The Great Monsanto has spoken!

“Farmers in South Africa have suffered millions of dollars in lost income due to the failure of their genetically modified (GMO) corn to produce kernels. The three varieties of plants look lush and healthy from the outside, but when the husks were pulled back there are no kernels. Monsanto’s GMO corn was planted on 82,000 hectares of farmland, an amount that equals over 202,000 acres. The loss is spread over three South African provinces, and 280 of the 1,000 farmers who planted the corn have reported the lack of kernel development.

Monsanto has blamed the failure on under fertilization processes in the laboratory and attempted to make light of the situation by claiming that only 25% of the Monsanto seeded farms are involved in the loss. But Marian Mayet, environmental activist and director of the Africa Centre for Biosecurity in Johannesburg is not buying it. According to her information, some farms have suffered up to an 80% crop failure. She has demanded an urgent government investigation and an immediate ban on all GMO food. She points out that it is biotechnology that is the failure, and a careless mistake would not affect three different varieties of corn at the same time. The varieties failing to produce kernels were designed with a built-in resistance to Monsanto’s weed killers, and were manipulated to increase yields.”

http://www.naturalnews.com/025992.html

stories like these are false propoganda to slander the great Monsanto. No need for a victory garden here. The great Monsanto and little brother Tyson will care for all.

I have spoken!

That must be why I find David Corn so congenial … Actually, I had a similar thought just the other day. Is AdBusters or Mother Jones more conservative in the way that term matters to me than the more familiar organs of the right?

As to Röepke, I find a certain unresolved tension in his work; he could never successfully reconcile his Austrianism with his distributism. The failure is given by the remark quoted in the review. It is NOT a matter of placing a better way of producing food in opposition to a better way of producing happiness. Rather, local production is more efficient in BOTH categories. Distributism has been trapped in a false dichotomy, and has conceded economic “efficiency” to somebody else, indeed everybody else. But it is not true. It is a better way of production on any level you care to measure it. And further, it can be measured. It can be measured in Mondragon and in Emilia-Romagna. Austrianism cannot be measured anywhere because it has never existed. It has never existed for the simple reason that it cannot exist. The “axioms” exist in a fairyland, never in reality. The realists are the distributists.

And this is one of the points Berry makes a lot, and McKibbon makes too, and tightwad Amy Dacyczyn also–that we have to reclaim an understanding of work as a pleasure. Work will always have its chores, of course, but the same can be said of many “pleasures”–most sports, for example. But we still think of marathoning as fun, some of us, while some of us see vegetable gardening as a chore, when it’s only the perspective that makes the game.

Personally I think we can’t repeat too often that any community not getting most of its food from a reasonable distance is inherently fragile and at risk. Alas–millions for homeland security systems, but not one dime for a hundred-mile diet. Unless you count the First Garden.

The same trend waxes and wanes here in this country. The recent hyper globalist, hyper consumer era saw it fall into near oblivion but it is roaring back and many people actually do like to dig in the dirt and work …as a form of leisure….for their own food. Its anybody’s guess how long the trend will last but the emerging awareness of the downside of globalist industrial food leads me to believe it will be more than a flash in the pan this time around. Once again, the public is leading both government and big industry and all across the country, local food production is growing remarkably well and this may actually still the need for the individual to grow their own.

We have yet to see what impact the ongoing dislocation in the financialized economy will do to the urban renaissance that has been growing since the 80′s. Still, you are likely correct that a very large sector of the populace would be happy to remain fingertip consumers. I’m not convinced the desire will be supported by the reality of changing circumstances.

Cheeks,
Your categories exist but are just part of the larger historical categories which to a degree, have almost inverted themselves since the era of the Framers. Left and Right today are caricatures that circumvent both reflection and debate by creating glee clubs for the Cliff-Notes Politics of the day and they almost provide the same services to the Omnivore State as do Show Trials: Putting on a little entertainment and diversion so as to encourage the volk to think they still mean anything. Personally, I’d like to see people “get along” but I’d also like to see some real reasoned disagreement that stretches all concerned. I’d also like to see the self-satisfied righteousness on both sides take a gut shot and go away. Watching Fox News and then tuning in MSNBC is a full immersion in condescension and disdain . This appeal to cheap shot and base emotions is the media’s chief service to the runaway State.

But recall, many people in, say, Geneva during the war had their version of what Americans had — “Victory Gardens” — precisely because of the shortages of food due to the war effort in America and trade barriers in wartime Switzerland.

But in “normal” times when war is not absorbing a huge amount of a society’s resources and trade barriers are not blocking people from mutually advantageous exchanges with neighbors in other lands, what we see is that most people prefer to maximize their happiness by buying the least expensive version of a good that has the qualities and features they are interested and willing to pay for regardless of whether the supplier is next door or on the other side of the world.

And while some have mini-gardens in their city flower pots or in the back yard of their home, most people do not.

Digging in the backyard, clearing away the rocks, planting the seeds and tending them from the weather or the animals or insects that might eat what as been planted is not what most people view as “fun.”

That is why we increasingly live in urbanized areas in an increasingly global marketplace, and pay others for the “happiness” of providing us food and flowers.

Richard Ebeling

Empedocles: I won’t speak for all of the Front Porchers, but I hope the FPR can be a “place” for civil dialogue between left and right–a dialogue that begins by identifying what we agree on. Localism is an obvious starter. I know that this dialogue is something that Wendell Berry is very interested in and has been talking about to Matt Rothschild at The Progressive. McKibben and Kunstler would be welcome in the rocking chairs on either side of me.

Local agriculture then becomes a matter of self-determination …Jefferson’s yeoman farmer.

One wonders what an “opening” to the West might do to Cuba.

What is Freedom America?

What, exactly is the “Pursuit of Happiness?”