RE: [pf] "the great postings several weeks ago"; which, Don?

At 10:23 14/9/2000 -0700, you wrote:
> I would like to reply with the great postings several weeks ago on this
list but I didn't save them, did any of you save some of them?
>If you could forward them to me personally it would be much appreciated
>
>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46532-2000Sep10.html
>
>We'll Feed Our People As We See Fit
>
>It is possible to kill someone with kindness, literally. That could be
>the result of the well-meaning but extremely misguided attempts by
>European and North American groups that are advising Africans to be wary
>of agricultural biotechnology. They claim to have the environment and
>public health at the core of their opposition, but scientific evidence
>disproves their claims that enhanced crops are anything but safe. If we
>take their alarmist warnings to heart, millions of Africans will suffer
>and possibly die. ...

**  I have all the posts to Pos Fut; for weeks ago: on the hard-disk;
before that: on ane of several CDs.

**  Which ones do you mean?

**  Below are some of the posts on the Subject:

Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All (Aug. 24 Manchester Guardian; George Monbiot)

To: Positive Futures <positive-futures@igc.topica.com>
From: Tom Wheeler <twbounds@pop.mail.rcn.net>
Subject: [pf] Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All 
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 08:53:50 -0700

  Published on Thursday, August 24, 2000 in the Manchester Guardian (UK)
Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All
   by George Monbiot

The advice could scarcely have come from a more surprising source. "If
anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world," Steve Smith, a
director of the world's biggest biotechnology company, Novartis, insisted,
"tell them that it is not... To feed the world takes political and financial
will - it's not about production and distribution."
Mr Smith was voicing a truth which most of his colleagues in biotechnology
companies have gone to great lengths to deny. On a planet wallowing in
surfeit, people starve because they have neither the land on which to grow
food for themselves nor the money with which to buy it. There is no question
that, as the population increases, the world will have to grow more, but if
this task is left to the rich and powerful - big farmers and big business -
then, irrespective of how much is grown, people will become progressively
hungrier. Only a redistribution of land and wealth can save the world from
mass starvation.

But in one respect Mr Smith is wrong. It is, in part, about production. A
series of remarkable experiments has shown that the growing techniques which
his company and many others have sought to impose upon the world are, in
contradiction to everything we have been brought up to believe, actually
less productive than some of the methods developed by traditional farmers
over the past 10,000 years.

Last week, Nature magazine reported the results of one of the biggest
agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese scientists had
tested the key principle of modern rice-growing (planting a single, hi-tech
variety across hundreds of hectares) against a much older technique
(planting several breeds in one field). They found, to the astonishment of
the farmers who had been drilled for years in the benefits of "monoculture",
that reverting to the old method resulted in spectacular increases in yield.
Rice blast - a devastating fungus which normally requires repeated
applications of poison to control - decreased by 94%. The farmers planting a
mixture of strains were able to stop applying their poisons altogether,
while producing 18% more rice per acre than they were growing before.

Another paper, published in Nature two years ago, showed that yields of
organic maize are identical to yields of maize grown with fertilisers and
pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields dramatically improves.
In trials in Hertfordshire, wheat grown with manure has produced higher
yields for the past 150 years than wheat grown with artificial nutrients.

Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in India,
Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled their yields
by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study in the US
reveals that small farms growing a wide range of plants can produce 10 times
as much money per acre as big farms growing single crops. Cuba, forced into
organic farming by the economic blockade, has now adopted this as policy,
having discovered that it improves both the productivity and the quality of
its crops.

Hi-tech farming, by contrast, is sowing ever graver problems. This year,
food production in Punjab and Haryana, the Indian states long celebrated as
the great success stories of modern, intensive cultivation, has all but
collapsed. The new crops the farmers there have been encouraged to grow
demand far more water and nutrients than the old ones, with the result that,
in many places, both the ground water and the soil have been exhausted.

We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has been stamped
out all over the world not because it is less productive than monoculture,
but because it is, in some respects, more productive. Organic cultivation
has been characterised as an enemy of progress for the simple reason that it
cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by any farmer anywhere, without the
help of multinational companies. Though it is more productive to grow
several species or several varieties of crops in one field, the biotech
companies must reduce diversity in order to make money, leaving farmers with
no choice but to purchase their most profitable seeds. This is why they have
spent the last 10 years buying up seed breeding institutes and lobbying
governments to do what ours has done: banning the sale of any seed which has
not been officially - and expensively - registered and approved.

All this requires an unrelenting propaganda war against the tried and tested
techniques of traditional farming, as the big companies and their scientists
dismiss them as unproductive, unsophisticated and unsafe. The truth, so
effectively suppressed that it is now almost impossible to believe, is that
organic farming is the key to feeding the world.


© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000

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At 12:31 24/8/2000 -0700, Kaleopono wrote:

[Kaleopono]  The great production increases with organic growing are due to
the grower's caring, careful observation and intimate knowledge of a
specific, comparatively small plot of land.  It is gardening that
incorporates connectivity to spirit, to Gaia, if you will.  Farming, on the
other hand, is an industrial activity.  It depends upon "efficiencies of
scale" achieved through abstraction and systematization, and the
substitution of tremendous quantities of capital to replace human care,
aloha and touch.  Farming -- industrialism in general -- is soulless. Given
the trends in agriculture and the biosphere, and the tidal wave carrying us
toward One Big Collapse, it is prudent for everyone who is aware to become
gardeners, themselves.  Learn how to produce enough for yourself, family
and loved ones, first.  Then expand to produce a surplus to share with
others, to give to those less fortunate and to sell or exchange in the
neighborhood farmers' market.  If possible, do not buy your seed from
monopolized commercial sources.  Instead, obtain open pollinated seed from
other gardeners via exchange, like Jill does.  The principle:  use it or
lose it.  A decentralized network of seed distribution must be strengthened
to fend off catastrophe due to corporate monopolization of the food source
gene pool.

Those living in cities can grow food on rooftops, vacant lots, park spaces
set aside for community gardens.  There are many, many models that have
been developed since the 1970s.  Once you start looking, you will be amazed
by the amount of "how to" information that is available.  A few simple hand
tools are all that is absolutely required. What is most important is
visualizing the goal, fixing the will to achieve it, observing carefully
what happens and making adjustments on that basis, and sticking to it!

___________________________________________________________

At 13:12 24/8/2000 -0700, Jill Taylor Bussiere wrote:

Kaleopono,
    I agree with everything you said except with your distinction between
farming and gardening.

    I know several farmers who take just the sort of care that you are
talking about.  One of them has a CSA, and in addition grows 30 (I think)
acres of cucumbers.  He told me proudly a few weeks ago that he is the
largest certified organic pickle producer with manual labor in the country,
and he was proud of it.

    He used to farm in the conventional way - vegetables - and by watching
his land, learned that it was becoming less and less fertile.  He began to
learn new ways.  He not only respects the land, but also the animals he
raises, and the workers he employs.  He is a teacher.  He has taught me a
alot.  In return, I am introducing him to heirloom seeds - they are a
natural fit - him and heirloom seeds.

    I know another farmer, a dairy farmer, that switched to rotational
grazing in order to make his life easier.  He has since noticed that his
cows are healthier, and that he uses less machinery.  Yet another farmer
has switched to being an organic dairy farmer to survive in the market, and
has had to adjust to growing forage sorghum rather than corn.  He too is
learning as he goes.  Now he is using a Normandy bull to breed with his
Holsteins, since the Normandys are aggressive grazers, and hardy as well.
They also increase the butterfat in the Holstein/Normandy dairy offspring.
The Normandys also have high quality beef, according to him, and he has
begun marketing his transitional beef, which will be organic in 2 1/2
years. He rotationally grazes his cattle.

    I would classify all of the above as farmers, as they would themselves.
They have much soul.

    I do, however, agree with you about the trend of farming - and agree
that the industrial farms pay little attention to the complex web of life
in which they do their destruction.

    The difference is appropriate technology - in this case, methods of
farming.  The difference is also Small is Beautiful.  Smaller farms enable
a farmer to really know the land and life in and on the soil.

    I also agree with you that people should know how to grow their own
food.  It is the possession of this knowledge that gives the greatest
security to a people.

                                Jill

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sent on by David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/index.html#top
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