voting with dollars

My guess is Monsanto basically was forced into stopping because there was such a huge, worldwide backlash to GE'd foods and Monsanto effectively owning the food supply.

The company announced the suspension at its headquarters in St. Louis Monday, saying that it had suspended development of the wheat, which would have been able to resist Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, primarily for economic reasons. The suspension means that it will also discontinue breeding and field-level research of the crop, as well.

What: Organic Gardening 102
Where: Lake Oswego, OR: Luscher Farm
When: February 21, 2004
Cost: $15 1-4pm

OG 102 is a continuation of Session I (you can sign-up for just this session!) and will cover: planting (companion, intensive, intercropping); fertilization (short and long term); pest management (preventative and emergency!); irrigation; diversified yields and composting. This mini-course is designed to give the organic gardener a basic understanding of holistic organic gardening. Covering a full-spectrum of activities for the avid gardener, this course will equip students with all information needed to start and grow a vibrant organic garden.

Not that I like paying high prices for stuff, but I'm to the point I refuse to buy much of any non-food items new because of how poorly workers are treated and how little information gets back to me. More specifically if I don't know where something was grown/produced/assembled I make a point of not buying it.

Big-brand fashion and food retailers are accused of contributing to appalling employment conditions around the world in a new study by Oxfam published today.

Using their power at the top of global supply chains, companies with ruthless buying practices are squeezing their suppliers to deliver faster and more cheaply, the aid agency says. The effect is to drive down wages and compromise the welfare of the workers.

"There is a widening gap between the rhetoric of global corporate social responsibility and the reality of corporate practice," Oxfam's policy director, Justin Forsyth, said.

The report, Trading Away Our Rights, gathers research from 12 countries and inter views with more than 1,000 workers, factory owners, global brand owners, importers, exporters, and union and government officials.

It adds to concerns aired by the government's food and farming tsar, Sir Don Curry, that the impact of price wars is being unfairly felt by those at the bottom of the chain.

Tesco and Asda-Wal-Mart, the British retailers identified in the report, deny the allegations, saying that they enforce rigorous codes of ethical trading. The report highlights examples from around the world of the pressure from international buyers being transferred by factories to workers.

What makes this promoting shade grown coffee even more important is it provides birds with steady habitat which is becoming rarer every year. Of course it would be better to stop the deforestation, but converting to shade grown coffee at least gives us (the birds and the humans) more time to set things right.

A shade grown coffee farmer stands in his coffee plot laced with orange, avocado, lime and scattered high-canopy trees. Birdsong rains down from above and the rustle of animals in the twigs and fallen leaves surrounds him on all sides. Dappled sunlight filters down and glints off the glossy green leaves of his mature coffee shrubs.

This vision is in sharp contrast to the sun-baked, acidified soil and relative silence found on standard full-sun coffee plantations, which must clear-cut the forest and use large quantities of toxic fertilizers and pesticides to keep their full-sun coffee productive.

Coffee is a shade-loving shrub and naturally-occurring varieties can only be cultivated under a canopy of shade trees. What we now refer to as "shade grown coffee" was the only way coffee was cultivated until 25 years ago, when new full-sun hybrids were developed that produced substantially higher yields for coffee farmers and allowed the creation of massive agribusiness-style plantations, which were not economically viable prior to this time.

The increased yields of full-sun coffee come at the expense:
* of the environment
* the flavor of the coffee itself
* of migratory bird populations, which have been decimated in the last 25 years.

Due to Soviet era policies to divert water for cotton irrigation, not only one but two of the largest inland bodies of water are very close to extinction. The Aral Sea has receded so much, that there is not a drop as far as the eye can see. The Aral Sea use to be one of the great fisheries of the world, now it is litered with ships stuck in the dried mud and surrounded by human misery on an immense scale.

Now, Lake Balkhash the second largest lake in Central Asia after the Aral Sea is drying up at a very rapid rate. The lake has already "shrunk by over 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles)."

The next time you buy that ultra-cheap cotton whatever, please remember the what is happening to the Aral Sea, Lake Balkhash, and all of the rivers and ground water supplies that are getting diverted to grow crops in the desert.

For better or worse, we get what we pay for.