Agroecology Popular in Latin World

I came across several good articles on agroecology this week.  First, Lois Ross at Rabble.ca feels we have a lot to learn from Cuba’s agroecological revolution.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union Cuba’s export market for sugar fell.  “It did not have the currency to import petroleum or petroleum-based fertilizers to continue cultivation of monocultures on large state farms. And it had no currency to import food. The Cuban people were getting hungry!”

These dire circumstances fostered the kind of creativity and research that led to Cuba becoming:

…a huge incubator farm for organic and sustainable models of agriculture. As the new millennium dawned, Cuba received The Right Livelihood Award (often called the Alternative Nobel Prize) from the Swedish Parliament for its Herculean efforts in sustainable agriculture.

For more than 25 years, Cuba has been modelling its food production on agroecology and applying organic agriculture to a multitude of small-scale projects. To this day, it’s held up as a model in the development of sustainable agriculture with farmer-to-farmer tours, tours for international agriculture students, and the hosting of researchers from around the world doing field work to assess and write about the island’s advances in feeding its own people.

To the west in El Salvador, telesurtv.net covers the women and social movements that employ agroecological techniques to cultivate land in an environmentally sustainable way that helps to regenerate the land’s biodiversity.

If the land does not give us corn, it will give us something else,” said one member from Las Mesas cooperative in the province of La Libertad. “We have cassava, we have orange, chili, tomato…that way, we always work, because if we can’t harvest one thing, we will harvest another.

Organic Seed Banks Preserve Genetically Diverse Food Supply

Seed Activism

In a recent study titled “Seed Freedom: A Global Citizens Report,” Shiva’s research showed the ways that genetic contamination is rapidly spreading and, specifically, how India has lost organic cotton seed varieties due to contamination by Bt Cotton. The report also points to other places, like Mexico, facing similar challenges.

“Mexico, the historical cradle of corn, has lost eighty percent of its corn varieties,” according to the report. It is in the face of this global scourge, Shiva hopes, that organic seed banks will help create a different future.

Worldwide, these banks operate on various scales, with distinct forms of operations and funding. SeedSavers.org, for instance, offers an alternative model to biotech-fueled agriculture through “participatory preservation of organic seeds” among its members to ensure the planet maintains a “genetically diverse food supply.” The group, headquartered in Decorah, Iowa, operates one of the largest seed banks in North America where it works with farmers and gardeners to secure heirloom varieties of seeds.

Monsanto Drawing Opposition Across Globe

Increasingly Monsanto is drawing opposition across the globe.  In The Times of India Laxmi Prasanna reports on a recent conference held in Thiruvananthapuram that attracted green activists and scientists from around the world.

As part of the global call against Monsanto, participants including green activists from 400 cities across the world including Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram will organise protest marches and rallies on October 12, calling for Safe Food to prevent contamination of food by genetically modified crops and toxic pesticides. “We have no crisis in food security, it is crisis in distribution of safe food and the government has to address that,” Green activist Sridhar Radhakrishnan told TOI on Friday.

Later in the day leading freshwater conservation biologists got together calling for concrete strategies to conserve freshwater biodiversity in a symposium on ‘Aichi Targets and freshwater biodiversity conservation in the Western Ghats’. Though freshwater ecosystems occupy less than one per of the Earth’s surface, it harbors 10 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity. Yet they are one of the most poorly protected ecosystems on earth and face various threats including pollution, overexploitation and alien invasive species.

Dr. Jorg Freyhof, Scientist at the Leibniz Institute of Inland Fisheries in Berlin, Germany stressed the need for larger holistic data bases to convince and prioritise arguments for biodiversity conservation. He said policy makers and conservationists need to collate data that is easily available including species description, ecological trait data, threatened biodiversity, Red List assessment, protected area network and priority areas for restoration.

Agrochemical Companies and their stockholders the only ones who need genetically engineered crops

In the opinion section of Pambazuka News, Ali Masmadi Jehu Appiah, a Chairperson for Food Sovereignty Ghana, asserts, “The only people who need genetically engineered crops are the foreign seed and agrochemical companies and their stockholders.”  He provides a compelling argument for why Ghana should reject genetically engineered Bt cotton:

After several years of apparent short-term success in Burkina Faso of Bt cotton in increasing yields, and improving profits of small scale cotton farmers, authorities in Ghana have decided to go down the same road.

Ghana’s National Biosafety Committee (NBC) has just approved field tests of GE rice in the Ashanti Region, and GE cotton field tests at 6 different locations in the Northern Region. Bt is bacillus thuringiensis, a pesticide used to control bollworms in cotton, and stem borers in rice.

Why is Ghana looking only to the short-term gains of Burkina? Why not also look at the much longer-term experience of Bt cotton in India, China, the USA, and Indonesia? In all of these countries, there is evidence of huge problems arising from Bt crops after the first few years.

New Paradigm: Earth Democracy

Vandana Shiva has long advocated that we change our worldview from separation from nature to connectedness with it.  In this excerpt from her essay New Paradigm:  Earth Democracy, she addresses the root of the problem and urges us to again become part of the Earth community:

The same technological and economic systems that violate the planet also violate the rights of communities to her resources – the land, the biodiversity, the water. When land, biodiversity and water are reduced to tradeable commodities and privatized, not only are the rights of nature violated, the rights of communities are also violated. Pitting humans against nature and placing them outside the Earth community is an outmoded, fossilized legacy of capitalist patriarchy and mechanistic thought that gave us fossil-fuel based industrialism and colonialism and is now imposing militarized growth on communities. If our species is to survive, we must re- imbed ourselves in the planet and again become part of the Earth community. We must reawaken our duties to protect the Earth and our rights as Earth citizens to a fair share of her gifts. For this we need to revisit our concepts of growth and prosperity, we need to change the assessment of technologies to include the impact on the Earth and on society.

I’ve posted the entire essay here.