BEIJING (Reuters) – Farmers are illegally growing genetically modified corn in China’s northeast, said environmental non-profit Greenpeace on Wednesday, in a report that may generate further distrust of the government’s ability to ensure a safe food supply.
Beijing has spent billions of dollars to develop GMO crops that it hopes will ensure food supplies for its 1.4 billion people but has not yet approved commercial cultivation amid deep-seated anti-GMO sentiment. The new findings seem to confirm concerns that Beijing will be unable to supervise the planting of GMO crops once commercial cultivation is permitted, leading to widespread contamination of the food chain with GM varieties.
In its report, Greenpeace said 93 percent of samples taken last year from corn fields in five counties in Liaoning province, part of China’s breadbasket, tested positive for GMO contamination.
With the U.S. government intertwined with GMO agrobusiness in more ways than you can count, the U.S. is driving it’s entire global food distribution chain into the ground. Putin sees this as a fantastic opportunity to provide a trustworthy natural grown produce source, and become a world leader in healthy holistic crops.
[Introductory remark: This is a slightly modified version of an article originally written for
the Permaculture magazine in the late 90s. You have to make allowance for its age and the
passage of time, but I would stand by most of what is written].
In Crash on Demand, David Holmgren not only updates Future Scenarios (2007) work but also builds on his essay Money vs Fossil Energy: The battle for control of the world(2009), as a running commentary on the rapid changes in the big picture context for permaculture activism, especially in the Australian context. It assumes understanding of these previous works and, of course permaculture. ‘Preaching to the choir’ it may be, but hopefully it contributes new perspectives to keep permaculture activists ahead of the game.
Permaculture teaching and activism have always aimed to work with those already interested in changing their lives, land and communities for the better, rather than proselytising the disinterested majority. Over many decades, idealistic youth have responded positively to the ‘can-do’, personal empowerment of permaculture design, but it has also attracted more experienced citizens disillusioned with top down mainstream environmentalism’s failure to stop the juggernaut of consumer capitalism. Similarly, disillusioned social and political activists are just starting to recognise permaculture as a potentially effective pathway for societal change as 20th century style mass movements seem to have lost their potency.
David’s argument is essentially that radical, but achievable, behaviour change from dependent consumers to responsible self-reliant producers (by some relatively small minority of the global middle class) has a chance of stopping the juggernaut of consumer capitalism from driving the world over the climate change cliff. It maybe a slim chance, but a better bet than current herculean efforts to get the elites to pull the right policy levers; whether by sweet promises of green tech profits or alternatively threats from mass movements shouting for less consumption.
Jill Redwood, an inspirational woman living on her own, off-grid, an hour from the nearest shop. This wonderful woman is Jill Redwood. Jill built her house in East Gippsland, Australia where she has lived alone for over 30 years entirely off-grid with no mains power, water, mobile reception or television.
Lyon, France, 26 October 2015 – The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer agency of the World Health Organization, has evaluated the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat. Red meat After thoroughly reviewing the accumulated scientific literature, a Working Group of 22 experts from 10 countries convened by the IARC Monographs Programme classified the consumption of red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A), based on limited evidence that the consumption of red meat causes cancer in humans and strong mechanistic evidence supporting a carcinogenic effect. This association was observed mainly for colorectal cancer, but associations were also seen for pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer. Processed meat Processed meat was classified as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1), based on sufficient evidence in humans that the consumption of processed meat causes colorectal cancer. Meat consumption and its effects The consumption of meat varies greatly between countries, with from a few percent up to 100% of people eating red meat, depending on the country, and somewhat lower proportions eating processed meat. The experts concluded that each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%.
What food habits do all great civilizations have in common? John McDougall suggests that starch-based diets are the foods humans were born to eat. He has been studying, writing, and speaking out about the effects of nutrition on disease for over 40 years and is a bestselling author of several titles, including The Starch Solution.
The experiments worked (although she is not sure which one did the trick), leaving her with healthy skin and a newfound interest in her intestines. “I experienced with my own body that knowledge is power,” she writes of the episode in “Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ,” which was published in North America last month after its surprising success in Germany, where it has sold almost 1.5 million copies since its release in March 2014.
Valuable additional resources that contain reliable information about nutrition are available at the British Nutrition Foundation, Medline Plus, Harvard Nutrition Source and Nutrition.gov. For advanced students, the use of Pubmed is recommended. Pubmed is a public database for the scientific literature in the fields of biomedicine and health that also covers portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences and bioengineering. PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institute of Health (NIH). When using PubMed and other databases, the inclusion of search terms such as “review” and “meta-analysis” is recommended. These are the terms used for certain types of articles that provide a broad overview of a topic. For instance, if you are interested in overview articles about the relation between dietary fiber and colon cancer, enter the search terms “colon cancer” (or “colorectal cancer”), “dietary fiber” (or “dietary fibre”) and “meta-analysis” or “review” using the advanced search tool in PubMed.
Information about the nutrient content of foods is available from the USDA and through Eurofir. Many countries have their own website that provides information on food composition. The website used in the Netherlands can be found here.
