Ten things you need to know about the Séralini study

by gmoseralini.org Admin | December 30th, 2012 | Critics answered |1 2 Comments

1. Most criticisms of Séralini’s study wrongly assume it was a badly designed cancer study. It wasn’t. It was a chronic toxicity study – and a well-designed and well-conducted one.

2. Séralini’s study is the only long-term study on the commercialized GM maize NK603 and the pesticide (Roundup) it is designed to be grown with. See here: Why is this study important?

3. Séralini used the same strain of rat (Sprague-Dawley, SD) that Monsanto used in its 90-day studies on GM foods and its long-term studies on glyphosate, the chemical ingredient of Roundup, conducted for regulatory approval.

4. The SD rat is about as prone to tumours as humans are. As with humans, the SD rat’s tendency to cancer increases with age.

5.Compared with industry tests on GM foods, Séralini’s study analyzed the same number of rats but over a longer period (two years instead of 90 days), measured more effects more often, and was uniquely able to distinguish the effects of the GM food from the pesticide it is grown with.

6. If we argue that Séralini’s study does not prove that the GM food tested is dangerous, then we must also accept that industry studies on GM foods cannot prove they are safe.

7. Séralini’s study showed that 90-day tests commonly done on GM foods are not long enough to see long-term effects like cancer, organ damage, and premature death. The first tumours only appeared 4-7 months into the study.

8. Séralini’s study showed that industry and regulators are wrong to dismiss toxic effects seen in 90-day studies on GM foods as “not biologically meaningful”. Signs of toxicity found in Monsanto’s 90-day studies were found to develop into organ damage, cancer, and premature death in Séralini’s two-year study.

9. Long-term tests on GM foods are not required by regulators anywhere in the world.

10. GM foods have been found to have toxic effects on laboratory and farm animals in a number of studies.

SOURCE : http://www.gmoseralini.org/ten-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-seralini-study/

Istanbul Organic Farmers Market

Feriköy Organic Market

Maria Eliades / December 28, 2012

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Excitement was in the air when we found our way to the Feriköy Organic Market. Set up in the Şişli Municipality Car Park near the Uğur Center in Bomonti by the Buğday Association for Ecological Living (Buğday Ekolojik Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği), every Saturday from 7am to 5pm organic farmers and stores sell their wares under the covered garage and nearby tarps set up to shield from rain and sun. 

Shoppers can find everything from organic, seasonal produce to organic honey, bread, cheese, and other dairy products to organic cosmetics, detergents, and bath products at the various stalls. As in any weekly market, a tea and gözleme (the Turkish equivalent of a quesadilla but stuffed with kaşar (a salty hard cheese similar to kaseri), potatoes, or spinach, or a combination of all three) stand also take their place under the tents -but everything is organic, of course.

Other organic markets organized by Buğday take place in Kartal, Beylikdüzü, and Bakırköy, but for those who are centrally located, the one at Feriköy is the top choice. Şişli Belediyesi Otopark, Lala Şahin Sokak, Bomonti Caddesi, Bomonti

SOURCE: http://vimeo.com/45812021
http://www.theguideistanbul.com/news/view/968/ferikoy-organic-

Millets in mid-day meal to boost nutrition

SUNITHA SEKAR | CHENNAI, December 14, 2012

Come January, schoolchildren may savour the flavour of ragi puttu and cholam biscuits in their mid-day meals.

The State government plans to introduce millets in the mid-day meal owing to its increased nutritional value from January 26, 2013, said T.Thanasekaran, deputy director of the Agriculture department.

“The process is on to include millets in the nutritious meal scheme and we hope to launch it on the Republic Day. Initially, we may introduce items such as puttu, kali or dosai with finger millet (Ragi) and biscuits with barnyard millet (cholam). Soon, depending on how the children receive the recipe we may think of including millets in the Public Distribution System (PDS),” he said.

This move comes in the backdrop of the Agriculture Ministry urging the States to introduce millets in the scheme last September.

“This time, the monsoon can be called a near failure and we have incurred deficit of rainfall. When the production of paddy falls, cultivation of millets, which are highly drought-resistant, could be increased. We are trying to increase the productivity of millets by distributing improved variety of seeds to farmers,” he added.

For quite sometime now, the State has been organising demonstrations and campaigns for farmers to promote cultivation of millets.

V.R. Ananthoo of Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) who also runs reStore— a not-for-profit store that sells organic products sourced from farmers and underprivileged groups — was asked to facilitate a meeting by the State Planning Commission in October to promote millets. In fact, the officers were given an eight-course millet meals with dishes such as Varagu Bissibelabath, Saamai curd rice etc.

“Just when we had been working at reStore with a focus to bring back millets, we organised a meeting for the Planning Commission with secretaries of various departments to sensitise them about millets. Since millets are easy to grow, drought-resistant and replenish the soil as well, it can be used to address several issues including malnutrition,” he said.

Dr. G. Sivaraman, a Siddha physician, said malnutrition in the State could best be tackled by inclusion of millets in the mid-day meal.

“Malnutrition is mainly caused due to low protein levels in the body. Finger millets and barnyard millets will increase protein content in the body. Plus, millets are low glycemic functional food which prevents non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cardio-vascular diseases and cancers,” he said.

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Plan to introduce puttu, kali or dosai with finger millet

New recipe likely from January 26

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/millets-in-midday-meal-to-boost-nutrition/article4198341.ece

ARTCLE : A new rice every day?

The Hindu
Sci-Tech » Agriculture December 8, 2012

Updated: December 9, 2012 09:38 IST

BIODIVERSITY

 
ASHISH KOTHARI

The small farmer is increasingly getting the short shrift, and control over farming is moving into the hands of the private corporate sector. This does not paint a happy picture.

Natwar Sarangi could eat a new variety of rice every day of the year. None of it bought in the market. When I met this remarkable farmer in a small village in Odisha, I realised the magical potential of India’s ‘ordinary’ peasants. A potential sadly neglected by our agricultural bureaucracy and ‘development’ planners.

 

Natwarbhai, 80+, is a resident of Narishu village, near Niali in Cuttack district. A retired schoolteacher, he has been practising organic farming for the last decade or so, and swears by its potential to feed India’s population. He says some of the varieties he grows yield over 20 quintals per acre, higher than the so-called ‘high-yielding’ varieties that farmers around him get after using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And he spends much less, since his main inputs are gobar, natural pesticides when occasionally needed, and labour.

 

Natwarbhai was earlier a ‘modern’ farmer, lured into it by officials and traders, involving high-yielding varieties, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. One day, while watching a labourer spray Carbofuran (a highly toxic pesticide), he was horrified to see him stagger and collapse. Rushed for treatment, the worker survived, but not Natwarbhai’s faith in the new agriculture. Especially after the labourer told him: “I could not breathe, my head was reeling”; and especially after, having buried the remaining stock of Carbofuran in a pit in his fields, Natwarbhai “saw dead snails, snakes, and frogs floating in the water that had accumulated there; I immediately wondered what would be happening to the earthworms and micro-organisms that I knew kept the soil alive.”

 

Natwarbhai switched to organic inputs, but with the high yielding varieties that the agricultural establishment had distributed. His son Rajendra, by now having become involved in a number of environmental movements, advised him to try traditional crop varieties. The problem was, most such varieties had gone out of cultivation in the area.

 

Around this time (1999), along with Rajendra another young man of the village, Jubraj Swain, had been active with relief and reconstruction work after a super-cyclone. Now they set off to find traditional rice varieties; travelling over 5000 km within (and a bit outside) Odisha, they brought back dozens of varieties still being grown by so-called ‘backward’ farmers. Natwarbhai tried them all, noting down their names, characteristics, and productivity. He and Jubraj continued even after the tragic death of Rajendra due to cerebral malaria, eventually reaching the astounding figure of 360 varieties (90per cent of these from Odisha). When I expressed astonishment at this, Natwarbhai laughed: “we are aiming to have at least 500. This is in any case only a small fraction of the total diversity that Indian farmers have created”.

 

So true. I remember when coordinating India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process a decade ago, I had come across the mindboggling fact that the country’s rice diversity was anything between 50,000 and 300,000 varieties!

 

How does Natwarbhai keep track of this diversity, year after year? He said he and his colleagues kept an album, in which they noted down each variety’s characteristics. I was later shown a two-volume set of this album by Sudhir Pattnaik of the Oriya journal Samadrusti; it had tiny packets of each kind of rice variety, with key features of their growth, performance, and values written alongside.

 

Diversity was nice, but would it feed India’s growing population? Natwarbhai was categorical: “Without doubt. Firstly, I get as much or more average rice production on my land as those using chemicals in this region; secondly, I can grow pulses as a next crop, and then gourds or other crops as the third … all on the same plot of land. And I get better fodder and mulching material. Overall productivity is therefore higher than my neighbours who use new seeds and chemicals. If land is not turned to non-food cash crops like tobacco, we would easily produce enough food with organic farming.”

 

So why then were his neighbours not switching to organic? Natwarbhai explained that the government and corporations were constantly giving ‘incentives’, e.g. subsidies on chemicals, and filling the cultivators’ minds with promises of bumper crops and high returns. Another factor was that many of the traditional varieties had tall stalks, and ‘lodged’ (fell down) if there were unseasonal rains. But Natwarbhai asserted that even with this, productivity did not drop significantly, provided it did not keep on raining. Yet another reason was that many of the lands here were being cultivated by sharecroppers, who had to do what their absentee landlords told them to.

 

I reflected on this a bit. Farmers here were probably also being seduced by news from other regions of India, some of which had achieved over 30 quintals per acre; no-one was telling that this was possible only with increasing amounts of external inputs, that the land would simply not sustain this intensity of cultivation for long, and that growing costs of inputs would eventually reduce profit margins. Official records showed that in any case, HYV rice had yielded an average of around 15 quintals in Orissa.

 

Other farmers were slowly getting interested in Natwarbhai’s methods. He and others have organised dozens of meetings with farmers, and offered free seeds for those willing to test them out (on condition that if they had a good crop, they would return twice the amount, to go into a grain bank). The journal Samadrusti also did its bit in public outreach. If only the government would help, these efforts would go much further. Unfortunately even civil society organisations were not always helpful; Natwarbhai pointed to a patch of black-grain paddy (Kali Jiri) swaying gently in the breeze, and sadly recounted how an institution from Chennai run by a famous agricultural scientist had taken some samples, and then claimed credit for the variety!

 

I asked Jubraj why he had not gone looking for a job in the city, like his other young colleagues? He was, after all, a graduate in history. His answer was simple: “I enjoy this. I think it is more worthwhile than a job in the city”. Productivity on his land? “I’m getting 18-20 quintals per acre; those using new seeds and chemicals here were getting less, while spending more.” In a general scenario of the newer generations turning away from occupations like farming, it was good to see the young man wanting to carry on Natwarbhai’s mission.

 

In a recent address to an international conference on biodiversity in Hyderabad, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: “Biodiversity, found in our forests and our fields, could provide us keys to the solutions of the future. So we need to build a movement to conserve traditional varieties of crops.” Nice words. But the Indian government’s agricultural policies and programmes have systematically destroyed the diversity and knowledge of thousands of years of intelligent, innovative farming systems. Increasingly they are marginalising the small cultivator, and handing over controls over farming to the private corporate sector. Efforts like Natwarbhai’s and Jubraj’s, small as they may seem, are crucial elements of sustainability that India is going to desperately need when its food production systems face ecological and social collapse.

 

Ashish Kothari is with Kalpavriksh, Pune

 

SOURCE : http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/agriculture/a-new-rice-every-day/article4173839.ece

BOOK: Small producer agency in the globalised market: making choices in a changing world

Bill Vorley, Ethel Del Pozo-Vergnes, Anna Barnett

International expectations for the world’s half-billion small farms are growing, against a very dynamic backdrop. Small-scale farming is expected to contribute solutions in areas ranging from poverty reduction and food security to climate change adaptation. Most of the ‘inclusive business’ models and value chain interventions already set up to do that are reaching only a narrow minority of farmers. To get the future right for the majority there is a need to ask the right questions. Instead of thinking about how to ‘make markets work for the poor’, we must look at how small-scale farmers make markets work for them. Farmers themselves are facing and effecting rapid changes in markets, in land and other resources, and in the demographics of rural communities.

This book presents the results of a three-year Knowledge Programme led by IIED, Hivos and a global Learning Network, it integrates knowledge of researchers and practitioners working or trading directly with small producers across three continents. It focuses on agency — how small-scale farmers navigate formal and informal, global and local markets, their strategies, interests, expectations and limitations, and how they make choices in the dynamic context of a restructuring agrifood sector. From this perspective, globalisation and modernisation appear not to be sweeping the world economy clean, but spreading in parallel with vibrant informal and local economies.

This book challenges our institutions and the development community, both in terms of our assumptions on the roles of smallholders and agribusiness and how we go about the process of generating knowledge and developing effective policies and interventions.

Vorley, B., del Pozo-Vergnes, E., Barnett, A. 2012. Small producer agency in the globalised market: making choices in a changing world. IIED, London; HIVOS, The Hague.

download link : http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/16521IIED.pdf?

SOURCE: http://pubs.iied.org/16521IIED.html

Monthly conferences to facilitate smooth supply of organic products

CITIES » BENGALURU

BANGALORE, December 1, 2012

Updated: December 1, 2012 09:43 IST

To ensure smooth supply of organic products from producers to retailers in the city, the State government will initiate monthly conferences between these two important stakeholders in the sector.

“These will be through videoconferencing from the State capital with retailers participating in the conference with producers at all the district centres,” K.V. Sarvesh, Director, Department of Agriculture, told The Hindu. He said that this would be a bridge-building exercise between the two.

His comments came after an interactive session between organic producers and retailers at the three-day BioFach India, an international organic trade fair here on Friday.

The interaction also saw retailers expressing concerns about the supply chain in the sector.

According to another senior official in the department, the videoconference could help the retailer plan his stock and farmers in managing their produce.

Certification agency

The State-owned Karnataka State Seed Certification Agency has started the Karnataka State Organic Certification Agency, an organic certifying agency with a team of qualified and experienced personnel, trained by consultants in organic certification methods and standards as per the National Programme for Organic Production guidelines.

According to officials, there are four accredited organic certification agencies in Karnataka, and despite developments in the organic sector the State did not have a government agency.

SOURCE: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/monthly-conferences-to-facilitate-smooth-supply-of-organic-products/article4153380.ece