Monsanto, Microsoft and Africa

I didn't watch the News Hour much all summer - either baseball or work in the garden filled the early evening slot - and so I was surprised to see the Monsanto ad when I tuned in last week. It isn't greenwashing - it's just blatant lying.

This print version
http://www.monsanto.com/pdf/sustainability/advertisement_now_what.pdf
is tame by comparison.

The ad on the News Hour concludes:
"That’s sustainable agriculture. And that’s what Monsanto is all about."

I screamed disgust at the tv, and Moko ran under the bed.

This latest mass media lie by Monsanto has convinced me that the word sustainable is lost - I feel as though I can only use it when I know exactly to whom I am talking, and know that they share my ideas.

Vandana Shiva doesn't pull any punches in her opinions about Monsanto in this short promo for the non-profit Center for Food Safety:
https://secure.ga3.org/03/FFF_Shiva

But we've known Monsanto's game for a long time.

What was news to me was just how intertwined Monsanto and the Gates Foundation are.

A friend handed on the 21 September issue of The Nation, which had this article by Raj Patel et.al.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/patel_et_al
with a nuanced critique of the new green revolution proposed for Africa.

The writers draw on the research of the Community Alliance for Global Justice in Seattle, which reports that that they have found the Gates have given over $100 million in grants to organizations with links to Monsanto.

And what do Monsanto and Microsoft have in common? A deeply held belief in the value of intellectual property. It's not the simple belief in technology; it's the belief in who owns it, in who controls knowledge, in who profits.

This is so depressing I may have to find some silly comedies to watch before bedtime.

If Bill and Melinda really wanted to do something for the farmers of Africa, they would stop supporting GM seeds, with the monocropping and related land grabs and environmental degradation they cause. They'd find a way to use communication technology to help the small-scale farmers on that continent share the successes they are having using traditional knowledge of ecological agriculture in even better ways.

But philanthropy will condescend.

There's an exchange of letters about the article here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/exchange2

Unintended Consequences

Some emails and lots of postings this week about the death at 95 of Norman Borlaug, father of the "green revolution".

The National Academy of Sciences credits him with saving millions of lives, and those with whom he worked and lots of Iowans, apparently, revere him. As one plows through the coverage, it seems pretty clear that he was a deeply compassionate, humble man. And he was a competent scientist.

What has distressed me, though, is that this has provided an opportunity to silence or diminish critics of the green revolution - despite what we now know about its lack of sustainability.

We should not be surprised that The News Hour did this, greenwashing the green revolution.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/july-dec09/faminefighter_09-14.html
After all, look at their sponsors: agrichemical companies.

But we need to be honest about the fact that yesterday's best science is not necessarily the greatest hope for the future. High tech agriculture that relies on fossil fuel inputs and synthetic pesticides is not sustainable for most of the world's population - either economically or ecologically.

There will be those of an older generation, like Borlaug, who see such high tech solutions as GMOs, the key to the "new green revolution" ("green revolution 2"? "son of the green revolution"?) as the way forward, and condemn their critics as elitists, immune to the plight of the hungry.

And there will be those like John Jeavons, in South Africa right now, working with folks who want to support small scale local farmers in sustainable growing techniques.

And there will continue to be a place for science, but working with local culture and biodiversity to find the most appropriate strains of seeds, searching for best biological practices to manage plant and animal pests and build soil fertility, and helping share knowledge among different locales as climate change brings about shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns.

The era of better living through chemistry, of the magic bullet, is over. But its saints are still on our calendar, in spite of the unintended consequences, as a reminder that we all strive to do the best we can to respond with compassion to our world in our times.

Biofuels, if you can get past the sponsor

I'm not going to post this site in my links list

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/science/globalwarming/index.html

because it's pretty lame.

First, it's still labeled the global warming "debate". It's not a debate, though what to do about it is a wide ranging discussion at times.

Second, you're unlikely to see anything about links between the food system and global warming, since much of the content is sponsored by ADM. Greenwashing writ large.

But yesterday's coverage of Steven Chu and colleagues' work at UC Berkeley dealt with a lot of the important questions and questionable dynamics around biofuels (though light on the international ones), and I commend it for your listening.