And just WHAT are genetically modified foods good for?

Bigger crop yields, right?  And resistance to weeds?

Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of "superweeds", according to a report by 20 Indian, south-east Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups representing millions of people.  The Guardian.

I already wrote about how Monsanto's RoundUp weed killer was creating superweeds..   (Wonder if they're edible?)

GM foods require more weedkiller and seem to be attracting more insect pests as well, and apparently for no good at all except to make Monsanto shareholders rich.  For the case against Monsanto, and what people are doing to organize, see the organic Consumer's Millions Against Monsanto page.

Graphic from Alphachimp's photostream at Flickr.

Monsanto: I told you so

It's late but I have to get something out about this tonight.  My litany of grievances against Monsanto is long; today's not-unexpected news that weeds are becoming resistant to Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller still has me shaking my head a bit at the fact that anyone is surprised.  Actually, maybe I am a bit surprised that the resistance has come so quickly-- in just ten years..

The New York Times just posted an article, The Rise of the Superweeds, There's an interactive version of the graphic in this post that shows areas with resistant weeds.

The Organic Consumers Association has a Millions Against Monsanto campaign  Their current stories include: Conflict of Interest: Ex Monsanto Lawyer Clarence Thomas to Hear Major Monsanto Case,Monsanto Hid PCB Pollution for Decades,Monsanto Sues More Small Family Farmers,Monsanto Takes Ownership of Public Water Resources.  You won't believe the corporation's reach.

Food shortages not in the news but scarcely over

The Guardian's Jayoti Ghosh has an excellent article about the increasingly low media profile the food shortage is receiving. Remember the riots in Haiti? The famine in Liberia? Rice hoarding in the Midwest of America? Is it over?

"No, the "silent tsunami" has simply been overwhelmed in public awareness by the much noisier tsunami in the world of international finance, with the giant sucking sounds of possible bank collapses and enormous bail-outs grabbing all the attention. Yet the global food crisis is far from over, and is even likely to intensify in the near future," Ghosh writes.

Falling crop prices this year after two years of massive increases may have led policy makers to believe they could pay less attention to the issue. The U.S. had a bumper crop of grain this year; crop prices fell 40% in Australia. Somehow, though, those bumper crops and cheaper prices are not putting any more food in people's bellies.

Weather and insect plagues can cause food shortages. Extremely cold temperatures and gasoline shortages in Bosnia have completely cut some villages off from food. Floods have washed out roads in the Philippines have prevented food from being delivered. Be glad you're not a Liberian farmer, having to flee your lands because of an invasion of Army worms-- fierce caterpillars that eat anything in sight. News24.

Climate and poor soil can reduce crop yields. Much of Kenya's soil is nutritionally depleted and the severe drought is pushing the people toward famine. Drought in Burundi has caused thousands of families to flee to neighboring countries in search of food.

Ghosh points to three main causes of of the food crisis:

• A crisis in cultivation. Policy neglect and lack of investment in agriculture's infrastructure, lack of credit for the farmers and trade liberalization have made farming an unprofitable venture.
• Depression of wages in developing countries. The food is there, but people just can't afford it.
• Fewer agribusinesses exercising more control. Government subsidies encourage taking land meant for food to production of ethanol. Thus, consumer prices remain the same or higher.

All of these forces are less obvious in the United States but still have their role to play. Over the last three years, one in nine Americans has experienced food insecurity. That means that 13 million households went hungry some time during each year. Oddly, though, poverty in America tends to equal obesity. In 2004, Jefferson County, one of the poorest counties in the country, also had the dubious honor of being the most obese. You get more calories from a dollar's worth of carbohydrates than a dollar's worth of fruit.

In the capitalist global economy, corporations have to make a profit to survive. But where do we draw the line? This month Monsanto, the world's largest seed corporation, boasted its quarterly earnings have doubled over last quarter. To understand Monsanto's stranglehold on agriculture, see Vanity Fair's May, 2008 article.

We are unlikely to be able to change agricultural policy until we can make sense of it.

Sculpture from Frankie Roberto's photostream on Flickr.

Not everyone can walk their way out of hunger

For every mile you walk, you burn about 250 calories. How much do North Koreans take that into account as they attempt to walk into South Korea and China? Surely they are aware of the shoot-to-kill orders issued to North Korean border guards. On the Chinese side of the border, Chinese border guards invade the homes of ethnic Koreans living in China who may be harboring refugees from starvation.

Biofuels, increased food demand in developing countries and the high cost of fuel are taking the blame for the current world crisis but there are many reasons more people are hungry right now.

Global warming may very well bear the blame for the cyclone that destroyed 65% of Myanmar's rice fields. That same area is responsible for 50% of its poultry and pork production and 85% of its aquaculture.

Global warming is definitely one of the factors responsible for the salmon shortage that is leaving the Stellat'en people in British Columbia with only one salmon for every twenty-five people, not enough to meet their caloric needs. Warmer waters mean fewer salmon spawn. The salmon shortage has involved the region in difficult discussions over catch-sharing and fishing practices. The Tyee.

The 1,100 inhabitants of Christmas island shouldn't be hungry, but the company the island contracts with to deliver food hasn't made a delivery since January. Planes fly over from Australia once a week with small amounts of fresh produce; lettuce is selling for $11 a head.

While the U.S. may be coming to think of the typical Indian as working in a call center, India still has more poor people-- some 600 million-- than any country on earth. Yet farmers are abandoning their farmland and rice fields because they cannot recoup the cost of seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, much of it a result of patented seeds from multinationals like Monsanto, which forbids farmers saving seeds from one harvest to the next. More than 36,000 farmers have committed suicide in the years from 1997 to 2006, the last year for which statistics are available.

Other people around the world are still (and increasingly) dealing with the shortage of rice and the cost of food, exacerbated in many places by poverty and unstable governments. Boarding schools in Zimbabwe are so short of food they are asking students to bring their own groceries. The Ugandan government said this week that increasing competition for scarce food supplies in Kenya and Sudan are leading to shortages in Uganda, also.

Finally, a full belly is one of the first casualties of war. 130,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria received subsidized food aid last month, but the U.N. agency that provides the food is running out of money.

Solutions to hunger exist, but the longer we wait, the more difficult it will become.

Soil is the skin of the earth

This Sunday my nephew and I are going to be digging in the dirt-- taking the first six inches of soil from my old garden and moving it to my new garden five miles away.

I tried to have a garden in my new place last year, but the end result wasn't great. The soil was sandy and didn't make a fragrant ball in my hand when I squeezed it together-- just ran out between my fingers. I'd forgotten what unenriched backyard soil is like.

For nearly thirty years I gardened in the same spot, the deep back yard of an inner city house. My tools were a garden spade, a shovel, garden shears, a wheelbarrow, a trowel and a claw. I turned the soil myself each spring and in the first years, the thatch grew so thick I'd have to beat the clods against the earth to shake loose the dirt. I bought bags of composted manure for the first years and I started a compost pile. Just about everything went into it: leaves, yard waste, food scraps, used kitty litter (minus the poop). A few times I mixed in a 30 x bag of bone meal to help the pile heat up. My compost pile was very informal, not even fenced in. Once or twice a year I'd turn it by taking from the top layers with my spading fork and moving them to another pile. When I got down to soil, , my shovel would slide into dark, rich, grumbly earth and I'd shovel it (and many earthworms) into the wheelbarrow, cart it over to my garden and mix it in to the soil's top layers. I'd get ten or twelve full wheelbarrows a year. Now multiply that by thirty years over a 40' by 60' plot, add years of grass clipping and other mulch, and you can see why I want my soil! That soil is my true wealth, accumulated through investment and hard work.

I don't exactly know how I came to care so much about earth, seeing as I grew up in the suburbs and the city, but I feel incredibly fortunate to have more than a passing understanding of how plants are born, live, provide food, and enrich the soil at the end of their season.

Last week the Associated Press said that according to a new World Resources Institute report, food production has been cut by about a sixth because of declining soil productivity. One-fifth of the world's cropland has deteriorated to some degree.

Fertilizer is a quick fix to improve crop yields, but the real solution is soil health: crop rotation, addition of organic material, less tilling, cover crops, erosion prevention.

The Nation has a good article on the roots of our food crisis and what can be done about it.

The current global food system, which was designed by US-based agribusiness conglomerates like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM and forced into place by the US government and its allies at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, has planted the seeds of disaster by pressuring farmers here and abroad to produce cash crops for export and alternative fuels rather than grow healthy food for local consumption and regional stability

Please, grow something-- anything-- this season.

Harold Williams

Tom Devine has a fascinating post up from the archives of the "Mitch Ogulewicz Chronicles." Mitch, who served on Springfield's city council in the 80"s, was a maverick if there ever was one; spoke truth to power no matter what the cost. I would probably disagree with his positions more than now than I did then, but I still admire him.

Tom mentioned how Mitch picked up a lot of support in the African-American community once Roger Williams got on board his campaign. I didn't know Roger well, and don't know where he is now-- passed away, perhaps?-- hope not-- but who I did know was his brother Harold.

While Roger made his contribution to our community through housing development, Harold worked at Monsanto and developed lung disease. He was a lifelong communist who never seemed permanently disillusioned about the potential for people to make a difference. He came to many of Arise's early meetings, huffing away, with the party newspaper under his arm. Of course, most of us at that time were current or recent welfare recipients, and we were way too disorganized intellectually either to refute or endorse his beliefs. We only knew we had an ally, someone who supported our struggle, and he remained an ally to the end of his life.

Until last month, right up until we closed the Arise office, we had a picture of Harold hanging on our wall. My friend Michael has it in safekeeping right now. Wish I could see it. Harold looked a bit like Ernest Borgnine. I tried to find a reference to Harold on Google, and found several Harold Williams who served on the Monsanto board,or were managers, and one Harold Williams who was some bigwig in the Communist Party, but those aren't my Harold. My Harold was a tireless foot soldier and friend. I don't want to forget him.