Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Rat Paradise - Where Drug Addiction Is No Longer An Issue For Rats Or Humans Who Are Not In Cages

Rat Park - It's not the drug, it's the box [cage] ...
http://suboxforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=1444
 
In the late 1970's, Bruce Alexander conducted the Rat Park experiments in an attempt to better understand the effects of environment on addiction. Instead of keeping his junky (adicted) rats alone in a wire cage with nothing but heroin to do, he built them a rat paradise.

The rats in Rat Park showed some curious behavior: when presented with an unlimited supply of morphine, they chose plain fresh water instead. He even added sugar to the morphine water to make it more appealing, and still the rats just said No.
Quote:
A Skinner box is a cage equipped to condition an animal’s behaviour through reward or punishment. In a typical drug test, a surgically implanted catheter is hooked up to a drug supply that the animal self-administers by pressing a lever. Hundreds of trials showed that lab animals readily became slaves to such drugs as heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. “They were said to prove that these kinds of dope are irresistible, and that’s it, that’s the end of the addiction story right there,” Alexander says. After one particularly fruitless seminar in 1976, he decided to run his own tests.

The problem with the Skinner box experiments, Alexander and his co-researchers suspected, was the box itself. To test that hypothesis, Alexander built an Eden for rats. Rat Park was a plywood enclosure the size of 200 standard cages. There were cedar shavings, boxes, tin cans for hiding and nesting, poles for climbing, and plenty of food. Most important, because rats live in colonies, Rat Park housed sixteen to twenty animals of both sexes.

Rats in Rat Park and control animals in standard laboratory cages had access to two water bottles, one filled with plain water and the other with morphine-laced water. The denizens of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Even when Alexander tried to seduce his rats by sweetening the morphine, the ones in Rat Park drank far less than the ones in cages. Only when he added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic effects, did the rats in Rat Park start drinking from the water-sugar-morphine bottle. They wanted the sweet water, but not if it made them high.
The addicted rats in Rat Park even kicked their habits voluntarily when given the option to do so:
Quote:
In a variation he calls “Kicking the Habit,” Alexander gave rats in both environments nothing but morphine-laced water for fifty-seven days, until they were physically dependent on the drug. But as soon as they had a choice between plain water and morphine, the animals in Rat Park switched to plain water more often than the caged rats did, voluntarily putting themselves through the discomfort of withdrawal to do so.

Maybe this offers an explanation as to why some people can use addictive drugs without becoming addictive. It might also offer some ideas as to why addiction treatment so often fails. Maybe we're focused on the wrong things. Maybe we need to fix the issues that seem to so often foster addiction [Both physical and mental cages.]: poverty, loneliness, lack of community, lack of spirituality.

Well worth reading: A more in depth chapter from the book - Opening Skinner's Box by Lauren Slater is here.

More articles on Rat Paradise here:
http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/02/08/the-rat-park/
http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2008/02/rat-park-addiction-and-environmental.html
http://homelessnation.org/en/node/6949


You can read more about the Rat Park experiments here.

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Honduras Moving Toward Self Determination - Not Business As Usual

Building on that good will, Venezuela and the United States agreed to restore their ambassadors late last week. 
“re-brand” America in the eyes of the world as a reasonable power engaged in respectful diplomacy as opposed to reckless unilateralism.

Zelaya began to criticize powerful, vested interests in the country such as the media and owners of maquiladora sweatshops which produced goods for export in industrial free zones.
adopt some socially progressive policies.

a 60 per cent minimum wage increase


force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.”
Honduras is the third poorest country in the hemisphere and 70 per cent of its people live in poverty.


drug consumption should be legalized to halt violence related to smuggling.

“Instead of pursuing drug traffickers, societies should invest resources in educating drug addicts and curbing their demand,”

an increasingly more independent foreign policy.
join the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (known by its Spanish acronym ALBA), an alliance of leftist Latin American and Caribbean nations
seeks to counteract corporate-friendly U.S-backed free trade schemes.
promoted joint factories and banks, an emergency food fund, and exchanges of cheap Venezuelan oil for food, housing, and educational investment.

Now that I am meeting with the impoverished peoples of the world, they criticize me.”

Zelaya’s Letter to Obama
denounced the meddling of the United States in Bolivia's internal affairs.”
“The world powers must treat us fairly and with respect,”

Zelaya accused the U.S. of “interventionism” and called on the new administration in Washington to respect the principle of non-interference in the political affairs of other nations.

the issue of U.S. visas and urged Obama to “revise the procedure by which visas are cancelled or denied to citizens of different parts of the world as a means of pressure against those people who hold different beliefs or ideologies which pose no threat to the U.S.”

“The legitimate struggle against drug trafficking…should not be used as an excuse to carry out interventionist policies in other countries.”

vigorous policy of controlling distribution and consumer demand in all countries, as well as money laundering which operates through financial circuits and which involve networks within developed countries.”

Run Up to June Coup

The U.S. has had longstanding military ties to the Honduran armed forces, particularly during the Contra War in Nicaragua during the 1980s.
The New York Times has reported claims that the Obama administration knew that a coup was imminent and tried to persuade the military to back down.
Obama himself has taken the high road, remarking “I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms [and] the rule of law…Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”
+++




The Coup in Honduras
Obama's Real Message to Latin America?

by Nikolas Kozloff
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14161

Could the diplomatic thaw between Venezuela and the United States be coming to an abrupt end?  At the recent Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Barack Obama shook Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s hand and declared that he would pursue a less arrogant foreign policy towards Latin America.  Building on that good will, Venezuela and the United States agreed to restore their ambassadors late last week. Such diplomatic overtures provided a stark contrast to the miserable state of relations during the Bush years: just nine months ago Venezuela expelled the U.S. envoy in a diplomatic tussle.  At the time, Chávez said he kicked the U.S. ambassador out to demonstrate solidarity with left ally Bolivia, which had also expelled a top American diplomat after accusing him of blatant political interference in the Andean nation’s internal affairs.

Whatever goodwill existed last week however could now be undone by turbulent political events in Honduras.  Following the military coup d’etat there on Sunday, Chávez accused the U.S. of helping to orchestrate the overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.  “Behind these soldiers are the Honduran bourgeois, the rich who converted Honduras into a Banana Republic, into a political and military base for North American imperialism,” Chávez thundered.  The Venezuelan leader urged the Honduran military to return Zelaya to power and even threatened military action against the coup regime if Venezuela’s ambassador was killed or local troops entered the Venezuelan Embassy.  Reportedly, Honduran soldiers beat the ambassador and left him on the side of a road in the course of the military coup. Tensions have ratcheted up to such an extent that Chávez has now placed his armed forces on alert.

On the surface at least it seems unlikely that Obama would endorse an interventionist U.S. foreign policy in Central America.  Over the past few months he has gone to great lengths to “re-brand” America in the eyes of the world as a reasonable power engaged in respectful diplomacy as opposed to reckless unilateralism.  If it were ever proven that Obama sanctioned the overthrow of a democratically elected government this could completely undermine the U.S. President’s carefully crafted image.

Officially, the military removed Zelaya from power on the grounds that the Honduran President had abused his authority.  On Sunday Zelaya hoped to hold a constitutional referendum which could have allowed him to run for reelection for another four year term, a move which Honduras’ Supreme Court and Congress declared illegal. But while the controversy over Zelaya’s constitutional referendum certainly provided the excuse for military intervention, it’s no secret that the President was at odds politically with the Honduran elite for the past few years and had become one of Washington’s fiercest critics in the region.

The Rise of Zelaya

Zelaya, who sports a thick black mustache, cowboy boots and large white Stetson hat, was elected in late 2005.  At first blush he hardly seemed the type of politician to rock the boat.  A landowner from a wealthy landowning family engaged in the lumber industry, Zelaya headed the Liberal Party, one of the two dominant political parties in Honduras.  The President supported the Central American Free Trade Agreement which eliminated trade barriers with the United States.

Despite these initial conservative leanings, Zelaya began to criticize powerful, vested interests in the country such as the media and owners of maquiladora sweatshops which produced goods for export in industrial free zones.  Gradually he started to adopt some socially progressive policies.  For example, Zelaya instituted a 60 per cent minimum wage increase which angered the wealthy business community.  The hike in the minimum wage, Zelaya declared, would “force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.”  “This is a government of great social transformations, committed to the poor,” he added.  Trade unions celebrated the decision, not surprising given that Honduras is the third poorest country in the hemisphere and 70 per cent of its people live in poverty.  When private business associations announced that they would challenge the government’s wage decree in Honduras’ Supreme Court, Zelaya’s Labor Minister called the critics “greedy exploiters.”

In another move that must have raised eyebrows in Washington, Zelaya declared during a meeting of Latin American and Caribbean anti-drug officials that drug consumption should be legalized to halt violence related to smuggling.  In recent years Honduras has been plagued by drug trafficking and so-called maras or street gangs which carry out gruesome beheadings, rapes and eye gouging.  “Instead of pursuing drug traffickers, societies should invest resources in educating drug addicts and curbing their demand,” Zelaya said.  Rodolfo Zelaya, the head of a Honduran congressional commission on drug trafficking, rejected Zelaya’s comments. He told participants at the meeting that he was “confused and stunned by what the Honduran leader said.”

Zelaya and ALBA

Not content to stop there, Zelaya started to conduct an increasingly more independent foreign policy.  In late 2007 he traveled to Cuba, the first official trip by a Honduran president to the Communist island in 46 years.  There, Zelaya met with Raul Castro to discuss bilateral relations and other topics of mutual interest.

But what really led Zelaya towards a political collision course with the Honduran elite was his decision to join the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (known by its Spanish acronym ALBA), an alliance of leftist Latin American and Caribbean nations headed by Chávez.  The regional trade group including Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Dominica seeks to counteract corporate-friendly U.S-backed free trade schemes.  Since its founding in 2004, ALBA countries have promoted joint factories and banks, an emergency food fund, and exchanges of cheap Venezuelan oil for food, housing, and educational investment.

In an emphatic departure from previous Honduran leaders who had been compliant vassals of the U.S., Zelaya stated “Honduras and the Honduran people do not have to ask permission of any imperialism to join the ALBA.”  Speaking in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa before a crowd of 50,000 unionists, women’s groups, farmers and indigenous peoples, Chávez remarked that Venezuela would guarantee cheap oil to Honduras for “at least 100 years.”  By signing onto ALBA, Zelaya was able to secure access to credit lines, energy and food benefits.  As an act of good faith, Chávez agreed to forgive Honduran debt to Venezuela amounting to $30 million.

Infuriating the local elite, Chávez declared that Hondurans who opposed ALBA were “sellouts.”  “I did not come here to meddle in internal affairs,” he continued, “but…I cannot explain how a Honduran could be against Honduras joining the ALBA, the path of development, the path of integration.” Chávez lambasted the Honduran press which he labeled pitiyanquis (little Yanqui imitators) and “abject hand-lickers of the Yanquis.”  For his part, Zelaya said “we need no one’s permission to sign this commitment. Today we are taking a step towards becoming a government of the center-left, and if anyone dislikes this, well just remove the word ‘center’ and keep the second one.”

It wasn’t long before private business started to attack Zelaya bitterly for moving Honduras into Chávez’s orbit.  By joining ALBA, business representatives argued, the President was endangering free enterprise and the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  Former President Ricardo Maduro even claimed that the United States might retaliate against Honduras by deporting Honduran migrants from the United States.  “Don't bite the hand that feeds you,” Maduro warned, alluding to Washington.  Zelaya was piqued by the criticisms.  “When I met with (U.S. President) George W. Bush,” he said, “no one called me an anti-imperialist and the business community applauded me. Now that I am meeting with the impoverished peoples of the world, they criticize me.”

Zelaya’s Letter to Obama

In September, 2008 Zelaya further strained U.S. relations by delaying accreditation of the new U.S. ambassador out of solidarity with Bolivia and Venezuela which had just gone through diplomatic dust ups with Washington.  “We are not breaking relations with the United States,” Zelaya said. “We only are (doing this) in solidarity with [Bolivian President] Morales, who has denounced the meddling of the United States in Bolivia's internal affairs.”  Defending his decision, Zelaya said small nations needed to stick together.  “The world powers must treat us fairly and with respect,” he stated.

In November, Zelaya hailed Obama’s election in the U.S. as “a hope for the world,” but just two months later tensions began to emerge.  In an audacious letter sent personally to Obama, Zelaya accused the U.S. of “interventionism” and called on the new administration in Washington to respect the principle of non-interference in the political affairs of other nations.  According to Spanish news agency EFE which saw a copy of the note, Zelaya told Obama that it wasn’t his intention to tell the U.S. President what he should or should not do.

He then however went on to do precisely that.  First of all, Zelaya brought up the issue of U.S. visas and urged Obama to “revise the procedure by which visas are cancelled or denied to citizens of different parts of the world as a means of pressure against those people who hold different beliefs or ideologies which pose no threat to the U.S.”

As if that was not impudent enough, Zelaya then moved on to drug trafficking: “The legitimate struggle against drug trafficking…should not be used as an excuse to carry out interventionist policies in other countries.”  The struggle against drug smuggling, Zelaya wrote, “should not be divorced from a vigorous policy of controlling distribution and consumer demand in all countries, as well as money laundering which operates through financial circuits and which involve networks within developed countries.”

Zelaya also argued “for the urgent necessity” of revising and transforming the structure of the United Nations and “to solve the Venezuela and Bolivia problems” through dialogue which “yields better fruit than confrontation.”  The Cuban embargo, meanwhile, “was a useless instrument” and “a means of unjust pressure and violation of human rights.”

Run Up to June Coup

It’s unclear what Obama might have made of the audacious letter sent from the leader of a small Central American nation.  It does seem however that Zelaya became somewhat disenchanted with the new administration in Washington.  Just three months ago, the Honduran leader declined to attend a meeting of the System for Central American Integration (known by its Spanish acronym SICA) which would bring Central American Presidents together with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in San José, Costa Rica.

Both Zelaya and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua boycotted the meeting, viewing it as a diplomatic affront.  Nicaragua currently holds the presidency of SICA, and so the proper course of action should have been for Biden to have Ortega hold the meeting.  Sandinista economist and former Nicaraguan Minister of Foreign Trade Alejandro Martínez Cuenca declared that the United States had missed a vital opportunity to encourage a new era of relations with Central America by “prioritizing personal relations with [Costa Rican President] Arias over respect for Central America's institutional order.”

Could all of the contentious diplomatic back and forth between Tegucigalpa and Washington have turned the Obama administration against Zelaya?  In the days ahead there will surely be a lot of attention and scrutiny paid to the role of Romeo Vasquez, a General who led the military coup against Zelaya.  Vasquez is a graduate of the notorious U.S. School of the Americas, an institution which trained the Latin American military in torture.

Are we to believe that the United States had no role in coordinating with Vasquez and the coup plotters?  The U.S. has had longstanding military ties to the Honduran armed forces, particularly during the Contra War in Nicaragua during the 1980s.  The White House, needless to say, has rejected claims that the U.S. played a role.  The New York Times has reported claims that the Obama administration knew that a coup was imminent and tried to persuade the military to back down.  The paper writes that it was the Honduran military which broke off discussions with American officials.  Obama himself has taken the high road, remarking “I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms [and] the rule of law…Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”

Even if the Obama administration did not play an underhanded role in this affair, the Honduran coup highlights growing geo-political tensions in the region.  In recent years, Chávez has sought to extend his influence to smaller Central American and Caribbean nations.  The Venezuelan leader shows no intention of backing down over the Honduran coup, remarking that ALBA nations “will not recognize any [Honduran] government that isn't Zelaya’s.”

Chávez then derided Honduras’ interim president, Roberto Micheletti. “Mr. Roberto Micheletti will either wind up in prison or he'll need to go into exile… If they swear him in we'll overthrow him, mark my words.  Thugetti--as I'm going to refer to him from now on--you better pack your bags, because you're either going to jail or you're going into exile.  We're not going to forgive your error, you're going to get swept out of there.  We're not going to let it happen, we're going to make life impossible for you.  President Manuel Zelaya needs to retake his position as president.”

With tensions running high, heads of ALBA nations have vowed to meet in Managua to discuss the coup in Honduras.  Zelaya, who was exiled to Costa Rica from Honduras, plans to fly to Nicaragua to speak with his colleagues.  With such political unity amongst ALBA nations, Obama will have to decide what the public U.S. posture ought to be.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) Follow his blog at senorchichero.blogspot.com


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Sunday, June 28, 2009

An Inspiration For The World - Peru Reverses Policy And Decides To Better Protect The Amazon Instead Of Further Destruction

An Inspiration For The World - Peru Reverses Policy And Decides To Better Protect The Amazon Instead Of Further Destruction

defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without
.

people who live in the Amazon.
people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive.

"My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests."
toxic waste allegedly dumped after Chevron-Texaco's drilling has been blamed by an independent scientific investigation for 1,401 deaths, mostly of children from cancer.

do not want to see their forests felled and their lands poisoned.
preserve ... habitat

Some of Garcia's associates have been caught on tape talking about how to sell off the Amazon to their cronies.
"The government has been giving away our natural resources to the lowest bidders. This has not benefited Peru, but the administration's friends."

blockaded the rivers and roads to stop the oil companies getting anything in or out.
captured two valves of Peru's sole pipeline between the country's gas field and the coast, which could have led to fuel-rationing.
ake care of the forest, to save the life of the equator and the entire world."

"The earth has no price. It cannot be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth.

something extraordinary happened.
The Peruvian Congress repealed the laws that allowed oil company drilling, by a margin of 82 votes to 12.
Garcia was forced to apologise for his "serious errors and exaggerations".

Human beings need to make far more decisions like this: to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to leave rainforests standing.

Ecuador
leave ... country's largest oil reserve under the soil,
+++


Johann Hari: A fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world

The uprising In the Amazon is more urgent than Iran's - it will determine the future of the planet

Wednesday, 24 June 2009

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.

Here's the story of how it happened – and how we all need to pick up this fight. Earlier this year, Peru's right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country's swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon's trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia's plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn't bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block (12A)B, said in 2007: "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests." The company denies liability, saying they are "aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts".

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, according to an independent report, toxic waste allegedly dumped after Chevron-Texaco's drilling has been blamed by an independent scientific investigation for 1,401 deaths, mostly of children from cancer. When the BBC investigator Greg Palast put these charges to Chevron's lawyer, he replied: "And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?... They have to prove it's our crude, [which] is absolutely impossible."

The people of the Amazon do not want to see their forests felled and their lands poisoned. And here, the need of the indigenous peoples to preserve their habitat has collided with your need to preserve your habitat. The rainforests inhale massive amounts of warming gases and keep them stored away from the atmosphere. Already, we are chopping them down so fast that it is causing 25 per cent of man-made carbon emissions every year – more than planes, trains and automobiles combined. But it is doubly destructive to cut them down to get to fossil fuels, which then cook the planet yet more. Garcia's plan was to turn the Amazon from the planet's air conditioner into its fireplace.

Why is he doing this? He was responding to intense pressure from the US, whose new Free Trade Pact requires this "opening up", and from the International Monetary Fund, paid for by our taxes. In Peru, it has also been alleged that the ruling party, APRA, is motivated by oil bribes. Some of Garcia's associates have been caught on tape talking about how to sell off the Amazon to their cronies. The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the affair, Rep. Daniel Abugattas, says: "The government has been giving away our natural resources to the lowest bidders. This has not benefited Peru, but the administration's friends."

So the indigenous peoples acted in their own self-defence, and ours. Using their own bodies and weapons made from wood, they blockaded the rivers and roads to stop the oil companies getting anything in or out. They captured two valves of Peru's sole pipeline between the country's gas field and the coast, which could have led to fuel-rationing. Their leaders issued a statement explaining: "We will fight together with our parents and children to take care of the forest, to save the life of the equator and the entire world."

Garcia responded by sending in the military. He declared a "state of emergency" in the Amazon, suspending almost all constitutional rights. Army helicopters opened fire on the protesters with live ammunition and stun-grenades. More than a dozen were killed. But the indigenous peoples did not run away. Even though they were risking their lives, they stood their ground. One of their leaders, Davi Yanomami, said simply: "The earth has no price. It cannot be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth. If we don't fight together, what will our future be?"

And then something extraordinary happened. The indigenous peoples won. The Peruvian Congress repealed the laws that allowed oil company drilling, by a margin of 82 votes to 12. Garcia was forced to apologise for his "serious errors and exaggerations". The protesters have celebrated and returned to their homes deep in the Amazon.

Of course, the oil companies will regroup and return – but this is an inspirational victory for the forces of sanity that will be hard to reverse.

Human beings need to make far more decisions like this: to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to leave rainforests standing. In microcosm, this rumble in the jungle is the fight we all face now. Will we allow a small number of rich people to make a short-term profit from seizing and burning resources, at the expense of our collective ability to survive?

If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to Professor Jim Hansen, the world's leading climatologist, whose predictions have consistently turned out to be correct. He says: "Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know. We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with a sea level 75 metres higher. Coastal disasters would occur continually. The only uncertainty is the time it would take for complete ice sheet disintegration."

Of course, fossil fools will argue that the only alternative to burning up our remaining oil and gas supplies is for us all to live like the indigenous peoples in the Amazon. But next door to Peru, you can see a very different, environmentally sane model to lift up the poor emerging – if only we will grasp it.

Ecuador is a poor country with large oil resources underneath its rainforests – but its president, Rafael Correa, is offering us the opposite of Garcia's plan. He has announced that he is willing to leave his country's largest oil reserve under the soil, if the rest of the world will match the $9.2bn in revenues it would provide.

If we don't start reaching for these alternatives, we will render this month's victory in the Amazon meaningless. The Hadley Centre in Exeter, one of the most sophisticated scientific centres for studying the impacts of global warming, has warned that if we carry on belching out greenhouse gases at the current rate, the humid Amazon will dry up and burn down – and soon.

Their study earlier this year explained" Their study earlier this year explained: "The Amazonian rainforest is likely to suffer catastrophic damage even with the lowest temperature rises forecast under climate change. Up to 40 per cent of the rainforest will be lost if temperature rises are restricted to C, which most climatologists regard as the least that can be expected by 2050. A 3C rise is likely to result in 75 per cent of the forest disappearing while a 4C rise, regarded as the most likely increase this century unless greenhouse gas emissions are slashed, will kill off 85 per cent of the forest." That would send gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere – making the world even more inhabitable.

There is something thrilling about the fight in the Amazon, yet also something shaming. These people had nothing, but they stood up to the oil companies. We have everything, yet too many of us sit limp and passive, filling up our tanks with stolen oil without a thought for tomorrow. The people of the Amazon have shown they are up for the fight to save our ecosystem. Are we?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here.

j.hari@independent.co.uk



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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Global Food Sovereignty - Beyond The Global Food Price Crisis - Small Farms 3 To 14 Times More Productive Than Large Farms

peasants and small farmers,
regions of peasant dominance still represented half the human race

Yet peasants have refused to die and go gently into that good night
federation of peasants and small farmers would become an influential actor on the agriculture and trade scene globally.

The spirit of internationalism
the universal interest of society
is now on display in the international peasant movement.

rural migrants in China who are returning en masse to the countryside as factories close owing to the spreading global recession.[12]
plant corn for subsistence despite their having been priced out of the market by imported corn dumped by the United States.

small farmers have confounded those who have preached their demise by showing that labour-intensive small farms can be far more productive than big farms.

small farms were three to 14 times more productive per acre than the large farms.[13]

organising internationally to protect their interests from the steamroller of industrial capitalist agriculture.
an alternative paradigm for agricultural development called 'food sovereignty'
a return to the countryside of significant numbers of both ex-peasants and semi-proletarians, such as the ex-urban dwellers that have driven the land occupations

farmers and others who seek to escape the dependency on capital by reproducing the peasant condition, where one works with nature from a limited resource base to create a condition of autonomy from the forces of capital and the market.

The emergence of urban agriculture, the creation of networks linking consumers to farmers within a given region,

focus on the construction of an autonomous and self governed resource base, clearly specifies the way forward.'[14]

small-scale agriculture as an alternative to globalised farming
protect local production
by small-scale farmers.
corporate industrial agriculture could not be allowed to completely restructure the global economy without any accountability.

the 'peasant way' has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organising production, community, and life itself.

a local-market centered paradigm
'advocacy of the peasant way

peasants and small farmers continue to be the backbone of global food production, constituting over a third of the world's population and two thirds of the world's food producers.[16]

'Millions of small farmers in the Global South still produce the majority of staple crops needed to feed the planet's rural and urban populations.
produce 51 per cent of the maize, 77 per cent of the beans, and 61 per cent of the potatoes for domestic consumption.[17]

socially and ecologically.
Satisfying the real needs of the global majority

commodification - that is at the crux of the crisis of the contemporary food system.
+++



the causes, dynamics, and solution to the food price crisis

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was widely acknowledged that the world had enough food to feed some seven or eight billion and that hunger and malnutrition stemmed from unequal income distribution that translated into unequal access to food.

the European ban on GMOs and the restraints placed on the growth of commercial agriculture

Collier's identifying Europe's GMO ban ... is disingenuous.

The main problem with European agricultural production has, in fact, been overproduction and dumping brought about by heavy subsidisation.

dismissal of concerns about GMO-based agriculture is cavalier,
well known negative ecological and social impacts that accompanied the first, chemical-intensive Green Revolution.
fears about GE are not abstract but are concerns that are well-grounded empirically.

transgenic foods have the potential for creating unexpected reactions
[must be] tested rigorously in accordance with the universally recognised precautionary principle.

The effects of transgenic crops on biodiversity far extend the concerns already raised by monocropping under the Green Revolution.
contaminate and eradicate generations of evolution of diverse and subtly differentiated strains of a single crop, such as the recently discovered transgenic contamination of landraces of indigenous corn in Mexico.[3]

posing starkly a choice between peasant and small farmer-based agriculture and industrial agriculture as the solution to the world's food needs.


the Brazilian agro-enterprise is part of a larger system of global industrial agriculture, marked by large agribusiness that combines, monopolistic trading companies, long-distance transportation of food, and supermarkets, catering largely to the global elite and upper middle class.

created severe strains on the environment, effectively marginalised large numbers of people from the market, and contributed to greater poverty and greater income disparities within countries and globally.

externally imposed policies that severely weakened agricultural capacity in a wide swath of developing countries and transitional economies.
systematically starved agriculture of state support.

seeking to supplant peasant producers with capitalist entrepreneurs

+++

Global Food Price Crisis

by Walden Bello

Perhaps the most influential orthodox view on the causes, dynamics, and solution to the food price crisis was provided by Oxford University economist Paul Collier in an article that came out in Foreign Affairs[1] Collier, author of the controversial The Bottom Billion[2], asserted that the food price crisis stemmed from the increased demand for food in Asia, brought on by prosperity that was not matched on the supply side owing to three problems: The failure to promote commercial farming, especially in Africa, the ban against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the European Union (EU), and the diversion of around a third of American grain to the production of ethanol instead of food.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was widely acknowledged that the world had enough food to feed some seven or eight billion and that hunger and malnutrition stemmed from unequal income distribution that translated into unequal access to food. By the turn of the millennium, the problem had become one of production. However, Collier's diagnosis of the supply constraints left much to be desired. The diversion of corn to agro-fuel production was one cause that was certainly incontrovertible, but the other two factors he identified - the European ban on GMOs and the restraints placed on the growth of commercial agriculture - were questionable.

Collier's identifying Europe's GMO ban - now eased, incidentally - as a key constraint on production is disingenuous.

The main problem with European agricultural production has, in fact, been overproduction and dumping brought about by heavy subsidisation. He adds though, that he is concerned about the ban's impact on Africa's farmers, discouraging them from engaging in genetically engineered agriculture owing to fears of their exports being banned from entering Europe. A 'New Green Revolution' based on genetic engineering (GE) is necessary, says Collier, because the productivity of African agriculture is so low, having missed the first Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

Collier's attributing African agriculture's problems mainly to the lack of a GE-inspired miracle is idiosyncratic, to say the least. Moreover, his dismissal of concerns about GMO-based agriculture is cavalier, implying an unscientific stance among those critical of a GE transformation of agriculture. He fails to appreciate that the stance of critics of GE is a legacy of the well known negative ecological and social impacts that accompanied the first, chemical-intensive Green Revolution. Moreover, he fails to recognise that the fears about GE are not abstract but are concerns that are well-grounded empirically.

Proponents of GMOs have not been able to alleviate worries that transgenic foods have the potential for creating unexpected reactions in humans unless these foods, which have never been seen before and thus not selected for human consumption by eons of evolution, are tested rigorously in accordance with the universally recognised precautionary principle. Neither have they been able to allay worries that non-target populations might be negatively affected by genetic modification aimed at specific pests, as in the case of Bt corn's impact on the monarch butterfly. Nor have they dispelled the very real threat of loss of biodiversity posed by GMOs. The risks are hardly trifling, as noted by one account:

The effects of transgenic crops on biodiversity far extend the concerns already raised by monocropping under the Green Revolution. Not only is diversity decreased through the physical loss of species, but because of its 'live' aspect, it has the potential to contaminate, and potentially to dominate, other strains of the same species. While this may be a limited concern with respect to the contamination of another commercial crop, it is significantly more worrisome when it could contaminate and eradicate generations of evolution of diverse and subtly differentiated strains of a single crop, such as the recently discovered transgenic contamination of landraces of indigenous corn in Mexico.[3]

Collier's advocacy of GE is, in fact, out of line with even orthodox expert opinion at this point. The recently released International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - sponsored and funded by, among others, United Nations (UN) agencies, the World Bank, and other institutions - failed to endorse GM crops, choosing instead to highlight the lingering doubts and uncertainties regarding their ecological and health impacts.[4]

Collier's promotion of an African Green Revolution powered by genetic engineering is linked to his third contention - that it has been the non-development of commercial agriculture in Africa that has been responsible for the failure of supply to keep up with continental demand. Instead, 'over the past 40 years, African governments have worked to scale back large commercial agriculture.'[5] For Collier, the solution to Africa's food shortages are commercial agricultural farms employing genetically modified seeds. Further, peasant agriculture is part of the problem. Peasants, he says, are not entrepreneurs or innovators, being too concerned with their food security. Peasants would rather have jobs rather than be entrepreneurs, for which only a few people are fit. The most capable of fitting the role of innovative entrepreneurs are commercial farming operations:

'[Re]luctant peasants are right: Their mode of production is ill-suited to modern agricultural production, in which scale is helpful. In modern agriculture, technology is fast-evolving, investment is lumpy, the private provision of transportation infrastructure is necessary to counter the lack of its public provision, consumer food chains are fast-changing and best met by integrated marketing chains, and regulatory standards are rising toward the holy grail of traceability of produce back to its source.[6]'

Collier's account has, at least, the merit of posing starkly a choice between peasant and small farmer-based agriculture and industrial agriculture as the solution to the world's food needs. However, his choice, the 'Brazilian model' of industrial agriculture, is not exactly one that would elicit enthusiasm, being a model identified with having placed tremendous stresses on the environment. Moreover, the Brazilian agro-enterprise is part of a larger system of global industrial agriculture, marked by large agribusiness that combines, monopolistic trading companies, long-distance transportation of food, and supermarkets, catering largely to the global elite and upper middle class.

This globalised system of production has created severe strains on the environment, effectively marginalised large numbers of people from the market, and contributed to greater poverty and greater income disparities within countries and globally. The Brazilian model is part of the problem but Collier's awareness of the model's systemic flaws only comes when he notes that some 'have criticised the Brazilian model for displacing peoples and destroying the rain forest, which has indeed happened in places where commercialism has gone unregulated.'[7]

But what is most astounding in Collier's account is the absence of any reference to externally imposed policies that severely weakened agricultural capacity in a wide swath of developing countries and transitional economies. He notes that part of the problem in Africa has been the breaking down of publicly funded research stations that was part of a 'more widespread malfunctioning of the public sector.' But he fails to point out that this breakdown was due to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank's structural adjustment policies (SAPs) that systematically starved agriculture of state support. In October 2008, a report by an independent evaluation team of the World Bank simply confirmed what others had pointed out for two decades:

'Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertiliser subsidies, de-control prices and privatise may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production. It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertiliser. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.'[8]

There was a link between the Brazilian model and SAPs. Both were central elements of a capitalist transformation of agriculture that was intended to integrate local food systems via trade liberalisation, into a global system that is marked by a division of labour that would allegedly result in greater efficiency and greater prosperity in the aggregate. Collier fails to see that SAPs were the cutting edge of this process by seeking to supplant peasant producers with capitalist entrepreneurs who are producing not just for local but for global markets as one step towards large-scale globally integrated capitalist industrial agriculture.

Death of the Peasantry?

As for his put-down of peasants and small farmers, Collier is not unique. Many analysts share his view, some of them with progressive credentials. In his acclaimed 1994 book The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that 'the death of the peasantry' was 'the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century,' one that cut 'us off forever from the world of the past.'[9]

Hobsbawm's proclamation of their death as a class struck many as premature since as he himself noted, 'Admittedly... regions of peasant dominance still represented half the human race at the end of our period.'[10] Yet Hobsbawm's views have a respectable pedigree. Marx himself compared peasants to a 'sack of potatoes' with little real solidarity and even less class consciousness, and thus destined for the ash heap of history.

Yet peasants have refused to die and go gently into that good night to which Collier, Hobsbawm, and Marx have consigned them. Indeed, one year before Hobsbawm's book was published, Via Campesina was founded in 1993, and over the next decade this federation of peasants and small farmers would become an influential actor on the agriculture and trade scene globally.

The spirit of internationalism and active identification of one's class interests with the universal interest of society that was once a prominent feature of workers' movement is now on display in the international peasant movement.

Certainly, de-peasantisation and de-agrarianisation have greatly advanced with globalisation, with local self-subsistence production no longer, in many places, the escape that it usually provided for peasants who are caught up in market relations. Summing up a research on 'disappearing' peasantries, Deborah Bryceson writes that under conditions of rapid globalisation and neglected peasant hinterlands, peasants crossing international borders now provide a massive supply of labour for global capital. Although psychologically, many of these peasants still have the notion of a piece of land as a fallback in times of need, in fact, 'as a class, they face proletarianisation by the force of global commodity and labour markets combined with government indifference.'[11]

Yet the belief that the land is waiting, as a refuge of last resort, continues to persist among many peasants-turned-workers, among them those rural migrants in China who are returning en masse to the countryside as factories close owing to the spreading global recession.[12] Indeed, peasants continue to show an extraordinary persistence to survive as a class, and perhaps nothing underlines this more than Mexican peasants who continue to plant corn for subsistence despite their having been priced out of the market by imported corn dumped by the United States.

In other areas, small farmers have confounded those who have preached their demise by showing that labour-intensive small farms can be far more productive than big farms. To cite just one well known study, a World Bank report on agriculture in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador showed that small farms were three to 14 times more productive per acre than the large farms.[13]

Perhaps the most significant recent development in the long struggle of the peasants as a class has been their organising internationally to protect their interests from the steamroller of industrial capitalist agriculture. Via Campesina - translated as the 'Peasant Way' - has not only been effective in mounting opposition to the World Trade Organisation (WTO); it has also offered an alternative paradigm for agricultural development called 'food sovereignty'. The analysis and appeal of groups like Via Campesina resonate widely because the ability of capital to absorb labour is so limited under the conditions of inequitable globalisation that in recent years, there has been a return to the countryside of significant numbers of both ex-peasants and semi-proletarians, such as the ex-urban dwellers that have driven the land occupations of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil.

Indeed, not only in the South but also in the North, one witnesses farmers and others who seek to escape the dependency on capital by reproducing the peasant condition, where one works with nature from a limited resource base to create a condition of autonomy from the forces of capital and the market.

The emergence of urban agriculture, the creation of networks linking consumers to farmers within a given region, the rise of new militant movements for land - all these, according to Jan van der Ploeg, indicate a movement of 'repeasantisation' that has been created by the negative dynamics of 'Empire' and seeks to reverse them. Under the conditions of the deep crisis of globalisation, which is felt widely as a loss of autonomy, 'the peasant principle, with its focus on the construction of an autonomous and self governed resource base, clearly specifies the way forward.'[14]

Production of Paradigms in Conflict

Romanticism, says Collier, is at the root of the increased salience of small-scale agriculture as an alternative to globalised farming in progressive circles. In this he is joined by some intellectuals of the left like Henry Bernstein, who refers to partisans of the new peasant movements as the 'new populists', implying their similarity to the Narodniks of pre-revolutionary Russia. But however their conditions and vicissitudes are analysed by the intellectuals, some of whom even question the label 'peasant' to describe many of them, small food producers are gathering allies, including many of the governments of the South, which torpedoed the Doha Round of the WTO by their stubbornly hanging on to their advocacy of 'Special Safeguard Mechanisms' (SSMs) against agricultural imports and the designation of key commodities as 'Special Products' (SPs) exempt from tariff liberalisation to protect local production, much of it by small-scale farmers. This resistance stemmed not only from the pressure exerted by groups like Via Campesina, which was not negligible, but to a growing sentiment in official circles that corporate industrial agriculture could not be allowed to completely restructure the global economy without any accountability.

More broadly, with environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up, and industrialised agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the 'peasant way' has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organising production, community, and life itself. It is this that lies at the heart of the 'romanticisation of the peasant' that exercises Collier so much.

Ultimately, the battle between globalised agriculture and the new peasant movement will hinge on the question of food production carried out under different paradigms - a global market-driven paradigm on the one hand and a local-market centered paradigm on the other. To people like Collier and Bernstein, the latter is no solution, with Bernstein asserting that 'advocacy of the peasant way largely ignores issues of feeding the world's population, which has grown so greatly almost everywhere in the modern epoch, in significant part because of the revolutions in productivity achieved by the development of capitalism.'[15]

Partisans of the peasant way hotly dispute this, claiming that peasants and small farmers continue to be the backbone of global food production, constituting over a third of the world's population and two thirds of the world's food producers.[16] Indeed, according to agroecologist Miguel Altieri:

'Millions of small farmers in the Global South still produce the majority of staple crops needed to feed the planet's rural and urban populations. In Latin America, about 17 million peasant production units occupying close to 60.5 million hectares, or 34.5 per cent of the total cultivated land with average farm sizes of about 1.8 hectares, produce 51 per cent of the maize, 77 per cent of the beans, and 61 per cent of the potatoes for domestic consumption.[17]

From the perspective of the defenders of peasant agriculture, it is capitalist industrial agriculture, with its wrenching destabilisation and transformation of land, nature, and social relations, that is mainly responsible for today's food crises, and it points to a dead end both socially and ecologically. For instance, to capital, food, feed, and agrofuels are interchangeable as investment areas for capital, with rates of profit determining where investment will be allocated. Satisfying the real needs of the global majority is a secondary consideration, if indeed it enters the calculation at all. To the critics of capitalist agriculture, it is this devaluation and inversion of real relations into abstract relations of exchange - otherwise known as commodification - that is at the crux of the crisis of the contemporary food system.

References:

[1] Paul Collier, ‘The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the Food Crisis,’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 2008).

[2] Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[3] Gerardo Otero and Gabriela Pechlaner, ‘Latin American Agriculture, Food, and Biotechnology: Temperate Dietary Pattern Adoption and Unsustainability,’ in Gerardo Otero, ed., Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology Revolution in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 50.

[4] Lim Li Ching, ‘A New Green Revolution,’ Development, Vol. 51, No. 4 (December 2008), p. 572. The IAASTD is the equivalent in the agricultural sciences of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on global warming issues.

[5] Paul Collier, ‘The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the Food Crisis,’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 2008), p.73.

[6] Ibid., p. 71.

[7] Ibid.

[8]‘World Bank Neglects African Farming, Study Says,’ New York Times, Oct. 15, 2007.

[9] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 289.

[10] Ibid., p. 291.

[11] Deborah Bryceson, ‘Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labor Redundncy in the Neo-liberal Era and Beyond,’ in Bryceson, C. Kay, and J. Mooij, eds., Disappearing Peasantries (London: Intermediate Techology Publications, 2000), p. 313.

[12] 101 East, Al Jazeera, Dec. 19, 2008.

[13] Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, ‘Why Can’t People Feed Themselves?,’ in Douglas Boucher, ed., The Paradox of Plenty (Oakland: Food First, 1999), p. 65

[14] Jan van der Ploeg, the New Peasantries (London: Earthscan, 2008) p. 276

[15] Henry Bernstein, ‘Agrarian Questions from Transition to Globalization,’ in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 255.

[16] Wayne Roberts, cited in Philip McMichael, ‘Food Sovereignty in Movement: the Challenge to Neo-liberal Globalization,’ Draft, Cornell University, 2008.

[17] Miguel Altieri, ‘Small Farms as a Planetary Ecological Asset: Five Key Reasons why We Should Support the Revitalization of Small Farms in the Global South,’ Food First, 2008; http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2115

 

Creative Commons License

America: The Choice Ahead is licensed under a Creative Commons License by Share The World's Resources.

 

 

Walden Bello, a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, is professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author of, among other books, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).



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Despite Global Depression There Is A Strong Demand For Organic Food

organic food sales were growing at a double-digit pace are giving up their organic certifications.

Sales in the U.S. of organic foods sold mostly at supermarkets are expected to drop 1.1 percent to $5.07 billion this year,
annual growth of 12 percent to 23 percent since 2003.

interest in organics remains strong because the industry is not as bad off as others.

Even though it's slowed down, there continues to be strong demand,"
+++


Slowdown in Once-Booming Organics Troubles Farmers

by Rick Callahan

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/06/26-4

Westby, Wisc. - The organic dairy industry was thriving when Allen and Jean Moody bought a 200-acre Wisconsin dairy farm in 2006 and joined the ranks of farmers churning out milk raised without growth hormones, pesticides or other chemicals.

[In this photo taken Tuesday, June 9, 2009, organic farmer Allen Moody is seen on his farm in Westby, Wis. A growing number of farmers who went all-natural in the years when organic food sales were growing at a double-digit pace are giving up their organic certifications. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)]In this photo taken Tuesday, June 9, 2009, organic farmer Allen Moody is seen on his farm in Westby, Wis. A growing number of farmers who went all-natural in the years when organic food sales were growing at a double-digit pace are giving up their organic certifications. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Three years later, the good days are gone and the Moodys aren't alone in wanting out.

A growing number of farmers who went all-natural in the years when organic food sales were growing at a double-digit pace are giving up their organic certifications. Organic farming is costly and labor-intensive, and many consumers are no longer willing to pay the price in a recession.

Sales in the U.S. of organic foods sold mostly at supermarkets are expected to drop 1.1 percent to $5.07 billion this year, according to the Chicago-based research firm Mintel. While the drop is small, it is the first in an industry that has seen annual growth of 12 percent to 23 percent since 2003.

The organic dairy industry has been the hardest hit, with farmers squeezed by soaring feed costs and plummeting milk prices.

The soured market has been particularly bad news for Moody, 53, and his 51-year-old wife, who put their farm in La Farge, Wis., up for sale last summer after deciding that running a dairy was too much work at their age. The credit crunch has left a string of would-be buyers unable to seal the deal even as the Moodys' milk buyer has cut his rate roughly 10 percent.

"We're kind of in limbo land right now. It's just really tough - I told my wife we may be here another two or three more years before things turn around and the money supply loosens up," Moody said.

The recession and credit crisis also have made times uncertain for George Mears, who raises organic corn, buckwheat, wheat and soybeans on 140 acres near Delphi, Ind. Much of it becomes feed for livestock that produce organic eggs, milk and beef.

Some buyers are no longer willing to purchase grain on contract because of uncertainty about the economy. And one company that buys Mears' grain has been slow to pay - Mears suspects because it can't get credit to buy grain up front.

"We're usually smaller farmers and you send a semi load or two of grain and that's like a quarter of your income for the year," he said. "You just don't drop a fourth of your income on the farm without some hardship."

A growing number of farmers are losing their certifications in the nation's two top organic states, California and Wisconsin.

In a typical year, the California Certified Organic Farmers, one of the nation's largest certifying groups, sees about 20 farms among its roughly 2,000 certified farms and processors lose their certification because of nonpayment of fees.

But two weeks ago, letters went out to 100 farms warning that their organic status would be revoked because of nonpayment, said Peggy Miars, the group's executive director. She blames weak sales and the state's lingering drought.

Bonnie Wideman, director of the Midwest Organic Services Association, expects about 80 of the group's roughly 1,200 certified organic farms in Wisconsin and several Midwestern states to surrender their certifications this year, up from about 60 in years past.

Still, the California and Wisconsin groups said interest in organics remains strong because the industry is not as bad off as others.

"In this depressed economy, when you're looking at bankruptcies and layoffs - we're just not seeing that in organics. Even though it's slowed down, there continues to be strong demand," Miars said.

Wideman's group issued 200 new organic certifications this year, mostly to vegetable, corn and soybean farmers. Some believe organics still have a greater potential for profit than conventional farming, she said. Others are simply committed to chemical-free farming.

That's the case for Jeff Evard, who once maintained golf courses heavily reliant on chemicals to stay green. He now raises tomatoes, onions, eggplant, broccoli and other crops on a 10-acre organic farm in south-central Indiana.

Half of his produce goes to about 65 families who pay up front for a season's worth of fresh vegetables and fruit. The rest heads to farmers' markets in Bloomington, Ind., about 30 miles away or is sold to organic wholesale stores.

Mindful of the recession, the farm's business manager recently lowered the price of the farm's top spring seller - cherry tomatoes - from $4 to $3.50 a pint to stave off a drop in demand. That seems to have done the trick.

"I've sold out of tomatoes every week for the past three or four weeks," the 36-year-old Evard said recently.

Consumers concerned about food quality have kept demand for organic vegetables and meat strong even as they've sacrificed organic snacks and other less nutritional items, said Marcia Mogelonsky, a senior research analyst for Mintel.

That should give the Moodys reason for hope. Committed to natural farming, they plan to buy a small organic beef farm whenever their dairy finally sells.



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Thursday, June 25, 2009

Novecento - Movie: 1900

[Here's a little known incredible film that when initially released in Europe did not play much or at all in the USA or Soviet Union - the powers that be of those two countries didn't like it. The movie did quite well in Europe. It is now available on DVD world wide - the full 300 plus minute original version. In the DVD's extras - comments by the Director/Writer Bernardo Bertolucci are well worth watching.

A look at rural Italy (not unlike Europe and other parts of the world) where most rural areas had their own variations of language and ways of living before excessive consumerism, world war and other corruptions were forced on the world.]

(Other films from Bertolucci: * Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970), Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1973), La Luna (Luna, 1979), L'ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, 1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993))
===

Movies: 1900
http://www.answers.com/topic/1900-film

Bernardo Bertolucci's massive epic, a history of Italy from 1900 to 1945 as reflected through the friendship of two men across class lines, is one of the most fascinating, if little seen, of his films.

After beginning with Robert De Niro as wealthy landowner Alfredo, and Gérard Depardieu as labor leader Olmo, the film returns to 1901 with the death of composer Giuseppe Verdi and the birth of the two friends. The opposing class interests of their grandfathers, padrone Alfredo Berlinghieri (Burt Lancaster), and laborer Leo Dalco (Sterling Hayden), is quickly established in the enmity between the characters. The director is graphic in his depiction of ... [exploitive ownership] ...

As they grow, the boys become friends, mystified by the tensions that separate their families.

But as time passes and Alfredo assumes the role of padrone, while Olmo works the land, their relationship becomes strained. With the rise of fascism, the director spells out its complicity with business interests, as the diffident Alfredo falls under the spell of a vicious and degraded fascist farm manager played by Donald Sutherland.

Bertolucci, as he has in The Conformist (1970) and The Last Emperor (1987), brilliantly uses characterization to imply and contrast the crippling emotional effects of wealth and power. [Also the issue of extreme poverty during a year of crop failure.] At over five hours in the restored version, the stately film has a kind of cumulative power now rare on the screen.

... Among the large cast, the two leads are exceptional, with De Niro evincing an unusual vulnerability. Sutherland gives a disturbingly brilliant performance, and Lancaster is also memorable as the stern landowner. Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's longtime collaborator, and one of the greatest of cinematographers, produces images of breathtaking beauty ... the rapturous shots of the vast fields ... One comes away from this majestic undertaking with a sense of wonder, and awareness that it's not likely to be replicated any time soon. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide


    * Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
    * AMG Rating: ****
    * Genre: Drama
    * Movie Type: Family Drama, Period Film
    * Themes: Rise To Power, Class Differences, Political Unrest
    * Main Cast: Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Donald Sutherland, Dominique Sanda
    * Release Year: 1976
    * Country: IT/WG/FR
    * Run Time: 315 minutes
    * MPAA Rating: RCast

    * Robert De Niro - Alfredo Berlinghieti, grandson
    * Gérard Depardieu - Olmo Dalco
    * Burt Lancaster - Alfredo Berlinghieri, grandfather
    * Sterling Hayden - Leo Dalco
    * Donald Sutherland - Attila
    * Dominique Sanda - Ada

Filmography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Bertolucci

    * La commare secca (1962)
    * Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione, 1964)
    * La via del petrolio (1965)
    * Il Canale (1966)
    * Partner (1968)
    * Amore e rabbia (1969, episode "il Fico Infruttuoso")
    * L'Inchiesta (1971) (TV)
    * La strategia del ragno (The Spider's Stratagem, 1970)
    * Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970)
    * Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1973)
    * 1900 (Novecento, 1976)
    * La Luna (Luna, 1979)
    * La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (1981)
    * L'ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, 1987)
    * The Sheltering Sky (1990)
    * Little Buddha (1993)
    * Stealing Beauty (Io ballo da sola, 1996)
    * Besieged (1998)
    * Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002)
    * The Dreamers (2003)



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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Obama Running Scared - Scared To Make Single Payer Health Care For Everyone

Nearly all Republicans and some moderate Democrats oppose any public plan option.
These are the same lawmakers who receive many government-provided perks including health insurance.

Obama should tear a page out of LBJ's vote-getting manual and shame the heartless opponents.

The health of all Americans is our business.
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Obama Running Scared

by Helen Thomas

A universal health care system based on the single-payer model appears to be a bridge too far for President Barack Obama.

A single-payer system, such as Medicare for everyone, would provide health care for all.

President Lyndon Johnson had the courage to weigh in with all his clout to win passage of Medicare and Medicaid.

President Roosevelt put all his chips on the table to win passage of the Social Security Act that makes the elderly more secure.

All around the world, governments have long made medical care available for their citizens. Why not us?

Obama clearly has no stomach for the political battle that any single-payer plan would ignite. So he's endorsed a step that would allow the government to provide health insurance coverage -- not health care -- to eligible people. Such government-sponsored health insurance is being considered in Congress as it writes health care reform legislation.

While the public plan option gets full consideration in Congress, the single-payer model has been unwelcome at the White House or on Capitol Hill.

Obama said part of the fierce opposition to health care reform has been fueled "by some interest groups and lobbyists -- opposition that has used fear tactics to paint any effort to achieve reform as an attempt to, yes, socialize medicine."

He made it clear that his idea of health care reform would allow patients to choose their own doctors and keep their own health plans.

Somehow government bailouts have been more palatable for Wall Street plutocrats who happen to be needy.

Obama stressed in a speech to the AMA in Chicago last week that he does not favor socialized medicine.

Some 47 million Americans are uninsured -- many because some employers have dropped coverage in the economic downturn. Others lack insurance because pre-existing illnesses deny them access to private insurance. There also are millions with no way to pay for soaring health insurance payments because they have lost their jobs.

Nearly all Republicans and some moderate Democrats oppose any public plan option. These are the same lawmakers who receive many government-provided perks including health insurance.

In his remarks to the AMA, Obama warned against "scare tactics" and "fear mongering" by opponents of the public plan option, which the President said should be available to those who have no health insurance.

Obama rejected the "illegitimate concern that's being put forward by those who are claiming that a public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system."

Obama should tear a page out of LBJ's vote-getting manual and shame the heartless opponents.

The health of all Americans is our business.



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