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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
Below is an excerpt from the Washington Post. Some of you may recognize
the author's name. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...9/28/AR2007092 801324.html THE GOOD EARTH The Blessings of Dirty Work By Barbara Kingsolver Washington Post Sunday, September 30, 2007 Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, is an elegant scientist in her silk sari, with a red bindi on her forehead like an accent mark over her broad smile. She was trained as a physicist but is best known for her work for farmers' rights. The soil of her country, India, is home to one-quarter of all the world's farmers. Increasingly they grow commodities for export rather than traditional, locally adapted foods for their own communities. This strategy was laid out by the technological Green Revolution, as it was called in the 1970s (when "green" was not the word it is today), which promised that one farmer with the right tools and chemicals could feed hundreds, freeing the rest of us for cleaner work. It sounds good unless you're that one guy on a tractor in Nebraska, and the price of soybeans won't quite refuel your tank and pay for your fertilizer. Elsewhere, it's worse. In India, Shiva says, 150,000 farmers have committed suicide -- often by drinking pesticide, to underscore the point -- after being bankrupted by costly chemicals in a cycle of debt created by ties to corporate agriculture. Centralized food production requires constant inputs -- fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation -- that in some settings are impossible to sustain, and chemical-based farming virtually always damages the soil over time, whether in India or Nebraska. Traditional farming retains soil structure, but intensive modern agriculture does not: Since the 1970s, while global grain production has tripled, an estimated 30 percent of the world's farmland has become too damaged to use. Also shrinking are the fossil fuel reserves for a system that requires petroleum to run the farm machines, serve as the chemical base of fertilizers, fuel the milling and processing plants and drive the food to widely dispersed consumers. Shiva puts it this way: "The new modified crops brought to us by the Green Revolution were described as 'green oil of the future.' Ironically, that has turned out to be correct in a way, as the Green Revolution makes a renewable resource -- food -- into a nonrenewable one, just like petroleum." Farmers come to Shiva's farm-based institute in Derha Dun to learn how to free themselves from chemicals, indebtedness and landlessness. Shiva's research has shown that returning to more traditional multi-crop food farms can offer them higher, more consistent incomes than modern single-crop fields of export commodities. She identifies the extinction of traditional seed varieties as the principal threat to food security here; to name an important example, South Asian farmers once grew about 50,000 varieties of rice, a number that has dropped to around 5,000 as a globalized seeds-and-chemicals industry displaces tradition, sometimes with coercion from the Indian government. The institute, called Navdanya, is a small, green Eden framed against the startling blue backdrop of the Himalayas. On the morning of my visit last December, birds sang from the fruit trees as we ate our breakfast of millet porridge with fruit and nuts, lemon pickle and tea, all grown on the farm's intensively planted organic acres. Sixteen years earlier, with no funds beyond her small savings, Shiva and her acolytes had bought this piece of ruined land, which neighboring farmers advised her would never grow anything at all. Her devoted team has built the soil with compost and careful crop rotation to its present lushness. After a tour through the fields, we took off our shoes to enter the seed bank room, a precious library of germ plasm collected in labeled jars and baskets: oilseeds, mustard greens, wheats and barleys, 380 varieties of rice. Other farmers throughout the country are building different seed banks of locally appropriate varieties, all replanted in the fields each year as a living catalogue. "This is the basis of Indian farmers' sovereignty," Shiva said. "Our traditional crops." Navdanya now hosts what Shiva calls the Grandmothers' University, a series of cooking festivals to help connect the conservation of traditional crops with the practical skills of cooking and eating them. Clearly, traditional farming and time-honored food customs are mutually dependent. Less clear is whether this country could lose its powerful food culture -- what is more important to an Indian girl's education than perfecting the art of making her mother's daal? But Shiva warns that even here, the consumption of packaged foods is on the rise. "The nutrition transition is driven by economic changes that coerce people into jobs that give them no time for food culture," she said. "Tech jobs, telephone industry jobs here are mostly held by kids who may have very few other employment prospects. They are making great money by local standards, but they are sometimes working 20 hours per day! In a life like that, there is no time for your mother's daal." Industrial farming -- however destructive to the land and our nutrition -- has held out as its main selling point the allure of freedom: Two percent of the population would be able to feed everyone. The rest could do as we pleased. Shiva sees straight through that promise. "Most of those who have moved off of farms are still working in the industry of creating food and bringing it to consumers: as cashiers, truck drivers, even the oil-rig workers who generate the fuels to run the trucks. Those jobs are all necessary to a travel-dependent, highly mechanized food system. And many of those jobs are menial, life-taking work, instead of the life-giving work of farming on the land. The analyses we have done show that no matter what, whether the system is highly technological or much more simple, about 50 to 60 percent of a population has to be involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service." Waiting tables, for instance, or driving a truck full of lettuce, or spending 70 hours a week in an office overseeing a magazine full of glossy ads selling food products. Surprise: There is no free lunch. No animal can really escape the work of feeding itself. We're just the only one with fancy clothes and big enough brains to make up a story like that: Hooray, we are far from the soil, and that has set us free. -- FB - FFF Billy http://angryarab.blogspot.com/ |
#2
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
If Hillary is elected, she will put a Swami in as Secretary of
Agriculture |
#3
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
In article ,
Frank frankdotlogullo@comcastperiodnet wrote: If Hillary is elected, she will put a Swami in as Secretary of Agriculture More sock puppets? Don't think it'll help. With all the money she is dragging in, "Big Money" must either feel she is beatable or already in their pocket. The point though is diversity, not monocultures, and crop rotation, not chemical fertilizers, and family farmers selling locally, will give us the healthiest food, clean air, and clean water. Problem is that the Republicrats take money from them what's has an agenda (making us poor and them rich). Campaign financing is the only way to separate the politicians and the plutocrats. It has already been pointed out, that in our dense stupidity, this is unlikely to happen, and all that could be, won't. -- FB - FFF Billy Get up, stand up, stand up for yor rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight. - Bob Marley |
#4
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
In article , Charlie wrote:
On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:33:27 -0700, Billy wrote: Below is an excerpt from the Washington Post. Some of you may recognize the author's name. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...9/28/AR2007092 801324.html THE GOOD EARTH The Blessings of Dirty Work By Barbara Kingsolver Washington Post Sunday, September 30, 2007 Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, is an elegant scientist in her silk sari, with a red bindi on her forehead like an accent mark over her broad smile. She was trained as a physicist but is best known for her work for farmers' rights. The soil of her country, India, is home to one-quarter of all the world's farmers. Increasingly they grow commodities for export rather than traditional, locally adapted foods for their own communities. This strategy was laid out by the technological Green Revolution, as it was called in the 1970s (when "green" was not the word it is today), which promised that one farmer with the right tools and chemicals could feed hundreds, freeing the rest of us for cleaner work. Makes me think of a song...... "Tragedy Now you tell me Who you gonna get to do the dirty work When all the slaves are free?" ~Joni Mitchell For more on the work and activism of Vandana Shiva see this: http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=90 A search of CounterCurrents will turn up articles on the suicides of Indian farmers. Excellant post, Billy. More people need to be aware of the situation in other parts of the world and look to the misery that has been created in order to see our future. Factory farming must be abandoned. I spent the afternoon creating another compost heap...6x6x6...green garden refuse and raked leaves and did the layering thing....inoculated and watered and ready to start cookin'. Looks like, after the leaves all fall, and all the garden tailings are used, I should have as many more this size as I want. FFF - Fart For Fuel. Oh, and FB! And Monsanto. Charlie Spoken as a "Real American". Down with tyrants every where. -- FB - FFF Billy Get up, stand up, stand up for yor rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight. - Bob Marley |
#5
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
Josh Kalish wrote:
Billy wrote: involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service." Ah, too bad that we can't become subsistence farmers again. Life was truly better then. Damn science! Except if you got sick. |
#6
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
In article ,
Josh Kalish wrote: Billy wrote: involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service." Ah, too bad that we can't become subsistence farmers again. Life was truly better then. Damn science! Oh we can become subsistence farmers, all you need are patented seeds, and chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers give you about one calorie out for each calorie you invest, whereas with crop rotation you get two calories out for each calorie put in. The up side is less dependence on petroleum products (no need for megalomaniacal wars for oil), healthy soil (which is less prone to erosion, you do know about the loss of top soil, don't you?), and cleaner water ( which in the mid-west is toxic in places for use in babies formula, and which cause giant dead zones off the coasts of America, which impact the harvesting of sea food). The Republicans shut down the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment which gave scientific assessments of legislation and set up debates between wackos (bad science proponents: administration's cretins) and those who represented mainstream science (Union of Concerned Scientists). Under such an administration, a straw man can be constructed which depicts organic farmers as subsistence farmers and science that shows otherwise can be held in contempt. NY TIMES MAGAZINE article by RON SUSKIND where he talks with a WHITE HOUSE aide....According to Mr. Suskind, "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. " The aide told Mr. Suskind, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." But just because the anal sphincter in the White House says it's true, probably means it isn't. But it takes so much more space to show what an ignorant ass you are than for you to say, "Damn Science". You are truly a waste of time Josh Kalish. -- FB - FFF Billy Get up, stand up, stand up for yor rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight. - Bob Marley |
#7
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
my lecture on the green revolution. Ingrid
http://weloveteaching.com/spring2006...evolution.html On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:33:27 -0700, Billy wrote: Below is an excerpt from the Washington Post. Some of you may recognize the author's name. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...9/28/AR2007092 801324.html THE GOOD EARTH The Blessings of Dirty Work By Barbara Kingsolver Washington Post Sunday, September 30, 2007 Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, is an elegant scientist in her silk sari, with a red bindi on her forehead like an accent mark over her broad smile. She was trained as a physicist but is best known for her work for farmers' rights. The soil of her country, India, is home to one-quarter of all the world's farmers. Increasingly they grow commodities for export rather than traditional, locally adapted foods for their own communities. This strategy was laid out by the technological Green Revolution, as it was called in the 1970s (when "green" was not the word it is today), which promised that one farmer with the right tools and chemicals could feed hundreds, freeing the rest of us for cleaner work. It sounds good unless you're that one guy on a tractor in Nebraska, and the price of soybeans won't quite refuel your tank and pay for your fertilizer. Elsewhere, it's worse. In India, Shiva says, 150,000 farmers have committed suicide -- often by drinking pesticide, to underscore the point -- after being bankrupted by costly chemicals in a cycle of debt created by ties to corporate agriculture. Centralized food production requires constant inputs -- fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation -- that in some settings are impossible to sustain, and chemical-based farming virtually always damages the soil over time, whether in India or Nebraska. Traditional farming retains soil structure, but intensive modern agriculture does not: Since the 1970s, while global grain production has tripled, an estimated 30 percent of the world's farmland has become too damaged to use. Also shrinking are the fossil fuel reserves for a system that requires petroleum to run the farm machines, serve as the chemical base of fertilizers, fuel the milling and processing plants and drive the food to widely dispersed consumers. Shiva puts it this way: "The new modified crops brought to us by the Green Revolution were described as 'green oil of the future.' Ironically, that has turned out to be correct in a way, as the Green Revolution makes a renewable resource -- food -- into a nonrenewable one, just like petroleum." Farmers come to Shiva's farm-based institute in Derha Dun to learn how to free themselves from chemicals, indebtedness and landlessness. Shiva's research has shown that returning to more traditional multi-crop food farms can offer them higher, more consistent incomes than modern single-crop fields of export commodities. She identifies the extinction of traditional seed varieties as the principal threat to food security here; to name an important example, South Asian farmers once grew about 50,000 varieties of rice, a number that has dropped to around 5,000 as a globalized seeds-and-chemicals industry displaces tradition, sometimes with coercion from the Indian government. The institute, called Navdanya, is a small, green Eden framed against the startling blue backdrop of the Himalayas. On the morning of my visit last December, birds sang from the fruit trees as we ate our breakfast of millet porridge with fruit and nuts, lemon pickle and tea, all grown on the farm's intensively planted organic acres. Sixteen years earlier, with no funds beyond her small savings, Shiva and her acolytes had bought this piece of ruined land, which neighboring farmers advised her would never grow anything at all. Her devoted team has built the soil with compost and careful crop rotation to its present lushness. After a tour through the fields, we took off our shoes to enter the seed bank room, a precious library of germ plasm collected in labeled jars and baskets: oilseeds, mustard greens, wheats and barleys, 380 varieties of rice. Other farmers throughout the country are building different seed banks of locally appropriate varieties, all replanted in the fields each year as a living catalogue. "This is the basis of Indian farmers' sovereignty," Shiva said. "Our traditional crops." Navdanya now hosts what Shiva calls the Grandmothers' University, a series of cooking festivals to help connect the conservation of traditional crops with the practical skills of cooking and eating them. Clearly, traditional farming and time-honored food customs are mutually dependent. Less clear is whether this country could lose its powerful food culture -- what is more important to an Indian girl's education than perfecting the art of making her mother's daal? But Shiva warns that even here, the consumption of packaged foods is on the rise. "The nutrition transition is driven by economic changes that coerce people into jobs that give them no time for food culture," she said. "Tech jobs, telephone industry jobs here are mostly held by kids who may have very few other employment prospects. They are making great money by local standards, but they are sometimes working 20 hours per day! In a life like that, there is no time for your mother's daal." Industrial farming -- however destructive to the land and our nutrition -- has held out as its main selling point the allure of freedom: Two percent of the population would be able to feed everyone. The rest could do as we pleased. Shiva sees straight through that promise. "Most of those who have moved off of farms are still working in the industry of creating food and bringing it to consumers: as cashiers, truck drivers, even the oil-rig workers who generate the fuels to run the trucks. Those jobs are all necessary to a travel-dependent, highly mechanized food system. And many of those jobs are menial, life-taking work, instead of the life-giving work of farming on the land. The analyses we have done show that no matter what, whether the system is highly technological or much more simple, about 50 to 60 percent of a population has to be involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service." Waiting tables, for instance, or driving a truck full of lettuce, or spending 70 hours a week in an office overseeing a magazine full of glossy ads selling food products. Surprise: There is no free lunch. No animal can really escape the work of feeding itself. We're just the only one with fancy clothes and big enough brains to make up a story like that: Hooray, we are far from the soil, and that has set us free. |
#8
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
Not all science needs to be applied. There are always consequences to progress, the
ying and the yang. The point is to spend at least some time pondering the consequences and not letting the "appliers" make all the decisions. There are great needs for biotechnology, for recombinant blood products free of blood borne diseases for example. But we let Monsanto et all decide what to do with the science instead. For the really smart there are always work arounds that can work, it may not put the most money into corporations pockets, but it is sustainable. And we have no long term view in the US, unlike in other countries. Ingrid Ah, too bad that we can't become subsistence farmers again. Life was truly better then. Damn science! |
#9
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
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#10
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The Lie of the "Green Revolution"
In article ,
Josh Kalish wrote: Billy wrote: involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service." Ah, too bad that we can't become subsistence farmers again. Life was truly better then. Damn science! You don't read too good, do you boy? Using the latest, scientific advances in agriculture, modern farmers are, in many places, less than subsistance farmers. ------- This strategy was laid out by the technological Green Revolution, as it was called in the 1970s (when "green" was not the word it is today), which promised that one farmer with the right tools and chemicals could feed hundreds, freeing the rest of us for cleaner work. It sounds good unless you're that one guy on a tractor in Nebraska, and the price of soybeans won't quite refuel your tank and pay for your fertilizer. Elsewhere, it's worse. In India, Shiva says, 150,000 farmers have committed suicide -- often by drinking pesticide, to underscore the point -- after being bankrupted by costly chemicals in a cycle of debt created by ties to corporate agriculture. Centralized food production requires constant inputs -- fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation -- that in some settings are impossible to sustain, and chemical-based farming virtually always damages the soil over time, whether in India or Nebraska. -- FB - FFF Billy http://angryarab.blogspot.com/ |
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