Tag: GM foods

What's the Difference Between Fox News and Oxford University Press?

Published on Thursday, April 5, 2012 by?Common Dreams

by?Frances Moore Lapp?

Eighteen months ago I read a book that changed my life. Yeah, yeah, I know… sounds corny. But it’s not what you think. This book changed my life not because of what it said but because of what it didn’t say.
On a nothing-special summer afternoon in 2010, I sat in the Cambridge Public Library preparing a speech on something I’d been studying for decades. I plugged “world hunger” into the library’s computer.?Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know?popped up.
Perfect, I thought. I knew I would have differences with the book because I’d just read a critique of the views of its author, Robert Paarlberg, by my daughter Anna Lapp? on the?Foreign Policy?website. But I’m always eager to know how those with whom I disagree make their case. Noticing that?Food Politics?was published by Oxford University Press, I felt confident I could count on it being a credibly argued and sourced counterpoint. Continue reading “What's the Difference Between Fox News and Oxford University Press?”

Control by seed

To the rest of the world, Abu Ghraib is associated with inhuman torture, incarceration without trial and arrogant US unilateralism. To the farmers of Iraq, Abu Ghraib was better known for the national seed gene bank, started in the early 70s. In fact, Iraq?s most well-known wheat variety is known as ?Abu Ghraib?. The country precious heritage is now all but lost.
Facing the same unsolicited adversary, Syria is under a similar threat. The Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) is situated there and still holds remaining samples of Iraq?s threatened seeds. It is worrying because the planned destruction of Iraq?s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ?fertile crescent? of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq?s sovereignty. Continue reading “Control by seed”