Genetically modifying and patenting seeds isn’t the answer

Charles Eisenstein writes: The great historian Lewis Mumford once described a patent as “a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention”. He was pointing out that we do not produce inventions ex nihilo, but rather draw on the totality of the inventions and knowledge that came before us.

It is no longer just the fruits of a centuries-long social process that are targets of patent claims. Through genetic engineering, corporations can now create and patent new life forms. Physicist Vandana Shiva, in a video launching the global Seed Freedom Campaign, calls this ownership of entire new species a form of slavery, and calls upon farmers and consumers to fight the privatisation of the genetic commons.

Could it be that she is being naive? Facing the spectre of world hunger amid continued population growth, maybe we will have to let go of our sentimental attachment to traditional farmers saving seeds, and transition to high-tech agriculture so that we can improve yields per hectare. After all, we cannot clear much more cropland at the expense of forests and wetlands. And to finance the enormous long-term investment necessary to engineer high-yielding, drought-resistant, pest-resistant varieties, don’t we need to enforce a strong system of patents?

This position seems reasonable, but it is fraught with assumptions that collapse under close scrutiny. First and foremost is the notion that we need chemical pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to feed the hungry. Surely each new innovation brings higher crop yields, right? Surely yields are higher when you kill the bugs than when you don’t, higher when you use improved strains than when you don’t?

Not really. Holding all other variables constant, certainly a large wheat field will produce more if it is treated with chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers. But organic agriculture, and especially permaculture and traditional peasant agriculture, don’t hold variables constant at all. Each farming culture adapts over time to the unique characteristics of the local soil, biome and climate. Farmer and land co-evolve over generations. Numerous studies show that when organic agriculture is practised well, it can bring double or triple the yields of conventional techniques. With intensive intercropping on mixed permaculture farms, yields can be higher still. It is a myth that mechanised, chemical, GMO agriculture maximises yield per hectare. [Continue reading…]

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Romney’s new freedom agenda draws praise from Bushworld

BuzzFeed reports: Mitt Romney’s foreign policy address offered the clearest articulation yet of his relationship to George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda, offering a vision distinctly shaped by Bush’s views, but tempered by difficult lessons of 11 years of American war in the Muslim world.

Bush’s foreign policy legacy, at a low when he departed from office in the throes of an unpopular occupation of Iraq and deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, is in the early stages of a rehabilitation, at least in some circles. Bush’s defenders see the Arab Spring as the outcome of his belief in democracy in the region and, some argue, his invasion of Iraq — a notion most of the the regional leaders of the Arab Spring reject. And they note that his failures to resolve the standoff between Israel and the Palestinian leadership was followed by Obama’s similar failure, while Obama has unexpectedly embraced some of Bush’s more muscular national security tools.

But it was Romney’s speech, and its echoes of the Freedom Agenda, that drew rave reviews from some of the leading avatars and supporters of the clear and combative foreign policy of Bush’s first term.

“Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney,” Bush’s first term Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted “He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”

Romney’s speech offers a new Republican articulation of the Bush doctrine of moral clarity, wielded — as Romney said — “wisely, with solemnity and without false pride” to “make the world better—not perfect, but better.”

“What’s not to like?” asked Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, a leading foreign policy hawk and backer of Bush’s war in Iraq, who called the speech “kinder, gentler neocon.”

Kristol’s fellow travelers on the neoconservative right were ebullient. [Continue reading…]

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Libyan prime minister stands down after no confidence vote

The Telegraph reports: Libya’s parliament ousted the country’s new prime minister in a no-confidence vote on Sunday, the latest blow to hopes that the country’s factions could agree on a government charged with restoring stability after last year’s civil war.

Mustafa Abushagur was Libya’s first elected prime minister after last year’s overthrow of dictator Moammar Gadhafi. He represented an offshoot of the country’s oldest anti-Gadhafi opposition movement, and was considered a compromise candidate acceptable to both liberals and Islamists.

But his proposed Cabinet was struck down by a legislature representing dozens of divided tribes, towns, and regions across the country, many of whom feel they are owed the spoils of victory over Gadhafi. He was forced to withdraw his first ministerial line-up under pressure and his second attempt to submit one resulted in his ouster.

In a short statement on Libya al-Wataniya TV after the vote, Abushagur said he respected the decision made by the General National Congress as part of Libya’s democracy but warned of instability if it takes too long to elect his replacement.

“There should be quickness in the election of the prime minister and formation of the government so the country does not slip into a vacuum,” he said.

He had 25 days from his Sep. 12 appointment by parliament to form a Cabinet and win the legislature’s approval, but that deadline expired on Sunday. The Congress voted 125 to 44 in favor of removing him as prime minister, with 17 abstaining from voting. He had just put forth 10 names for key ministerial posts Sunday when the no-confidence vote was held.

Until a replacement can be elected by the parliament, management of Libya’s government is in the hands of the legislature.

The Congress will have to vote on a new prime minister in the coming weeks. The incoming leader will be responsible for rebuilding Libya’s army and police force and removing major pockets of support for the former regime.

On Sunday, around 1,000 people protested in the capital Tripoli outside the congressional headquarters to demand that militias operating alongside the army end a partial siege of the town of Bani Walid, considered a major stronghold of former regime loyalists. They called for a peaceful solution to the standoff that has already sent families fleeing from the town in anticipation of a strike. [Continue reading…]

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Americans deserve a better choice in this election than the one they’ve got

Gary Younge writes: At a dinner table in Akron, Ohio, recently half a dozen Democratic activists took a break from trashing Ralph Nader for allowing a Bush victory in 2000 to discuss the material benefits of Barack Obama’s first term. One had been able to keep his children on his healthcare plan after graduation; another with a pre-existing condition had been able to move plans without penalty. Then there was an awkward silence, broken by the mention of the jobs saved in Toledo, 140 miles away, by the auto bailout. That brought us on to Republican Mitt Romney’s call to “Let Detroit go bankrupt“. And soon, the conversation is flowing as easily as the beer as talk turns to how bad things might have been – and could yet be – with Republicans at the helm.

Such are the cramped parameters within which Democratic loyalists converse. Questions about poverty, bankers, inequality, climate change or drone attacks are not engaged with a defence of Obama’s record on the economy, regulation, the environment or foreign policy but avoided with a threat: Romney. Speculation about what Obama might have done differently are met with arguments about what Bush did do wrong. Inquire if Obama will get more done if elected, and they shrug and point to the obstructionist Republicans in Congress.

Dare to prod further as to why anyone should vote for him given the likelihood that Republicans will win in Congress and they’ll take you right back where you started: Romney. Any question about the good things that might have happened as a result of Obama’s victory in 2008 is short-circuited by a response about the bad things that might happen as a result of his defeat in 2012. Hope curdled to fear. Everyone can tell you how things get worse; no one can tell you how they get better. [Continue reading…]

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Capitalism: How the left lost the argument

Slavoj Zizek writes: One might think that a crisis brought on by rapacious, unregulated capitalism would have changed a few minds about the fundamental nature of the global economy.

One would be wrong. True, there is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today, particularly as a crisis brought on by the system’s worst excesses continues to ravage the global economy. If anything, we are witnessing an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: Books, newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound, telling us of companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are bailed out by taxpayer money, and sweatshops where children work overtime.

Yet no matter how grievous the abuse or how indicative of a larger, more systemic failure, there’s a limit to how far these critiques go. The goal is invariably to democratize capitalism in the name of fighting excesses and to extend democratic control of the economy through the pressure of more media scrutiny, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, and honest police investigations. What is never questioned is the bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street and the World Social Forum dare not touch.

It’s no wonder, then, that the optimistic leftist expectations that the ongoing crisis would be a sobering moment — the awakening from a dream — turned out to be dangerously shortsighted. The year 2011 was indeed one of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around the world. A year later, every day brings new proof of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening actually was. The enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious fundamentalism; Occupy is losing momentum to such an extent that the police cleansing of New York’s Zuccotti Park even seemed like a blessing in disguise. It’s the same story around the world: Nepal’s Maoists seem outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” experiment is regressing further and further into caudillo-run populism; and even the most hopeful sign, Greece’s anti-austerity movement, has lost energy after the electoral defeat of the leftist Syriza party.

It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism, more wars, more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out of their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their lives, the first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which leads to a return to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the ruling ideology are not put into doubt. They are even more violently asserted. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s illegal drone war

Eric Posner writes: The Wall Street Journal recently reported on debates within the Obama administration about the legality of the drone war in Pakistan. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School and even more former darling of the left for his criticisms of the Bush administration’s aggressive theories of executive power, plays a prominent role in them. Koh apparently concluded that the drone war “veers near the edge” of illegality but does not quite tumble over it.

That is a questionable judgment. The U.N. Charter permits countries to use military force abroad only with the approval of the U.N. Security Council, in self-defense, or with the permission of the country in which military force is to be used. The U.N. Security Council never authorized the drone war in Pakistan. Self-defense, traditionally defined to mean the use of force against an “imminent” armed attack by a nation-state, does not apply either, because no one thinks that Pakistan plans to invade the United States. That leaves consent as the only possible legal theory.

But Pakistan has never consented to the drone war. Publicly and officially the country has opposed it. Before the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the CIA sent a fax every month to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency that would identify the airspace in which drones would be sent. The ISI would send back an acknowledgment that it had received the fax, and the U.S. government inferred consent on the basis of the acknowledgments. But after the raid, the ISI stopped sending back the acknowledgments.

Now what to do? The administration argues that consent can still be inferred despite the unanswered faxes. The reason is that “the Pakistani military continues to clear airspace for drones and doesn’t interfere physically with the unpiloted aircraft in flight” — meaning that Pakistan does not shoot down the drones or permit private aircraft to collide with them.

We might call this “coerced consent.” Consider it this way: You walk into a jewelry store and the proprietor announces that he will deem you to have consented to the purchase of a diamond tiara for $10,000, despite all your protests to the contrary, unless you use physical force to stop him as he removes your wallet from your pocket. Imagine further that he’s 7 feet tall and weighs 400 pounds. This is what a Pakistani official meant when he told the Wall Street Journal that shooting down a drone would be “needlessly provocative.” He meant that such an action would risk provoking retaliation from the United States, a risk that Pakistan cannot afford to take. Because Pakistan lies prostrate and endures the pummeling rather than makes a futile effort to stop it, it is deemed to consent to the bombing of its own territory. [Continue reading…]

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Wider war feared between Turkey and Syria

The Associated Press reports: Turkey and Syria fired artillery and mortars across their volatile border for a fifth consecutive day on Sunday, in one of the most serious and prolonged flare-ups of violence along the frontier.

The exchange of fire stoked fears that Syria’s civil war will escalate into a regional conflagration drawing in NATO member Turkey, once an ally of President Bashar Assad but now a key supporter of the rebels fighting to topple him.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had warned on Saturday that Ankara would respond forcefully to each errant Syrian shell that lands on Turkish soil.

Ankara’s warning was coupled by an apparent diplomatic push by the Turkish leadership to promote Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa as a possible figure to head a transitional administration to end the conflict in the country.

In an interview with Turkish state television TRT Saturday, Davutoglu said that al-Sharaa was a figure “whose hands are not contaminated in blood” and therefore acceptable to Syrian opposition groups.

It was not clear whether the Turkish stance was coordinated with other allies, but the candid remarks by Davutoglu suggested some consensus might be emerging over a future role for him.

Al-Sharaa, 73, a close associate and longtime loyalist to the Assad family, has been a controversial figure since the start of the uprising.

He appeared in public in late August for the first time in weeks, ending repeated rumors that he had defected. The regime has suffered a string of prominent defections in recent months, though Assad’s inner circle and military have largely kept their cohesive stance behind him.

Early on in the uprising, the Syrian president delegated to al-Sharaa, a skilled diplomat, responsibility for holding a dialogue with the opposition. A Sunni from the southern town of Daraa, birthplace of the Syrian uprising, al-Sharaa’s silence since the start of the uprising made him a prime candidate for rumors that he broke with the regime.

“No one knows the system better than Farouk al-Sharaa,” said Davutoglu, adding that al-Sharaa has not been involved in the violence and massacres in Syria.

The Syrian opposition is deeply fragmented, and various factions would likely disagree on whether they would accept him to lead a transitional government. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Turkey’s military launched a retaliatory strike after Syria fired a mortar shell into countryside in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay on Monday, a Turkish state official told Reuters.

It was the sixth consecutive day of Turkish retaliation against bombardment from the Syrian side of the border, where President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are battling rebels.

The exchanges are the most serious cross-border violence in Syria’s revolt against Assad, which began in March last year with protests for reform and has evolved into a civil war with sectarian overtones which threatens to draw in regional powers.

The Associated Press reports: The leader of Syria’s main opposition group says members of President Bashar Assad’s ruling Baath party can play a role in Syria’s political future as long as they did not participate in killings during the country’s uprising and civil war.

Abdulbaset Sieda’s comments Monday appear to be a softening of the opposition’s stance that it will accept nothing less than the complete removal of the Assad regime and its inner circle.

Sieda is the head of the opposition Syrian National Council, based in Turkey.

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With ‘sabotage’ charge, Iran takes hostile tone with U.N. watchdog

The Washington Post reports: Iran is ratcheting up pressure on the U.N. agency responsible for overseeing the country’s nuclear program, accusing its inspectors of engaging in spying and sabotage and threatening to restrict U.N. access to Iranian nuclear facilities.

So strident has been Iran’s criticism of the International Atomic Energy Agency in recent weeks that some Western officials fear that the country is preparing to officially downgrade its cooperation with the nuclear watchdog. The Vienna-based agency is the only international body allowed to routinely visit Iran’s most sensitive nuclear installations.

The IAEA’s notoriously troubled relations with the Islamic Republic deteriorated sharply last month after Iran reported attacks by alleged saboteurs on electrical grids serving its two uranium-enrichment plants. Since then, Iranian officials have alleged the agency was directly involved in the attacks, accusations leveled in private meetings as well as in public statements, according to Western diplomats and government officials briefed on the exchanges.

IAEA officials initially rejected the allegations as absurd. Since then, the agency’s internal assessments have been unable to confirm that the attacks occurred at all, according to two European diplomats privy to the internal review.

Iran’s nuclear facilities are known to have been targeted by saboteurs in the past, notably in a series of covert cyberattacks attributed to the United States and Israel. But the lack of supporting evidence for any IAEA involvement in recent sabotage has under­scored concerns that Iran is seeking a pretext for curtailing cooperation with U.N. inspectors, the diplomats said. [Continue reading…]

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Morocco’s ‘third path’ between democracy and tyranny

James Traub writes: When I was in Morocco this summer, I heard a great deal about “Moroccan exceptionalism.” Historian Abdallah Laroui has described Morocco as “an island” cut off from its neighbors by sea, sand, and mountains, making it subject to its own laws of development. For the last four centuries, Morocco has been ruled by the Alaoui dynasty, which claims direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed. Moroccans, it is said, revere the monarchy as an almost divine institution, and they expect the current Alaoui king, Mohammed VI, to be an active, engaged monarch, to lead the country and serve as the arbiter among its diverse interests, classes, tribes, and regions. The king, in turn, wants to rule, but not dominate, I was told, which is why he agreed last year to promulgate a new constitution sharply limiting his powers. Morocco, in short, isn’t like Tunisia or Egypt or Libya or the other countries turned upside down and inside out by the Arab Spring. It has, instead, embarked on “a third path of reform with stability,” as Mustapha El Khalfi, the government’s spokesman and its communications minister, told me.

Has it? Nearly everywhere else in the Arab world since the upheaval began in the last days of 2010, power has been seized after a traumatic convulsion, or the ruler has stood his ground by crushing a popular opposition. Absolute rulers, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, do not normally surrender their power without a fight. So Morocco’s “third path” would constitute a rare, and precious, form of incremental democratization. If it worked.

It’s true that the country has not only a new constitution but a new prime minister, Abdelilah Benkirane, and a new government, which is feeling its way, albeit very haltingly, toward a new modus operandi with the king. No one really knows, however, whether the king and his palace aides are prepared to let the new government succeed or whether the mild Islamists of the ruling Party of Justice and Development are prepared to challenge entrenched royal prerogative.

One morning I took myself on a tour of the 19th-century royal palace complex in the capital city of Rabat. Visitors cannot penetrate the interior. (Moroccans cannot even linger within the outer walls.) As I was walking along the facade past a great tiled doorway, a security official emerged to say, “You cannot walk any farther.” I smiled and said that I didn’t see a line. “No,” he said gravely, “there is no line.” That is today’s Morocco: There are still limits, and you may not know until you’ve transgressed them. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s suffering opens a door for Washington

Patrick Cockburn writes: Turkish artillery is firing across the border into Syria. Explosions have torn apart buildings in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, making their floors collapse on top of each other so they look like giant concrete sandwiches. The country resembles Lebanon during its civil war, the victim of unbearable and ever-escalating violence but with no clear victor likely to emerge.

In Iran, Syria’s most important ally in the region, sanctions on oil exports and central bank transactions are paralysing the economy. The bazaar in Tehran closed after violent protests at a 40 per cent fall in the value of the currency, the rial, over the past week. Demonstrators gathered outside the central bank after finding they could no longer get dollars from their accounts. Popular anger is at its highest level since the alleged fixing of Iran’s presidential election of 2009.

Will these events lead to a change in the balance of power at the heart of the region? Iran and Syria were the leaders for the past 10 years of the so-called “resistance bloc”, the grouping that supported the Palestinians and opposed the US-led combination that brought together Arab dictatorships and Israel in a tacit alliance. This anti-American bulwark was at the height of its influence between 2006 and 2010 after the failed US invasion of Iraq and Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon and Gaza.

At first, the Arab Spring seemed to favour the “resistance bloc”. Without Syria and Iran having to lift a finger, President Hosni Mubarak and President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali were driven from power in Egypt and Tunisia. And Bashar al-Assad seemed confident, in the first months of 2011, that his opposition to the US, Arab autocracies and Israel would protect him against the revolutionary wave.

Eighteen months later, it is the “resistance bloc” that is fighting for its life. Turkey is becoming ever more menacing to Syria and impatient of American restraint. After the US presidential election, Washington could well decide that it is in its interests to go along with Turkish urgings and give more military support to the Syrian opposition. The US might calculate that a prolonged and indecisive civil war in Syria, during which central government authority collapses, gives too many chances to al-Qa’ida or even Iran. It has had a recent example of how a political vacuum can produce nasty surprises when the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed in Benghazi last month. [Continue reading…]

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Rebels say West’s inaction is pushing Syrians to extremism

C.J. Chivers reports: Majed al-Muhammad, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, slammed his hand on his desk. “Doesn’t America have satellites?” he asked, almost shouting. “Can’t it see what is happening?”

A retired Syrian Army medic, Mr. Muhammad had reached the rank of sergeant major in the military he now fights against. He said he had never been a member of a party, and loathed jihadists and terrorists.

But he offered a warning to the West now commonly heard among fighters seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad: The Syrian people are being radicalized by a combination of a grinding conflict and their belief that they have been abandoned by a watching world.

If the West continues to turn its back on Syria’s suffering, he said, Syrians will turn their backs in return, and this may imperil Western interests and security at one of the crossroads of the Middle East.

This is a theme that has resonated in recent days, not just in Syria, but in Turkey, where the government fired artillery shells into northern Syria this week after a Syrian mortar round hit a Turkish town and killed five civilians. In Turkey, there is a growing sense of frustration shared by the Syrian rebels that the West, the United States in particular, called for Mr. Assad to leave power, only to sit quietly on the sidelines as the crisis transformed into a bloody civil war.

“We are now at a very critical juncture,” wrote Melih Asik in the Turkish newspaper Milliyet. “We are not only facing Syria, but Iran, Iraq, Russia and China behind it as well. Behind us, we have nothing but the provocative stance and empty promises of the U.S.” [Continue reading…]

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Who’s in charge inside your head?

David P. Barash writes: Providing room and board to other life-forms doesn’t only compromise one’s nutritional status (not to mention peace of mind), it often reduces freedom of action, too. The technical phrase is “host manipulation.”

Take the tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis, which causes its mouse host to become obese and sluggish, making it easy pickings for predators, notably foxes, which — not coincidentally — provide an optimal environment for the tapeworm to move into the next phase in its life cycle.

Sometimes the process is truly strange. For example, a kind of fluke known as Dicrocoelium dentriticum does time inside a snail, then an ant, followed by a sheep. Ensconced within an ant, some of the resourceful worms migrate to their host’s brain, where they manage to rewire its neurons, essentially hijacking its body.

The manipulated ant, in response to Dicrocoelium’s demands, then climbs to the top of a blade of grass and waits patiently and conspicuously until it is consumed by a grazing sheep. Once in its desired happy breeding ground, the worm releases its eggs, which depart with a healthy helping of sheep poop, only to be consumed once more by snails, which eventually excrete the immature worms for another generation of unlucky ants to consume.

It may be distressing to those committed to “autonomy,” but such manipulators have inherited the earth. Including us. [Continue reading…]

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