Entrevista en Córdoba (Argentina) a Carmelo Ruiz de Millones Contra Mons...

Paraguay en lucha por la soberania alimentaria

Video documental sobre la soberanía alimentaria en Paraguay, desde la perspectiva de la ley antiterrorista. Con la participación de Roque Orrego de CODEHUPY (Coordinadora de Derechos Humanos del Paraguay) y el IALA Guaraní. Subido el 24-IX-12.

Agrotóxicos en el Cono Sur. Boletín N° 491 de la RALLT

http://www.biodiversidadla.org/Principal/Secciones/Documentos/Agrotoxicos_en_el_Cono_Sur._Boletin_N_491_de_la_RALLT

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Lanzamiento en Argentina de la “Campaña Nacional contra los Agrotóxicos y por la vida”; Soja transgénica y agrotóxicos en Paraguay; Avanza la caña de azúcar transgénica; Miel chilena está contaminada con polen transgénico; Argentina: Monsanto espera “enorme” cosecha de maíz en el país. Boletín N° 491 de la Red por una América Latina Libre de Transgénicos

RED POR UNA AMÉRICA LATINA

LIBRE DE TRANSGÉNICOS

BOLETÍN 491

Contenido:

Voces de resistencia:

LANZAMIENTO EN ARGENTINA DE LA “CAMPAÑA NACIONAL CONTRA LOS AGROTOXICOS Y POR LA VIDA”

Transgénicos en la región:

SOJA TRANSGÉNICA Y AGROTÓXICOS EN PARAGUAY

AVANZA LA CAÑA DE AZÚCAR TRANSGÉNICA

Impacto de los transgénicos:

MIEL CHILENA ESTÁ CONTAMINADA CON POLEN TRANSGÉNICO

Noticias de la industria:

ARGENTINA: MONSANTO ESPERA “ENORME” COSECHA DE MAÍZ EN EL PAÍS

Good Food March paralyses European capital

Mass Demonstration and Teach-in for Organic Farming in EU! For the first time, farmers, consumers and activists from many European countries came together and went on the streets to demand good food and to protest against genetic engineering, agro-chemicals, imported fodder, food exports and low producer prices.  http://www.organic-market.info/web/Know_How/Good_Food_March/219/0/0/13230.html

My op-ed on peak oil and global warming

http://progressive.org/global_warming_urgency.html

We need to act urgently on global warming

by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero August 2, 2012

It doesn’t matter whether we’ve hit peak oil yet. We still must address global warming. We can’t wait for oil shortages to wean us off our bad habits.

Peak oil is one of the decade’s hot subjects. According to this thesis, proposed by geologist M. King Hubbert, somewhere in our future an oil crunch will occur, as ever-increasing demand exhausts the dwindling supply.

Back in 2009, British environmental polemicist George Monbiot warned that the peak oil disaster was upon us. But in a July 2 London Guardian column he did an about-face.

“We were wrong on peak oil,” he said. “There is enough to fry us all.”

While other energy experts took sides on this issue, the real question isn’t where we are on the peak oil curve, but where we are on the global warming front. And we’re getting dreadfully close to the tipping point there.

Those who thought that peak oil would mean that the world economy would “by necessity” embrace renewable energy were fooling themselves. Even as the alarms were ringing, industry and consumers here remained addicted to fossil fuels.

It’s just not true that the law of supply and demand will bring us painlessly into a solar-powered, green utopia. Barring state intervention and environmental activism, industrial civilization will not rethink its oil addiction, any more than a shark can be talked into going vegetarian. What peak oil means is that the quest for oil will become more nasty, violent and desperate.

And if you expect some leftist ecological revolution in the Third World to come to the planet’s rescue, think again. Latin America’s left-leaning governments love oil as much as any capitalist does.

Socialist Bolivian President Evo Morales can talk all he wants about the environment, but his country is now no less dependent on oil and natural gas exports than it was under previous governments.

And under the leadership of the Workers’ Party, Brazil’s national oil company Petrobras has become one of the world’s largest corporations. Petrobras is now digging for oil in the Atlantic, in waters that are deeper and more dangerous than where the Deepwater Horizon tragedy took place.

What this means for the environment is that none of the peak oil forecast models spare us from global warming’s worst-case scenario.

Whether or not we agree on the precise time of peak oil, we must band together to change the economy’s course or face planetary catastrophe. Local grassroots struggles against fossil fuel extraction operations, like mountaintop removal and shale oil, are an essential part of this effort.

Our window of opportunity for action is beginning to close. We do not have much time.

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is a Puerto Rican author, journalist and environmental educator.

Visita de Valter Pomar a Puerto Rico 2011

VISITA DE VALTER POMAR, SECRETARIO EJECUTIVO DEL FORO DE SAO PAULO, A PUERTO RICO, OCTUBRE 2011

Gurian-Sherman on GMO drought resistance

http://blog.ucsusa.org/a-less-thirsty-future-through-engineered-crops/

A Less Thirsty Future Through Engineered Crops?

Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist, Food and Environment

September 13, 2012

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal sees a bright future for crops engineered for drought tolerance, water use efficiency, and other useful traits. The author, R. Paul Thompson, criticizes our recent report, “High and Dry,” for expressing too little faith in the ability of science and technology to make good on its unmet promises about genetic engineering.

The basic point of the article is that new technologies typically start slow, but get more effective and less expensive as they mature,  so we should expect GE to get cheaper and more effective too.

Corn plant in drought-cracked soil. Copyright iStockphoto.com/Drbouz

New Improved Biotech?

Clearly technologies can advance, and the author provides a few cases in point. But technologies do not always significantly improve or become much cheaper. The backers of nuclear power claimed it would become “too cheap to meter” after it was rolled out more than half a century ago. Nuclear power is still expensive, and still faces big technological hurdles such as the disposal of nuclear waste. And after Fukushima, we are less sanguine about its safety as well.

Technologies may face challenges that ultimately do not find adequate solutions, for technical, social, or economic reasons. Thompson implies that UCS considered only current aspects of GE drought tolerant crops without understanding that they may improve over time. In fact, we did analyze the prospects of GE drought tolerance for coming years.

Thompson ignores the part of our report that examines why the technology faces significant challenges in addressing drought. These include unanswered questions about complex and unpredictable interactions of engineered genes with the rest of the workings of the crop that may result in undesirable tradeoffs in crop properties.

An important reason for considering the current state of genetically engineered drought tolerance, and its prospects, is to inform our investments in agricultural science to improve our ability to confront the challenges that Thompson and others have noted. Should those investments be based on our best information regarding what works, as we contend, or on the hope that we will find ways to make GE substantially cheaper and more effective?

And the truth is, we can make major headway toward answering agriculture’s challenges now–we don’t need to hold our breaths to see if GE will improve! We already have multiple ways to substantially address Thompson’s agricultural challenges, but we are not implementing them widely, or adequately supporting research to improve them.

Conventional breeding is already producing numerous drought tolerant crops, as noted in “High and Dry”. There is also substantial evidence from recent genetics studies to suggest that conventional breeding can continue to produce big improvements in drought tolerance and other traits, which is also discussed in the report. And there are clear benefits from ecologically-based farming systems that employ practices like long crop rotations (alternating crops from year to year) and the addition and recycling of nutrients and organic matter in the form of manure, mulches, and cover crops.

For example, Thompson wants to blunt the damaging effect of fertilizers and pesticides on the environment. But we already know that cover crops can typically reduce nitrogen fertilizer pollution by 40 to 70 percent, reduce the need for pesticides and fertilizers, enrich the soil, and maintain or increase crop productivity. Cover crops are not widely used today due to misplaced policies like insurance penalties, and lack of research and infrastructure to make them more farmer-friendly. Other ecologically based farming methods can provide similar benefits.

The typical refrain from some promoters of GE is that we need all of these methods of meeting our agricultural challenges. That remains an assertion that has never been demonstrated, because there are probably several paths to achieving food security that include conventional breeding, agroecology, reducing food waste, empowerment of poor farmers (especially women), and more judicious consumption of meat, which is an inefficient source of protein and calories.

And Thompson never mentions that producing enough food alone won’t ensure that everyone is well fed, as the billion people who have too little food now demonstrates. It is not enough to understand the safety and efficacy of a technology, as Thompson contends, we also need to understand whether it may be compatible with justice and fairness.

One could argue that prudence suggests that every technology should be aggressively pursued unless there are compelling safety reasons to the contrary. In a world without substantial resource constraints, that might be the case. But in the real world of limited resources, we need to make informed choices. Our reports, and major reports like the IAASTD, are part of a growing body of evidence that supports an emphasis on agroecology, other agronomic and infrastructure improvements (e.g. more efficient irrigation and reducing waste) and conventional breeding, not GE

TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE: http://blog.ucsusa.org/a-less-thirsty-future-through-engineered-crops/

Notas contra Monsanto

http://www.biodiversidadla.org/Principal/Secciones/Documentos/Notas_contra_Monsanto_y_otros_OGM._Boletin_N_490_de_la_RALLT

Notas contra Monsanto y otros OGM. Boletín N° 490 de la RALLT

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En este boletín compartimentos con ustedes algunas notas sobre casos legales relacionados con la producción transgénica. Debido a los salud y el ambiente, que son ya bastante conocidos, los productores de transgénicos ahora tienen que enfrentar casos legales.

RED POR UNA AMÉRICA LATINA
LIBRE DE TRANSGÉNICOS
BOLETÍN 490

En este boletín incluimos información sobre un juicio contra Monsanto por dar información engañosa, otro por contaminación genética a partir de las fumigaciones de la soja RR, y una queja por procedimientos incompletos previa la aprobación de nuevos cultivos transgénicos.

Finalmente, compartimos una nota de prensa sobre el fracaso de las pruebas con mosquitos transgénicos hechos en las Islas Cayman, a pesar de todas las promesas hechas.

COORDINACIÓN RALLT

===================================================

Contenido

Brasil:

TRIBUNAL DE BRASIL CONDENA A MULTINACIONAL MONSANTO POR PUBLICIDAD ENGAÑOSA

BRASIL ADVIERTE EN CONTRA DE LAS NUEVAS SEMILLAS DE MONSANTO

Argentina:

JUICIO POR AGROTÓXICOS EN ITUZAINGÓ: FUMIGAR ES DELITO, PERO NO HUBO CÁRCEL

Unión Europea:

QUEJA CONTRA AUTORIZACIÓN DE LA UE DE LA SOJA GENÉTICAMENTE MODIFICADAS CON GENES APILADOS

Notas de la industria:

NESTLÉ OBLIGADA A ETIQUETAR SUS ALIMENTOS TRANSGÉNICOS EN BRASIL

Estados Unidos:

LOS AGRICULTORES FRENTE A MONSANTO

Mosquitos transgénicos

RESULTADOS DEL ENSAYO CON MOSQUITOS GM EN CAYMAN: UN BALDE DE AGUA FRÍA A LOS BENEFICIOS ANUNCIADOS

Reasons to Buy Organic

Reasons to Buy Organic: Let Us Count the Ways

Margaret Mellon, sr. scientist, Food & Environment

September 12, 2012

No more peaches, no more blackberries! As my colleague, Jeff O’Hara, and I pore over the list of fruits and vegetables coming in our shared community supported agriculture (CSA) delivery, we are facing the sad fact of seasonal eating. Seasons end. Yes, we will still get tomatoes and butternut squash—but oh what a summer this has been for berries and peaches.

My colleague Jeff O’Hara with our CSA share.

The Tuesday afternoon arrival of bags of organic fruits and vegetables has turned out to be a highlight of the summer for Jeff and me. Although not certified, our farmer employs the same practices that make organic produce a healthy choice and delivers them fresh from field right to our downtown DC office.

Of course, like most enthusiastic consumers of organic food, Jeff and I have reasons besides taste and freshness for choosing it. For a start, we both value the best-known features of organic agriculture: it prohibits antibiotics and synthetic pesticides.

News reports on a study from Stanford

So what do I make of a recent, widely reported story on National Public Radio saying that a new study by Stanford University scientists means that there is “hardly any evidence at all that organic food is healthier” and implies that Jeff and I might have been duped?

As a scientist, I am pleased to see a major meta-analysis (a study of studies) on the nutritional and safety aspects of organic food, but I found the interpretation by the authors of the study and news media disconcerting—and surprising.

The Stanford analysis confirmed that in comparison with conventional food, organic food has significantly lower pesticide levels, lower multidrug-resistant bacteria levels, and higher beneficial fat levels. In my book, that’s a pretty good case that organic food is healthier.

TO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE: http://blog.ucsusa.org/reasons-to-buy-organic-let-us-count-the-ways/

Seed Freedom Fortnight

Seed Freedom Fortnight

 FORTNIGHT OF ACTIONS FOR SEED FREEDOM Oct 2nd – Oct 16th 2012

From 2^nd October (Gandhi’s Birth Anniversary), to 16^th October (World Food Day) the Global Alliance for Seed Freedom is planning intensive actions to create a global citizens’ response on the issue of Seed Freedom that we hope will act as a wake up call for citizens and the government. Gandhi had said, “as long as the superstition that unjust laws must be obeyed exist, so will slavery exist”. Humanity and diverse species on the Earth are being pushed into a new form of seed slavery. In the spirit of Gandhi, we therefore call for a civil disobedience against unjust laws. Below, we outline a number of ideas for actions that we emphasize are only a starting point. We look forward to planning common strategies and actions together as the campaign for Seed Freedom becomes stronger and louder.

»View The Fortnight of Action Global Calendar Of Events

FRENCH STUDY FINDS TUMOURS IN RATS FED GM CORN

FRENCH STUDY FINDS TUMOURS IN RATS FED GM CORN

• Reuters, September 19, 2012 Straight to the Source 
  
• Rats fed a lifetime diet of Monsanto's genetically modified corn or exposed to its top-selling weedkiller Roundup suffered tumours and multiple organ damage, according to a French study published on Wednesday.

Joel Salatin Shares His Views on Sustainable Agriculture

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_26065.cfm

Dr. Mercola on Joel Salatin:

"I recently visited Joel Salatin at his Polyface farm in Virginia. He's truly one of the pioneers in sustainable agriculture, and you can take a virtual tour through his various farm operations in the video above.

 As a physician, it's patently obvious to me-and I'm sure most of you viewing this--that the food we eat plays a major role in our health. As a society, we've strayed quite far from our dietary roots and become so disconnected from our food sources that our health is now in serious jeopardy."

 About 90 percent of the money Americans spend on food is spent on processed foods1, and the health of the average American is a testament to the abject failure of such foods to support good health. Fortunately, more and more people are now beginning to recognize this, and are making efforts to get back to real food."

>>> Read the Full Article 

FUERA MONSANTO DE ARGENTINA!

PROTESTA FRENTE A LAS OFICINAS DE MONSANTO EN BUENOS AIRES. DIA MUNDIAL DE ACCIONES CONTRA MONSANTO, 17 DE SEPTIEMBRE 2012

LLAMADO A JORNADA INTERNACIONAL DE ACCIONES EN DEFENSA DE LAS SEMILLAS

Especial llamado en defensa del maíz americano

Llamado mundial a la acción directa no violenta

En el marco del festival internacional Pachamama Kokopelli

en el valle Sagrado de Ollantaytambo, Perú, Agosto del 2012, múltiples actores sociales que defienden las semillas y luchan contra la contaminación transgénica acuerdan responder al llamado internacional en defensa de las semillas que hacen Vandana Shiva y la organización de Navdanya (http://seedfreedom.in/).

Se acuerda que en las fechas 02 y 16 de octubre del presente 2012 realizar múltiples y diversas acciones a nivel planetario en contra de los cultivos transgénicos y las ilegítimas leyes que privatizan las semillas e impiden su reproducción por parte de los agricultores. Se llama por medio de la acción directa no violenta  a  visibilizar nuestro repudio a la introducción de cultivos transgénicos, y a proclamar nuestro amor en defensa de la preservación y la libertad  de las semillas nativas, campesinas e indígenas y a defender los derechos de los agricultores a intercambiar, regalar o vender sus semillas.

Además. La Red por Una América Latina Libre de Transgénicos (www.rallt.org) hace un especial llamado en defensa del maíz en América. La contaminación con maíz transgénico en el continente es una agresión culposa de las corporaciones que atenta contra un  profundo tramado de relaciones agrícola-culturales  entre la gente y el maíz. América como centro de origen del Maíz debe de ser especialmente protegida contra la contaminación transgénica. La RALLT ha lanzado una campaña para que el Maíz sea declarado como patrimonio cultural de la humanidad ante la UNESCO en aras facilitar la protección ante la agresión transgénica en el continente.  Para apoyar esta iniciativa visitar el siguiente enlace

( http://maiznuestropatrimonio.org)

La Red de Semillas Libres, conformada en el marco del Festival Pachamama Kokopelli también estará articulando múltiples acciones en defensa de las semillas y compartiendo su declaratoria de principios disponible en el siguiente enlace: (http://www.redsemillaslibres.org/)

Se invita abiertamente a adherirse y compartir dicha declaratoria en el marco de la jornada mundial de acciones en defensa de las semillas.

Informes: Fabián Pacheco <bloqueverde@gmail.com>

Ribeiro: Comida que calienta

Comida que calienta

SILVIA RIBEIRO

Dos de las mayores crisis planetarias que vivimos, la crisis alimentaria y la crisis climática, tienen como causa principal el sistema alimentario agroindustrial: desde la agricultura y pecuaria industrial a los supermercados forman una cadena que oprime a la gente y exprime al planeta, con Monsanto firmemente tirando de un extremo y Walmart del otro.

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