The Globalized Valentine Flowers

I boycott all occasion-driven marketer's haydays. Xmas, Easter, Halloween, Valentines, St. Patricks. Stores filled with people buying crap that will be killing someone in the developing world because the planet cannot sustain everyone at this level of consumption and I have first choice. I loathe our disregard for where things are grown and who suffers so we can have what exactly?

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

Just by way of contrast, here is another article about 3rd world farmers, but this time it's about poor women farmers in India. They're finding success in growing food for their communities using traditional agricultural methods and local varieties of seeds rather than trying to grow cash crops for export using the high-input, factory farming methods with expensive and under performing hybridized or GM seeds the multinational agri-businesses and even their own government attempts to push on them.<br><br> <b>Poor Women Farmers' Crops of Truth</b><br><br> <i>Rhea Gala reports from a ‘backward' area of Andhra Pradesh where dispossessed women farmers have regained control of their destiny by promoting a diversity of traditional crop varieties</i><br><br> While in Hyderabad, India, I heard about the work of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) that is a beacon for sustainable agriculture. I took a long and bumpy bus ride to Zaheerabad in Medak District to find out more, and was well rewarded.<br><br> The DDS is a 20 year-old grassroots organisation for social development that works with women's sanghams (voluntary village-level associations of poor women, mostly dalits ; the lowest group in India's social hierarchy; sangham means union). Five thousand women from 75 villages in Medak District (60 miles from the Andhra Pradesh (AP) capital Hyderabad) have been helped by the DDS to prioritise their needs and through their own efforts, gain food security, enhance their natural resources, and provide education and healthcare for their communities.<br><br> As a result, the women have acquired a new self-esteem and a sense of solidarity, allowing them to regain their natural leadership status within their village communities. After 20 years and many successful initiatives guided by DDS's charismatic Director, PV Satheesh, these thriving communities are now increasingly in control of their natural resources including seed, food production, local markets and media.<br><br> On arriving at the main compound in Pastapur village, I was immediately struck by the energy, friendliness and warmth of the community, as individuals went about their business in a relaxed but purposeful way. There was a tangible ambience of vitality and ease. Mr Satheesh was in Europe, and Mr Suresh hosted my visit with inspiring enthusiasm.<br><br> “Discovering the core issues and realising the needs of the most marginalised women creates a social strength that can move mountains.” He said. “The women's achievements arise from ongoing discussions that initiate community-building activities. These generate the new skills and confidence that enable more needs to be met as they arise. For example, thousands of acres of degraded agricultural land, common land and forest have been regenerated. There are village crèches that feed young children nutritious local food and teach them traditional games and songs while parents work on projects. And medicinal plants are grown close to villages to provide previously unavailable healthcare.”<br><br> That was just the beginning.<br><br> <b>Food sovereignty is possible for the poorest people</b><br><br> The Medak District is a semi-arid area that hosts some of the poorest populations and the most degraded agricultural land in the whole of India, so it is remarkable that these women's sanghams have made so much progress. The diversity of the cropping system developed by the sanghams on these highly infertile soils has a huge significance for ecologically sustainable agriculture all around the world; especially as traditional skills have become marginalised and forgotten through national and global market forces.<br><br> Continued here; <a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk/PWFCOT.php">Poor Women Farmers' Crops of Truth</a><br><br> This story is from the UK based Institute of Science in Society (ISIS). For anyone interested in keeping informed about the issues surrounding sustainable agriculture, I'd recommend signing up for the free ISIS email newsletter. The newsletter comes out about once a week or so, and it frequently contains encouraging stories from different parts of the world about farmers who are finding success in rejecting high-input, unsustainable, factory farming methods and adapting their home regions' traditional methods and crops to grow healthy, nutritious food for themselves and their communities and doing it all in a fashion that will be sustainable for the long term as well. The sign up link is on the right hand side of the home page at: <a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk">www.i-sis.org.uk</a><br><br> More articles from ISIS on sustainable/organic agriculture are available here:<br><a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk/susag.php">www.i-sis.org.uk/susag.php</a>

That is encouraging Spanky.

This week my small community will be having a full day gathering for those interested in discussing and sharing our ideas and our skills for making our community self-sufficient. This really is the best way to take back our production of food and the way we want to do business. (Bartering and exchange)

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

I agree. We should advocate that the entire population of the 3rd world return to an agrarian society of subsitence farmers. That would be the best way that they can free themselves of the shackles of western imperialism. Maybe then they could feed themselves without massive western foreign aid. Additionally, they should wall up their states so none of our poisonous thoughts or technology reach them. Then, after they go through their own middle ages and reformation, maybe they will have the maturity in their society to eliminate their internal corruption, throw off the yoke that their current ideology holds their society to and be able to be sit at the table with the other world powers as equals. Sure it will probably take another 1000 years or more and probably halve their populations since they can't feed themselves, but that is a small price to pay to stick it to the imperialists and especially those nasty American neocons. After all, it has to be a neocon/corporate fascist behind the plight of the flower girl in the story doesn't it? Evil knows no other face.

Very funny Michael! Do you call the poisoning of millions of farmworkers with chemicals a "technology"? How about the forcing of untried, unproven GM seeds and foods on the world, endangering not only the health of people and animals, but also the reproduction of the natural ecology by these seeds and pollens? Apart from the increased chemical use poisoning the atmosphere. All for corporate profits, without any benefits to others.

I was involved in the early days of the "Green Revolution" when we were spraying the deadliest chemicals without any protective clothing, just as workers in the so called "Third World" countries are forced to do now. Our farmers and farmworkers are now using protection, but the residues are buried in the vegetables and fruits, making them stink and reek of chemicals, causing cancer and other epidemics we never had before. Is this "science", or "technology" ?

Luckily, I quit before the Green Revolution killed me, as it has all my friends I was working with. I went through hell myself, paralyzed for months, when the chemicals broke loose in my body and I wish all those "scientifically minded" propagandists would go through the same 4 weeks of hell I had to, without sleep, hardly able to move. I went through it and recovered, but I'd rather be dead than facing it again, so that some corporation can report "increased quarterly earnings". We didn't know any better at the time, but what's the excuse now. "Economic efficiency????"

And we didn't poison ourselves, and the land, in Asia, or Africa, but in England, 5 miles from Cambridge, where the professors were telling us that it was all harmless.

There's nothing wrong with subsistence farming which can easily be developed into very efficient, really scientific food production methods, even if at times the producers may need outside income. At least they can experience some personal freedoms and decision making powers, air and good, healthy foods.

Ask the 2 or 3 millions of Mexican subsistence farmers who were forced off their lands by NAFTA, now living in cardboard shacks, so their children can happily feed themselves off the dumps of Mexico City. And it happened in 5, or 10 years, not in 1000. How long before they can experience some, even limited freedom and eat reasonably healthy foods again ?

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Paragraph 1 - yep, I do call that technology. Just not a very good one.

Paragraph 2 - I'd rather die of cancer in my 80's than die of the flu when I am 6. That is the benefit of this much maligned technology.

Paragraph 3 - which corporation did you work for in the "Green Revolution" that poisoned you for the sake of profits? Is it still in business? Did you sue them? Maybe you should hire Erin Brokovich.

Paragraph 5 - if the 3rd world went back to subsistence farming, they would halve their populations due to starvation, or they would strip the land bare - especially India and China. There is simply not enough arable land to feed the population under the subsistence farming regime in those two countries. Furthermore, subsistence farming is good on a small scale, but it would be a detriment to their society on a grand scale. Perhaps that is why there is not 1 country in the entire world that advocates this principle. Except Cambodia back in the Pol Pot days... what a paradise that was. How many died under those policies, and how were the neocons implicated in that one?

Paragraph 6 - Mexican children were living in the dumps in the 1970's. Don't blame NAFTA for every damn problem Mexico has. They had a massive underclass long before NAFTA came about, and I remember programs on the dump children back in the 70's. I'll join you in saying that there needs to be reforms done to help the advantages of NAFTA be more fairly accessable to the Mexican people as a whole. I'll even go so far as saying Canada should be playing a major role in upgrading Mexican infrastructure to assist in this endeavor. Those subsistence farmers you lament, for the most part, were chicken and corn farmers who sold their products at market, and who found that their prices were undercut by mainly US products that were made cheaper due to economies of scale. I cry as much for them as for the US and Canadian autoworkers who lost their jobs due to plant expansions in Chihuahua and Guadalajara. Economies of scale. Not everyone is a winner. Not everyone is a loser. Only 3 regions of Mexico are winning in this equation however... and that is why I believe Canadians need to get involved in Mexican infrastructure.

Yeah lets get those third world farmers on board with the latest techniques in high-input, energy-intensive, soil depleting, aquifier destroying first world agriculture just as the world is about to hit a wall with <a href="http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php">Peak Oil</a> and the evidence continues to mount that the factory farming method we have come to rely on were built on a temporary bubble of easy access to cheap, highly energy-dense sources of energy (oil and natural gas) along with the destruction of our agricultural capital built up over aeons in our top soil and underground aquifiers.<br><br> <b>Making the World Sustainable</b><br><br> Mae-Wan Ho Biophysics Group,<br> Dept. of Pharmacy,<br> King’s College, Franklin-Wilkins Bldg.<br> London SE1 9NN, UK.<br><br> Institute of Science in Society<br> PO Box 32097,<br> London NW1 0XR,<br> UK<br> E-mail: m.w.ho@i-sis.org.uk<br><br> <b>Plenary lecture at Food Security in An Energy-Scarce World international conference, 23-25 June 2005, University College, Dublin, Ireland.</b><br><br> A fuller version with references and figures are posted on ISIS Members’ website. <a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk/membership.php">Details here</a><br><br> <b>Abstract</b><br><br> Decades of an "environmental bubble economy" built on the over-exploitation of natural resources has accelerated global warming, environmental degradation, depletion of water and oil, and brought falling crop yields, precipitating a crisis in world food security with no prospects for improvement under the business as usual scenario.<br><br> There is, nevertheless, a wealth of knowledge for making our food system sustainable that not only can provide food security and health for all, but can also go a long way towards mitigating global warming by preventing greenhouse gas emissions and creating new carbon stocks and sinks.<br><br> One of the most important obstacles to implementing the existing knowledge is the dominant economic model of unrestrained, unbalanced growth that has already failed the reality test. I describe a highly productive integrated farming system based on maximising internal input to illustrate a theory of sustainable organic growth as alternative to the dominant model.<br><br> <b>Current food production system due for collapse</b><br><br> World grain yield fell for four successive years from 2000 to 2003 as temperatures soar, bringing reserves to the lowest in thirty years . The situation did not improve despite a ‘bumper’ harvest in 2004, which was just enough to satisfy world consumption. Experts are predicting that global warming is set to do far worse damage to food production than "even the gloomiest of previous forecasts." An international team of crop scientists from China, India, the Philippines and the United States had already reported that crop yields fall by 10 percent for each deg. C rise in night-time temperature during the growing season .<br><br> The Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted in 2001 that the earth’s average temperature would rise by 1.4 to 5.8 deg. C within this century . In 2003, a Royal Society conference in London told us that the IPCC model fails to capture the abrupt nature of climate change, that it could be happening over a matter of decades or years . In January 2005, a group based in Oxford University in the UK predicts a greater temperature rise of 1.9 to 11.5 deg. C when carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, currently standing at 379 parts per million, doubles its pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million sometime within the present century .<br><br> The "environmental bubble economy" built on the unsustainable exploitation of our natural resources is due for collapse said Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute. The task of turning our food production system sustainable must be addressed at "war-time" speed.<br><br> He summarised the fallout of the environmental bubble economy succinctly : "..collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, expanding deserts, rising CO2 levels, eroding soils, rising temperatures, falling water tables, melting glaciers, deteriorating grasslands, rising seas, rivers that are running dry, and disappearing species."<br><br> In too many of the major food-production regions of the world, such as the bread baskets of China, India and the United States, conventional farming practices including heavy irrigation have severely depleted the underground water [7, 8]. At the same time, world oil production may have passed its peak ; oil price hit a record high of US$58 a barrel on 4 April 2005, and is expected to top US$100 within two years . This spells looming disaster for conventional industrial agriculture, which is heavily dependent on both oil and water.<br><br> Our current food production system is a legacy of the high input agriculture of the green revolution, exacerbated and promoted by agricultural policies that benefit trans-national agribusiness corporations at the expense of farmers [11, 12]. Its true costs are becoming all too clear (see Box 1).<br><br> Continued at: <a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MTWS.php">www.i-sis.org.uk/MTWS.php</a><br><br> See also the article <a href="http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html">Eating Fossil Fuels</a> by Dale Allen Pfeifer<br><br> <b>Soil, Cropland and Water</b><br><br> Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. Technologically-enhanced agriculture has augmented soil erosion, polluted and overdrawn groundwater and surface water, and even (largely due to increased pesticide use) caused serious public health and environmental problems. Soil erosion, overtaxed cropland and water resource overdraft in turn lead to even greater use of fossil fuels and hydrocarbon products. More hydrocarbon-based fertilizers must be applied, along with more pesticides; irrigation water requires more energy to pump; and fossil fuels are used to process polluted water.<br><br> It takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of topsoil.21 In a natural environment, topsoil is built up by decaying plant matter and weathering rock, and it is protected from erosion by growing plants. In soil made susceptible by agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65% each year. Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate.Food crops are much hungrier than the natural grasses that once covered the Great Plains. As a result, the remaining topsoil is increasingly depleted of nutrients. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from U.S. agricultural soils every year. Much of the soil in the Great Plains is little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops.<br><br> Every year in the U.S., more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging. On top of this, urbanization, road building, and industry claim another 1 million acres annually from farmland. Approximately three-quarters of the land area in the United States is devoted to agriculture and commercial forestry. The expanding human population is putting increasing pressure on land availability. Incidentally, only a small portion of U.S. land area remains available for the solar energy technologies necessary to support a solar energy-based economy. The land area for harvesting biomass is likewise limited. For this reason, the development of solar energy or biomass must be at the expense of agriculture.<br><br> Modern agriculture also places a strain on our water resources. Agriculture consumes fully 85% of all U.S. freshwater resources. Overdraft is occurring from many surface water resources, especially in the west and south. The typical example is the Colorado River, which is diverted to a trickle by the time it reaches the Pacific. Yet surface water only supplies 60% of the water used in irrigation. The remainder, and in some places the majority of water for irrigation, comes from ground water aquifers. Ground water is recharged slowly by the percolation of rainwater through the earth's crust. Less than 0.1% of the stored ground water mined annually is replaced by rainfall. The great Ogallala aquifer that supplies agriculture, industry and home use in much of the southern and central plains states has an annual overdraft up to 160% above its recharge rate. The Ogallala aquifer will become unproductive in a matter of decades.<br><br> We can illustrate the demand that modern agriculture places on water resources by looking at a farmland producing corn. A corn crop that produces 118 bushels/acre/year requires more than 500,000 gallons/acre of water during the growing season. The production of 1 pound of maize requires 1,400 pounds (or 175 gallons) of water.29 Unless something is done to lower these consumption rates, modern agriculture will help to propel the United States into a water crisis.<br><br> In the last two decades, the use of hydrocarbon-based pesticides in the U.S. has increased 33-fold, yet each year we lose more crops to pests.30 This is the result of the abandonment of traditional crop rotation practices. Nearly 50% of U.S. corn land is grown continuously as a monoculture.31 This results in an increase in corn pests, which in turn requires the use of more pesticides. Pesticide use on corn crops had increased 1,000-fold even before the introduction of genetically engineered, pesticide resistant corn. However, corn losses have still risen 4-fold.32<br><br> Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. It is damaging the land, draining water supplies and polluting the environment. And all of this requires more and more fossil fuel input to pump irrigation water, to replace nutrients, to provide pest protection, to remediate the environment and simply to hold crop production at a constant. Yet this necessary fossil fuel input is going to crash headlong into declining fossil fuel production.<br><br> Continued at:<br> <a href="http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html">Eating Fossil Fuels</a>

No doubt there are two ways to look at agricultural chemicals. There are those who are well acquainted with the short end of the stick who have had the pleasure of testing the limits of just how safe these chemicals are (yes sarcasm), and those who have the luxury, not having been closely acquainted with the fallout of shrugging at the plight of those who have suffered. Having been on the short end of the stick, like ED, I have little patience for the careless shrugs of those who evaluate the risk to all by merely what has been their limited experience and lucky circumstance to date.

Woo-hoo! We're all gonna die! The skies will open up and rain fire! Finally the neocons will get their just deserts!

Unfortunately, they will have the pleasure of seeing everyone else die first. Which is what they were scheming to begin with. Damn them corporate fascists!

The peak oil point came and past in 2003. The climate tipping point has now past. We are doomed I tell you! DOOMED!!!!!

Jeez, would the real chicken little please stand up?

BTW - can anyone tell me how you get a flower from Kenya to the US or Canada without it dying??? I mean, we ship fruit when it isn't ripe so that it ripens on the journey, so I get that... but what do they do with flowers? If they are kept in a darkened container for a couple days, they'd be dead. They can't cut them or they'd be dead before the ship left. Do they pot them and keep them on the decks so they don't die, or do they surround them in more nefarious chemicals (sorta like embalming fluid) to keep them going for the 10 day plus journey?

Michael,

I worked for Chivers and Sons Ltd. at Hardwick Cambs. They were, at that time, probably the largest jam manufacturing company in England. I don't know whether the jam part still exists, but their farm company is. At that time no farmer, or farmworker wore, or used any protective gear, on the advice of the professors and manufacturers.

You can find my English adventures by going on google and typing in "Hardwick Cambridgeshire" then "Hardwick History", then go down to People "Hardwick Faces & Places" with my drawings, then "Living in Hardwick", "Life on the farm in postwar Hardwick", with my stories and photos. Among others, you'll find the name of my good friend, George Happy Kester, who was killed by the chemicals, with multiple cancers in his sixties, within about 10 years after he started using them, with me as his helper.

I've never known any kids killed by the flu when I was one, neither have I heard of leukemia, or any form of child cancers, because they didn't exist. In the 12 years I went to school in Europe, I can remember 2 children who died of illnesses. I knew 1 old man personally, who died of cancer and heard of 2 more in my first 17 years.

The first time I heard of leukemia was when the comedian Red Skelton brought his little boy to England in the early 50s, to show him the world before he died of a "very rare illness called leukemia". The first time we heard of breast cancer we were in our mid forties, around 1970, when a young woman across the street in Vancouver came down and died from it.

Now look at the hospitals filled with children and women , full of cancers. What's causing them? I do know and so do my genuine scientist friends who are not on corporate and government payrolls.

Ed Deak.

Ed, if you want to change something, then do so. Sue these guys. There is no statute of limitations on this, especially since it killed your friend, and who knows how many others. Get together with any other workers (or their families if they are dead) and nail them to the wall. I don't know how long ago this was, so they may have followed all the testing requirements of the time (since stringent testing for cancers didn't come about until after WWII to my knowledge), but that shouldn't alleviate their responsibilities.

I guess you are right. When you were a kid, people were dying of small pox and polio. Too bad we aren't dying of those diseases anymore. Damn technology! Damn the manufacturers of the polio vaccine and their corporate fascist ideology of profit that has helped virtually eliminate the disease!

As for children killed by the flu, you need to look into the 3rd world. They die of stuff that doesn't kill us in the west, due to medicines developed by scientists both on and off the corporate payrolls. Dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, malaria, flu... stuff that technology saves us from by providing clean water, sanitation, vaccines, etc... There are many more people that die of the flu than are killed by AIDS and most of them are in the 3rd world.

Cancer and heart disease rates are truly on the rise (though I would strongly dispute your contention that they did not exist when you were a kid). I can't dispute that they kill a large percentage of people (particularly in North America), nor would I try. Heart disease I blame on unhealthy lifestyles (smoking, obesity) in conjunction with the chemicals we put in food/air/water. Cancers definitely come from the toxic environment that we create, so I think we agree on this. I don't dispute that our air/water and ground are poison, that we shouldn't dump as much chemicals on our food as we do. I do believe that we need to clean up our act if we are going to continue to live the good life and leave a decent planet for our kids. However, I don't believe that a return to an agrarian society will propel us further towards any sort of utopia, but it would in fact be a step back.

The people in the 3rd world need to stand up for themselves. Who are we to say that they should work on subsistence farms? When I visit the 3rd world, the people I talk to want many of the materialistic things that we have. I don't think that there is much chance that anything you or I say will move most of them back onto the land. Then again, who are we to tell them what to do at all? If they want to move onto farms, good for them. If they want to grow stuff organically and without chemicals, good for them (if they decide to sell it, they'll make a killing here). If they want to work on a flower farm, good for them. If they are somehow forced to work on this farm, then that's a different story. But I think they work there by choice.

I'm not sure, but I would guess their largest market is most likely Europe / Asia. I know that most, if not all of the florists in my area are supplied from local growers. Anything more exotic that doesn't grow here is brought in from South America or southern north america.

I used to live smack in the centre of London's (UK)largest flower market - and everything brought in to the market was UK grown. Florists would be there from 4am waiting for their day or week's supply of flowers. So, I really would be curious to know Kenya's market for roses.

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"It's a heck of a place to bring your family." —George W. Bush, on New Orleans, La., Jan. 12, 2006

a google search found this article on rose exports:<br />
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<a href="http://www.blonnet.com/2002/02/09/stories/2002020900241000.htm">http://www.blonnet.com/2002/02/09/stories/2002020900241000.htm</a><br />
<br />
seems like the largest clientele come from down under and Asia. The roses are flown to their destinations...<p>---<br>"It's a heck of a place to bring your family." —George W. Bush, on New Orleans, La., Jan. 12, 2006