Project Soil Case Studies: Growing Public Food / Sustain Ontario

UNIMAK 2

The following are just some of what I have received TODAY from across the continent of Africa.

Sustainable Agriculture

Links

Project Soil Case Studies: Growing Public Food / Sustain Ontario

UNEP report: Keeping Track of Adaptation Actions in Africa: Targeted Fiscal Stimulus Actions Making A Difference

New Infographic: “How Much Is Being Done for the Worlds 450 Million Smallholder Farmers?” / The Initiative for Smallholder Finance

Soil: The Sustainable Alternative to Oil Income in Africa / The Guardian

The Quinoa Quarrel: Who Owns the World’s Greatest Superfood? / Harper’s Magazine

Can Whole Foods Change the Way Poor People Eat? / Slate

Master’s Program in Agro ecology offered in Uganda

A new peer-reviewed scientific*studyhas foundthat soybean workers exposed to glyphosate suffer from DNA damage and elevated cell death.Adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T) are the components of nucleic acid that make up DNA, and biotech is making these important parts of our biology a mash-up that no sane person would ever want to experience.

Soybean workers in Brazil exposed to fungicides herbicides and insecticides (the main three chemical classifications used extensively by the biotech farming model) experienced an elevated level of cellular apoptosis, as well as remarkable DNA damageaccording tothe Elsevier published,Mutation Research/Genetic Toxicology and Environmental Mutagenesis.

The research concentrated on Glyphosate and 2, 4-D, two chemicals that practically cover all of the US farming landscape. Glyphosate alone is used doubly as often as it was five years ago, with more than185 million pounds of glyphosate-based and Round Up ready chemicals sprayed on our crops annually. Most GM crops were made, in fact, to withstand Round Up chemicals specifically. (Interestingly, the USDAwon’t even test for glyphosateregularly because it’s ‘too expensive.’)

The herbicide2,4-Dhas been used even longer than glyphosate – since the 1940s in fact – so there is no telling just how saturated our soil, and water is with this particular chemical. (Agent Orange, used during the Vietnam War contained 2, 4-D.)

Danieli Benedetti and others found that the widespread cultivation of GM soybeans in the State of Rio Grande do Sul (RS, Brazil), especially in the city of Espumoso is particularly toxic to farm workers there.

They find:

“. . .the comet assay in peripheral leukocytes and the buccal micronucleus (MN) cytome assay (BMCyt) in exfoliated buccal cells were used to assess the effects of exposures to pesticides in soybean farm workers from Espumoso.A total of 127 individuals, 81 exposed and 46 non-exposed controls, were evaluated. Comet assay and BMCyt (micronuclei and nuclear buds) data revealed DNA damage in soybean workers.

Cell death was also observed(condensed chromatin, karyorhectic, and karyolitic cells). Inhibition of non-specific choline esterase (BchE) was not observed in the workers. The trace element contents of buccal samples were analyzed by Particle-Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE).Higher concentrations of Mg, Al, Si, P, S, and Cl were observed in cells from workers. No associations with use of personal protective equipment, gender, or mode of application of pesticides were observed.

Ourfindings indicate the advisability of monitoring genetic toxicity in soybean farm workers exposed to pesticides.”

It isn’t just farm workers that need to be concerned, though. Research in the German journalIthacastumbled upon significant concentrations of glyphosate in the urine samples ofcity dwellers. Many of the participants in this study showedglyphosate levels in their blood and urinethat were up to20 times the allowable levels in drinking water.

Other Studies Agree – Pesticide Chemicals Damage DNA

Multiple studies prior to the Brazilian research just conducted have shown cytotoxic and DNA-damaging effects of glyphosate exposure. In one study, Koller and his colleaguesfound that:

“. . .Lymphocytes and cells from internal organs indicate that epithelial cells are more susceptible to the cytotoxic and DNA-damaging properties of the herbicide and its formulation. Since we found genotoxic effects after short exposure to concentrations that correspond to a 450-fold dilution of spraying used in agriculture, our findings indicate that inhalation may cause DNA damage in exposed individuals.”

As Natural Society previously reported, another study found that it only takes57 parts per million for Round Up tocompletely destroy human kidney cells. We kind of need our kidneys. Agricultural levels of glyphosate are often more than200 times this level.

You have to assume Monsantoknewthat its Roundup chemicals would damage DNA.After all, they’ve hidden toxicity results before, saying thatthey were a ‘commercial secret.’

Approximately 92% of all soybeans grown in the US are GMO, which means they are grown with Round Up or glyphosate-containing chemicals, and the Koller study found that even smaller concentrations (.02%) of Monsanto’s best seller sprayed on our crops causes DNA damage.

That meansyou candilute Round Up more than 98%and it willstilldamageyour cells.

In what country is a company allowed to knowingly, purposefully, scientifically kill human DNA (and thus humans) and not be charged with murder, treason, or at the bare minimum the withholding of information? Oh, that’s right – America.

Sure,biotech companieswill tell youthat DNA gets damaged all the time – from UV rays, oxidation, medical X-rays, even environmental toxins which biotech doesn’t create, but then they systemically market a product(s) that kills your cells – shouldn’t they be stopped?

Damaged DNA leads to cancer, faster aging, neurological disease and the breakdown of our organs. There are hundreds ofpathological conditionswhich are caused by damaged DNA, not that we can’t takeproactive steps to heal our DNA, but agencies which allow these products to stay on the market are an abomination.

Even 9thgraders understand the importance of DNA, and while the human genome project that sequenced more than 100, 00 genes still didn’t explain the whole picture of our genetic make-up, DNA is an essential part of it, and shouldn’t be damaged. You can revisit the basics of DNA,here.

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It’s all in the Soil -

Structural Adjustment Programmes One African’ perspective – you do not have to agree with it – BUT WHY has to be explained

For nearly two decades, from the World Bank’s Berg report of 1981 onwards, Africa suffered the consequences of structural adjustment – or more kindly economic reform – at the behest of the international finance institutions. The consequences were devastating for employment, livelihoods and state capacity. But the neoliberal medicine did not work. There was a period in the 1990s when there were all sorts of arcane debates on why. Was it the imbalance of economic measures, was it the timing and sequencing, was it the lack of political will to implement properly? But in the end most agree that it was a disastrous period, the consequences of which are still being felt.

These consequences include the massive undermining of state capacity, including health services, agricultural research and extension and more, along with the loss of a generation of potential. The recent shocking impacts of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa can be in part related to these long-term effects of systematic underdevelopment – what some call ‘structural violence’.

In Zimbabwe, the Mugabe government abandoned its post-Independence ‘growth with equity’ strategy for one modelled on the designs of the World Bank and the IMF in 1991. The Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP – also known as 'economic suffering for African peoples', and many other plays on the same) was rolled out through the 1990s. It presaged the unrest that provoked the labour movement and war veteran mobilisations in the latter part of the decade, and was of course the backdrop for the land reform from 2000.

Of course some benefit from such neoliberal economic reforms. Despite the high-flown rhetoric, the Mugabe government did not push for land reform or other redistributions in the 1990s. Instead elites accumulated, corruption extended and a new politics emerged. In this period large-scale, mostly white-owned (but also now incorporating some of the new black elite) farming and other businesses profited. In agriculture, high value farming operations boomed, seeking profits in export markets as part of the new, competitive neoliberal order. In some ways, it was a great success. But in many ways a troublesome anomaly, as the benefits were not widely shared, and the festering discontents around land distribution, unresolved from the colonial period, continued unaddressed.

So what has this all to do with Greece? A week ago a new party, Syriza, dramatically came to power in Greece committed to ending the structural reforms imposed by the European Union, and Germany in particular, but also committing to tackle the deep corruption and oligarchic elitism that had come to characterise Greek political economy. The rise of Syriza has sent shockwaves through Europe with its rejection of the status quo, and the deep inequities of the ‘austerity packages’ imposed, what have been described by the new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis,as“fiscal waterboarding” that had turned Greece into a “debt colony” (see excerpts from his book via this link).

A former colleague of mine, Diana Conyers, who lived in Zimbabwe during the ESAP period, and now lives in Greece wrote a thought-provoking blog for the IDS website recently. It drew the parallels between Greece and Africa in interesting ways. On the day of the Greek election, the UK Sunday broadsheet, The Observer, had an extended editorial on the Greek situation. If you replaced ‘Greece’ with ‘Africa’ (or any particular African country) in the piece – as I do below – the parallels that Diana drew attention to are striking:

Africans have been subjected to what many feel is a sustained, brutal and unnecessarily destructive attack on their basic living standards, way of life and national independence. If a country is invaded and occupied by hostile forces, it might expect to lose its freedom and its voice. But the subjugation of Africa, in the name of fiscal responsibility, debt reduction and structural reform, was undertaken by so-called friendly powers, principally, [western donors, the World Bank and the IMF[…[A]usterity is not working, either, as a group of leading economists noted… “The historical evidence demonstrates the futility and dangers of imposing unsustainable debt and repayment conditions on debtor countries [and] the negative impact of austerity policies on weakening economies… Debt should be cancelled”.

In the 1990s the global policy elite and the international commentariat, let alone ‘leading economists’, did not offer such a perspective on Africa. Partly Africa was far away and had less influence on the West than even Greece, but also the ‘historical evidence’ – mostly resulting from the failed experiments in Africa, post-Soviet Russia and elsewhere - had not been learned. And of course in Africa, where emergent democracies were being controlled through the same route as their economies via programmes of ‘good governance’, the prospects for an insurgent, popular, progressive, alternative politics, as has emerged in Greece (and maybe Spain too), was not feasible.

Through the 1990s, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, political and business elites were quite happy to build their wealth and power on the back of austerity and ‘reform’, with inequality and deepening structural poverty growing with this. The Greek Syrzia moment perhaps has some parallels with Zimbabwe in 2000. The challenges will be similar: the prospects of diplomatic isolation, capital withdrawal, external pressure to conform and political tensions regionally, but equally the need to compromise, manage change and seek an alternative, while offsetting corruption, political division and social conflict that threaten a more humane, redistributive growth path.

In the past 15 years, Zimbabwe has sought an alternative political-economic trajectory, breaking some of the shackles of the past; but it has also failed dramatically to address other challenges, with the consequence that the economy continues to languish, corruption has extended even further, growth has failed to take off and the benefits of redistributive policy remain to be realised. Let’s hope the Syrzia coalition fares better. Perhaps in the future Athens, rather than Washington, will be able to send economic advisers to Africa.

This article was written in Zimbabwe

Best wishes,

John