Category: Environment

Protect Yourself

While the risk of death appears to be lower than previously thought, it’s not nice to get sick and a small percentage of people who do get sick will die.  Follow the generally published advice including covering your mouth when you sneeze, washing your hands often and if you are in an area of an outbreak, avoid crowded or enclosed places where the virus can spread.

Respect Others, Including Mexicans

The virus has now spread over a large area, and anyone can be infected.  There is no reason to single out any ethnic group as being more at risk, not the least of which Mexicans.  Everyone deserves to be treated with respect.  Don’t use the flu outbreak as an excuse to be racist.

Don’t Eat Pork

It doesn’t matter how often we’re told it’s safe to eat pork products.

Many people feel it’s a point of debate if pork or factory farm pork is healthy in the first place.  It’s not the point if it’s safe, the point is factory pig farming was most likely behind the current flu outbreak, and we should vote with our pocketbooks!  The best thing would be to completely give up eating factory farm (pork) products, but at least during the current crisis let your anger at the situation be known by refusing to buy the products behind it.

Don’t listen to the arguments it will hurt the economy or leave people unemployed.  This industry needs to be restructured as much as any other, just like the car manufacturers are in trouble for building out of date cars, the food industry is just as out of date.  The world’s food industry is the largest global source of greenhouse gasses, looks likely to be exempt from Kyoto Protocol limits, and these methods of raising food are killing the planet.

Stand Up to Corporate Welfare

You can be assured after the crisis passes the politicians will all be lining up to give the factory farming industry compensation over their losses.  This will most certainly be done quietly and they will hope no one notices.  Watch out for this, take a stand against it, and spread the word so others can voice their opposition too.

Support the Rights of the Workers

A lot of people will lose their jobs in the wake of this crisis.  Support their rights to severance pay, unemployment benefits, health care and assistance finding other jobs.

According to this recent article on the GRAIN website, sugar made from GM sugar beets has already been approved for import by the EU because — according to Monsanto, the refined product no longer contains GMOs.

For some time now Europe has been a major producer and exporter of sugar and sugar beets, but this is due to change in 2009.  After recent reorganizations in farming subsidies, the EU is left with just a few small centers of sugar beet production, and will go from being a net exporter to an importer of sugar.  Even though growing GM sugar beets is not allowed on a large scale at the moment in Europe, the importation of refined GM sugar is about to begin.

Following Monsanto’s logic that the refined product no longer contains GMOs, it seems likely GM sugar will also eventually find it’s way into certified organic products.

Sugar beets are strongly out-breeding plants, and their pollen is spread long distances in the wind.  Sugar beets will also cross pollinate with common beetroot.  In some places there are also naturally occurring weeds that can cross pollinate with sugar beets, potentially acting as a reservoir for the modified genes like what’s happened worldwide with GM rape (canola).  These contaminated weeds are potential ‘super weeds’ in that they can have resistance to Round Up.

For now purchasing European sourced sugar, as well as sugar labelled as ‘cane sugar’ will ensure you are not getting a GM product, but this will almost certainly change.  Work is well under way on GM sugar cane, and it’s likely to soon be grown on a very wide scale.  It also seems likely approval for growing GM sugar beets in Europe is not far away.

One the the main driving forces behind the massively large scale growing of sugar beets and cane is demand for biofuels in the US and Europe as well as other places.  This threatens to create ‘sugar deserts’ across large parts of Latin America as tons of glyphosate herbicide are dumped on these crops killing everything except the monoculture sugar crop itself.  The land used for this comes from deforestation or use of land that should be used for food production.

With respect to sugar cane, which is seen as the cheapest form of sugar production, very hard physical labor is required to harvest the canes.  Workers are often exploited and under paid.  Every year a number of workers die as a result of physical exhaustion.

The world does not need refined sugar and biofuels at this price!