Devinder Sharma

EVERY time I meet an agricultural scientist, especially those who are engaged in Genetic Engineering, I am shocked at the blatant manner in which they lie. They are not even remotely ashamed of telling a lie, although they know they are not speaking the truth.

I thought telling a lying was a prerogative of the agricultural scientists alone. But over the past few years I am noticing that molecular geneticists, whether they work for the Royal Society in London or Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi or even the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, have picked up the art (or should I say science) of lying, and that too right through their nose.
Genetic Engineering has surely come of age. It has become synomenous with lying.

It didn't shock me when I was told last week that the Royal Society in London had come out with a report, which warns that if Britain does not adopt GM crops, it should be ready to face hunger and starvation. Feeding another 2.3 billion people by the year 2050 and at the same time limit the environmental impact of farming would require GM crop research to be taken up vigorously, the study says.

Both the points stressed in the report -- producing more food to feed an additional 2.3 billion people, and the use of GM crops to offset any environmental damage accruing from intensive farming systems -- are simple lies. Neither do GM crops produce higher yields (in fact, the GM crops in market by and large produce less than the normal varieties), nor are they environmentally safe. World over the debate is about its biosafety and environmental impacts, and look at these scientists associated with the Royal Society, they don't even bat an eyelid before speaking lies.

Oh dear ! Where is science headed to? If this is the level to which the scientists can stoop down to, you should be ready for the worst.

What a climbdown? What a disgrace for modern science? I am so glad my children did not pick up science in their graduation.

The other day I was in a TV discussion on Bt brinjal. There were two scientists on the panel -- one from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the other from Jawaharlal Nehru University. If you had watched that programme, I am sure you would have been appalled at the number of times they lied. I was particularly very disturbed when I found one of them having the courage to tell a blatant lie, and that too starkly. There is no difference in the development of high-yielding crop varieties and the transgenics like Bt brinjal, the scientist said.

I realise that the GM scientists have a tremendous task at hand to justify what they are doing in their labs (and also outside labs, when they hobnob with biotech company officials). The mere fact that they have to resort to all kinds of lies to justify the tinkering of plant genome, and the mindless insertion of Bt genes in every crop they can lay their hands upon, speaks volumes about what is happening behind the closed doors of the GM laboratories.

I can cite numerous other instances when GM scientists have lied. But I think I would rather have you tell me if you were also faced with a pack of lies. GM scientists are liers, and let us make that public. We would be doing a great service to the society, to humanity, and to mankind.

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How the world would feed its hungry?

MORE than 1 billion people suffer hunger today, according to the UN. A crucial part of this complex problem is food production and distribution. Is it possible to increase food production in an environmentally and socially sustainable way? Can modernisation, research and investment enhance food security? Is there anything to learn from traditional knowledge? How do trade and energy policies affect the equation? And gender? Where and when is food aid really needed? Can the upswing of commodity prices be positive for some countries? How are farmers coping with climate change? Inter Press Service writers debate the issues.

The global economic crisis has led to an historic increase in hunger and undernourishment in the world's poorest countries, with broad consequences for political security and stability, according to two reports released for World Food Day, observed Friday.

More than a billion people are undernourished worldwide, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP). This figure includes 642 million people suffering from chronic hunger in Asia and the Pacific; 265 million in Latin America and the Caribbean; 42 million in the Near East and North Africa; and 15 million in developed countries.

"The most striking and shocking fact in this report is that now more than one billion people are going hungry," WFP spokesperson Bettina Luescher told IPS. "As an aid organisation, this is unbelievable and unexpected that today one in six people are going hungry."

The increasing levels of undernourishment have been a decade-long trend, the report says, which has continued steadily in both periods of low prices and economic prosperity - as experienced in the early 2000s - and high prices and economic downturn - as seen during the global financial crisis. This implies fundamental problems with the "global food security governance system".

"World leaders have reacted forcefully to the financial and economic crisis and succeeded in mobilising billions of dollars in a short time period. The same strong action is needed now to combat hunger and poverty," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf.

"The rising number of hungry people is intolerable. We have the economic and technical means to make hunger disappear, what is missing is a stronger political will to eradicate hunger forever," he said. "Investing in agriculture in developing countries is key as a healthy agricultural sector is essential not only to overcome hunger and poverty but also to ensure overall economic growth and peace and stability in the world."

The FAO emphasised that the current situation facing the world's poorest populations has deteriorated further during the global economic downturn. People already vulnerable to food insecurity are experiencing even greater difficulties now that food prices have gone up, migrant remittances have declined, and income and employment levels have dropped.

"I think what we're seeing is that people who have not much to do with the financial crisis are affected the worse. First they're hit with high food prices and then the financial crisis. In some places it may have taken time to hit them, but now they are being affected by it," said Luescher.

Over the last two decades, developing economies have become more integrated in the global economy, making them more vulnerable to global economic shocks and recession.

"The 17 largest Latin American economies, for example, received 184 billion dollars in financial inflows in 2007, which was roughly halved in 2008 to 89 billion dollars and is expected to be halved again to 43 billion dollars in 2009," said the WFP report.

"This means that that consumption must be reduced, and for some low-income food-deficit countries, adjusting consumption may mean reducing badly needed food imports and other imported items such as health-care equipment and medicines," it said.

Also in observance of World Food Day, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) released its own report reflecting similar trends to those discussed in the U.N. report, and offered a detailed map of the worldwide progress in reducing hunger in its Global Hunger Index (GHI).

The report evidences the slow progress in reducing hunger, with the GHI dropping by only one quarter since 1990.

Significant progress has been made in Southeast Asia, the Near East, North Africa and Latin America, but hunger levels remain high in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

IFPRI says that the countries with the largest percentage improvement in their GHI were Kuwait, Tunisia, Fiji, Malaysia, and Turkey. The countries with the largest absolute improvements in their score were Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nicaragua and Vietnam.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the countries with the highest levels of hunger, and the highest GHI scores, were Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone.

Noticeably, most of the countries with high GHI scores have experienced war or violent conflicts which have led to poverty and food insecurity, says the IFPRI.

Like the U.N. report, the GHI points to the link between the financial crisis and food instability as a key and complex problem to address.

The IFPRI also emphasised that fighting global hunger is a crucial step in addressing gender inequality, since GHI data shows that higher levels of hunger are correlated with lower literacy levels and less access to education for women.

The focus on food security is shared not just by the U.N. and NGOs with an interest in food policy, but also by massive charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which spends billions on public health challenges and development in some of the world's poorest countries.

"Melinda and I believe that helping the poorest small-holder farmers grow more crops and get them to market is the world's single most powerful lever for reducing hunger and poverty," Bill Gates said at the announcement of a 120-million-dollar grant to increase the yields of small farmers in poor countries.

"The next Green Revolution has to be greener than the first," Gates said. "It must be guided by small-holder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment." [Courtesy IPS]

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More food may not mean less hunger

Paul Virgo

ACHIEVING ambitious Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) production targets to meet growing world demands will not suffice to feed the world, and focusing too much on churning out crops may even be damaging, experts warn. The Rome-based United Nations agency said earlier this month that world food production must increase 70 percent by 2050 to nourish a human population likely to reach 9.1 billion. It said this can happen if developing countries, expected to generate most of the extra 2.3 billion people, increase agricultural investment by around 83 billion dollars per year.

But FAO's estimate that over one billion people, almost one-sixth of humanity, are suffering hunger in a world that today generates more than enough to feed everyone suggests that meeting this target is only part of the equation.

"We ask how we can feed the world by 2050, but what we should also ask is how we can overcome poverty by 2050," Hasan Sahin, programme officer of the Tehran-based Economic Cooperation Organisation tells IPS.

Marco Contiero, the genetic engineering and sustainable agriculture specialist at Greenpeace's European Unit, also thinks there is a danger of taking too narrow an approach. "The dogma that we just need to produce more is wrong," Contiero tells IPS.

"Of course we must increase production where it is at low levels. But we already produce lots of food and yet we still have one billion people going hungry, while 1.6 billion are overweight and 500 million are obese. This shows there is much more to the problem."

Some analysts fear the drive to meet quantity targets could lead to an increased use of large-scale industrial farming of a restricted number of crops - methods that have kept the First World well-fed but which might not be appropriate for developing countries.

One of the main reasons these methods may be inappropriate is that they risk further damaging the plight of poor people in rural areas worst affected by hunger, where a Catch 22 situation frequently materialises.

"When the prices are too low the farmers have no cash. If the gate price does not even pay for the calories they spend in their muscles on ploughing, that's nonsensical. But when prices are high, poor people become very vulnerable," Roberto Ridolfi, head of the European Commission's Europe Aid F3 Unit, tells IPS. "It's bad news for poor people no matter what."

Helping developing countries' small farmers to break out of poverty, on the other hand, could create a virtuous circle in which they stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution.

"We are not the ones who feed the world, the farmers are. What we need to do is motivate farmers to increase productivity - farmers need to be a major concern for us," Benyamin Lakitan, secretary of Indonesia's State Ministry for Research and Development tells IPS.

"The problem in developing countries is that farmers' prosperity has really not increased for decades. We need to put more effort into increasing farmer prosperity; that way farmers will help us to increase food production. Financial incentives for farmers is the key issue."

Ridolfi, who is in charge of the 1 billion euro Food Facility the EU set up to help the most exposed after the sharp rise in food prices in 2007-08, sees a need for three levels of action.

"The first is boosting production in poor countries, not everywhere. The second is ensuring small-scale investments are made at the community level, small dams, small irrigation schemes, small feeder roads, which are very important so that poor farmers can produce their goods and get them to market. The third is safety nets to ensure that vulnerable groups in rural areas are not in the position that they cannot work on the land."

Dr Warwick Easdown of the Taiwan-based World Vegetable Centre says there are several other important issues that are in danger of being neglected if there is excessive concentration on production.

"It's all about production and technology for production," Easdown tells IPS. "I think we've missed some key points; one is that some 95 percent of research done in the last 30 years has been on increasing production rather than reducing losses.

"If you're going to feed the world in 2050, it has to get into people's mouths. There is a big step between producing a crop and getting it into someone's mouth.

"In the area where I work, vegetables, where you are dealing with a lot of perishable crops, there are very high losses. Regularly it's up to 50 percent, even in developed countries we know the post-harvest losses are 15 percent. But that has received very little interest and very little focus.

"By reducing losses we can significantly increase the total amount of food available. So I think we have to look beyond the agronomist's perspective of just increasing production here."

Easdown is also worried that not enough attention will be paid to the quality of people's diets amid the furious rush to ensure there are enough staple foods to fill stomachs. He says this could lead to dramatic consequences in health terms.

"We are focusing on an awfully small number of crops, we have been looking at four major staples but you simply cannot survive on eating rice," he said.

"We know that in many countries up to 70 percent of all energy comes from one staple and that leads to very unhealthy diets. If we just go on producing more and more staples, that reduces agricultural biodiversity and reduces the quality of people's diets."

He also argues that some strain could be taken off the food system by combating over-consumption in wealthier parts of the world.

"Now we have more overweight and obese people than people suffering hunger, and yet we want to produce more food," he said. "In many cases there are people putting too much in their mouths but we haven't even looked at that." [Courtesy IPS]

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Kuala Lumpur declaration to criminalise war

SHAD Saleem Faruqi of the Global Research, November 6, 2009 wrote an extensive article on war crimes of America and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here are excerpts

Regardless of size or power, no country or national leader is exempt from international humanitarian law.

On Saturday Oct 31, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) heard the opening arguments from the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) about war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Commission submitted on many grave issues of international law of war and of humanitarian law, arising out of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the conquest of Iraq in 2003 by the United States and its allies.

There are well documented allegations that the invading armies used banned weapons of mass destruction, bombed civilian areas and committed mass murders. There were kidnappings, torture, racial and religious profiling and many other acts of savagery and lawlessness that satisfy the legal definitions of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

Furthermore, in a show of invincibility and impunity, then US President George W. Bush, by a White House Memorandum of Feb 7, 2002 exempted his nation from the binding provisions of the much-venerated Geneva Conventions, excluding (suspected) al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees from the Conventions’ protection.

The carnage in Afghanistan and Iraq continues but the Western world largely remains silent. Inter national institutions like the UN Security Council, the World Court and the International Criminal Court (ICC) look the other way.

It is in this context that in 2005, the KL-based Perdana Global Peace Forum hosted a number of international consultations bringing together legal luminaries from around the world. This resulted in the launching of the Kuala Lumpur Declaration to Criminalise War.

A War Crimes Commission was appointed to investigate allegations of brutality and to gather evidence. A War Crimes Court was set up.

The Commission took two-and-a-half years to trace and interview victims, gather evidence and research the law. Last Saturday, when the Commission submitted its case to the seven-judge Tribunal, two preliminary issues came up for adjudication.

First, does the Tribunal have jurisdiction to hear the cases? Second, can a head of state or government unilaterally exempt itself from any international treaty or convention (such as the Geneva Conventions) duly ratified by the state without first abrogating the relevant treaty or convention?

On both issues the Tribunal gave unanimous opinions. The Tribunal held that it has jurisdiction to adjudicate on war crimes in Iraq because of the Charter of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal. Its proceedings were also inspired by previous precedents of People’s Tribunals, e.g. the Sir Bertrand Russell Tribunal in relation to US War Crimes in Vietnam, the Tokyo Tribunal on Afghanistan and the Turkish Tribunal in relation to Iraq.

The KL proceedings are inspired by the noble principle that wherever there is a right there must be a remedy. The families of the 650,000 innocents slaughtered in Iraq in the last five years, the thousands more who had been tortured and the millions more who have been displaced have no remedy in national or international courts.

Their country is still under brutal occupation and it is inconceivable that any Iraqi court will prosecute members of the occupation force for war crimes. US courts have no jurisdiction in Iraq and some US judges have even feigned helplessness in relation to torture and unlawful detentions in US-controlled concentration camps in Guantanamo Bay.

The ICC has been approached with 240 complaints. Its chief prosecutor, a European, has most amazingly ruled that the complaints do not have “sufficient gravity” to merit prosecution!

The Rome Statute that created the ICC has a number of flaws that prevent the horrendous war crimes, the genocide, the crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression from being prosecuted.

First, the United States did not ratify the Rome Statute. As such, US politicians and generals are largely exempt from the jurisdiction of the ICC.

British and Australian citizens belong to a ratifying state, and as such are subject to the ICC’s jurisdiction but are being shielded by the ICC prosecutor because in his opinion their crimes of complicity lack sufficient gravity!

Second, for a crime to be prosecuted before the ICC, it must be committed on the territories of a member state of the ICC. Iraq and Afghanistan are not parties to the ICC Treaty and the bestialities committed there are, therefore, exempt from the ICC’s jurisdiction.

Third, the UN Security Council has the power to refer a non-signatory to the ICC (as it did for Darfur). But due to its geopolitical, racial and religious bias, the UNSC will not refer US, British, Polish, Italian or Australian citizens to the ICC.

Fourth, the ICC can investigate a case only if national courts fail or are unable to investigate a case. In the United States and Britain, only low-level soldiers have been prosecuted. The fact that the orders came right from the top is being ignored by the international legal system.

The Tribunal was also unanimous in holding that over the last 50 years, international humanitarian law has developed to the point that no head of state or nation can unilaterally renounce it.

If there is a treaty, it is binding. Even if a nation is not a signatory to a treaty or claims to revoke it, it is still bound by a higher customary international law that is universal and that cannot be disowned.

National sovereignty is no more the absolutist concept it was in the Middle Ages. Today, sovereignty is a shield against foreign aggression.

It cannot be used as a sword against one’s own people or the people of other nations. No nation can legislate to legalise wars, conquer territories, enslave populations or commit genocide, torture or crimes against humanity.

In the case of former president Bush there was an additional factor: in the United States, treaties are part of the law of the land.

The US president has no authority to abrogate the law of his country. Therefore, Bush’s memorandum exempting the United States from the binding rules of the Geneva Convention had no force in law.

The Tribunal held that in relation to crimes against humanitarian law, the status of a head of state does not constitute a defence. Nor is it a defence to submit that one was acting under the orders of a superior; this is the law since the Nuremberg Trials.

The lifting of immunity and the principle of individual criminal respon sibility are now embodied in a plethora of international laws and decisions. These include the UN General Assembly Resolution 95(1) of Dec 11, 1946; Article 13 of the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind (1991); UN Document No. S/25704 (1993); and Article 27 of the Rome Statute. The Tribunal has just begun its work. The road ahead is long and painful.

What is important is that there is a Malaysian initiative to remind the world that some rules of civilised behaviour bind all nations of the world, big and small. No nation of the world, no matter how powerful, can exempt its officials from the long arm of international humanitarian law.

[Programme details of the Conference ,the exhibition ,the Commission and the Tribunal the profiles of the speakers and other information pertaining to the event from these websites:
www.perdana4peace.org
www.criminalisewar.org]

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