Sustainable Organic Gardening News

• Irrigation expenses loom as planting season begins
  Good luck to all the sustainable farmers this season. (spring 2006) Everyone look for local grown products at your area farmer's markets.
  
  
• New "Sustainable" Label Aims to Compete with Organic
  Tired of paying a premium for organic fruits and veggies? A coalition of farmers, environmentalists, and public officials is promoting an alternative that they say will be less costly: a "sustainable" certification system and label.
  
  
• KIDS AT RISK FROM PESTICIDES IN SCHOOLS
  A summer 2005 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports "significant increases" in pesticide poisonings of children in schools since 1998. Nearly a third of the cases were attributable to drifting pesticides from applications taking place off-site, while the majority were due to the use of insecticides inside schools. Study authors also addressed chronic exposure to herbicides due to repeated applications on school yards, saying "the potential for chronic health effects from pesticide exposures at schools should not be dismissed." A piece of legislation that would reduce these chemical risk factors in schools is currently stalled in the House of Representatives. Learn more and sign on to support the School Environmental Protection Act here.
  
  
• Global Seed Industry Concentration
  Corporate concentration in the seed industry is deepening with implications for farmers and biodiversity.
  
  
• Think Global, Eat Local
  Local sustainable agriculture initiatives offer advantages from three perspectives: human health and food safety; the strengthening of local economies; land, environmental and animal quality.
  
  
• USDA Admits to 1000 Violations of Mad Cow Rules
  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal food safety inspectors found more than 1,000 instances since 2004 where U.S. meat plants cut corners or violated regulations aimed at preventing the spread of mad cow disease, the U.S. Agriculture Department said on Monday.
  
  
• Environmental Toxicants and Developmental Disabilities
  With their underdeveloped livers and kidneys and their greater intake of food, air and water on a per bodyweight basis, young children are more vulnerable to the effects of environmental contaminants than adults.
  
  
• Everything Gets Worse With Coca-Cola
  In the end it was the 'generosity' of Coca-Cola in distributing cadmium-laden waste sludge as 'free fertilizer' to the tribal aborigines who live near the beverage giant's bottling plant in this remote Kerala village that proved to be its undoing.
  
  
• WHO Endorses GM foods in its New Report
  The recently released report of the World Health Organization (WHO) titled “Modern Food Biotechnology, Human Health and Development: An Evidence –Based Study” makes an unapologetic case for the acceptance of GM foods saying they can “contribute directly to enhancing human health”.
  
  
• Research strongly links poverty to obesity
  "It's not a question of being sensible or silly when it comes to food choices," Drewnowski said. "It is the opposite of choice. People are not poor by choice, and they become obese primarily because they are poor."
  
  
"The real disgrace of poverty [is] not in owning to the fact
but in declining the struggle against it."

-- Thucydides, "Peloponnesian War"


• Some Okies have a beef with Idol's latest title
  But some say the 2005 American Idol winner's image is taking a twist after she won a "World's Sexiest Vegetarian" contest this week...
  
  
• When the Wells Run Dry
  We use more oil than we find, and if producers are fixing their figures the end could be closer than thought...
  
  
• The Independent Science Panel
  The Independent Science Panel is a group of scientists from many disciplines committed to accountable, accessible and widely participatory science to inform public policy. The ISP is launching a project on sustainable agriculture. They are currently working to produce a report with recommendations for governments on how to make agricultural systems more sustainable.
  
  
• Humus and Humility
  Edgard Pisani, former French agricultural minister, visited Toronto a few weeks ago to launch the English translations of his two recent books. M. Pisani acknowledges the many errors of modern agricultural policy, including his own, and now advocates sustainable approaches.
  
  
• THE CUBA DIET
  This article from the April edition of Harper's looks at the remarkable success story of low input agriculture in Cuba. Sustainable, small scale and polycultural production, as the Cuban experience shows, is as productive as the industrial monocultures they replace. Cuba's sustainable revolution was forced - emerging from the food crisis precipitated by the fall of the Soviet Union. Numerous other tensions - environmental, political and economic, may force similar revolutions elsewhere. Their is much to be learned from the Cuban experience.
  
  
• Seeds of Distraction
  The biotech companies want us to consider everything except their motives.
  
  
• Small is Vulnerable
  The supermarkets could kill organic farming’s potential to revolutionise the foodchain.
  
  
• Journey to Planet Earth
  Journey To Planet Earth is a PBS series that dramatizes new ways of looking at the delicate relationship between people and the world they inhabit.
  
  
• Farmers Fight to Save Organic Crops  by Ben Lilliston
  Ben Lilliston is the communications coordinator of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. He is the co-author, along with Ronnie Cummins, of "Genetically Engineered Foods: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers".
  
  
• Planet Friendly.net
  A CONTSTANT source of information.
  
  
• Rice with human genes: pharming in California
  The Independent Science Panel (ISP) is a panel of scientists from many disciplines, committed to the Promotion of Science for the Public Good.
  
  
• www.SustainableTable.org
  Visit their special features section for breaking news, information on special events, collaborations with other groups, and special projects of Sustainable Table.
  
  
• Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy
  Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal.