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You are what you eat, namely declining fossil fuels
Dec 19, 2007
Focus: Environment
Action Request: Think About
Location: United States


Very important & well-written new paper from leading oil expert Richard Heinberg -- combines a macro-level analysis of the world's food-security dilemma in light of climate, energy & environmental trends, with a call to the sustainable & organic agriculture movement to lead the world with a "focus on averting famine under crisis conditions." Forward widely!

Published on 3 Dec 2007 by Global Public Media. Archived on 3 Dec 2007.


What will we eat as the oil runs out?
by Richard Heinberg

Our global food system faces a crisis of unprecedented scope. This crisis, which threatens to imperil the lives of hundreds of millions and possibly billions of human beings, consists of four simultaneously colliding dilemmas, all arising from our relatively recent pattern of dependence on depleting fossil fuels.

The first dilemma consists of the direct impacts on agriculture of higher oil prices: increased costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs.

The second is an indirect consequence of high oil prices - the increased demand for biofuels, which is resulting in farmland being turned from food production to fuel production, thus making food more costly.

The third dilemma consists of the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events caused by fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the greatest environmental crisis of our time; however, fossil fuel depletion complicates the situation enormously, and if we fail to address either problem properly the consequences will be dire.

Finally comes the degradation or loss of basic natural resources (principally, topsoil and fresh water supplies) as a result of high rates, and unsustainable methods, of production stimulated by decades of cheap energy.

Each of these problems is developing at a somewhat different pace regionally, and each is exacerbated by the continually expanding size of the human population. As these dilemmas collide, the resulting overall food crisis is likely to be profound and unprecedented in scope.

I propose to discuss each of these dilemmas briefly and to show how all are intertwined with our societal reliance on oil and other fossil fuels. I will then argue that the primary solution to the overall crisis of the world food system must be a planned rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels in the growing and delivery of food. As we will see, this strategy, though ultimately unavoidable, will bring enormous problems of its own unless it is applied with forethought and intelligence. But the organic movement is uniquely positioned to guide this inevitable transition of the world's food systems away from reliance on fossil fuels, if leaders and practitioners of the various strands of organic agriculture are willing to work together and with policy makers.

Structural Dependency

Until now, fossil fuels have been widely perceived as an enormous boon to humanity, and certainly to the human food system. After all, there was a time not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not accepted, part of life even in wealthy countries. Until the 19th century - whether in China, France, India or Britain - food came almost entirely from local sources and harvests were variable. In good years, there was plenty - enough for seasonal feasts and for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come; in bad years, starvation cut down the poor, the very young, the old, and the sickly. Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing the size of the population by several percent. This was the normal condition of life in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.1

By the nineteenth century a profound shift in this ancient regime was under way. For Europeans, the export of surplus population to other continents, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were all gradually making famines less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was in view.

But crisis was narrowly averted through the use of fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process yields 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, producing a total quantity of available nitrogen equal to the amount introduced annually by all natural sources combined.2

Fossil fuels went on to offer other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.

In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of British and American cropland had been set aside to grow grain to feed horses, of which most worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans. Early steam-driven tractors had come into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded throughout the twentieth century, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia.

Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after World War II, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Petrochemical-based pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.

In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.

At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing human carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way. The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.

The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just an enormous leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown over six-fold since [the] dawn of [the] industrial revolution.

However, in the process, conventional industrial agriculture has become overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. According to one study, approximately ten calories of fossil fuel energy are needed to produce each calorie of food energy in modern industrial agriculture.3 With globalized trade in food, many regions host human populations larger than local resources alone could possibly support. Those systems of global distribution and trade also rely on oil.

Today, in the industrialized world, the frequency of famine that our ancestors knew and expected is hard to imagine. Food is so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked or shipped from hundreds of miles away. All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but the fact that nearly all of this recent abundance depends on depleting, non-renewable fossil fuels whose burning emits climate-altering carbon dioxide gas means that the current situation is not sustainable. This means that it must and will come to an end.

The Worsening Oil Supply Picture

During the past decade a growing chorus of energy analysts has warned of the approach of "Peak Oil," the time when the global rate of extraction of petroleum will reach a maximum and begin its inevitable decline.

During this same decade, the price of oil has advanced from about US$12 per barrel to nearly $100 per barrel.

While there is some dispute among experts as to when the peak will occur, there is none as to whether. The global peak is merely the cumulative result of production peaks in individual oilfields and whole oil-producing nations, and these mini-peaks are occurring at an increasing rate.

The most famous and instructive national peak occurred in the US in 1970: at that time America produced 9.5 million barrels of oil per day; the current figure is less than 5.2 Mb/d. While at one time the US was the world's foremost oil exporting nation, it is today the world's foremost importer.

The history of US oil production also helps us evaluate the prospects for delaying the global peak. After 1970, exploration efforts succeeded in identifying two enormous new American oil provinces - the North Slope of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. During this period, other kinds of liquid fuels (such as ethanol and gas condensates) began to supplement crude. Also, improvements in oil recovery technology helped to increase the proportion of the oil in existing fields able to be extracted. These are precisely the strategies (exploration, substitution, and technological improvements) that the oil producers are relying on to delay the global production peak. In the US, each of these strategies made a difference - but not enough to reverse, for more than a year or two at a time, the overall 37-year trend of declining production. To assume that the results for the world as a whole will be much different is probably unwise.

The recent peak and decline in production of oil from the North Sea is of perhaps of more direct relevance to this audience. In just seven years, production from the British-controlled region has declined by almost half.

How near is the global peak? Today the majority of oil-producing nations are seeing reduced output: in 2006, BP's Statistical Review of World Energy reported declines in 27 of the 51 producing nations listed. In some instances, these declines will be temporary and are occurring because of lack of investment in production technology or domestic political problems. But in most instances the decline results from factors of geology: while older oil fields continue to yield crude, beyond a certain point it becomes impossible to maintain existing flow rates by any available means. As a result, over time there are fewer nations in the category of oil exporters and more nations in the category of oil importers.4

Meanwhile global rates of discovery of new oilfields have been declining since 1964.5

These two trends (a growing preponderance of past-peak producing nations, and a declining success rate for exploration) by themselves suggest that the world peak may be near [or here].

Clearly the timing of the global peak is crucial. If it happens soon, or if in fact it already has occurred, the consequences will be devastating. Oil has become the world's foremost energy resource. There is no ready substitute, and decades will be required to wean societies from it. Peak Oil could therefore constitute the greatest economic challenge since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

An authoritative new study by the Energy Watch Group of Germany concludes that global crude production hit its maximum level in 2006 and has already begun its gradual decline.6 Indeed, the past two years have seen sustained high prices for oil, a situation that should provide a powerful incentive to increase production wherever possible. Yet actual aggregate global production of conventional petroleum has stagnated during this time; the record monthly total for crude was achieved in May 2005, 30 months ago.

The latest medium-term report of the IEA, issued July 9, projects that world oil demand will rise by about 2.2 percent per year until 2012 while production will lag, leading to what the report's authors call a "supply crunch."7

Many put their hopes in coal and other low-grade fossil fuels to substitute for depleting oil. However, global coal production will hit its own peak perhaps as soon as 2025 according to the most recent studies, while so-called "clean coal" technologies are three decades away from widespread commercial application.8 Thus to avert a climate catastrophe from coal-based carbon emissions, our best hope is simply to keep most of the remaining coal in the ground.

The Price of Sustenance

During these past two years, as oil prices have soared, food prices have done so as well. Farmers now face steeply increasing costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs. However, the linkage between fuel and food prices is more complicated than this, and there are other factors entirely separate from petroleum costs that have impacted food prices. I will attempt to sort these various linkages and influences out in a moment.

First, however, it is worth taking a moment to survey the food price situation.

An article by John Vidal published in the Guardian on November 3, titled "Global Food Crisis Looms As Climate Change and Fuel Shortages Bite," began this way:
Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18 percent food price inflation in China, 13 percent in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10 percent or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50 percent higher than a year ago and rice is 20 percent more expensive. . . .

Last week the Kremlin forced Russian companies to freeze the price of milk, bread and other foods until January 31. . . .

India, Yemen, Mexico, Burkina Faso and several other countries have had, or been close to, food riots in the last year. . . . Meanwhile, there are shortages of beef, chicken and milk in Venezuela and other countries as governments try to keep a lid on food price inflation.9
Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, said in London early this month, "If you combine the increase of the oil prices and the increase of food prices then you have the elements of a very serious [social] crisis. . . ." FAO statistics show that grain stocks have been declining for more than a decade and now stand at a mere 57 days, the lowest level in a quarter century, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis."10

According to Josette Sheeran, director of the UN's World Food Program (WFP), "There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world's most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach."11

In its biannual Food Outlook report released November 7, the FAO predicted that higher food prices will force poor nations, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, to cut food consumption and risk an increase in malnutrition. The report noted, "Given the firmness of food prices in the international markets, the situation could deteriorate further in the coming months."12

Meanwhile, a story by Peter Apps in Reuters from October 16 noted that the cost of food aid is rising dramatically, just as the global need for aid is expanding. The amount of money that nations and international agencies set aside for food aid remains relatively constant, while the amount of food that money will buy is shrinking.13

To be sure, higher food prices are good for farmers - assuming that at least some of the increase in price actually translates to higher income for growers. This is indeed the case for the poorest farmers, who have never adopted industrial methods. But for many others, the higher prices paid for food simply reflect higher production costs. Meanwhile, it is the urban poor who are impacted the worst.

Impact of Biofuels

One factor influencing food prices arises from the increasing incentives for farmers worldwide to grow biofuel crops rather than food crops. Ethanol and biodiesel can be produced from a variety of crops including maize, soy, rapeseed, sunflower, cassava, sugar cane, palm, and jatropha. As the price of oil rises, many farmers are finding that they can produce more income from their efforts by growing these crops and selling them to a biofuels plant, than by growing food crops either for their local community or for export.

Already nearly 20 percent of the US maize crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that proportion is expected to rise to one quarter, based solely on existing projects-in-development and government mandates. Last year US farmers grew 14 million tons of maize for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of corn. Both Congress and the White House favour expanding ethanol production even further - to replace 20 percent of gasoline demand by 2017 - in an effort to promote energy security by reducing reliance on oil imports. Other nations including Britain are mandating increased biofuel production or imports as a way of reducing carbon emissions, though most analyses show that the actual net reduction in CO2 will be minor or nonexistent.14

The US is responsible for 70 percent of world maize exports, and countries such as Mexico, Japan, and Egypt that depend on American corn farmers use maize both as food for people and feed for animals. The ballooning of the US ethanol industry is therefore impacting food availability in other nations both directly and indirectly, raising the price for tortillas in Mexico and disrupting the livestock and poultry industries in Europe and Africa.

GRAIN, a Barcelona-based food-resources NGO, reports that the Indian government is committed to planting 14 million hectares with Jatropha for biodiesel production. Meanwhile, Brazil plans to grow 120 million hectares of fuel crops, and Africa up to 400 million hectares. While currently unproductive land will be used for much of this new production, many millions of people will be forced off that land in the process.15

Lester Brown, founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, has said: "The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue."16 This is an opinion no longer being voiced just by environmentalists. In its twice-yearly report on the world economy, released October 17, the International Monetary Fund noted that, "The use of food as a source of fuel may have serious implications for the demand for food if the expansion of biofuels continues."17 And earlier this month, Oxfam warned the EU that its policy of substituting ten percent of all auto fuel with biofuels threatened to displace poor farmers. Jean Ziegler, a UN special rapporteur went so far as to call the biofuel trade "a crime against humanity," and echoed journalist George Monbiot's call for a five-year moratorium on government mandates and incentives for biofuel expansion.18

The British government has pledged that "only the most sustainable biofuels" will be used in the UK, but, as Monbiot has recently noted, there are no explicit standards to define "sustainable" biofuels, and there are no means to enforce those standards in any case.19

Impact of Climate Change and Environmental Degradation

Beyond the push for biofuels, the food crisis is also being driven by extreme weather events and environmental degradation.

The phrase "global warming" implies only the fact that the world's average temperature increase by a degree or more over the next few decades. The much greater problem for farmers is destabilization of weather patterns. We face not just a warmer climate, but climate chaos: droughts, floods, and stronger storms in general (hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms) - in short, unpredictable weather of all kinds. Farmers depend on relatively consistent seasonal patterns of rain and sun, cold and heat; a climate shift can spell the end of farmers' ability to grow a crop in a given region, and even a single freak storm can destroy an entire year's national production for some crops. Given the fact that modern agriculture has become highly centralized due to cheap transport and economies of scale, the damage from that freak storm is today potentially continental or even global in scale. We have embarked on a century in which, increasingly, freakish weather is normal.

According to the UN's World Food Program (WFP), 57 countries, including 29 in Africa, 19 in Asia and nine in Latin America, have been hit by catastrophic floods. Harvests have been affected by drought and heatwaves in south Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.20

Last week the Australian government said drought had slashed predictions of winter harvests by nearly 40 percent, or four million tons. "It is likely to be even smaller than the disastrous drought-ravaged 2006-07 harvest and the worst in more than a decade," said the Bureau of Agriculture and Resource.21

In addition to climate chaos, we must contend with the depletion or degradation of several resources essential to agriculture.

Phosphorus is set to become much more scarce and expensive, according to a study by Patrick Déry, a Canadian agriculture and environment analyst and consultant. Using data from the US Geological Survey, Déry performed a peaking analysis on phosphate rock, similar to the techniques used by petroleum geologists to forecast declines in production from oilfields. He found that "we have already passed the phosphate peak [of production] for United States (1988) and for the World (1989)." We will not completely run out of rock phosphate any time soon, but we will be relying on lower-grade ores as time goes on, with prices inexorably rising.22

At the same time, soil erosion undermines food production and water availability, as well as producing 30 percent of climate-changing greenhouse gases. Each year, roughly 100,000 square kilometres of land loses its vegetation and becomes degraded or turns into desert, altering the temperature and energy balance of the planet.23

Finally, yet another worrisome environmental trend is the increasing scarcity of fresh water. According to United Nations estimates, one third of the world's population lives in areas with water shortages and 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. That situation is expected to worsen dramatically over the next few decades. Climate change has provoked more frequent and intense droughts in sub-tropical areas of Asia and Africa, exacerbating shortages in some of the world's poorest countries.

While human population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. According to Bridget Scanlon and colleagues, writing in Water Resources Research this past March 27, in the last 100 years irrigated agriculture expanded globally by 480 percent, and it is projected to increase another 20 percent by 2030 in developing countries. Irrigation is expanding fastest in countries such as China and India. Global irrigated agriculture now accounts for almost 90 percent of global freshwater consumption, despite representing only 18 percent of global cropland. In addition to drawing down aquifers and surface water sources, it also degrades water quality, as salts in soils are mobilized, and as fertilizers and pesticides leach into aquifers and streams.24

These problems all interact and compound one another. For example, soil degradation produces growing shortages of water, since soil and vegetation act as a sponge that holds and gradually releases water. Soil degradation also worsens climate change as increased evaporation triggers more extreme weather.

This month the UN Environment Program concluded that the planet's water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks are all in "inexorable decline." Much of this decline is due to agriculture, which constitutes the greatest single source of human impact on the biosphere.25

In the face of all these daunting challenges, the world must produce more food every year to keep up with population growth. Zafar Adeel, director of the International Network on Water, Environment and Health (INWEH), has calculated that more food will have to be produced during the next 50 years than during the last 10,000 years combined.26

What Is the Solution?

International food agency officials spin out various scenarios to describe how our currently precarious global food system might successfully adapt and expand. Perhaps markets will automatically readjust to shortages, higher prices making it more profitable once again to grow crops for people rather than cars. New designer-gene crop varieties could help crops adapt to capricious climactic conditions, to require less water, or to grow in more marginal soils. And if people were to simply eat less meat, more land could be freed up to grow food for humans rather than farm animals. A slowdown or reversal in population growth would naturally ease pressures on the food system, while the cultivation of currently unproductive land could help increase supplies.

However, given the scale of the crisis facing us, merely to assume that these things will happen, or that they will be sufficient to overcome the dilemmas we have been discussing, seems overly optimistic, perhaps even to the point of irresponsibility.

One hopeful sign is that governments and international agencies are beginning to take the situation seriously. This month the World Bank issued a major report, "Agriculture for Development," whose main author, economist Alain de Janvry, appears to reverse his institution's traditional stance. For a half-century, development agencies such as the World Bank have minimized the importance of agriculture, urging nations to industrialize and urbanize as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the Bank has not featured agriculture in an annual report since 1982. De Janvry says that, since half the world's population and three-quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas where food production is the mainstay of the economy, farming must be central to efforts to reduce hunger and poverty.27

Many agencies, including the INWEH, are now calling for an end to the estimated 30 billion dollars in food subsidies in the North that contribute directly to land degradation in Africa and elsewhere, and that force poor farmers to intensify their production in order to compete.28

In addition, there are calls for sweeping changes in how land use decisions are made at all levels of government. Because soil, water, energy, climate, biodiversity, and food production are interconnected, integrated policy-making is essential. Yet policies currently are set by various different governmental departments and agencies that often have little understanding of one another's sectors.

Delegates at a soils forum in Iceland this month took up a proposal for a formal agreement on protecting the world's soils. And the World Water Council is promoting a range of programs to ensure the availability of clean water especially to people in poorer countries.29

All these efforts are laudable; however, they largely fail to address the common sources of the dilemmas we face - human population growth, and society's and agriculture's reliance on fossil fuels.

The solution most often promoted by the biggest companies within the agriculture industry - the bioengineering of crops and farm animals - does little or nothing to address these deeper causes. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, and the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.30

To get to the heart of the crisis, we need a more fundamental reform of agriculture than anything we have seen in many decades. In essence, we need an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels.

The idea is not new. The aim of substantially or entirely removing fossil fuels from agriculture is implicit in organic farming in all its various forms and permutations - including ecological agriculture, Biodynamics, Permaculture, Biointensive farming, and Natural Farming. All also have in common a prescription for the reduction or elimination of tillage, and the reduction or elimination of reliance on mechanized farm equipment. Nearly all of these systems rely on increased amounts of human labour, and on greater application of place-specific knowledge of soils, microorganisms, weather, water, and interactions between plants, animals, and humans.

Critics of organic or biological agriculture have always contended that chemical-free and less-mechanized forms of food production are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. This view is increasingly being challenged.

A recent survey of studies, by Christos Vasilikiotis, Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, titled "Can Organic Farming Feed the World?", concluded: "From the studies mentioned above and from an increasing body of case studies, it is becoming evident that organic farming does not result in either catastrophic crop losses due to pests nor in dramatically reduced yields. . . ."31

The most recent publication on the subject, by Perfecto et al., in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, found that "Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food on individual farms in developing countries, as [conventional] methods on the same land. . . ."32

Moreover, is clear that ecological agriculture could help directly to address the dilemmas we have been discussing.

Regarding water, organic production can help by building soil structure, thus reducing the need for irrigation. And with no petrochemical runoff, water quality is not degraded.33

Soil erosion and land degradation can be halted and even reversed: by careful composting, organic farmers have demonstrated the ability to build humus at many times the natural rate.34

Climate change can be addressed, by keeping carbon molecules in the soil and in forests and grasslands. Indeed, as much as 20 percent of anticipated net fossil fuel emissions between now and 2050 could be stored in this way, according to Maryam Niamir-Fuller of the U.N. Development Program.35

Natural gas depletion will mean higher prices and shortages for ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizers. But ecologically sound organic-biological agricultural practices use plant and manure-based fertilizers rather than fossil fuels. And when farmers concentrate on building healthy topsoil rich in beneficial microbes, plants have reduced needs for nitrogen.36

The impending global shortage of phosphate will be more difficult to address, as there is no substitute for this substance. The only solution here will be to recycle nutrients by returning all animal and human manures to cultivated soil, as Asian farmers did for many centuries, and as many ecological farmers have long advocated.37

What Will Be Needed

How might we actually accomplish this comprehensive transformation [f]or world agriculture? Some clues are offered by the example of a society that has already experienced and dealt with a fossil-fuel famine.

In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their US counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight and malnutrition was nearly universal. The Cuban GDP fell dramatically and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.38

Several agronomists at Cuban universities had for many years been advocating a transition to organic methods. Cuban authorities responded to the crisis by giving these ecological agronomists carte blanche to redesign the nation's food system. Officials broke up large state-owned farms, offered land to farming families, and encouraged the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.

As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine.

If the rest of the world does not plan for a reduction in fossil fuel use in agriculture, its post-peak-oil agricultural transition may be far less successful than was Cuba's. Already in poor countries, farmers who are attempting to apply industrial methods but cannot afford tractor fuel and petrochemical inputs are watching their crops fail. Soon farmers in wealthier nations will be having a similar experience.

Where food is still being produced, there will be the challenge of getting it to the stores. Britain had a taste of this problem in 2000; David Strahan relates in his brilliant book The Last Oil Shock how close Britain came to political chaos then as truckers went on strike because of high fuel costs. He writes: "Supermarket shelves were being stripped of staple foods in scenes of panic buying. Sainsbury, Asda, and Safeway reported that some branches were having to ration bread and milk."39 This was, of course, merely a brief interruption in the normal functioning of the British energy-food system. In the future we may be facing instead what my colleague James Howard Kunstler calls "the long emergency."40

How will Britain and the rest of the world cope? What will be needed to ensure a successful transition away from an oil-based food system, as opposed to a haphazard and perhaps catastrophic one?

Because ecological organic farming methods are often dramatically more labour- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture, their adoption will require an economic transformation of societies. The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a forced pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.

Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations from their regional resource base. In some cases, relocation of people on a large scale may be necessary.

We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Recently, Oakland California adopted a food policy that mandates by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.41

Localization of food systems means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This again would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favours the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.

Clearly, we must also minimize indirect chemical inputs to agriculture - such as those introduced in packaging and processing.

We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains. We can only bring back working animals to the extent that we can free up land with which to produce food for them. One way to do that would be to reduce the number of farm animals grown for meat [in Cuba beef consumption was discouraged until the stock of oxen increased].

Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes farming a rewarding way of life capable of attracting young people.

Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.

It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap food. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.

In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might be advantageous; but, given the fact that rapid adaptation is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.

Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.

All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying mere techno-fixes - will almost certainly lead to dire consequences. All of the worrisome trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.42

So far we have addressed the responsibility of government in facilitating the needed transformation in agriculture. Consumers can help enormously by becoming more conscious of their food choices, seeking out locally produced organic foods and reducing meat consumption.

The organic movement, while it may view the crisis in industrial agriculture as an opportunity, also bears an enormous responsibility. In the example of Cuba just cited, the active lobbying of organic agronomists proved crucial. Without that guiding effort on the part of previously marginalized experts, the authorities would have had no way to respond. Now crisis is at hand for the world as a whole. The organic movement has most of the answers that will be needed; however, its message still isn't getting through. Three things will be necessary to change that.

The various strands of the organic movement must come together so that they can speak to national and international policy makers with a unified voice.

The leaders of this newly unified organic movement must produce a coherent plan for a global transition to a post-fossil-fuel food system. Organic farmers and their organizations have been promoting some of the needed policies for decades in a piecemeal fashion. Now, however, there is an acute need for a clearly formulated, comprehensive, alternative national and global food policy, and there is little time to communicate and implement it. It is up to the organic movement to proactively seek out policy makers and promote this coherent alternative, just as it is up to representatives of government at all levels to listen.

I have just called for unity in the organic movement, and to achieve this it will be necessary to address a recent split within the movement. What might be called traditional organic remains focused on small-scale, labour-intensive, local production for local consumption. In contrast to this, the more recently emerging corporate organic model merely removes petrochemicals from production, while maintaining nearly all the other characteristics of the modern industrial food system. This trend may be entirely understandable in terms of the economic pressures and incentives within the food industry as a whole. However, corporate organic has much less to offer in terms of solutions to the emerging crisis. Thus as the various strands of the organic movement come together, they should do so in light of the larger societal necessity. The discussion must move beyond merely gaining market share; it must focus on averting famine under crisis conditions.

To conclude, let me simply restate what is I hope clear by now: Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and that we are already in view of the global oil production peak, we must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if the process is problematic in many ways. Of course, the process will take time; it is a journey that will take place over decades. Nevertheless, it must begin soon, and it must begin with a comprehensive plan. The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as organic food, whether or not we act. But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.

Notes

1. See Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1982)
2. See Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Boston: WIT Press, 2004)
3. David Pimentel, "Constraints on the Expansion of Global Food Supply," Kindell, Henry H. and Pimentel, David. Ambio Vol. 23 No. 3, May 1994. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. http://www.dieoff.com/page36htm
4. See also Roger D. Blanchard, The Future of Global Oil Production: Facts, Figures, Trend and Projections (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005)
5. Longwell, "The future of the oil and gas industry: past approaches, new challenges," World Energy Vol. 5 #3, 2002 http://www.worldenergysource.com/articles/pdf/longwell_WE_v5n3.pdf
6. Energy Watch Group, "Crude Oil - The Supply Outlook," http://www.energywatchgroup.de/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Oilreport_10-2007.pdf
7. "Oil Supplies Face More Pressure," BBC online, July 9 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6283992.stm
8. Energy Watch Group, "Coal: Resources and Future Production" (April, 2007). http://www.energywatchgroup.org/files/Coalreport.pdf
9. John Vidal, "Global Food Crisis Looms as Climate Change and Fuel Shortages Bite," The Guardian, Nov. 3, 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
10. Jacques Diouf quoted in John Vidal, op. cit.
11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
12. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah876e/ah876e00.htm
13. Peter Apps, "Cost of Food Aid Soars As Global Need Rises, Reuters, October 16 http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN648660.html
14. See Jack Santa Barbara, The False Promise of Biofuels (San Francisco: International Forum on Globalization, 2007)
15. Vidal, op. cit.
16. Lester Brown quoted in Vidal, op. cit.
17. "IMF Concerned by Impact of Biofuels of Food Prices," Industry Week online, October 18, 2007, http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=15197
18. Ziegler, quoted by George Monbiot http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/11/06/an-agricultural-crime-against-humanity/
19. Monbiot, op. cit.
20. Vidal, op. cit.
21. Vidal, op. cit.
22. Patrick Déry and Bart Anderson, "Peak Phosphorus," http://energybulletin.net/33164.html
23. http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39083
24. "Agriculture Consuming World's Water," Geotimes online, June 2007 http://www.geotimes.org/june07/article.html?id=nn_agriculture.html
25. "Unsustainable Development 'Puts Humanity at Risk'," New Scientist online, October 17 2007, http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12834
26. "Between Hungry People and Climate Change, Soils Need Help," Environmental New Service, August 31, 2007, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2007/2007-08-31-03.asp
27. Celia W. Dugger, "World Bank Puts Agriculture at Center of Anti-Poverty Effort," New York Times, October 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com...
28. Stephen Leahy, "Dirt Isn't So Cheap After All," http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39083
29. Ibid.; http://www.worldwatercouncil.org
30. See, for example, William M. Muir, "Potential environmental risks and hazards of biotechnology," http://www.biotech-info.net/potential_risks.html
31. http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~christos/articles/cv_organic_farming.html
32. (vol 22, p 86) University of Michigan, July 10, 2007
33. "Organic Agriculture," FAO report, 1999, http://www.fao.org/unfao/bodies/COAG/COAG15/X0075E.htm
34. Ibid.
35. "Between Hungry People and Climate Change, Soils Need Help," Environmental New Service, August 31, 2007, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2007/2007-08-31-03.asp
36. FAO, op. cit.
37. F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea and Japan, (New York: Dover Publications, 1911, ed. 2004)
38. The story of how Cuba responded to its oil famine is described in the film, "The Power of Community," http://www.powerofcommunity.org
39. David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 15
40. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (Nerw York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)
41. Matthew Green, "Oakland Looks toward Greener Pastures," Edible East Bay, Spring 2007, http://www.edibleeastbay.com/pages/articles/spring2007/pdfs/oakland.pdf
42. Peter Goodchild, "Agriculture In A Post-Oil Economy," 22 September, 2007
http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild220907.htm


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Posted in full because of its importance. This is Museletter #188, also appearing at Richard Heinberg's website and at Global Public Media.

The Oil Depletion Analysis Center (ODAC) in the UK posted further information on this talk and its reception [in] their bulletin, as follows:

On the 22nd November, Richard Heinberg, Peak Oil educator extraordinaire, gave the Soil Association's annual Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture, entitled What Will We Eat When The Oil Runs Out? A lecture outline, short summary of the event on YouTube, full transcript of the lecture and podcast, plus further information on the panel discussion that followed, are available from the Soil Association website.

An ODAC contact, Simon Wheeler, attended the lecture/panel discussion and took some notes on ODAC's behalf. Read Simon's thoughts.

David Strahan interviewed Richard Heinberg at the event. See Localise and go organic to avert post-peak famine - Heinberg (article plus podcast).

The lecture was reported by the UK's largest (by sales) broadsheet newspaper, The Telegraph. The article was in the 'Earth' section of the newspaper: Apocalyptic vision of a post-fossil fuel world. Such a gloomy title does not exactly inspire, as in 'must read', but it is still a pretty good article because it focuses on the positive, what can and must be done to avoid said apocalypse.


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Posted: Dec 19, 2007 12:56am
What vegan looks like
May 20, 2007

What vegan looks like

Going without meat and dairy products no longer means you have to go without great taste

http://www.boston.com/ae/food/restaurants/articles/2007/05/17/this_is_what_vegan_looks_like/

By Sacha Pfeiffer, Globe Staff  |  May 17, 2007

Like yoga and vegetarianism, vegan eating has moved more into the mainstream in recent years. Vegans shun foods that contain animal ingredients of any kind, including eggs, honey, and dairy products such as milk and cheese. A vegan diet, they believe, is better for human health, kinder to the environment, and avoids unjust treatment of animals -- even, as in the case of bees raised for honey production, insects. This sort of eating regimen might sound challenging to follow. But Boston has a surprising number of vegan restaurants, and not just those with African and Asian menus, which often have numerous meatless and dairy-free offerings.

Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center 950 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. 617-547-6670. ibps.org/boston/GBBCC/eng/default.htm

I had walked countless times past this pretty complex with green awnings, which houses a Buddhist meditation hall, a bookstore, a gift shop, and a vegetarian dining room and teahouse. After finally stopping by for lunch, it instantly became one of my new favorite restaurants.

We were seated by a robed female monk , her head shorn. The menu is short and simple: hot and cold teas (I'm partial to kumquat, which tastes like lemonade extraordinaire), a half-dozen a la carte items (such as turnip cakes, cabbage-filled spring rolls, and steamed veggie dumplings), and a $5.95 lunch special that buys you soup, steamed rice, and four vegetarian dishes.

The veggie dishes, which change frequently, include sauteed cabbage and carrots, pan-fried steamed bean curd, Chinese greens, and tofu scramble . I'm neither vegan nor vegetarian, but every food item I tried (which was all of them, except for the dessert custard bun) was delicious -- hot, fresh, flavorful, nutritious. Together, they made an invigoratingly nourishing meal.

Grasshopper 1 North Beacon St., Allston. 617-254-8883. grasshoppervegan.com

Grasshopper, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, was one of the city's first all-vegan restaurants. Its motto, "Where the animals live to tell it all," reflects the diet of its Vietnamese-born owner, Hoai Nguyen. Like many natives of Southeast Asia, Nguyen and his family eat "the Buddha way," he explains, meaning a diet that shows respect for life by not requiring the death or mistreatment of living creatures.

In addition to many vegetable dishes, Grasshopper serves several faux-meat products, including a vegi-pork chop made of wheat gluten and vegetarian chicken made of tofu. Despite trying both with an open mind, I found them entirely unappetizing. They look like thick slabs of processed lunch meat and taste like bland bologna.

The vegi-shrimp are better. Made of taro root, they resemble genuine crustaceans; they're curved, streaked pinkish-orange, and fringed at each end, as if missing their tails and antennae. They even have bouncy shrimp-like texture. By themselves, they're fairly tasteless, but a salty sauce adds pizzazz.

Grasshopper makes its own cheesecake, too, using tofu, tofu cream cheese, and maple syrup.

You can also find fine vegan Asian food at My Thai Cafe in Coolidge Corner (404 Harvard St., Brookline. 617-739-8830) , Buddha's Delight in Chinatown (3 Beach St., second floor. 617-451-2395) , and Masao's Kitchen (581 Moody St., Waltham, 781-647-7977. masaoskitchen.com).

T.J. Scallywaggle's 487 Cambridge St., Allston. 617-787-9884. scallywaggles.com

"Above all, we serve hope," reads the sign on the front door of this vegan pizzeria and sub shop. Formerly T.J.'s House of Pizza, the business changed ownership, tweaked its name, and went totally vegan last summer. Among its intentionally misspelled menu offerings: hamm, turkee, and rohst beaf sandwiches, as well as chikhin cutlet subs and sauhsage pizzas, with or without cheeze.

These substitute meat and dairy products are the same name-brand items sold at many grocers, including Gardenburger patties, Follow Your Heart soy cheese, and Smart Deli cold cuts. Some taste a lot like the real thing. Eaten alone, the "meetbahls" have an odd softness. But in a toasted bun with tomato sauce, onions, and green peppers, I couldn't tell the difference. The soy cheese on the pizza thins out as it melts, like a smooth cottage cheese. It lacks the richness of dairy but is lower in saturated fat.

According to owner Steve Karian, T.J.'s is the prototype for a "national chain of all-vegan activist comfort food restaurants" aimed at shutting down slaughterhouses and mainstreaming cruelty-free eating. And what exactly is a scallywaggle? Explains Karian: "Somebody who wants to transform the world and has a good time doing it."

You can also find scrumptious vegan pizza at Veggie Planet in Harvard Square (Club Passim, 47 Palmer St., Cambridge. 617-661-1513. veggieplanet.net), where the vegan oddlot (tomatoes, spinach, basil tofu ricotta, calamata olives, fried garlic) and vegan peanut curry are available on organic dough or atop rice.

Organic Garden 294 Cabot St., Beverly. 978-922-0004. organicgardencafe.com

This North Shore raw-foods cafe is not only all-vegan, it's also wheat-free, tofu-free, soy-free, mostly gluten-free, and almost entirely organic.

The menu offers soups, salads, wraps, sandwiches, hot entrees, fresh juices, and smoothies. There's pad Thai with cashew butter sauce. Oat crust pizza with cashew mozzarella. Pizza topped with cranberry, apple slices, leeks, and roasted rosemary walnuts. Almond pecan herb pate. Salads with mung beans, clover, sprouted wild rice, lentils, and chick peas. Tacos with cashew sour cream in golden flax shells. Red beet ravioli with carrot filling.

Seeds, nuts, and grains are often soaked and sprouted, a process said to increase their nutrient levels. Items that require warming are put in low-heat dehydrators that preserve nutrition by not breaking down healthy natural enzymes.

Simply put: power food.

You can find similar vegan meals at Life Alive (194 Middle St., Lowell. 978-453-1311. lifealive.com) , whose organic, unprocessed foods -- replete with brown rice, carrots, beets, broccoli, tofu, squash, almonds, kale, and mushrooms -- will leave you feeling like Superman (or Superwoman).

Boston Cookies 52 Broadway, Somerville. 800-879-7403. bostoncookies.com

In a commercial kitchen in East Somerville, the sweet aroma of cocoa powder fills the air. Here, Brazil native Ademar Reis, with his wife and son, make an all-vegan line of cookies, brownies, and shortbreads in flavors like mocha chocolate chip, banana walnut, lemon poppyseed, peanut butter, and oatmeal raisin.

Reis launched his baking business after trying a cookie at a natural-foods store and declaring it "terrible." Convinced he could do better, he started Boston Cookies in 1999 and now sells his products at Whole Foods and Store 24, as well as online.

The cookies are notably chewier than those made with eggs and butter, and they're a satisfying healthier alternative, although the brownies have a strange grainy texture. As for the crunchy shortbread (flavors: vanilla wafer, chocolate chip, pecan), I didn't even miss the butter. All baked goods are free of cholesterol, trans fat, and hydrogenated oil.

You can also find tasty vegan sweets at Hippie Chick Bakery (11 Elm St., Amesbury. 978-388-6644. hippiechickbakery.com) and Cafe Indigo (128 Hall St., Concord, N.H.603-224-1770. cafeindigo.com), a vegan bakery that ships its cakes, cookies, pies, breads, and cinnamon rolls nationally.

Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com.
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Posted: May 20, 2007 1:43am
Tell the FDA to be honest about irradiated food!
Apr 9, 2007
Focus: Consumer Rights
Action Request: Write Letter
Location: United States

In a stunning turnabout, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to let food producers drop the "irradiated" label and radiation symbol from foods that have been treated with radiation, except when the treatment changes a product's material characteristics like taste, texture, or smell. Some irradiated foods may not be labeled at all; others may be labeled "pasteurized," a term that refers to heating to a high temperature, a process completely different from exposure to radiation. The proposed change will mislead and confuse consumers, making it impossible for them to avoid irradiated food. Tell the FDA to continue to require the term "irradiated" on irradiated food! Visit Regulations.gov, enter docket ID FDA-2007-0189-0001, click on one of the two "Views" options to read more about the FDA's proposal, and click on the yellow balloon to add your comments.
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Posted: Apr 9, 2007 12:13pm
Ain't Nobody Telling Me What My Baby Allergic To
Apr 4, 2007

This article is bloody scary, but i had to share it with you because it made me laugh to tears!!

Damn, this girl is so far out... that's freaky scary, but well, i guess she loves her kid... If she was in some way interested in health though, she would be a big mouth to make her voice hear! Maybe we could introduce her to the raw vegan lifestyle
Anyway, enjoy the reading


Ain't Nobody Telling Me What My Baby Allergic To

March 28, 2007 | Issue 43•13
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/60018

So yesterday some bitch nurse at the clinic was wasting my time trying to tell me my baby Liondrae all allergic to penicillin or some shit. I don't know what kind of made-up bullshit that is. She probably, like, said it just to come off all important.

Besides, who asked her to tell me what 'Drae allergic to anyway? I only brought him to the clinic 'cause that cut on his arm he got trying to climb the chain-link fence behind our apartment got all nasty and green and shit. They jabbed his arm up with penicillin to clear it up, but next morning, he got all swollen and looked funny, so I had to bring him back in, and that's when the nurse say he must be allergic. Now he have to be given special antibiotics twice a day, like I got time to fuck around with medicine.

And then they tried to blame me for the penicillin shit, like I should've known he'd have a bad reaction to it. Well, I ain't allergic to penicillin, so I know he didn't get that shit from me. Plus, if he was allergic to something for real he would have told me about it. He probably reacted crazy like that because they poked him up with all those needles, not 'cause of no antibiotic nobody asked them to squirt up in him in the first place.

People think they can teach me shit about 'Drae I don't know. They think I sit around all day and don't lift a finger. They go on about how he needs to be toilet-trained before he goes to kindergarten, but they don't give a shit that I know his favorite food is Gummi Bears, and that he loves Sean John. He also has this wooden spoon he calls Ugga that he bites on all the time, which I know is a little fucked-up but I let him do it 'cause it's important to let kids be kids.

I'm a good mom. I don't see anyone else watching that baby all damn day long and buying him Arby's.

'Cept for sometimes his older sister Rywanda watch him. She eight now and she needs some fucking responsibility if she's not going to go to school. I told her how the people from the school get on my ass when she don't go, but she can't stand second grade. I'm like, damn, I didn't start cutting class until fifth grade. I thought she'd at least get through elementary, but I can't make her do shit she don't want to do. She just like me. But if she ain't going to school no more, Rywanda's gotta stay home and watch 'Drae.

That boy better get over this shit soon, because ain't no way I'm going back to that clinic again. It took my ass near three hours to get there 'cause I have to transfer buses twice. Shit always happen when I take the kids on the bus, like that one time 'Drae got lost at the station and ended up on Channel 7, and that bitch Debra practically lived at my house for a week. If she want me to go back to that bullshit clinic, she can start giving me money for cab fare. I don't see her taking no three goddamn buses to get to her job.

It's not like I don't got enough other things to do beside drag my ass all the hell the way out there. Those clinic people are real assholes, making me get 'Drae shots for some rubella crap he ain't even got. Even with all that vaccination shit 'Drae keep getting sick anyway. If they had a vaccination against crazy-ass temper tantrums that come out of nowhere, then I'd be down with that.

These doctors think they can be the boss of you, like they know everything, but I know they are always trying to take money for stuff that just clear up on its own.

Like everybody say Rywanda had strep or some shit two months ago. But she's a strong-ass bitch like her mom, and she fought that shit off in three weeks. Never even saw a doctor. 'Drae strong, too. All that medicine and vaccination stuff just makes kids cry all the damn time. I ain't raising no weak-ass baby who's gotta live in a bubble. I saw a show about kids who are allergic to like sunlight or air or something, and their parents can't hug them or nothing because they'd, like, die. That ain't happening to 'Drae, 'cause I love my baby. Plus I'm not covering everything in my house with plastic bullshit.

'Drae'll turn like four or something soon, and he's got to learn to stay away from stuff that makes him allergic, especially if I get that night manager job at the BP. It's like, cats make my eyes all watery, so I stay the fuck away from them. I don't want to find out he got sick playing with a big-ass jar of penicillin 'cause he never learned it'll hurt him. But 'Drae smart. He'll figure it out eventually, just like he did the clothes dryer.
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Posted: Apr 4, 2007 10:15am
Review - The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
Jan 11, 2007
Focus: Environment
Action Request: Think About
Location: United States
http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/954/


Since coming into office in 2001, George W. Bush, his administration, and his supporters (mainly ideological religious groups and corporate powers) have waged an unprecedented attack on science. Broadly speaking, these attacks have focused on debunking scientific conclusions relating to evolution, health care (i.e., stem cell research), and perhaps most strikingly, the environment. It is in the realm of the environment that the administration’s policies will have the most lasting damage. A plethora of articles have documented the Bush administration’s systemic weakening of important environmental policies and even their agencies, the stacking of commissions with people directly from the business world hell bent on the bottom line, and the silencing of our nation’s top scientists.

The sum total of Bush’s policies is the speeding up of climate change. For many, it is somewhat difficult to understand how extreme the reversal of environmental policy is, primarily because a lot of people do not have even a basic grasp of the scientific principles that should guide our environmental policies. Several respected authorities on climate change, including former Vice President Al Gore, and conservationist Tim Flannery, whose book, "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth", is reviewed here, have published works that hope to explain what climate change is all about.

Ironically, Flannery’s book reads almost like an apocalyptic prophecy. "[Human] health, water, and food security are now under threat from the modest amount of climate change that has already occurred," writes Flannery. "If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable." However, Flannery’s doomsday scenario is carefully backed up by several decades of brilliant scientific research, rather than the New Testament. For that reason, his end-of-the-world prediction deserves to be treated seriously.

Flannery centers his book on the major chemical changes that have been taking place throughout the earth’s "aerial ocean" over the last several decades. In the troposphere, the lowest level of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" (gases that trap heat, including water), is getting hotter, and also expanding. It is this change that has led to some of the bizarre weather patterns the earth has experienced over the last few years (although the book was written prior to Katrina and the devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia, there is no doubt he would have included these two disasters in this discussion). Above the troposphere lies the stratosphere, which functions as a giant filter, ensuring that ultraviolet light (UV), which is extremely harmful to living organisms (it’s a known carcinogen, for one), is converted to harmless heat. The main agent in this filter is ozone, which, due to another set of gases, chloroflorocarbons (CFCs) has been greatly depleted. "As a result of the hole [CFCs] punched in the ozone layer, people living south of 40 degrees are experiencing a spectacular rise in the incidence of skin cancer…microscopic single-celled plants that form the base of the ocean’s food chain are severely affected by it…Indeed, anything that spawns in the open is at risk."

A good deal of "The Weather Makers" focuses on the "ozone hole," both as a way of explaining complex scientific concepts, and as a working model of how the nations of the world can address the major issue of the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. CFCs were "invented"—there is no known example of these molecules existing naturally—in 1928, "and were found to be very useful for refrigeration, in making Styrofoam, as propellants in spray cans, and in air-conditioning units." It took almost 50 years for a new generation of scientists to link CFCs to ozone depletion, and nearly a decade for governments to take serious action. By 1992, "the world’s governments pledged to phase out the offending chemicals" in the Montreal Protocal. According to Flannery, "scientists are optimistic that in fifty years’ time the ozone layer will be returned to its former strength."

This is a stunning achievement, one, unfortunately, that current world powers do not seem willing to replicate by tackling the issue of carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon is perhaps the single most important element to life on earth. Besides serving as the backbone of all living organisms, it is also the primary form of energy storage. In chemistry, energy is stored in the bonds between atoms. When a bond is broken, energy is released as heat. Heat can either be harnessed for other uses, or, it can simply warm its surroundings. Plants, especially growing ones, have the unique ability to take in carbon dioxide and convert it into sugars (fundamental for growth) and oxygen (fundamental for growth of animals). When any living thing dies, it breaks down into its fundamental building blocks, one of which is carbon.

Flannery explains to his readers that over time, this carbon, rather than being released into the atmosphere, has been stored in carbon "sinks," either at the bottom of the ocean, or deep in the earth’s crust. These sinks make life on earth possible; Should even a fraction of all the carbon stored in these sinks be released into the atmosphere (in some sort of gaseous form), the earth’s temperature would increase to the point of dramatically changing the earth’s ecosystem, and swallow up all of the available oxygen in the atmosphere, effectively cooking and smothering the entire animal kingdom.

Suffocation of all earth’s inhabitants is thankfully not around the corner, but global warming is certainly already here. Since the industrial revolution, mankind has harnessed the power stored in these carbon sinks, primarily in the forms of natural gas, oil, and coal. By taking massive amounts of carbon stored safely below the earth's surface (be it land or ocean), and using it for a multitude of energy purposes, we have unleashed an unprecedented amount of carbon into the earth's atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. "Prior to 1800, there were about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere…Today, the figures are 380 parts per million, or around 869 gigatons." Already, animal species living in the arctic, including polar bears and harp seals, have lost huge swaths of territory due to melting ice, and at least one species of tropical animal, the golden toad has gone into extinction due to climate change. (Flannery, a zoologist by training, often turns to the animal kingdom for evidence, which both provides compelling evidence of global warming, as well as for an interesting narrative).

Flannery believes that international actors have the ability to lessen carbon dioxide emissions, similar to the success in controlling CFC production. He strongly endorses the "Kyoto Protocol," the international agreement that has the promise to reduce emissions. The heart of this protocol is carbon emissions trading, which works the following way:

"A regulator imposes a permit requirement for the pollutant and restricts the number of permits available. Permits are then given away on a proportional basis to polluters or are auctioned off. Emitters who bear a high cost in reducing their pollution will then buy permits from those who can make the transition more easily. Benefits of the system include its transparency and the ease of administration, the market-based price signal it sends, the opportunities for new jobs and products it creates, and the lowered cost of reducing pollutants."

The United States, notably, has signed, but not ratified the protocol, claiming that it would damage the US economy, since developing countries were given more "shares" of carbon. This makes sense; since these countries are developing, they need more energy, and more time to get into compliance.

Flannery spends considerable time debunking assertions that regulating carbon dioxide will have negative impacts on the economy. Powerful business interests loudly objected to CFC regulation, but since those same businesses are finding that after an initial investment in safer alternatives, profit has actually increased. This hardly matters to many in the energy sector, which is "full of established, cashed-up businesses that use their influence to combat concern about climate change, to destroy emerging challengers, and to oppose moves toward greater energy efficiency." Flannery focuses his accusations at corporations based out of the US and Australia (of which he is a citizen), and elegantly summarizes their pseudo-scientific propaganda aimed at discrediting evidence of climate change. One such example is the Global Climate Coalition, which, before disbanding in 2000, donated over 60 million dollars to anti-environmental politicians, and spent even more on propaganda, meant to "cast doubt on the theory of global warming" (its own words).

Thankfully, Flannery does not simply provide an overview of the science and a history of failure. The last quarter of his book is a survey of many of the solutions offered to counter climate change. Some scientist-engineers have proposed grandiose solutions that, rather than change mankind’s dependence on carbon based energy, would lessen the damage caused by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Flannery sees little use in most of these quixotic plans, "which are neither as straightforward nor as cost effective as industry would like." Instead, he focuses on alternative energy sources, nuclear power, and what seems to be his favorite, energy derived from turbines, a highly reliable and cost efficient means of harnessing energy. None of the solutions Flannery proposes are radical or out of reach; Brazil, a "developing country" has largely switched to ethanol derived from sugar cane as an alternative to natural gas.

For Flannery, the solution (although this is a misnomer—much of man-made climate change is somewhat irreversible) is an international agreement adopting reductions of carbon emissions by 70% by 2050, which in turn would stimulate even more growth in alternative energy sources. Flannery’s blend of skepticism and optimism, scientific theory and historical precedent, offer an incredibly compelling argument of what the civilizations of the world must do to maintain an earth in balance.

Don’t want to wait for political leaders to call the shots? Here are some recommendations from Flannery:

*call your energy provider and ask if you can switch to a green power option, such as wind energy.

*use solar power to at least supplement heating of water, one of the biggest household uses of energy.

*if you can, replace any old air conditioners, refrigerators, and heating appliances with more energy efficient ones.

*get rid of your SUV, and drive a hybrid, or some other small car.

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Posted: Jan 11, 2007 9:46pm
What i need today
Apr 17, 2006
Today is a grey day... again, one more...
i need, i need... or is it that i want, i want... maybe both?

Well... someone, a new face to appear, someone amazing full of surprises to amaze me...  Isn't the internet full of such individuals?
So please stunning person, pop out & say hi...
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Posted: Apr 17, 2006 4:16am
What town do you live in?!
Mar 31, 2006
Just check it out www.mercola.com/townofallopath/index.htm
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Posted: Mar 31, 2006 10:20am
THE SCARE OF EPIDEMICS: What is the reality of the avian flu?
Mar 1, 2006

THE SCARE OF EPIDEMICS: What is the reality of the avian flu?

By Maneka Gandhi 

http://www.abolitionist-online.com/article-issue02_maneka.gandhi.shtml
 

Money makes not just the world go around but turns it topsy-turvy all the time. America needed a war to keep its armament companies happy - especially since the Vice president, Dick Cheney, himself had headed one of the largest government contracting companies. So they invented the bogey of Iraq. They destroyed Afghanistan before that, complaining that there were not enough " targets" to shoot at from the air (so they bombed schools and hospitals). But the most money in the world does not come from just armament sale. It comes from creating scares of epidemics. Then the world's purses open up readily.

Do you remember the scare created by the Americans just seven years ago when they declared that all computers would stop on New Year as the new millennium came and planes and trains would crash and stock markets would fall and the world would come to an end. Who made money out of that? Those computer companies that were brought in to " repair" this looming disaster. Not a single computer stopped, nothing happened.

What about the SARS "pandemic" which eventually faded away. A high pitched media campaign had convinced the world it was facing a great threat when in reality SARS turned out to be a comparably minor disease  .

Do you remember the Foot and Mouth scam in which lakhs of cows were killed brutally in Britain and there was the smell of burning flesh throughout the countryside. Foot and Mouth is not communicable to humans, it does not affect the meat, it is easily curable. But farmers who could not sell their cows for lack of orders and who wanted to get out of the cow-selling business created this scare and picked up thousands of pounds as compensation and insurance from the government for killing their cows.

Bird Flu is like that. It  is the latest scam perpetrated by the American Government and  pharmaceutical companies. Let us look at the facts.

Avian Flu is a virus strain that is found only in birds in badly kept poultries. It affects some birds that are already ill fed, suffering from lung and bone diseases and kept on a steady diet of hormones and antibiotics and other bird carcases. It does not spread to human beings and since the virus is already 8 years old and has not mutated as yet, there is no reason to believe it ever will. There are at least 15 different types of avian influenza that routinely infect birds around the world. The current outbreak is caused by a strain known as H5N1 and it has created a worldwide panic.

What is the reality of avian flu? This "global threat" that has led so many countries to kill their chickens, turkeys and other birds for no reason ( One Hong Kong member of Parliament has asked for each citizen of Hong Kong to be given a gun so that they can shoot any birds coming to Hong Kong)?

In 8 years, since the H5 N1 virus was supposedly detected in poultry birds, 53 people have died - 37 people in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand and four in Cambodia. 7000 people die of lightning struck deaths every year. Have you heard of a lightning epidemic? Are 54 deaths in 8 years an epidemic or even worse a PANDEMIC ?

Where did the panic generated by the media originate from?

The United States of America. President Bush goes on television to say that between 2 lakh to 2 crore people will die in America and he asks for billions of dollars to be allocated for this pandemic. On October 28 the American Senate passes an $8 billion emergency funding bill to address Avian Flu. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, during the debate on the Senate bill, told the press, 'If it isn't the current H5N1 virus that leads to an influenza pandemic, at some point in our nation's future, another virus will." Number of people dead -  Zero. The UN catches on and declares that they will ask for 500 million dollars from all the countries to stop this flu by sending a vaccine to all the countries.

What is 3.1 billion dollars spent on immediately? To buy 80 million vials of Tamiflu at $ 100 per dose - a drug that has no relationship to the virus. According to the authors of the "Total Health program" which looks into scams perpetrated in the name of medicine "Tamiflu, is a worthless drug that in no way shape or form treats the avian flu, but only decreases the amount of days one is sick”

Dig a little deeper and you will understand the reality of Avian flu.

Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate ) was developed and patented in 1996 by a California biotech firm, Gilead Sciences Inc, a  listed stock company in California. Due to lacklustre sales for many years Gilead Sciences licensed the marketing of oseltamivr to the Swiss-US pharmaceutical giant Roche Holdings of Basle getting a royalty for each vial sold.

Roche holds the sole licence to manufacture the only medicine we are told which  'possibly' might reduce symptoms of Avian Flu, . Due to the media panic, the order books at Roche today are filled to overflowing. Roche recently refused a request from the US Congress to lift its exclusive patent rights to allow other drug manufacturers to produce Tamiflu. 

Gilead which gave the marketing rights to its patented discovery to Roche makes as much money from its royalties. According to the Gilead website,"Roche has worldwide commercial rights to Tamiflu, and Gilead receives payments from Roche for the successful completion of program milestones and royalties on product sales."  In 1997, Donald H. Rumsfeld was named Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, where he remained until early 2001 when he became Defence Secretary in Bush's Cabinet. Rumsfeld had been on the board of Gilead since 1988.

He is also a major, if not the largest, stockholder in Gilead Sciences Inc. His 2004 financial disclosure indicates that he owned between 5 and 25 million dollars in equity in Gilead as of Dec 31, 2004; Since then , he has sold some of his holdings. Next year's disclosure will show the value range of any remaining holdings Rumsfeld stands to make a fortune on royalties as governments scramble to buy this  company's drug. The model suggests the parallel to the brazen corruption of Halliburton Corporation whose former CEO is Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's company has so far gotten billions worth of US construction contracts in Iraq and elsewhere. Who else stands to benefit ? Bush campaign-funders, Bilderberger spokesman Etienne F. Davignon and Reagan-Bush former Secretary of State George P. Shultz,  both of whom are also on the board of directors of Gilead.  Another member of the Bush circle is Lodewijk J.R. de Vink, who sits on the board of Hoffman-La Roche, Gilead's partner. In other words, "Bird Flu” will generate outrageous profits for insiders like Shultz, Rumsfeld, Davignon, and de Vink.

The Secretary of Defence, the man who allegedly supported the use of contrived intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, is now poised to reap huge gains for a flu panic his Administration has done everything it can to promote. It would be useful to know whether the Pentagon's successor to Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans developed the strategy of bio-warfare behind the current Avian Flu panic. Perhaps some Congressional committee might look into the entire subject of plausible conflicts of interest regarding Secretary Rumsfeld.

This is not the first time that Rumsfeld has been involved in pharmaceutical scams. It was after all Rumsfeld, as chairman of G.D. Searle, who pressured the FDA to get Aspartame approved. The FDA blocked its approval for ten years, stating it was toxic, before Rumsfeld twisted arms at the FDA.

Now that the Bush government has bought all these vials, how many people have been vaccinated. None. According to President Bush's national strategy he is protecting the American people by stockpiling vaccines in case there is an outbreak! What does the American Centre for Disease Control say?

“A specific vaccine for humans that is effective against avian influenza has not yet been approved. Based upon LIMITED data, the Centers for Disease Control have suggested that the anti-viral medication Oseltamavir (brand name-Tamiflu) MAY be effective in treating avian influenza."  

What does Bush say on this replacement of the Osama bin Laden bogey?

"If  left unchallenged, this virus could become the first pandemic of the 21st century. We must not allow that to happen. It is essential we work together, and as we do so, we will fulfil a moral duty to protect our citizens, and heal the sick, and comfort the afflicted."  He announces the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza during the UN General Assembly in September 2005. and the first meeting of the Partnership takes place October 6-7 in Washington, DC, hosted by the U.S. Department of State attended by officials from 88 countries, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health.

The goals of the International Partnership conceived by Bush are to Elevate the avian influenza issue on national agendas; Coordinate efforts among donor and affected nations; Mobilize and leverage resources; Build local capacity to identify, contain and respond to an influenza pandemic.  

After Bush announces that he is going to give funds to any country that has any signs of Avian flu($251 million to detect and contain outbreaks before they spread around the world) and starts off by giving 25 million dollars for prevent the spread of Avian Flu in "affected" South Asian countries and $ 13 million for "technical assistance promising millions more, suddenly each country that has a low GDP  discovers strains of Avian Flu. Not in poultry because then people will stop buying and eating chicken, but in wild migratory birds!

Everyone wants a piece of the money. The Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Mt Jerraud has suggested that his organization be given more money to expand its studies to the correlation between climate the spread of  avian flu!  

Where is the Avian flu?

Simple- 53 people have died of it. However they have not died of this virus as it cannot spread to humans - which every scientist has admitted. So what have they died of?  Look at the poultries in these and any country. The chickens are overcrowded, kept in filthy conditions and killed in the most filthy manner possible. They regularly suffer from cholera and most all of them get salmonella related bacterial diseases. The victims are poultry workers - people who live amongst filth and disease and work in the killing fields with their bare hands. How many people who work in the poultries in any Asian country die of salmonella poisoning . Thousands  - including in India.

Look at the words used by the media:

"A bird flu virus may mutate to a human form that becomes as deadly as the ones that killed millions during three influenza pandemics of the 20th century." Bird flu could become epidemic - 2/22/2005

"Hundreds of thousands of people may die and one quarter of the work force could be absent if Britain were hit by a bird flu pandemic..." Bird flu epidemic could kill as many as 750,000 - March 22

"The European Union's health commissioner called on Europe to protect itself from a possible epidemic of bird flu." EU warned to protect against bird flu epidemic - May 27

"The virus that killed hundreds of thousands of birds and dozens of people in recent years is about to mutate and cause a worldwide epidemic." WHO warns of worldwide deadly flu epidemic - June 12, 2005  

"International experts fear that bird flu is mutating into a strain that will cause a worldwide pandemic." Fears that new strain of bird flu will kill millions - 12 June 2005  

"A flu pandemic would be triggered if the lethal H5N1 strain mutated into a form that could jump from human to human. "China to shut borders if struck by bird flu" - October 28      

"If, could, may, fear that bird flu is mutating, about to mutate, may mutate, could become epidemic". Just "shock-n-awe" material to grab your attention. Our neighbours have it, say the Indian papers, regularly. Which neighbour? Duh... Which is the one paper that has taken this the most seriously? The one newspaper that sells every inch of its space - including the "news". Most newspapers ignore this nonsense - occasionally putting it in as a space filler. Why does India which sells the largest amount of eggs in Asia and exports the largest number of chickens all of which are kept in the same conditions as anywhere in Asia not have it? Because we don't have the money to import the vaccines. Once they are locally made by Ranbaxy, no doubt we will suddenly develop Avian Flu as well ! It is to the credit of India that we have not fallen prey to this scamming as yet. 

Here is the actual truth.

On October 28th the Chinese Ministry of Health and Ministry of Agriculture reiterated that China has experienced no human bird flu infection. The two children that fell sick with on Oct. 17 with symptoms of fever and cough of which one died (and this led to the killing of millions of birds) were later diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia. On January 24, 2005, newspapers in Vietnam reported that "three brothers in northern Vietnam who  MAY have contracted bird flu all drank raw duck blood at a family feast". Raw duck blood could give any disease - try it.

One human bird flu victim reported in Siberia. "We cannot say now if something out of the ordinary has occurred. The reason behind the accident could be bad water, feed poisoning, Newcastle disease or bird flu. More investigation is needed," ~ The Moscow News  

Even  WHO Director-General Dr. Jong Woo Lee, urging the world to prepare itself for the outbreak, betrays himself "The burning question is, will there be a human influenza pandemic. I believe, on behalf of WHO, that there will be. And right now the only one condition missing is the virus that is rapidly transmitted from human to human," said Dr. Lee.

WHO warns of human flu pandemic. How many cases reported in Europe so far by WHO? Not one. The only thing that is mutating is the propaganda line, and the resulting fear factor  

Let us presume that flu which has been in pandemic form for about several hundred years (how many times a year do you get it ? does the rounds again. Big deal.  Flu ( influenza ) is a viral infection that has a relatively short lifespan and causes problems for its victim in the form of several minor effects (chills, high fever, aches and pains, headaches, sore throat, mucosal irritation).  35,000 people get flu daily. Some die anyway if they have other complications. The great Global Threat is closer to what Spain's Agriculture Minister describes it as - "science fiction"  

Scientists in America are increasing airing their opinions about this "vaccine". A prominent radio show, The Diane Rehm show, was entirely about the "U.S. Strategy for Flu Pandemic." [ http://www.wamu.org/programs/dr/ ]

Some excerpts "This whole 'bird flu' issue is a total fraud. These tests are not for the virus but for the anti-bodies to the virus. This is a totally different thing. If an animal or person has antibodies to a virus it means that that animal or person has successively fought off the virus at some earlier time. If they are healthy they will still show the antibodies in future tests. That certainly does not mean they have the flu.

If avian flu becomes more than a threatened pandemic, it will have done so by political and economic design. This thesis is supported by current massive media misrepresentations, profiteering on risky and valueless vaccines, gross neglect of data showing earlier similar man-made plagues including SARS, West Nile Virus, AIDS and more; continuance of genetic studies breeding more mutant flu viruses , inside trading scandals involving pandemic savvy White House and drug industry officials, curious immunity of these pharmaceutical entities over the past century to law enforcement and mainstream media scrutiny.  

If Avian Flu is that serious and Tamiflu is the answer, why is Tamiflu only been sold to governments and not to the public? The answer lies here: About the time that President Bush was buying the "vaccine" he also announced that the United States must approve liability protection for the makers of lifesaving vaccines as American vaccine manufacturers had been hit with a flood of lawsuits. 

So government not only buys the drugs but they protect the manufacturers when the drugs are found to be useless ! Is there any other clue that this scam is mainly designed for pharmaceutical companies at taxpayer expense. . Bush and Rumsfeld, the people who led America into the Iraq decimation based on those mythical "weapons of mass destruction" have found another WMD as mythical - Avian flu.  Bush outraged Americans on both sides of the political spectrum when he announced his intention to have the U.S. military take over American cities hit by the avian flu! Bush has said no one knows when or where a deadly strain of flu will strike but "at some point we are likely to face another pandemic."  Avian Flu has become the new "terrorism" in place of Osama bin Laden and as usual bemused scientists and an easily led media will carry on with the game till the next bogey.  

Why have research scientists in the Western biogenetic field welcomed this fiction of Avian Flu. The Microular Virology at Cambridge University and the Roslin Institute in Scotland are involved in developing 'transgenic chickens' which would have small pieces of genetic material inserted into chicken eggs to allegedly make the chickens H5N1 resistant. This is what they say: "Once we have regulatory approval, we believe it will only take between four and five years to breed enough chickens to replace the entire world (chicken) population. We will have the patents on these chickens and control their products." It is increasingly clear that the entire saga of Avian Flu is one whose dimensions are only slowly coming to light.  

By the time you discover this fraud, taxpayer billions will have gone Indictments being handed down to Scooter Libby, the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States for lies and cover-up of information used deliberately to suppress the fact the Bush Administration had no 'smoking gun' to prove Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear arsenal. This new scandal is as outrageously criminal.  

Maneka Gandhi, December. 2005 

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Posted: Mar 1, 2006 11:11am

 
 
 
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