pictures, politics & geekery

TRIGGER WARNING FOR TALK OF RAPE!

Even if the rape victim is a 15-year-old girl raped again and again on her own school campus during the homecoming dance, there is always something apologists can use against her. And even if all women everywhere cover up, stay sober, don’t go to parties, always wear pants, remain un-pierced and un-inked, don’t wear makeup, always wear flats, never leave the house without a man, and stop living our lives freely, the rape apologists will find a new set of criteria that will make us responsible for our rapes anyway.

I flash back to that bus, to that bottle of cherry schnapps. Back then I knew where I was going, and that to get there I’d have to keep a clear head. But now I’m here, and my head doesn’t function the way it used to. All thanks to a test that measured … what, exactly? Nothing important, I’ve discovered. Nothing sustaining. Just “aptitude.”

That’s why we’re here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That’s what they wanted, so that’s what we delivered. A talent for nothing, but a knack for everything.

Nobody told us it wouldn’t be enough.

Hockey has political salience in Canada. A sometimes beautiful and sometimes brutal game, it has been co-opted by the Conservative government to become an allegedly defining Canadian quality, one of toughness, as the Conservatives try to remould Canada into a warrior nation, proud of being much more militarized. Putting so much emphasis on hockey as defining us in our new toughness – especially when done by figures in authority – only pushes up the temperature surrounding hockey. It’s asking for trouble, though nobody wants to admit that. Instead, most media coverage, especially television, spews forth material about “thugs” and “mayhem.” As if the culture of connecting hockey to military might could not be blamed.

Yes, it was a terrible embarrassment to Canada, given that TV news all over the world showed the footage of the riot. But the now-iconic image of the couple kissing on the riot-torn streets of Vancouver captures precisely what saves us from true embarrassment, in the end. There was much coverage of the mystery of the two people involved and the meaning of the image was lost. The photo captures how Canadians think of themselves and want the world to think of Canadians – decent, sweet-natured people, non-violent, much less aggressive than our crazy, violence-prone neighbours in the United States. Lovers and peace-keepers, not warriors and warmongers.

Agriculture is not natural; it is a human invention. It is also the basis of modern civilization. Yet agriculture is not uniform in its practices or productivity: some 40 percent of the world’s corn farmers still use nonhybrid, open-pollinated varieties that the U.S. abandoned decades ago, and their yields are far, far lower than what could be achieved with modern seed varieties. Nor is agriculture static. Yield increases through improved genetics are accelerating in crops that receive intense private research funding, such as corn, but are languishing in cassava and other important staples for the developing world, which get little or no support. Agriculture has significant ecological consequences, too: displaced forests and grasslands, greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizers and diesel-fueled farm machinery, and algae blooms from excess nutrient runoff. Clearly, there is much to improve on.

Modern humans emerged some 250,000 years ago, yet agriculture is a fairly recent invention, only about 10,000 years old. Many crop plants are rather new additions to our diet; broccoli—a flowering mutant of kale—is thought to be only 500 years old. Most innovation is far more recent still. Although Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiments quietly laid the basic foundations of genetics in the mid-19th century, his work was rediscovered and applied to crop breeding only at the beginning of the 20th century. Mendel demonstrated that plant traits were inherited and not acquired from the environment, which meant that crossing two plants with different characteristics could create a plant with potentially improved traits.

Putting aside the potential economic and health benefits that GMOs pose, it is important to consider the role of producers of GM seeds and products, such as the multinational corporation (MNC) Monsanto, which specializes in agricultural biotechnology. It is no secret that MNCs, such as Coca-Cola and Chiquita, do not always uphold the lofty ethical standards that some would expect. If demand and production of transgenic food continue on an upward slope, farmers could become dependent on GM seed to sustain their competitive edge in a market flooded with these controversial products.

Additionally, more and more farmers will have to buy GM seed from the major manufacturers that hold the intellectual property rights to transgenic patents for certain genome combinations. For example, until 2014, Monsanto has the rights to its Roundup Ready seed, which is resistant to the pesticide Roundup and makes it easier to spray crops en masse.[xviii] However, Monsanto is coming out with a new seed, called Roundup Ready 2 Yield, which contains a slightly different structural arrangement that will increase yields but still provide resistance to pesticides.[xix] Some believe that this timing is not coincidental, and critics claim that Monsanto is trying to pressure farmers into switching to the newer version before its patent on the original seed runs out.[xx] This would extend Monsanto’s monopolistic advantage over other seed companies and allow the firm to essentially set prices in this field.

Such a situation seems eerily similar to privatization of the water industry in Bolivia in the late 1990s. After privatization became a condition for aid, many countries pushed to bring down barriers to water services and to allow foreign MNCs to break into the industry. The result has been “steep and sudden price hikes,” along with, in some instances, no access to the water supply, adversely affecting the poorest inhabitants in the country. These economic concerns led to both the Cochabamba and El Alto revolts, which eventually ousted industry giants like Bechtel and Suez from their sites of operation.[xxi]

Can a parallel be drawn, and perhaps even expected, between Bechtel and Monsanto? Transgenic seeds, like water, may become necessary for farmers to stay competitive in both domestic and foreign markets. When a product becomes a necessity and only large companies hold the intellectual rights to it, potentially perilous situations can result. Monsanto already has made re-planting its seeds during the next planting season illegal, and farmers have witnessed price hikes in recent years.[xxii] Just ask Kansas farmer Luke Ulrich, whose Monsanto seed costs have increased by almost 50 percent from 2008 to 2009.[xxiii] Allowing these MNCs to exercise major control over seed production and price setting, and thus their production and exports, could become a slippery slope in any country.

Peru possesses one of the world’s richest environments, housing segments of both the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Rainforest, in addition to an extraordinarily extensive range of biodiversity and natural resources.[xv] Many members of Peru’s civil society were concerned that introducing a new species into such a fecund natural environment could have damaging and irreversible consequences, raising questions such as: how will transgenic crops react with Peru’s naturally occurring flora and fauna? how might the existing ecosystem be affected? how will the food chain be protected from disturbance in certain areas? And, of particular concern, what effect will GMOs have on Peru’s illustrious potato cultivation? If GM potatoes or other transgenic crops react poorly with Peruvian potato species, competition amongst the crops might ensue, resulting in the disappearance of naturally occurring species.[xvi]

The second main concern was that damage to the environment is almost always irreversible. Just as with ozone depletion and the melting ice caps, environmental changes are hard to combat and sometimes impossible to completely eradicate. Recent studies have shown that farmers, not surprisingly, end up using more pesticide when planting pesticide-resistant GM crops, as weeds become resistant along with their crops.[xvii] Such increased pesticide use creates extensive environmental damage and health risks due to expanded consumption and exposure. Also, many GMOs have been tested in nothing more than a laboratory setting or in another country’s natural environment, so it is possible that transgenic seeds could react differently in Peru than they have in other areas. Therefore, much of Peruvian civil society sought the moratorium on GMOs, advocating a more complete diagnosis of possible risks prior to introducing transgenic seeds/crops.

It started in the 1940s when I joined a new program, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, aimed at assisting poor farmers in Mexico to increase their wheat production. We spent nearly 20 years breeding high-yield dwarf wheat that resisted a variety of plant pests and diseases and yielded two to three times more grain than traditional varieties.

Eventually, in the 1960s, we were able to expand the program and teach local farmers in Pakistan and India to cultivate the new wheat properly. The results were wonderful:

* Pakistan produced 8.4 million tons in 1970, up from 4.6 million in 1965.
* India’s production was 20 million tons in 1970, up from 12.3 million 1965.

In 1968, when the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) wrote in his annual report that there was a big improvement in Pakistan and India, he said, “It looks like a Green Revolution.” That is how the label ‘The Green Revolution’ got started. As an aside, the “greenies” have nothing to do with the Green Revolution, which is all about alleviating world hunger.

In the 1980s, the success of the Green Revolution spilled over to China, which is now the world’s biggest food producer.