My friend Patrick Wilkinson has put together a fine video about the upcoming spraying of large parts of California in the ongoing war on the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM, pronounced el-bam).

As Patrick's film suggests, there'd better be something mighty scary about this moth to warrant monthly aerial spraying over most of Northern California over the next five years.

So what's the danger? Will the moth summon forth the apocalypse? No. Is it the harbinger of some strange Africanized disease? Not even. Will it ravage California's agriculture? Kinda. But not actually by eating anything or laying anything or causing anything to be damaged.

The reason LBAM is a menace is, er, NAFTA. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment | email this page

Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:03

We recently stumped up not-very-much money to subscribe to Vanity Fair, and it's a subscription we're likely to keep, especially now that we're practiced in ignoring the large wodge of adverts for cosmetics and high fashion that fill out the space between articles.

This month's issue is "The Green Issue". Again, ignoring Madonna on the front cover, there's some fine journalism to be found. In particular, there's a very good exposé of Monsanto's seedy practices. (An unintentional pun but worth keeping, I feel.)

Check it out here. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 5 April, 2008 - 13:17

Image:AboutColonBlank

A reporter at Bloomberg dropped a line with this story about diet pills in India. What with Indians ballooning (as we all are) there's something of a demand for weight-loss remedies.

The remedies that make sense (eat less, be a little more physically active, don't eat processed food, enjoy fresh food more) aren't terribly popular. Generating far more interest are the solutions that let you carry on eating unhealthily, but where you don't have to bother trying too hard. The chemical companies have been lining up to provide something like this, a magic regulator of free will that can help take the edge off our food cravings.

Through the cunning use of cannabis, specifically the discovery of how to switch off that part of the brain that makes you crave Mars bars when you're high, the drug giant Sanofi-Aventis has hit on a billion dollar weight-loss drug: Acompli. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 5 April, 2008 - 09:58

America's going bananas, with two books on the subject out recently with almost, but not quite, identical titles: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel and Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman.

I ought not to opine without having read Koeppel's work, but the interview I heard with him on the radio hinted at a key difference between the two books, one that appears in titles. Dan Koeppel appears to care a little more about the taste and fate of the banana, with a narrative that portrays everyone's yellow source of potassium as the real victim of industrial monoculture. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment | email this page

Posted on 29 March, 2008 - 00:03

Source

Eric Holt Gimenez over at Food First sent along this wee nugget from Grand Island, Nebraska.

It's a story about biofuels, based on a report from, er, the American Meat Institute, which ascribes the rise in the price of meat to biofuels. The estimates per animal are striking: "the costs [are] 53 cents per chicken; $3.40 per turkey; $38 per hog and $117.50 per fed beef animal." These are the costs associated with higher corn-feed for the animals, the price of which has been driven up by the US governments hare-brained biofuels schemes.

But statistics, like love, is a battlefield. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 5 comments | email this page

Posted on 20 March, 2008 - 22:32

School dinners were, in my day, disgusting. It seems little has changed. The Washington Post carries a chilling story of 'downer cattle' being passed as healthy, in an abattoir that provides beef for school dinners. It was captured on video by a member of the American Humane Society, who'd infiltrated the slaughterhouse in Chino, California. Be warned, the video is nasty - I couldn't bear to watch it all.

... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 1 February, 2008 - 01:22

It's been a while since we had a post mentioning bird flu, but in the past couple of days, folk've written in with avian influenza news. So it seems appropriate to acknowledge, first, that bird flu is alive and killing people - over 100 in Indonesia (out of 124 cases - those aren't good odds). But it's also spreading dangerously through India, in West Bengal. The Times of India quotes Mamata Banerjee even going so far as to say that it's "man-made" and part of a concerted strategy to destroy the rural economy. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 28 January, 2008 - 18:55

When the pesticide industry takes its gloves off, people get hurt. Below is a press release from Via Campesina about a recent killing by men with guns hired by Syngenta in response to a protest against genetically modified food.

To write to the authorities condemning this brutal attack, see the Food First Urgent Action (scroll down past the Michael Pollan article...

PRESS RELEASE

21/10/07

Attack of Syngenta?s armed militia results in deaths and wounded in Brazil

During an attack of an armed militia with around 40 gunmen on the peasant? camp at the experimental field trial of Syngenta Seeds multinational, at Santa Teresa do Oeste, at 13:30h of today (October 21st), a Via Campesina member, Valmir Motta, 32 years old, father of 3 children, was executed with two shots to his chest. Other six rural workers are severely wounded and a gunmen was possibly killed. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 25 October, 2007 - 17:33

This notice just came my way, and I thought I'd share. If you're in Washington DC next week, do consider dropping in... ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 11 October, 2007 - 16:48

When, in 2004, one of my favourite Italian thinkers, Giorgio Agamben, refused to come to the US, I was pleased. He objected to being fingerprinted in order to get his visa. And this close monitoring of our bodies, and the 'biopolitics' (to use the current phrase) that accompanies this surveillance, has some fairly dark origins in fascism.

Which is why it'll come as little surprise that in the United States have been announced technologies that will soon be applied not only to the cattle industry, but to (some) people too. Jim Hightower writes lucidly about how the US government merely wants to protect its citizens from terrorist livestock. ... read more »

Raj's blog | add new comment | email this page

Posted on 3 October, 2007 - 00:20