Our Green Pacific

Daily Kos: RAID on seeds (Life, itself) … by Monsanto
MONSANTO’S DESTRUCTION OF SEED CLEANERS AND THE IMMENSE THREAT TO HUMAN ACCESS TO SEEDS

I have been reporting on the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s raids on Mennonite dairy farmers, on the recent Ohio Department of Agriculture SWAT team raid on an organic coop, on the USDA’s terrible weapon against all farmers with animals (NAIS – the National Animal Identification System) – trying to give an idea of the destructive forces being used intentionally against non-corporate farming.

But unless one sees what is happening to seeds themselves, one misses the scope of things.

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Daily Kos: Chinese Melamine Scandal Far More Widespread Than Thought

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unbossed.com » Got rBST? Your Milk on Drugs – The Dangers of rBGH in Dairy Products
Got rBST? Your Milk on Drugs – The Dangers of rBGH in Dairy Products

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Food Crisis Set to Get Worse – Experts – CommonDreams.or

NEW YORK – The current food crisis causing hunger and starvation for millions of people across the world is not going to end as long as those who dominate the international grain markets remain unwilling to change their behavior, according to experts specializing in international trade and environmental economics.”

Business as usual is no longer a viable option,” said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based independent think tank. “Food security will deteriorate further unless leading countries can collectively mobilize to stabilize population and restrict the use of grain to produce automotive fuel.”

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Nation & World | Gore begins huge public campaign to go green | Seattle Times Newspaper
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore will launch a three-year, $300 million campaign Wednesday aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, a move that ranks as one of the most ambitious and costly public-advocacy campaigns in U.S. history.

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Scientists try to explain dismal salmon run

Amid growing concern over an imminent shutdown of the commercial and sport chinook salmon season, scientists are struggling to figure out why the largest run on the West Coast hit rock bottom and what Californians can do to bring it back.The chinook salmon – born in the rivers, growing in the bay and ocean, and returning to home rivers to spawn – need two essential conditions early in life to prosper: safe passage through the rivers to the bay and lots of seafood to eat once they reach the ocean.

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This is a great site.  It has diagrams and statistics and other interesting tidbits about the topic.

Great ideas for container gardening « Container Gardening

My experiments on growing vegetables in plastic bottles have been very convincing up to now. Not only all the species showed a good development (except for the cauliflower which was infected), but I am more and more convinced that this gardening method can be a significant contribution to the combat of desertification, hunger and pollution of the environment (less plastic in the household waste). It can efficiently be used for “desert gardening“.

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NGOs Wary of Doomsday Seed Vault – CommonDreams.org

BANGALORE – Agricultural non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in India and elsewhere are criticizing the newly-opened Global Seed Vault (GSV) at Svalbard in Norway as fundamentally unjust in its objectives.

The Barcelona-based agriculture lobby, GRAIN, with branches in major developing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, says a serious deficiency of the seed vault is that it deals basically with state and private-body depositors to the bank, thereby excluding the rights of poor farmers who cannot access these seeds.

GRAIN says the GSV’s ex-situ storage system takes unique plant varieties away from farming communities that originally created, selected, protected and shared the seeds. Farmers, it holds, do not know how to access the scientific and institutional framework involved in setting up the system and are excluded.

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Japan admits domestic contamination of dumplings

TOKYO — A Japanese local admitted on Thursday that pesticide detected recently on the surface of some Chinese-made dumplings packages are dichlorvos used in the store.

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Check out the video then, Take Action: Feeding dangerous cruelty to our kids in school lunches

WARNING: This video contains very graphic images.An investigation by The Humane Society of the United States at a cattle slaughterhouse has documented that animals too sick or injured to stand or walk—called “downers” by industry—have been kicked, beaten, dragged with chains, shocked with electric prods, sprayed in the face with hoses and pushed by forklifts in efforts to get them to their feet to pass USDA inspection. This unacceptable cruelty potentially puts the food supply at risk—at least 12 of the 15 identified cases of mad cow disease in North America to date have reportedly been downers.

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