Biologists have found over 150 different chemical residues in bee pollen, a deadly “pesticide cocktail” according to University of California apiculturist Eric Mussen. The chemical companies Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow, DuPont and Monsanto shrug their shoulders at the systemic complexity, as if the mystery were too complicated. They advocate no change in pesticide policy. After all, selling poisons to the world’s farmers is profitable.

Furthermore, wild bee habitat shrinks every year as industrial agribusiness converts grasslands and forest into monoculture farms, which are then contaminated with pesticides. To reverse the world bees decline, we need to fix our dysfunctional and destructive agricultural system…

To read the rest of this article please click here.

It’s a long trip from Goa to Odisha while taking the scenic route. First the train up north to Delhi then straight on to Varanassi. After a few days suffering the heat, filth and stomach parasites it was on to Kolkata and all its beautiful chaos.

About five days and five nights just to get to Kolkata but in this time the train passed some of the most beautiful and tragic landscapes I have seen, from lush forests, hills and rivers to toxic water bodies and devastated industrial moonscapes. It’s so sad to think that very thing now being celebrated in India is based on an absolute destruction of these environments which only a few decades ago were more or less the same as they had been for tens of thousands of years.

But all this was the perfect build up to the final destination, Odisha and the remote agricultural area in the middle of  the Niyamgiri hills,  home to the remote Kond communities and some of the most beautiful agricultural land in India.

The train stopped at Muniguda, one of the small growing towns close to the now infamous Lanjigarh, home to the Vedanta bauxite mines, one of the most controversial industrial projects in India.

This time I was not there to look at the issues surrounding industrial mining, I was there to visit a close friend of mine, Dr Debal Deb. Debal is a scientist and in my mind one of the most important people in the world. His work does not involve working with or for industry, it doesn’t involve manipulating markets and making money. His work involves feeding people, restoring cultural identity and protecting our environments.

Debal has for the last 17 years been working on protecting heirloom seed in India, documenting seed varieties and their characteristics so that the seed belong to the farmers of India and cannot be stolen by the likes of Monsanto and Syngenta.

Debal  knows that the only way to protect future generations and our agricultural heritage is to conserve these precious seeds on-farm, while educating farmers into long lost farming practices. When farmers in India have gone from earning around 50,000 Rs per acre to about 15,000 in just 50 years as a result of the chemicalization of agriculture,  you know that something is very wrong.

A couple of years ago, due to the changing climatic patterns, and also to some extent the reluctance of Bengali farmers to practice ecological agriculture, Debal had to move his farm, Basudha, from Bengal to Odisha.

Debjeet, from a local organization called Living Farms, helped him find some land to rent with a hill stream running though it, so he shifted his 920 varieties of rice there and has now decided to build a permanent seed bank for the local community.

This is no ordinary seed bank. this is a Debal seed bank made out of local stone, mud, sand, adobe bricks and local labour, this is a Debal building, 100% sustainable and 100% local. His long time friend, French architect Laurent Fournier helped him out with some of the design and finally the construction. The primary issue was how to build a roof that was capable of withstanding 45degree heat and monsoon rains without using external materials. As the stocks of bamboo had ben destroyed by a local paper mill many years ago, the only answer seemed to be adobe domes. Laurent told me that about 50 years ago in Egypt, the architect Hassan Fathy had rediscovered the techniques of building the ancient Nubian vaults and domes, these he told me were the perfect answer to this very particular architectural problem.

When I was filming the building was about half finished, the walls were all up and the internal vaults had begun. Using local labor has been a real challenge as many of the people in this area are from tribal communities and come from a hunter-gatherer heritage. To most people in these communities, when you hunt of gather you only do so to feed the family for the next couple of days, and so it is with working for money. One day’s wage at 200 rupees can last a long time when the government sells you subsidized rice at 1 rupee a kilo.

For days, Debal, Mita, Laurnet and his family labored under the mid day sun to try and make progress on the roof before the monsoon season… but failed. Debal’s own money had all but run out, Laurent and his family had to return to Kolkata and the local builders just never showed up.

For now, Debal is looking for some type of system to protect his vulnerable structure, a friend of his bought over from Karnataka some large sheaths from the beetle nut tree. Debal is experimenting with soaking and stitching these together to make a temporary rain shed. Whatever happens, in September, after the monsoon, work will begin again, even if Debal has to do all the work himself.  He is hoping that by this time next year, the building will be finished and he will be able to hand it and its contents over to his local farming community. For more information on Dr Debal Deb please go to http://www.goodnewsindia.com/index.php/post12/story/debal/

and for his seed bank Vrihi please visit www.vrihi.org

The Farmer, the Architect and the Scientist from The ABN and The Gaia Foundation on Vimeo.

A new film, ‘The Farmer, the Architect and the Scientist’ tells the story of a seed hero. Dr Debal Deb is a pioneering ecologist committed to working with traditional farmers in eastern India to conserve indigenous seed diversity. Over almost two decades, Debal has managed to save 920 varieties of rice, all of which he stores in community based seed banks in West Bengal and Odisha for farmers. This film follows the construction of a new seed bank premises in Odisha, a venture that provides a potent symbol of Debal’s values.

As we saw in Seeds of Freedom, small-scale traditional farmers and their rich diversity of locally adapted seed varieties are being written out of the story of seed. They are the victims of an aggressive global lobbying effort, designed to convince a world terrified about food security that the corporatization of the global food system, involving transgenic seeds, is the only way to feed the world.

But there are those who dispute this narrative – seed heroes, men and women, from around the world – who understand that the key to a healthy food system lies in maintaining the immense local and regional bio-cultural diversity of seeds and traditional farming methods. Their work to uphold farmland and community resilience and health has never been more important.

According to this holistic philosophy of environmental health, Debal’s scientific method is a far cry from the top down, exploitative practices of ag-biotech companies that Seeds of Freedom uncovered. His chief aim is to re-empower farmers to take control of their own heirloom seeds, creating the conditions for food sovereignty and security for future generations.

In Debal’s work there is no sense of the superiority of either science or traditional knowledge – the two are seen as mutually beneficial, a complementary pairing. Debal works with farmers as fellow scientists in the laboratory that is their fields; Truly recognising the depth of their knowledge, and that solutions to hunger must benefit the small producer who is at highest risk. This respect and concern is key to the collective successes Debal has helped realise.

The new 100& sustainable seed bank built with French architect Laurent Fournier

The Farmer, the Scientist and the Architect reveals Debal’s commitment to this collaborative method through sharing the story of the construction of a new local seed bank. Made using local stone, mud, sand, adobe bricks and local labour, this building is aesthetically delightful and, most importantly, 100% sustainable and 100% local. Debal has been working on this feat of truly ecological architecture with French architect Laurent Fournier. Together they are building this vital community resource, brick-by-handcrafted-brick, to convey to the community (and outsiders as well) that sustainability involves not only ecological agriculture but also ecological architecture, biodiversity, and an environmentally concerned lifestyle. Fittingly, upon completion the seed bank will be bequeathed to the people who need it.

Like Dr Melaku Worede of Ethiopia, whose work is the subject of a forthcoming film from The Gaia Foundation and African Biodiversity Network, Debal Deb is a largely unsung hero. This film hopes to go some way to changing that, showing that there is another, ethical way to treat our seed inheritance; opening minds to the sustainable possibilities for the future of food and the beneficent role science can play in this.

Click here to read Gaia’s blog explaining why the G8 Hunger Summit has much to learn from this film, and the approach of Dr Debal Deb and others like him.

G8 summit – a moment for NGOs to stick to supporting social movements in the global South, not cosy up to G8 governments: support for the G8 is support for its New Alliance corporations which will unleash more GMOs in Africa.

In Jonathan Glennie’s article in the Gates/Guardian Blog “G8 summit a moment for NGOs to stick to their guns, not dodge verbal flak: civil society has a duty to resist the inevitable hectoring of government officials ahead of the London nutrition summit” he provides a great reminder of the real politik of MPH in 2005. In this article he recalls the bullying tactics of government ministers and officials who tried to suppress NGO analysis about government duplicity in presenting its case to eliminate debt in the run up to the Gleneagles G8 Summit in 2005. He urges NGOs to “stick to their guns” and not “crumble in the face of such hectoring”.

Now, in 2013, some multinational NGOs are so in cahoots with government – for mutually favourable reasons – that it is hard to believe there will be any ‘hectoring’. In the rush to be seen to be in the lead in promoting corporate-friendly food regimes, it is difficult to determine who is more responsible, government or those NGOs, for conning the public that the perpetrators of hunger – the corporate agribusinesses – should be feted and given centre stage.

The ‘hectoring’ and ‘bullying’ Glennie describes in 2005 is, this time, not by “government aparatchiks” on NGOs but by those NGOs leading the parade in support of the G8 on the other NGOs, Trade Unions and those who believe the parade should be led by the people at the heart of resolving hunger problems – small-scale food providers and social movements in the global South: those who feed the world but are oppressed by aggressive companies and policies seeking to capture their resources, markets and labour – thereby exacerbating hunger.

What most camp followers of the G8 campaign who will be bopping to Angelique Kidjo in Hyde Park on Saturday do not realise is that a cheer for Cameron will unleash more GMOs in the name of eradicating hunger. Support will be taken as endorsement of the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. This Alliance of the 8 governments with the world’s largest food, agriculture and biotech corporations will spread GM crops and foods across Africa, and, with neo-colonial arrogance, require countries to change their laws to suit the corporations.

It’s not too late to pull out and call for:

• an end to the New Alliance and its corporate allies spreading GMOs across Africa,
• government to stop giving bungs to Multinational Corporations (DFID has committed nearly £400m to promoting them), and
• making the G8 history.

There are legitimate UN bodies that determine priorities on food and nutrition – the democratic and inclusive Committee on World Food Security – and public funding needs are identified. And there are legitimate voices from Civil Society, for example La Via Campesina whose proposals for feeding the world – food sovereignty – will be celebrated in their 20th anniversary conference in Jakarta this weekend.

And for people who have already booked to go to London on Saturday – they can join those in solidarity with Via Campesina at the event “Stop the G8 fuelling Hunger”

Download full text of Stop G⁸MOs

For more, see:

“What’s the problem with the IF campaign?” www.redpepper.org.uk/whats-the-problem-with-the-if-campaign/

“G8 should implement the CFS Tenure Guidelines rather than launch a new initiative”

www.europafrica.info/en/news/g8-should-implement-the-cfs-tenure-guidelines-rather-than-launch-a-new-initiative

“Family Farmers for Sustainable Food Systems” from the website of
europAfrica: towards food sovereignty

www.europafrica.info/en/publications/family-farmers-for-sustainable-food-systems

The gmo labeling bill overwhelmingly passed in the House in a 134 – 3 vote on Monday.

As the Hartford Courant reports, the bill entails a sort of trigger in order for it to take effect:

For the legislation to take effect four states — including those bordering Connecticut — must pass a similar bill. In addition, any combination of northeastern states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania or New Jersey), with an aggregate population of at least 20 million people, must approve labeling legislation.

Immediately after the vote, cheers could be heard outside the Hall of the House from advocates who had been pushing the labeling requirement.

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) said the trigger “unnecessarily puts on hold what consumers and lawmakers have already validated as important legislation,” but still welcomed the passage of the legislation as a victory in the food movement, and hoped Connecticut’s action would prove a catalyst for other states to enact similar measures.

Mark Kastel, co-director of the Cornucopia Institute, told the New York Times that the trigger may not be entirely negative.

“The hurdles in the Connecticut bill, if surmounted, would mean a critical mass in the marketplace that would emulate the impacts that would have materialized if California had passed its ballot initiative,” said Kastel.

Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!, cheered the bill’s passage as a victory of people power over corporate agriculture, saying, “The grassroots have won in Connecticut for a key victory over Monsanto and the biotech lobby.”

“It was inspiring to watch Connecticut legislators supporting GMO labeling stand strong in the face of the biotech industry’s effort to kill the bill,” said Murpy.

“Numerous other states in the Northeast and around the country are actively considering pending GE food labeling bills. Connecticut’s leadership provides momentum and an incentive for these other states to move forward,” Rebecca Spector, who works on state GMO labeling legislative efforts at CFS, said in a statement. “Other states should now pass GE labeling laws, providing millions of U.S. consumers with the basic right to know how their food is produced.”

The legislation now heads to Gov. Malloy, who is expected to sign it.

Original source: commondreams.org

The Agriculture Department said the wheat was of the type developed by Monsanto to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup, also known as glyphosate. Such wheat was field-tested in 16 states, including Oregon, from 1998 through 2005, but Monsanto dropped the project before the wheat was ever approved for commercial planting.

The department said it was not known yet whether any of the wheat got into the food supply or into grain shipments. Even if it did, officials said, it would pose no threat to health. The Food and Drug Administration reviewed the wheat and found no safety problems with it in 2004.

Still, the mere presence of the genetically modified plant could cause some countries to turn away exports of American wheat, especially if any traces of the unapproved grain were found in shipments. About $8.1 billion in American wheat was exported in 2012, representing nearly half the total $17.9 billion crop, according to U.S. Wheat Associates, which promotes American wheat abroad. About 90 percent of Oregon’s wheat crop is exported.

To read the whole NY Times article please click here.

As a Canadian, I have often worried about my home country of Ethiopia. Then again, how could I not be worried?

For Canadians, as CBC’s great journalist Brian Stewart once said, “Ethiopia is one country that I can never stop worrying about. Nor can the world.”

As I embrace my adopted citizenship and build my own foundation as a Canadian, I often reflect if I am doing enough to forward the cause of a country — a continent — that I left as a youngster.

The beauty of our unique Canadian citizenship allows us to celebrate our heritage while embracing our new adopted citizenship. As Canada becomes less involved in the affairs of Africa, I hope that is the commitment of the African diaspora in Canada as well as Canadians to continue to commit our citizenship in the betterment of Africa. Are we ever becoming spectators in the transformation of the continent?

Canada’s commitment to Africa is our signature in the world and is the way the world still sees Canada as builders of great institutions. Canada and Canadians need to continue to help reduce human misery and make Africa self-sufficient, free and democratic for once and for all.

As most African countries move forward with an agenda of growth and developments, what worries me the most is that Africa’s desperate and dire poverty has not diminished one bit. The rich Africans are occupied with being super rich while the vast majority of Africans are busy trying to feed themselves.

The faces of destitute Africans still occupy much of our TV screens here in Canada and war is still part of the African agenda. As for the countless NGOs (Non-Governmental Organization), what is really their role in Africa and how effective are they? Is helping Africa still a ticket to individual wealth and are African charities effective in the long term? How long are we going to exploit African faces in our determination to raise funds that mean little to everyday Africans in Africa?

There are too many questions and no simple answer.

The warriors of my continent are not those that are building the tallest nor the richest buildings in Africa but those that are fighting for real and practical solutions to Africa’s dire problems. Take for instance – the work of Dr. Melaku Worede, which has already earned him - the Right Livelihood Award in 1989 — two years after I left Ethiopia.

Upon completing his education from the University of Nebraska like most of my father’s generation, he went back to Ethiopia and became a public servant. He became an advocate for the preservation of genetic diversity with the Plant Genetic Resources Center, becoming its Director at the time of his retirement. When the cause needed him to be active once again he left retirement and started his own foundation, the Seeds of Survival Program of Ethiopia with the support of Canada…

To read the rest of this article by Samuel Getachew, please click here.

Now, the preeminent science journal Nature has devoted an entire issue to the question (to paraphrase that legendary IBM ad), where are the magic seeds? We were going to get seeds that would grow faster, yield more, save the environment, and be more nutritious. What we got were seeds for a few commodity crops such as corn, soy, and cotton that made their own pesticide or resisted herbicides, but otherwise provided little, if any, benefit to consumers.

Nonetheless, Nature assures us that the magic seeds are on the way. What the journal doesn’t say explicitly, however, is that there’s evidence that for existing GMO seeds, the best days are already over — and the next generation of seeds may be doomed even before they’re in the ground…

To read the rest of this article, please click here.

At the same time we recognize and celebrate the labour and creativity of nature, of women, of farmers,of our culture by promoting indigenous biodiversity and knowledge as the real solution to  hunger and malnutrition.

According to the “creation myth” of capitalist patriarchy, rich and powerful men are the “creators”. They can own life through patents and intellectual property. They can tinker with nature’s complex evolution over millennia, and claim their trivial yet destructive acts of gene manipulation “create” life, “create” food, “create” nutrition. In the case of GM bananas it is one rich man, Bill Gates ,financing one Australian scientist ,Dale, who knows one crop,the banana ,to impose inefficient and hazardous GM bananas on millions of people in India and Uganda who have grown hundreds of banana varieties over thousands of years in additional to thousands of other crops.

False solutions like genetically engineered bananas are being offered  by Bill Gates, who is funding Dr Dale in Queensland University of Technology,Australia, to develop genetically engineered bananas and transfer them to India. In addition our tax money is also funding this project.

India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) will provide AUD$1.4 million (US$1.44 million) towards the QUT component of the project and INR80 million (US$1.43 million) towards the cost of the Indian component.

Partners for the GM banana project will also include Australia’s National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, India’s National Research Centre for Bananas, the Indian Institute of Horticulture Research, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.

Dr Dale does not have a single paper related to iron fortification of bananas . This work has been done by the Bhabha Atomic Research Team.

(Gujulla B Sunil Kumar & Lingam Srinivas & Thumballi Ramabhatta Ganapathi

Iron Fortification of Banana by the Expression of Soybean Ferritin

Biol Trace Elem Res (2011) 142:232–241 DOI 10.1007/s12011-010-8754-6 )

So the research on GM banana is Indian, the finance comes from India, yet Dr Dale and Bill Gates strut around the world as if their research, their brains and their money is making a Technology transfer of GM bananas possible to India to save Indian Women.

GMO bananas are in any case not a solution to anemia. Bananas are rich in nutrition but have only 0.44mg of iron per 100 grams of edible portion. All the effort to increase iron content of bananas will fall short the iron content of our indigenous  biodiversity. According to the BARC scientists, they can achieve a 6 fold increase in iron content in GMO bananas.This makes it 2.6mg, which is 3000% less than iron in turmeric, or niger, or lotus stem, 2000% less than Amchur (mango powder). The safe, biodiverse alternatives are multifold.

The knowledge of growing this diversity and transforming it to food is women’s knowledge. That is why in Navdanya  we have created the network for  food sovereignty in women’s hands – Mahila Anna Swaraj .

The project is a waste of money, and a waste of time. It will take 10 years and millions of dollars to complete the research. But meantime, governments,research agencies, scientists will become blind to biodiversity based, low cost, safe, time tested , democratic alternatives in the hands of women .The National banana research centre while conseving 200 varieties of bananas, has already put the development of GMO bananas in its Vision Document 2030.

Just as Bt cotton has taken over 95%cotton in India inspite of having failed to increase yields or control pests, GM bananas will take over and destroy our rich biodiversity, even though they will fail to remove iron deficiency.

The real objective is to get access to our rich biodiversity through Biopiracy and control banana production through patents in the country with the highest production and consumption of bananas. Scientists like Dale already hold many patents on banana transformation. Just as Monsanto controls our cotton seed supply through IPRs by adding a toxic gene to cotton, Dale and MNC’s will start owning our banana through patents linked to genetic engineering. In fact that seems to be the main aim of the GMO banana project.

There is no need for introducing genetically engineered banana , which is a sacred plant and sacred food in India, ,when banana brings us many health benefits and we have so many affordable, accessible, safe and diverse options for meeting our nutritional needs of iron.

We have to grow nutrition by growing biodiversity, not industrially “fortify” nutritionally empty food at high cost, or put one or two nutrients into genetically engineered crops.

As the Navdanya report Health per Acre shows When an acre of farmland is used for organic mixed cropping in place of conventional mono cropping, 39 g of extra iron is produced. This amount is sufficient to nourish 16,250 lactating mothers with iron for a day. On a national scale, the extra amount of iron produced organically would be sufficient to meet the requirement of 20 billion hypothetical lactating mothers.Even if only part of this iron is absorbed, biodiversity offers us the potential of ending iron deficiency anemia. There need be no iron deficiency if we intensify biodiversity in our farms and gardens and food.

We don’t need irresponsible and wasteful experiments like GMO bananas, imposed by powerful men in distant places, who are totally ignorant of the biodiversity in our fields and thalis, and who never bear the consequences of their destructive power by creating new threats to our biodiversity  , our seed sovereignty, knowledge sovereignty, and our health , We need to put food security in women’s hands  so that the last woman and the last child can share in nature’s gifts of biodiversity.

The solution to malnutrition lies in growing nutrition, and growing nutrition means growing biodiversity, it means recognizing the knowledge of biodiversity and nutrition among millions of Indian women who have received it over generations as “Grandmothers Knowledge”. For removing iron deficiency, iron rich plants should be grown everywhere, on farms, in kitchen gardens, in community gardens, in school gardens, on roof tops, in balconies….Iron deficiency was not created by Nature. And we can get rid of it by becoming co-creators and co-producers with Nature.

For Further information:

Navdanya report “No to GMO bananas” www.navdanya.org

Watch the video 

To take action:

Petition to stop GMO bananas

Contact: Navdanya@gmail.com