Friday, April 23, 2010
2 Million Mysterious Deaths in the USA? Read about it!
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
WHAT? PREDATOR FISH?
I DO HOPE THE AUTHORITIES WOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS PRONTO BEFORE IT BECOMES COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL!!Invasion of the predator fish
By : Jennifer Gomez and Brenda Lim

KUALA LUMPUR: Local fish in ponds and rivers in Perak and the Klang Valley are in danger of being wiped out due to two highly aggressive predator fishes which are wreaking havoc in the
in Perak and the Klang Valleywaterways.
Pic Above: An angling enthusiast with a peacock bass. The peacock bass and zebra cichlid (below) are causing havoc with riverine biodiversity
Where these two predator fish are found, they have moved to the top of the fish chain, even attacking the original "king" of Malaysian predator fish, the toman.
And that is why local fishermen are hauling in fewer toman, haruan, sebarau and udang galah.
These predator fish attack in groups and their prey are known to beach themselves in futile attempts to escape being eaten.
DHI Water and Environment Sdn Bhd environmental consultant Mohd Zambri Mohd Akhir is particularly concerned about the threat posed by the peacock bass.
"Now you can find these fish in Chenderoh, the most downstream dam in Perak. If it enters the other river systems in Malaysia that has unique local species, it is going to cause irreversible damage," warned Zambri.
He said the peacock bass was already robbing riverine fishermen of their livelihood as the problem had been around for nearly a decade.
"Fishermen in Batu Gajah and Tanjung Tualang are already facing this problem as their income has been steadily suffering over the years.
"The supply of udang galah is also greatly reduced, depriving fishermen of a decent income."
The peacock bass is from the Amazon in South America and can grow up to five kilogrammes. It breeds fast and protects its eggs and fry, giving it a high survival rate.
The zebra cichlid from Africa, however, only grows up to palm size, but is known for its notorious feeding habits.
Fisherman Ishanorzaman Jaimit from Kampung Gajah confirmed that there were many peacock bass in the mining ponds and rivers in Perak, but said that they only ate the small fish.
There is also increasing demand for the peacock bass. Fishermen get RM5 per kg for it, while the middlemen sell it for RM6.50 per kg.
The peacock bass is not usually available in restaurants but it is known to make it to the dinner tables of fishermen and anglers who catch it.
Vincent Chin, owner of the Malaysian Fishing Net website, however, insists that the peacock bass is a real threat.
"It was brought into the country as an aquarium fish more than 10 years ago. It is a real nuisance because it feeds on local fish. They are vicious and attack like a pack of wolves," he said.
Another riverine fisherman, Muhammad Isa, said the zebra cichlid, nicknamed ikan belang for its distinctive stripes, was a bigger threat.
"The zebra cichlid is a bigger threat to the local species than the peacock bass," he said.
"In rivers and ponds in my area, the peacock bass is noted for eating only the perimpin (freshwater version of the ikan bilis).
"The zebra cichlid, however, eats most fry. Even if we haul in these zebra cichlids, we do not eat them."
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Manufactured Famine - Snatching Food from the Mouths of the Poor!
A new wave of food colonialism manufactures famine in Africa and Asia
By George Monbiot
The Guardian, August 26 2008
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendor and commissioned, among other extravagances, “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history,” between 12 and 29 million people died.[1] Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.
Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair’s favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world’s poorest people.
Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from fish.[2] Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population which ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; some two-thirds of these workers are women.[3] Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal’s stocks.
The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won’t confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to West Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country’s waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.[4]
In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheries agreements.[5,6] In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been looted.
The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew its fishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen — mostly from Spain and France — have found ways round the ban. They have been registering their boats as Senegalese, buying up quotas from local fishermen and transferring catches at sea from local boats. These practices mean that they can continue to take the country’s fish, and have no obligation to land them in Senegal. Their profits are kept on ice until the catch arrives in Europe.
Mandelson’s office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The dodges used by European trawlers would be legalized.
The UN’s Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU’s negotiations as “not sufficiently inclusive.” They suffer from a “lack of transparency” and from the African countries’ lack of capacity to handle the legal complexities.[7] ActionAid shows that Mandelson’s office has ignored these problems, raised the pressure on reluctant countries and “moved ahead in the negotiations at a pace much faster than the [African nations] could handle.” If these agreements are forced on West Africa, Lord Mandelson will be responsible for another imperial famine.
This is one instance of the food colonialism which is again coming to govern the relations between rich counties and poor. As global food supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last week the environmental group WWF published a report on the UK’s indirect consumption of water, purchased in the form of food.[8] We buy much of our rice and cotton, for example, from the Indus Valley, which contains most of Pakistan’s best farmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley’s aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow in the Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change. In some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through the diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all accrue to Pakistan.
Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations. The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT, which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets over “the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on.” Through “secretive bilateral agreements,” the paper reports, “the investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose during a crisis.”[9]
Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands of hectares.[10,11] This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: in Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope passed across the right desk magically transforms other people’s property into foreign exchange.[12] But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians are currently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can only exacerbate such famines.
None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but — in the short term at any rate — we will hardly notice. The rich world’s governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.
Friday, June 20, 2008
What's at risk: the future of human life on planet Earth
n this cartoon, the farmer character is fretting over something the entire human race is going to suddenly realize one day: Playing God with seeds and the food supply for the purpose of extracting maximum corporate profits is to plae the very future of humankind at extreme risk. Suppose the terminator gene crops somehow cross-pollinate staple food crops that now feed the world... what happens then? Imagine all the wheat grown in the United States suddenly self-destructing after a single growing season. Mass starvation would quickly ensue, followed by economic collapse, military action and quite possibly the collapse of the nation itself. And the same is true in Europe, Australia, Asia and South America, too.
This is what's at stake with terminator gene technology. For the sake of maximizing corporate profits, the Monsanto corporation is willing to place the very future of humankind at risk. But it's no surprise to learn Monsanto is behind this crime against nature -- this is the same corporation that tried to patent the pig, claiming it owned the genetic code of hogs. This is also the same corporation that promoted aspartame to the world by purchasing a company called Searle, whose CEO was a man named Donald Rumsfeld. He strong-armed the FDA to get aspartame approved as "safe," and we've seen alarming increases in brain tumors and neurodegenerative diseases ever since.
I believe there is no natural law that evil corporations led by greedy men will not violate in order to increase their own power or profits. Corporations have proven they will poison the environment, kill members of the public, bribe politicians, violate federal law, engage in competitive espionage, threaten critics, bribe the media, endanger lives, wipe out animal species and sacrifice the very future of life on planet Earth in order to squeeze out one more quarter of filthy profits. And they will do it with a straight face, while actually claiming they are "green."
There will be a day when the people will rise up against the corruption and overreaching power of the corporations. In time, they will reclaim their natural right to seeds, a clean environment, and natural health remedies. Today's patent laws -- which give ownership over virtually all commonsense ideas to corporations -- will crumble, and governments that colluded with corporations to strip power, health and dollars from the people will pay the price.
Until that day, of course, it's business as usual in the free market: Screw the people, violate the planet, desecrate nature and keep that share price propped up as high as possible. That's business as usual in the United States, a nation that has sold its soul to the highest bidder on eBay and now stands as an alarming historical example of what happens when a free market economic abandons basic ethics and human rights.
Must-see documentary: The Corporation. Watch this if you really want to know the truth about how corporations threaten the very future of humankind.
What can you do about all this? Grow heirloom plants, buy organic, non-GM foods and refuse to do business with corporations that use GM foods.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The Future of Food
Corporations like Monsanto are playing God with the food supply. Did you ever wonder what happens when all the genetically modified, pesticide-compatible, gene-terminated, laboratory-concocted Frankenfoods end up genetically contaminating the natural crops we depend on for a sustainable food future? In this comic, I explore this important concept by showing the plight of a farmer fretting over an empty bag of seedless watermelon seeds.
You may find this surprising to learn, but U.S. corporations have actually designed, patented and aggressively promoted "gene terminator" plant technology that causes second-generation plants to self-destruct. By doing this, the corporation can control intellectual property (seed patents) and demand royalties on seeds from poor farmers in third world countries. It eliminates the whole practice of "saving seeds" and propagating food from one plant generation to the next -- a practice that humankind has depended on for survival since the beginning of human history.
In doing so, this gene terminator technology is a crime against both nature and humanity. To deny farmers the ability to propagate seeds from one generation to the next is to enslave humanity in a system of corporate control that violates the laws of nature and God. Care to take a guess which U.S. corporation is engaged in this activity? If you guessed Monsanto, you're right. Click here to read news about Monsanto's terminator gene at the Organic Consumers Association.
You can also follow the news on this topic at BanTerminator.org.
If you buy seedless watermelons, or seedless grapes, or GM soy products, you're already supporting the corporations that are altering the food supply.
Seedless grapes are not natural, and they remove the very part of the grape that contains powerful cardiovascular medicine. Have you ever heard of the nutritional supplement called grape seed extract? Guess where it comes from? ... Grape seeds, of course. It's some of the best cardiovascular medicine known to modern science, far more potent than any prescription drug, yet with zero negative side effects. Yet food companies have removed it from the food supply and promoted "seedless grapes" as a benefit to consumers! (Of course, grape skins also contain powerful medicine called resveratrol, but grape seeds contain different medicines called proanthocyanidins and PCOs, which you can read about at the Physician's Desk Reference).
'Terminator Technology' Plants? Read On!
MONTREAL, Feb. 21 /CNW Telbec/ - Monsanto, the world's largest seed and agro-biotech company, made a public promise in 1999 not to commercialize 'Terminator Technology' - plants that are genetically engineered to produce sterile seeds. Now Monsanto says it may develop or use the so-called 'suicide seeds' after all.
The revised pledge from Monsanto now suggests that it would use Terminator seeds in non-food crops and does not rule out other uses of Terminator in the future. Monsanto's modified stance comes to light as the biotech and seed industry confront peasant and farmer movements, Indigenous peoples and their allies in an escalating battle at the United Nations over the future of Terminator.
The Future Of Food:
In 2000 the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)adopted a de facto moratorium on sterile seed technologies, also known as Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTs). But at next month's high-level meeting of the CBD in Curitiba, Brazil (20-31 March 2006) the biotechnology industry will intensify its push to undermine the six-year old de facto moratorium.
In response, over 300 organizations today declared their support for a global ban on Terminator Technology, asserting that sterile seeds threaten biodiversity and will destroy the livelihoods and cultures of the 1.4 billion people who depend on farm-saved seed.
"The world's farmers cannot trust Monsanto," said Stewart Wells, President of the National Farmers Union (NFU) of Canada Monsanto's broken promise is a deadly betrayal because Indigenous peoples and farmers depend on seed saving for food security."
Bad Seed: The Truth About Our Food
The Ban Terminator campaign today announces the names of over 300 organizations worldwide that are demanding a ban on Terminator technology.
Thelist of organizations and other background materials are available at www.banterminator.org
Friday, June 13, 2008
The End of Cheap Food
By Gwynne Dyer
The era of cheap food is over. The price of corn (maize) has doubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. The food price index in India has risen 11 percent in one year, and in Mexico in January there were riots after the price of corn flour (used in making the staple food of the poor, tortillas) went up fourfold. Even in the developed countries food prices are going up, and they are not going to come down again.
Cheap food lasted for only fifty years. Before the Second World War most families in the developed countries spent a third or more of their income on food (as the poor majority in developing countries still do). But after the war a series of radical changes, from mechanisation to the Green Revolution, raised agricultural productivity hugely and caused a long,steep fall in the real price of food. For the global middle class, it was the Good Old Days, with food taking only a tenth of their income.
It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade, and it may go much higher than that, because we are entering a period when three separate factors are converging to drive food prices up. The first is simply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow (about an extra Turkey or Vietnam every year), but as Asian economies race ahead more and more people in those populous countries are starting to eat significant amounts of meat.
Early this month, in its annual assessment of farming trends, the United Nations predicted that by 2016, less than ten years from now, people in the developing countries will be eating 30 percent more beef, 50 percent more pig meat and 25 percent more poultry. The animals will need a great deal of grain, and meeting that demand will require shifting huge amounts of grain-growing land from human to animal consumption -- so the price of grain and of meat will both go up.
The global poor don't care about the price of meat, because they can't afford it even now -- but if the price of grain goes up, some of them will starve. And maybe they won't have to wait until 2016, because the mania for "bio-fuels" is shifting huge amounts of land out of food production. One-sixth of all the grain grown in the United States this year will be "industrial corn" destined to be converted into ethanol and burned in cars, and Europe, Brazil and China are all heading in the same direction.
The attraction of bio-fuels for politicians is obvious: they can claim that they are doing something useful to combat emissions and global warming (though the claims are deeply suspect), without actually demanding any sacrifices from business or the voters. The amount of US farmland devoted to bio-fuels grew by 48 percent in the last year alone, and hardly any new land was brought under the plough to replace the lost food production. In other big bio-fuel producers like China and Brazil it's the
same straight switch from food to fuel. In fact, the food market and the energy market are becoming closely linked, which is very bad news for the poor.
As oil prices rise (and the rapid economic growth in Asia guarantees that they will), they pull up the price of bio-fuels as well, and it gets even more attractive for farmers to switch from food to fuel. Nor will politics save the day. As economist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute told the US Congress last month: "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's two billion poorest people." Guess who wins.
Soaring Asian demand and bio-fuels mean expensive food now and in the near future, but then it gets worse. Global warming hits crop yields, but only recently has anybody quantified how hard. The answer, published in "Environmental Research Letters" in March by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California and David Lobell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is quite simple: for every 0.5C (0.9F) hotter, crop yields fall between three and five percent. So two degrees C hotter (3.6F), the lower end of the range of predicted emperature rise in this century, means a twelve to twenty percent fall in global food production.
This is science, of course, so that answer could be wrong -- but it could be wrong by being too conservative. Last year in New Delhi, I interviewed the director of a think tank who had just completed a contract to estimate the impact on Indian food production of a rise of just two degrees C in global temperature. The answer, at least for India, was 25 percent. That would mean mass starvation, for if India were in that situation, every other major food-producing country would be too, and there would be no imports available at any price.
In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will help millions of farmers who have been scraping along on very poor returns for their effort because political power lies in the cities, but later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average income is heading for levels that have not been seen since the early 19th century, and it will not come down again in our lifetimes.
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Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
The Future Of Food!
There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America -- a revolution that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat.
THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.
Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world's food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.
Created by Deborah Koons Garcia and Lily Films, The Future of Food is the first of a series of documentaries Lily Films plans to produce dealing with the current issues influencing our food, environment and agriculture.

