Buckminster Fuller was one of the 20th century’s most visionary architects, whose philosophy of socially responsible planning and design has influenced cutting-edge technology research and public policy the world over, through the UN’s development programs and pioneering entrepreneurship aimed at lifting billions out of poverty. His vision was, in his own words, “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
So Buckminster Fuller made it his mission as thinker and designer to aim for a new paradigm in the use of technology, wherein the ancient and medieval assumption that the world could only provide for 1 in every 100 people to live comfortably could be discarded by the self-evident power of more advanced technology and economic balance, in which 100% of people could live in comfort, freedom and dignity. Metropolis magazine has called the prize “socially responsible design’s highest award”.
Scientists in Mississippi say they have discovered microscopic globules of hydrocarbons, i.e. petroleum, inside the outer shells of blue crab living along the Gulf coast. This discovery appears to show that oil has now entered the food chain. This process cannot be reversed, though measures may be taken to limit the spread of the oil deeper into the local and regional ecosystem.
Oil droplets have been found beneath the shells of tiny post-larval blue crabs drifting into Mississippi coastal marshes from offshore waters.
The finding represents one of the first examples of how oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is moving into the Gulf of Mexico’s food chain. The larval crabs are eaten by all kinds of fish, from speckled trout to whale sharks, as well as by shore birds.
Clean, safe drinking water is scarce for over 3 billion people across the world. At least 1 billion literally never have access to clean, safe drinking water, putting them at constant risk of severe thirst-related ill health effects, infectious diseases or toxic contamination. Over 100 countries face either sporadic or chronic crisis-level problems related to clean water scarcity.
Yet, over half of the world’s population is at risk for water shortages, with far-reaching effects. Lack of adequate clean water has serious health implications, including the prevalence of water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and E, and diarrhea. Globally, diarrhea is the leading cause of illness and death and 88% of those deaths are due to inadequate sanitation and availability of clean water. Water shortages also foment civil unrest and often lead to violence and regional conflicts, as we have seen in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, among others. Lack of water perpetuates poverty, increases the risk of political instability, and affects global prosperity.
Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.
But the most insidious and threatening long term effect is the erosion of the overall human food supply. With climate destabilization accelerating, arable land increasingly hard to come by, and grain harvests collapsing, the global food supply is under serious threat. Long term political stability, and the defensibility of political borders, is linked to a sustainable food supply.
Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.
A World Bank study has projected that the global financial crisis and resulting recession will plunge some 53 million people across “emerging markets” —like China and India— into absolute poverty, in 2009 alone. In China, tens of millions of people have lost jobs related to the export-dependent manufacturing sector.
Such a collapse in private fortunes for millions in the developing world could lead to major political instability, so China and other nations are on the lookout, ramping up security operations and domestic crackdowns on dissent or public gatherings. Unrest in China’s western Xinjiang province tied to repression of the Uighur muslim minority also has a socio-economic component, as Beijing steers Han Chinese merchants into Xinjiang with subsidies, while Uighurs remain poor.
It is thought the upheaval in response to Iran’s apparently manipulated vote, indeed the manipulations themselves, may be rooted in failing economic fortunes, as foreign wealth to invest in commodities like petroleum shrinks and jobs and wealth across the Islamic Republic are threatened.
A crop-borne fungus that targets wheat, named Ug99 because it was first identified in Uganda in 1999, has become one of the primary threats to global food security. Newfound virulence in the evolving stem-rust strain suggests the fungus could destroy as much as 80% of the world’s most widely grown crop: wheat.
Jim Peterson, who is professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Oregon State University in Corvallis, has called Ug99 a “time bomb” for the world wheat harvest. Ug99 has already “jumped the Red Sea” and has reached as far as Iran. Concern is spreading it will soon reach the Asian breadbasket of Pakistan, India and China, and will at some point spread to North America. It’s just a matter of when.
We often see that products we purchase that are “Certified Organic” are certified as such by achieving a threshold of 70% organic. It sounds great, but the problem is: what is the other 30%? We tend to assume that we consume foods or use products that are not so high as 30% industrial chemicals. And of course, 70% organic doesn’t mean 30% synthetic so much as 70% of the components are partly or at least 30% synthetic, depending on the case.
But it’s worth asking: how can we achieve products that are produced, packaged, distributed and brought to market, in such a way that they could achieve near 100% organic status? Are we counting the non-organic-quality industrial processes involved in burning fuel and creating plastics? Can we do without such processes? Would corn-based biodegradable plastics be a significant first step?
CafeSentido.com :: There are over 230 million people suffering from hunger or undernourishment in India. No other nation has so many people suffering chronic malnutrition, and the undernourished in India represent 27% of the worldwide hunger-stricken population. While India’s economy develops and the potential for an expanded middle class takes root, the total number of Indians going hungry has risen, despite the overall percentage of undernourished, as part of the whole population, having been reduced in recent years.
The current global economic crisis puts the most vulnerable in India at severe risk of persistent or even chronic hunger. Hundreds of millions of people living at the margins of a society in which the privileges of modern life are far from universal —people kept in a state of chronic poverty by countless socio-economic factors and often treated as the detritus of an incomplete political system struggling to comprehend its own massive responsibilities— simply do not have access to extra resources to cover worsening deficits in their food supply.
This means that a population the size of many nations may be facing the perils of a deepening condition of chronic hunger in a nation whose arable land is being diminished by huge dam projects, overuse and soil erosion, impromptu irrigation systems, hyper-expansion of water-use for non-sustenance purposes —industry, development and personal hygiene— and urban sprawl of a kind rarely seen in human history. Climate change is also putting India’s climate stability and water resources at risk, and chronic water shortage brings both the potential for tens of millions of water refugees and for outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
The population facing food shortage is roughly half the population of the expanded European Union. In fact, only China, India, the United States and Indonesia have populations larger than the 230 million undernourished within India. That population is actually about 5 million more than the combined populations of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela, Malaysia, North Korea, Taiwan, Ghana and Romania — all among the 50 most populous nations. So one could say that the number of malnourished in India encompasses the entire populations of 8 populous nations.
India’s food production and food consumption are both massive, by any standards, but the huge population makes the modes of distribution intensely relevant to the quality of life of hundreds of millions who find themselves at the fringes of that system. According to Time magazine:
India’s current food-distribution system is a legacy of the 1940s and ’50s, when chronic food shortages led the government to crack down on hoarding of produce by unscrupulous cartels. In 1966 the government introduced a new law that banned farmers from dealing directly with retailers and forced them to sell through licensed middlemen, called mandis.
India’s problem may be more to do with global harvest capacity and food distribution than with the nature of the retail sector there, however. India’s central plateaus are one of the world’s most prolific grain-producing regions. The country was saved from catastrophic famine in the 1960s by the so-called ‘Green Revolution’, which used modern farming techniques and highly efficient grain varieties to vastly increase crop yields, eventually making India a major exporter of grains. But in 2006, India was forced to import 3.5 million tons of wheat.
A long-running bellwether legal case in Canada’s farming industry, which has left at least one farmer unable to farm any crop variety of rapeseed (canola) —for fear of having to pay accidental royalties to bio-chemical giant Monsanto—, highlights the need for comprehensive reform of international seed regulation standards. The Canadian courts ruled that the individual farmer had to shoulder the burden of ferreting out any instance of “contamination” of his crop by pollen from nearby genetically-modified (GM) planting, as Monsanto held a patent on the seeds. The farmer, and those who support his claims, argue that there is no means by which anyone can prevent cross-pollination from GM plants.
In These Times reported in 2001 on the initial lower-court ruling that fined the farmer, Percy Schmeiser, for not reporting the invasion of his cropland to Monsanto and failing to compensate them for using their patented rapeseed DNA:
In a landmark victory for corporations heavily invested in genetically engineered foods, on March 29 a Canadian judge ruled that farmer Percy Schmeiser of Bruno, Saskatchewan must pay $105,000 to Monsanto for illegally growing the company’s genetically engineered rapeseed, from which canola oil is made. But Schmeiser says he never planted Monsanto’s seeds. “How can somebody put anything on someone else’s land, then claim it’s theirs and say, ‘We’ll take it. We’ll sue him. We’ll fine him’?” he asks.
In 1995, Monsanto put on the market a rapeseed that had been engineered to be immune to its Roundup Ready herbicide. This means a farmer can spray the herbicide over a planted field and kill all the weeds growing there, but not hurt the crop. The company sells the rapeseed- about half the rape planted in Saskatchewan in 1999 came from Monsanto seeds-but keeps the rights to the DNA itself. Thus, rather than save seeds from last year’s crop to use this year, as many do, and as Schmeiser traditionally has done, farmers must buy new rapeseed from Monsanto each year, and allow the company to inspect their fields.
A later Supreme Court ruling threw out the fine assessed against Schmeiser, which would have required him to pay the entire profits from his 1998 crop to the bio-chemical firm whose seeds had taken root on his land. In 2004, the BBC reported on the Canadian Supreme Court’s ruling in the case, again giving the victory to Monsanto:
Canada’s Supreme Court on Friday ruled that Percy Schmeiser, who was found to be growing the GM rapeseed in 1998, had breached Monsanto’s patent.
He had denied planting Monsanto seeds, saying they took root on his land through natural cross-pollination.
Logically incoherent as the ruling may be —many farmers not only resist using GM seed varieties, but argue they may be dangerous for the long-term sustainability of agriculture on a given plot of land, and view the “contamination” problem as just that, a wholesale invasion of natural resources like air, water and land, by a potentially harmful and unwanted pollutant—, it is instructive to note how powerful the logic of bio-tech patents has become, edging out even the logic of a clean, natural alternative.
The International Seed Federation has told the BBC World Service that once genetically modified crops are considered to be tested and safe, and have a growing and harvest history, they are treated as “conventional” crops, meaning that regulation of cross-pollination and “purity” measures used for conventional seeds can be applied. This is part of the logic that puts the burden on farmers, to be able to distinguish between seeds they have planted, and seeds produced by their own plants, but which were the result of cross-pollination from other farmers’ fields, planted with GM varieties.
With hospitals closing, funding non-existent, economy unraveling, political impasse and aid frozen, Zimbabwe is facing escalating risk of a severe cholera pandemic
Evelyn Winston Perez, CafeSentido.com :: The spread of cholera due to Zimbabwe’s foundering hygienic infrastructure is reaching crisis proportions. UNICEF is calling for an emergency fund of $17.5 million to fight the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe, calling the outbreak “a cholera crisis of unprecedented levels”. With 13,960 cases already declared and an estimated 589 dead to date, the UN warns upwards of 60,000 people could become infected if drastic and immediate action is not taken to contain the epidemic.
Aid groups are warning that many times more people may already have died from the disease, but that their infections and deaths are going unrecorded due to hospital closures and the collapse of Zimbabwe’s healthcare and communications infrastructure. According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper:
Oxfam said there were likely to be thousands of unreported deaths. “When you look at people who are already weakened by hunger, many already weakened by HIV and AIDS, and with rainy season comes malaria, and we know anthrax is spreading, it’s really just a recipe for disaster,” a spokeswoman said.
Itai Rusike, speaking for the Community Working Group, has said: “Phones are not working, nurses are not there, so their information system has collapsed. It is very difficult to tell how many people have died.” UNICEF is also warning that the severity of the humanitarian catastrophe cannot be underestimated, as 80% of the population of Zimbabwe has no access to safe drinking water.
The UK prime minister Gordon Brown told the press Mugabe leads “a bloodstained regime”, that the cholera outbreak means Zimbabwe’s crisis is “now not just a national emergency, it’s an international emergency”, which could “spill over, if nothing is done, into Mozambique, into South Africa”. Echoing the calls of other leaders, Brown quipped “enough is enough”.
In addition to Brown and other world leaders, South African archbishop Desmond Tutu has also called for Mugabe to “step down”, saying he should be offered a “soft landing” if he resigns and hands over power, but threatened with prosecution at the Hague for crimes against humanity, should he refuse to leave office. Mugabe is being blamed for an ongoing crackdown on dissent at all levels, which some say is worsening as the political stalemate drags on.
The Associated Press is reporting “Brian Raftopoulos, organizer of the Solidarity Peace Trust, said a number of activists have been abducted and protests violently quashed by riot police.” While the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai —who has been abducted and beaten multiple times this year by security forces— seeks to enter into a failing power-sharing agreement with Mugabe, the regime has refused to relinquish or share control of the police, leading to accusations Mugabe will use the police to impose his will indefinitely.
Mugabe’s government claims the cholera epidemic is being used to scapegoat the perennial president and blames sanctions imposed by “western” powers. Today, Zimbabwe’s information minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu complained “the cholera issue has been used to drive a wedge among us,” said the disease had been brought “under control” and blamed sanctions for the deaths experienced to date.
World Health Organization officials and regional governments suggest otherwise:
468 cholera cases had been detected in South Africa, nine of whom had died, and that Zimbabwe’s epidemic also had spread to Mozambique and Botswana. WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said the cases in South Africa were probably a mix of cholera already found in South Africa and spillover from Zimbabwe.
Experts say cholera is common in the region, as compared to other parts of the world, but that Zimbabwe had been better able to contain outbreaks before the startling collapse of its economy in recent years. Until now, the worst outbreak had seen roughly 3,000 recorded cases, according to Peter Lundberg, of the International Red Cross. By sheer number of infections, this outbreak is already 4.5 times as bad.
Joining the voices of Gordon Brown, Desmond Tutu, and Kenyan pres. Raila Odinga, US Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice has called on Mugabe to “leave”, blaming him for political violence, a “sham election”, and for sabotaging the process of forming a joint governing coalition with the opposition, who won more votes than his party in the first round of voting in this year’s election. Rice also blamed Mugabe for the socio-economic hardship and humanitarian crisis now facing the people of Zimbabwe.
