We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 20 hectares – the size of 20 football pitches.
The farm manager shows us millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 500m rows in computer controlled conditions. Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tonnes of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Source: Guardian
An atrazine-induced female frog (a genetic male) is shown (bottom) copulating with an unexposed male sibling. This union produced viable eggs and larvae that survived to metamorphosis and adulthood. Yet, because both animals were genetic males, the offspring were all males. (Tyrone Hayes photo)Atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used pesticides, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.
The 75 per cent that are chemically castrated are essentially “dead” because of their inability to reproduce in the wild, reports UC Berkeley’s Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology.
“These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. So their fertility is as low as 10 percent in some cases, and that is only if we isolate those animals and pair them with females,” he said. “In an environment where they are competing with unexposed animals, they have zero chance of reproducing.”
The 10 percent or more that turn from males into females – something not known to occur under natural conditions in amphibians – can successfully mate with male frogs but, because these females are genetically male, all their offspring are male.
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Vandana Shiva is the founder of Navdanya, the movement of 500,000 seed keepers and organic farmers in India. She is author of numerous books, including “The Violence of the Green Revolution” and “Soil, Not Oil.”
Food security over the next two decades will have to be built on ecological security and climate resilience. We need the real green revolution, not a second “Green Revolution” based on genetic engineering.
Genetic engineering has not increased yields. Recent research by Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists published as a study “Failure to Yield” has shown that in a nearly 20 year record, genetically engineered crops have not increased yields. The study did not find significantly increased yields from crops engineered for herbicide tolerance or crops engineered to be insect-resistant. Continue reading 'The Failure of Gene-Altered Crops'»
India’s Environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, finds himself in a quagmire after the leak of a letter he wrote to prime minister Manmohan Singh.
Minister Ramesh last week had called the campaign by Greenpeace against genetically modified Bt Brinjal as a “blackmail”. Continue reading 'A climate change U-turn?'»
The world’s largest manufacturer and user of the antiquated, persistent and highly hazardous pesticide endosulfan – India – is standing in the way of a global ban of the chemical. In mid-October, experts from around the world will meet in Geneva to consider the science behind the pesticide, and make decisions as to whether endosulfan should be considered for global phase-out under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs treaty).
So far, Indian officials have gone to significant trouble to block endosulfan’s listing on the POPs treaty, and delay a global ban. Pesticide Action Network North America and the Environmental Justice Foundation (U.K.) are putting pressure on the Indian government, urging them to support the global ban of endosulfan at the Geneva meeting. Jairam Ramesh, the Indian Minister of State for Environment and Forests, is the target of letters and petitions. Continue reading 'Ending India’s push for endosulfan'»
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