specifically for biodiesel . Since the arable land under cultivation is also finite , oil producing crop can come intead of food producing crop . shortage of food , starvation is a likely scenario. ..more


• Or else forests could be cut down to make room for oil producing plants. This as we know is not a very smart thing to do as well

We can see the effect of deforestation here

The need is to regulate the production of biodiesel . Biodiesel from wastes or from industrial waste sites can provide a fraction of our needs .
According to an article by George Monbiot

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44×10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

Biodiesel as I see is not a sustainable option at all. In it's billed avatar as a solution to all our woes is not just snake oil , it is something much more destructive .