Environmental for Food Justice

Poster credit of David Icke Moderator’s Note: We have our fill of scientists from corporate America who insinuate themselves into governmental positions, many with considerable decision making authority. According to my research, there are more than two-dozen former Monsanto, Dow, and Syngenta scientists currently serving inside the US government with most of these attached to the FDA and the USDA (including especially APHIS and ARS). The regulatory agency-industry merry-go-round is the mark of a neoliberal regime where the regulated are also the regulators. I always thought of this as a uniquely American form of systemic corruption. Turns out that EU and European countries have the same exact problem. In this guest post, our colleague and anti-GMO activist, Brian Johns, examines recent words and actions by Anne Glover, the EU’s “Chief Scientist” who has been promoting transgenic food as safe and dismissing the growing evidence that suggests otherwise. Her relationship with the biotec...

Agricultural scientists ‘discover’ diversity-resilience link? AS TRANSGENIC TREADMILLS WEAR OUT, AGROECOLOGY LOOMS ON HORIZON Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | March 19, 2014 Even with biotech crops, farmers still need to make use of age­old practices such as crop rotation to fight insect pests. That’s the lesson to be drawn from the latest discovery of resistance to the pest-fighting toxins added to maize — also known as corn. - Brian Owens, Nature, March 17, 2014 The March 17 edition of Nature includes a review of recent research on rootworm resistance to transgenic corn (Gassmann et al 2014). The author of the Nature review Brian Owens opens with the comment that even biotech crop farmers “still need to make use of age-old practices such as crop rotation to fight insect pests.” I am intrigued by the implications of this statement as much as by rootworm resistance to Bt corn because this should open a window to the critique of biotechnology from the vantage point of a likely successor s...

Mayan bee glyph Mayan farmers defeat ‘Gene Giant’ in latest court ruling LAST WEEK’S QUIET VICTORY IN CAMPECHE MAY HAVE HUGE IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S.   Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | March 15, 2014 I think Monsanto is about to become to biotech what Enron was to the energy markets. - A secretive doppelganger in the derivatives market The State of Campeche was named after the ancient classic Maya city-state of Ah Kin Pech (Canpech). The State is located in the southwestern portion of the Yucatán Peninsula along the Gulf of Mexico. This remains some of the most remote wild, self-willing land in México. The entire region has a relatively sparse, mostly city- and tourism-bound population of around 754,000 (2005 census). This is significantly less than you’ll count in the smallest Mexico City neighborhood. This is jungle-bound limestone cavern country. Like the nation of Belize, which borders it to the southeast, and the Petén in Guatemala, to the south, Campeche has some amazing beachfro...

Maíz resistente. School for Chiapas . Moderator’s Note: As part of a series on the 20 th anniversary of the Zapatista movement for Indigenous autonomy, we offer this first and original unauthorized translation of a report by Gallo Téenek. The report originally appeared in Spanish on Regeneración Radio in October 2013 and offers a “social perspective” on the meaning of direct democracy as constituted by Zapatista communities in the form of caracoles – which literally translates as “Snails” and figuratively alludes to the spiral shape of the snail shell. Don Durito and other Others might explain this as a symbol for the organizational form of Indigenous nurturing of deep place-based knowledge and also a nest or nido offering protective harbor for the social, biological, and cultural life of the organism and community.   Téenek desribes Zapatista grassroots institutions of collective action through a lengthy depiction of the Oventic Junta de Buen Gobierno or Good Government Coun...