Why do sensible people make irrational choices? In this fantastic IPS report on why small farmers plant GM seed in South Africa, the answer is "desperation". ... read more »

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Posted on 4 November, 2008 - 07:09

Some good-ish news from the world of agribusiness. Monsanto has reported that it's leaving the recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone business. The Ethicurean asks whether Monsanto's exit from the market might be because people are worried about the toxic effects of rBGH in their milk. Monsanto, however, insists that "This is really a great product… Business has been strong. Sales have been strong." So that's all cleared up then.

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Posted on 18 August, 2008 - 16:35

A little while ago I hailed a popular victory against a NAFTA-compliance measure that would spray large parts of Northern California with a toxin that hadn't been tested on people before, to eliminate a threat that wasn't a threat at all.

Turns out I was a little premature.

From the Retort mailing list comes this update... ... read more »

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Posted on 18 August, 2008 - 16:27

The headline says it all, and the article gives the details.

What's curious for me, though, is the organisation that sponsored the research. On its 'about' page, the Organization for Competitive Markets advertises itself thus:

We are "pro- business" because we believe in free markets and the law of supply and demand to allocate resources properly. We are "conservative" because we view American values such as honesty and morality should be demanded of our businesses and politicians. We are "liberal" because we believe government has a regulatory role to create and enforce the rules of doing business, thereby avoiding crony capitalism. We are "populist" because we have determined our nation is made economically and culturally wealthy by preserving the ability of independent families to produce our food without fear of the economically dominant firms in agribusiness.

In other words, they think that capitalism would be great if it weren't for the capitalists. It's something that my libertarian readers might like to chew over and, if they're libertarian, agree with. Oo, and that reminds me, I know I owe Luddhunter a fuller response, and I'll try to get to that in a couple of weeks time (I'm married to a lapsed libertarian, and have a rehab system that I'm happy to share). Until then, though, I get to post my favourite libertarian joke, as told to me by the excellent Martin O'Neill:
Q: What's the difference between anarchism and libertarianism?
A: Under anarchism, poor people get to shoot back. ... read more »

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Posted on 29 July, 2008 - 06:14

The Financial Times is doing what it usually does - providing concise and honest insight into how the elite bosses think, this time around genetically modified crops. The recent op-ed by John Gapper follows a logic that I've been bumping into increasingly.

1. We need to increase food production to feed the world.
2. Yield-increasing science has worked before.
3. The nay-sayers want to reduce output through organic agriculture.
4. Monsanto, on the other hand, is investing in science.
5. Therefore we ought to embrace GM technology to fight the food crisis.

Almost everything about this argument is wrong. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 June, 2008 - 17:36

New Scientist this week tells of one of the new horrors found in the industrial food processing industry. It affects those workers in slaughterhouses who work on swine heads (in an area known, and you decide if this is dark comedy or not, as "the head table").

In order to remove the brains, which are then canned and exported as a pink pig-food, workers use high pressure jets of compressed air. The process results in "an aerosol of brain matter that workers may inhale." ... read more »

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Posted on 11 February, 2008 - 17:26

As the New York Times points out, here and here, biofuels aren't all they're cracked up to be. The revelation was prompted by an article in Science which breaks it down quite nicely. Here's the abstract: ... read more »

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Posted on 10 February, 2008 - 05:59

So what are we to make of the interweb phenomenon of the FreeRice word game? It's run by the same outfit that brought us The Hunger Site, 'where your clicks give bowls of food to the hungry', using much the same business model - sell ads and use the revenue to buy food. ... read more »

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Posted on 18 November, 2007 - 07:15

When the pesticide industry takes its gloves off, people get hurt. Below is a press release from Via Campesina about a recent killing by men with guns hired by Syngenta in response to a protest against genetically modified food.

To write to the authorities condemning this brutal attack, see the Food First Urgent Action (scroll down past the Michael Pollan article...

PRESS RELEASE

21/10/07

Attack of Syngenta?s armed militia results in deaths and wounded in Brazil

During an attack of an armed militia with around 40 gunmen on the peasant? camp at the experimental field trial of Syngenta Seeds multinational, at Santa Teresa do Oeste, at 13:30h of today (October 21st), a Via Campesina member, Valmir Motta, 32 years old, father of 3 children, was executed with two shots to his chest. Other six rural workers are severely wounded and a gunmen was possibly killed. ... read more »

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Posted on 25 October, 2007 - 17:33

When, in 2004, one of my favourite Italian thinkers, Giorgio Agamben, refused to come to the US, I was pleased. He objected to being fingerprinted in order to get his visa. And this close monitoring of our bodies, and the 'biopolitics' (to use the current phrase) that accompanies this surveillance, has some fairly dark origins in fascism.

Which is why it'll come as little surprise that in the United States have been announced technologies that will soon be applied not only to the cattle industry, but to (some) people too. Jim Hightower writes lucidly about how the US government merely wants to protect its citizens from terrorist livestock. ... read more »

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Posted on 3 October, 2007 - 00:20