Horrible wet day here at the moment and lots of midges as well as there is no wind, all in all a day to be indoors. I have been surfing the internet and found a website that I would like to share with you it has lots of ideas and to help save money and reduce waste here is the address:- http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/
I am awaiting delivery of the new clothes for the autumn for Sones and also some Fairtrade toys. There are so many toys nowadays made of plastic and mass produced that I thought it would be nice to have something a bit different and as an added bonus fairly traded to benefit the artisans who made them. If there is anything that you would like to see available at Sones do send me an email and I will try to source it.
I found a very interesting article by Mark Lynas in the Guardian about GM crops which the government is keen to reassess running to profit seeking multi nationals is not the answer the article suggests. Bio technology companies have historically made expansive claims as to what GM can achieve and the latest is that we will be unable to produce sufficient food to feed the world without GM crops.
I have reservations about this, the current food price crisis is only partly about
supply. Yes, falling harvests have affected the amount of food
available, and the recent severe flooding in the US midwest certainly
won't help the situation. But, as with oil, rising demand is the
biggest factor driving prices towards the stratosphere. As countries
such as India and China
get richer and adopt more western diets, they consume more meat,
sucking grain off the market to feed growing numbers of livestock. The
misconceived rush to biofuels has further intensified the problem,
gobbling up vast quantities of corn and soya in order to produce the
fuel Americans and Europeans need to feed their addiction to the car.
Underlying all this, the human population continues to grow, adding
another 80 million mouths every single year.
But look a little closer at the companies which are promising our
salvation and their motivations seem somewhat less than altruistic. According to the Canada-based ETC Group, big biotech companies have already filed some 532 patents on "climate-ready" genes
at patent offices around the world. I doubt these companies have any
intention of giving out free seeds to the world's poorest farmers:
instead, they seal up intellectual property rights in transgenic crops
and force growers to pay a licence fee. Traditional practices of saving
or exchanging seeds are of course forbidden. This concentration of
ownership of the food chain is not going to reduce hunger; it is much
more likely to intensify it.
There are also much deeper ethical questions around GM which have never
been addressed – and cannot be addressed by science, because they lie
outside the scientific arena. One is the question of whether it is
ethically justified to mix genetic material from completely unrelated
organisms, like viruses and potato plants. GM proponents constantly
argue that this is simply another stage on from traditional selective
breeding techniques, but this is clearly untrue. Mixing DNA from
unrelated species is an entirely different undertaking, and one which
raises all sorts of new risks – as well as deeper questions about
humankind playing God. In my view, the technology moves entirely in the
wrong direction, intensifying human technological manipulation of
nature when we should be aiming at a more holistic ecological approach
instead.
We need to keep asking difficult questions, and not be browbeaten by
emotionally manipulative advertising from profit-seeking corporations suggests Mark. There are many people seeking to reassure us on the question of GM but personally I don't think its the answer to all our problems although it is obviously in many peoples interest that it should be seen to be. What is your opinion?
Linda
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