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Benjamin McKeown

Why Ebola is terrifying and dangerous: It preys on family, caregiving, and human bonds. - 0 views

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health disease

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • 75 percent of Ebola victims are women, people who do much of the care work throughout Africa and the rest of the world. In short, Ebola parasitizes our humanity.
  • Its kill rate: In this particular outbreak, a running tabulation suggests that 54 percent of the infected die, though adjusted numbers suggest that the rate is much higher. Its exponential growth: At this point, the number of people infected is doubling approximately every three weeks, leading some epidemiologists to project between 77,000 and 277,000 cases by the end of 2014. The gruesomeness with which it kills: by hijacking cells and migrating throughout the body to affect all organs, causing victims to bleed profusely. The ease with which it is transmitted: through contact with bodily fluids, including sweat, tears, saliva, blood, urine, semen, etc., including objects that have come in contact with bodily fluids (such as bed sheets, clothing, and needles) and corpses. The threat of mutation: Prominent figures have expressed serious concerns that this disease will go airborne, and there are many other mechanisms through which mutation might make it much more transmissible.
Benjamin McKeown

Eyjafjallajokull Geography Case Study | Discover the World Education - 0 views

www.discover-the-world.com/...eyjafjallajokull-case-study

Eyjafjallajokull volcanoes

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 09 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Benjamin McKeown on 09 Jan 19
     
    "Eyjafjallajokul"
Benjamin McKeown

BBC News - Halving of malaria deaths 'tremendous achievement' - 1 views

www.bbc.com/health-30375202

disease malaria

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 09 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Global efforts have halved the number of people dying from malaria -
  • In 2004, 3% of those at risk had access to mosquito nets, but now 50% do.
  • scaling up of diagnostic testing, and more people now are able to receive medicines to treat the parasitic infection, which is spread by the bites of infected mosquitoes.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • An increasing number of countries are moving towards malaria elimination.
  • 2013, two countries - Azerbaijan and Sri Lanka - reported zero indigenous cases for the first time, and 11 others (Argentina, Armenia, Egypt, Georgia, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Oman, Paraguay, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) succeeded in maintaining zero cases
  • Africa, where 90% of all malaria deaths occur, infections have decreased significantly.
  • Here, the number of people infected has fallen by a quarter
  • despite a 43% increase in the African population
  • "These tremendous achievements are the result of improved tools, increased political commitment, the burgeoning of regional initiatives, and a major increase in international and domestic financing.
  • Most malaria-endemic countries are still far from achieving universal coverage with life-saving malaria interventions
  • Emerging drug- and insecticide-resistance continued to pose a major threat, and if left unaddressed, could trigger an upsurge in deaths,
  • There are also fears that the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa may set back the malaria fight.
Benjamin McKeown

Blaming natural disasters on climate change will backfire. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...mate_change_will_backfire.html

climate change poverty disparity

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 30 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Thus, the migration in response to the severe and prolonged drought exacerbated a number of the factors often cited as contributing to the unrest, which include unemployment, corruption, and rampant inequality. The conflict literature supports the idea that rapid demographic change encourages instability. Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with preexisting acute vulnerability, caused by poor policies and unsustainable land use practices in Syria’s case and perpetuated by the slow and ineffective response of the Assad regime [emphasis added].
  • suggests that an unprecedented drought accentuated frustration with the Assad regime and led to migration from rural to urban areas.
  • While climate change will probably increase the number and intensity of heavy showers, leading to more frequent landslides, intensive logging and government negligence in permitting new construction in these areas cause the real disasters.
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  • While global warming probably accentuated the torrential rains, it was actually policy failures that allowed heavy rains to cause the flood and human suffering: Over the past two decades, the city government has systematically disregarded basic principles of ecology and urban planning by building structures in flood plains and marshlands.
  • Climate change is often going to be the domino that falls. But that does not mean we can ignore the rest of the dominos in the row.
Benjamin McKeown

Kayapo Courage - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...brown-text

HL remote society environment

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 14 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • five officially demarcated tracts of contiguous land that in sum make up an area about the size of Kentucky. T
  • 9,000 indigenous people, most of whom can’t read or write and who still follow a largely subsistence way of life in 44 villages linked only by rivers and all-but-invisible trails.
  • Kendjam,
  • ...89 more annotations...
  • Xingu,
  • itself a major tributary of the Amazon.
  • shorts
  • kids wearing only
  • ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs
  • Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes
  • ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.
  • Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,
  • chief, Pukatire,
  • wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.
  • English he’d picked up on a trip to North America
  • dispute about logging.
  • Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.
  • a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.
  • ngobe, or men’s house
  • shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.
  • crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter
  • loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.
  • soccer ball
  • swallows; o
  • kingbird
  • evening baths,
  • caimans
  • persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.
  • In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.
  • 1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs
  • Ropni and Mekaron-Ti
  • organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure
  • even kill people caught trespassing on their land.
  • ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.
  • the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese
  • enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,
  • 1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.
  • Kararaô Dam
  • Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.
  • the Altamira Gathering.
  • Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”
  • e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.
  • shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.
  • hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.
  • based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.
  • 1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.
  • Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves
  • the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”
  • At least for the moment. It’s one thing to teach the skills and ceremonies of traditional culture; it’s another to inspire a sense of why knowledge of how to make arrow-tip poison (from herbs and snake venom with beeswax as an adhesive) or stack tortoises or stun fish using oxygen-depriving timbo vines might be valuable to a generation beguiled by iPhones and the convenience of store-bought food. Interest in traditional dress, beadwork, and ancestral practices is still strong in Kendjam, but it’s not uniform, and even if it were, the threats from outside are daunting.
  • 400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.
  • a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A
  • . The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.
  • n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)
  • two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors
  • a bow and arrows over his shoulder
  • Okêt a shotgun.
  • It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.
  • plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.
  • peacock bass and piabanha.
  • Bic lighters a
  • freshly whittled skewers.
  • flashlight.
  • he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”
  • his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.
  • Portuguese from missionaries
  • the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,
  • “Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”
  • “I am worried about our young people who are imitating whites, cutting their hair and wearing stupid little earrings like you see in town. None of the young people know how to make poison for arrows.
  • You can’t use the white man’s stuff. Let the white people have their culture, we have ours.’ If we start copying white people too much, they won’t be afraid of us, and they will come and take everything we have. But as long as we maintain our traditions, we will be different, and as long as we are different, they will be a little afraid of us.”
  • construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.
  • he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam
  • on the Xingu
  • Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.
  • the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.
  • nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.
  • ho still wear the lip disk
  • carried a wooden war club,
  • woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.
  • “I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”
  • the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.
  • money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.
  • he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”
  • More and more sad leaves were a part of Kayapo life,
  • specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.
  • pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.
  • In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”
  • FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.
  • , 26 eastern Kayapo leaders met in Tucumã and signed a letter rejecting further money from the dambuilding consortium: “We, the Mebengôkre Kayapo people, have decided that we do not want a single penny of your dirty money. We do not accept Belo Monte or any other dam on the Xingu. Our river does not have a price, our fish that we eat does not have a price, and the happiness of our grandchildren does not have a price. We will never stop fighting... The Xingu is our home and you are not welcome here.”
  • painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,
  • chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.
  • Can you be a Kayapo and not live in the forest?” Djyti thought for a while, then shook his head and said no. Then, as if contemplating something unthinkable, he added: “You are still a Kayapo, but you don’t have your culture.”
  • In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?
  • now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.
Benjamin McKeown

How Successful Were the Millennium Development Goals? A Final Report | New Security Beat - 0 views

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MDG

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “despite many successes, the poorest and most vulnerable people are being left behind.”
  • eport calls for better data collection practices to create a post-2015 development agenda that can overcome the MDG’s shortcomings.
  • number of people living in extreme poverty and proportion of undernourished people in developing regions has declined by more than half since 1990,
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  • The maternal mortality ratio has declined by 45 percent worldwide, and the proportion of the global population using an improved drinking water source rose from 76 percent to 91 percent
  • Those still left out, however, are increasingly concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and all across the globe, women and young people face the highest odds of living in poverty
  • Conflict and displacement is taking a toll as well.
  • While hunger has fallen in most areas, projections indicate that the prevalence of undernourishment in the Middle East will rise by 32 percent between 2014 and 2016 due to war, civil unrest, and increasing numbers of refugees.
  • Progress in maternal health is sharply divided along rural-urban lines
  • marginalized and easily forgotten amidst promising overall trends. “Millions of people are being left behind, especially the poorest and those disadvantaged because of their sex, age, disability, ethnicity, or geographic location,”
  • We need to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development,
  • “employment opportunities have diminished in both developing and developed regions
  • he employment-to-population ratio, which measures what percentage of the working population is employed, has declined around the world since 1990 with the biggest drops in East and South Asia.
  • rapid urbanization is taxing already-inadequate infrastructure. The proportion of the urban population living in slums in developing regions fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2014, surpassing the MDG target. However, the total number of urban residents living in slums continues to grow as a result of accelerating urbanization and population growth
  • Population growth and increased consumption have also stressed the environment, presenting challenges that overshadow progress on the seventh MDG
  • While ozone-depleting substances have nearly been eliminated since 1990 and the ozone layer is expected to recover by midcentury, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by more than 50 percent in the past 25 years
  • Between 1998 and 2011, the number of countries experiencing water stress increased from 36 to 41. Water scarcity currently affects more than 40 percent of the world population, a statistic that is only projected to increase.
  • For the global poor whose livelihoods are directly tied to natural resources and suffer the most from environmental degradation, climate change hinders development in other sectors. That’s why environmental change is a much bigger focus in the Sustainable Development Goals, set to be adopted later this year.
Benjamin McKeown

1st case of contracting Ebola outside of Africa - CNN.com - 0 views

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ebola disease africa

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 07 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • urse's assistant in Spain is the first person known to have contracted Ebo
  • treat a Spanish missionary and a Spanish priest, both of whom had contracted Ebola in West Africa. Both died after returning to Spain.
  • have had contact with while contagious. So far, there are n
Benjamin McKeown

Europe needs many more babies to avert a population disaster | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...pe-brink-depopulation-disaster

population migration

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 26 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • “We have provinces in Spain where for every baby born, more than two people die. And the ratio is moving closer to one to three.”
  • Spain has one of the lowest fertility rates in the EU, with an average of 1.27 children born for every woman of childbearing age, compared to the EU average of 1.55.
  • hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and migrants leave in the hope of finding jobs abroad.
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  • The result is that, since 2012, Spain’s population has been shrinking.
  • The paradox is that as police and security forces battle to keep them at bay
  • Record numbers of economic migrants and asylum-seekers are seeking to enter the European Union this summer and are risking their lives in the attempt
  • In Portugal, the population has been shrinking since 2010.
  • Portugal’s population could drop from 10.5 million to 6.3 million by 2060.
  • In Italy the retired population is soaring, with the proportion of over-65s set to rise from 2.7% last year to 18.8% in 2050.
  • Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world: 8.2 per 1,000 population between 2008 and 2013,
  • On average, Britain’s population grew at a faster rate over the last decade than it has done over the last 50 years.
  • a direct threat to economic growth as well as pensions, healthcare and social services.
  • the grey vote.
  • “During the same time frame, expenditures on pensions rose by more than 40%. We’re moving closer to being a gerontocratic society – it’s a government of the old.”
  • In 2012, the regional government launched a multi-pronged initiative to address the falling fertility rate, with plans to roll out measures such as home and transport subsidies for families and radio advertisements urging women to have more children.
  • The region of Galicia is one of the few in Spain that has addressed the issue.
  • “these issues will only be solved by a miracle.”
  • ack of financial security that prompts many Italians to live with their parents well into their 30s. The difficulty for mothers to return to the workplace also means women must make considerable sacrifices if they decide to have children.
  • give low-income couples a monthly “baby bonus” of €80
  • The youth jobless rate hit 44.2% in June, while overall it stood at 12.3%.
  • By 2060 the government expects the population to plunge from 81 million to 67 million,
  • In order to offset this shortage, Germany needs to welcome an average of 533,000 immigrants every year, which perhaps gives context to the estimate that 800,000 refugees are due to come to Germany this year.
  • Only Scandinavia appears to be weathering the demographic storm with any success, partly thanks to generous parental leave systems, stable economies, and, in the cases of Sweden and Norway, high net immigration.
  • n Sweden it is possible to combine motherhood with a working life,”
Benjamin McKeown

Immigration Should Be About Culture and Assimilation (and the Joy of Becoming American)... - 0 views

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migration HL response anti-globalization culture

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Were we to allow America’s ideals to be radically changed over time by outsiders coming in, the case could then be made that America as founded no longer exists. At that point we may as well change the name to not denigrate what American once was.
  • History compels us not to let America die by the noose of multiculturalism.
Benjamin McKeown

Louisiana five years after BP oil spill: 'It's not going back to normal no time soon' |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...years-not-going-back-to-normal

BP oil hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • the restaurants are still empty, FOR SALE signs are increasing in store windows, people are still moving away, and this marina on Pointe a la Hache – once packed most afternoons with oystermen bringing in their catch on their small boats, high school kids earning a few bucks unloading the sacks, and 18-wheelers backed up by the dozen to carry them away – is completely devoid of life, save one man, 69-year-old Clarence Duplessis, who cleans his boat to pass the time.
  • While some phenomena in the Gulf – people getting sick, fishing nets coming back empty – are hard to definitively pin on BP – experts say the signs of ecological and economic loss that followed the spill are deeply concerning for the future of the Gulf. Meanwhile, BP has pushed back hard on the notion that the effects of its disaster are much to worry about, spending millions on PR and commercials to convince Gulf residents everything will be OK.
  • the Gulf is recovering faster than expected,” Geoff Morrell, a BP senior vice-president for communications, said in an email.
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  • depleted oyster beds could be due to a variety of factors other than the spill – including the divergence of fresh water from the Mississippi into coastal marshes.
  • Anxiety seems to be the most prevalent emotion in this part of the state. Every cough and every cancer screening, every paltry catch and shrimp missing an eye raises the question – is it BP?
  • oystermen say their catches plummeted after the spill, and have only been getting worse.
  • In total, BP has so far spent $27bn in economic claims, its disaster response efforts, fines to various governments, and cleanup and restoration programs.
  • The company has been sued by dozens of entities since the Deepwater Horizon spill, including state, local and federal governments, and individuals claiming economic loss. It has so far agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines and plead guilty to a host of criminal charges, including felony manslaughter.
  • total just under $10 billion to businesses suffering because of the spill, but has fought the interpretation of that agreement at every step, claiming it it too easy for businesses without any proof of the spill directly causing damage to their bottom lines to win claims. The Supreme Court recently rejected BP’s bid to hear their challenge to that case.
  • the average claim for his association’s members ranged from a couple thousand to about $25,000. That, he says, is paltry when compared to the years-long recovery he sees ahead of him.
  • “My Facebook feed is filled with my friends’ pictures of crabs with no eyes, shrimp and crawfish with one eye or things missing,” Misty Fisher, 24, said.
  • Southern Louisiana’s economy hasn’t only been ravaged by the spill, but by multiple hurricanes and the ever-encroaching coastline: Louisiana is losing a football field worth of wetlands every 48 minutes thanks to a combination of global warming and a history of oil companies failing to remediate the canals they dredge for pipelines and oil and gas production.
  • Fisher and her fellow waitresses say they all know people who are sick – respiratory infections, breast cancers, constant headaches – which they blame on the spill.
Benjamin McKeown

The Quinoa Quarrel - Food and Environment Reporting Network - 0 views

thefern.org/...quinoa-quarrel

quinoa food food security

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • But at same time, what’s happening to Bolivian potato farmers? They have cheap industrial potatoes dumped into their market, so they can’t compete. They can’t make a living. They have to work in mines or migrate to cities. ”
  • to import useful qualities from the wild varieties, such as heat tolerance and pest resistance.
  • Of course, seeds from Bolivia and other Andean nations would offer a more easily accessible source of genetic diversity—but they’re not available.
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  • Must the whole world “start paying the Iranians a premium for every bushel of wheat,” he asks, “because their Iranian ancestors were the ones that domesticated it?”
  • “If you ask for one crop that can save the world and address climate change, nutrition, all these things—the answer is quinoa. There’s no doubt about it.”
  • “When we’re talking about people who die every day because they don’t have enough to eat, then I think that sharing is a must.”
  • While the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a handful of governments around the world hold small, freely shared collections, most varities of quinoa are off-limits. Who is to blame? It’s not the usual suspect— some multinational corporation with a full portfolio of patents and evil intentions. This time, the germplasm is being withheld by the Andean nations themselves.
  • Jellen pictured quinoa granola bars “in every Walmart in America.” But there was no way to meet this demand as long as the Andean nations refused to facilitate production outside their borders while lacking the infrastructure to supply additional demand themselves.
  • she has finally adapted the plant well enough to be able to provide farmers with seed later this year.
  • “Quinoa has been in a nursery kind of environment,” he explains. “Now it’s about to go out into the urban jungle, so to speak. It’s about to land in Times Square, and it’s going to have to fend for itself.”
  • “To think we can take a couple of Chilean quinoa strains and grow them in Iowa—it just doesn’t work that way,” Jellen tells me. “There’s always a disease right around the corner, and the big game in plant breeding is to be one step ahead of that.”
  • which is why Jellen favors the “free and fair” exchange of germplasm. He will gladly share his genetic material with any interested parties—Americans, Moroccans, Bolivians. “I’d give that seed to Monsanto if they wanted to use it.”
  • For decades, Bolivia did share its quinoa germplasm.
  • To make a hybrid, one plant is used to fertilize another. In the case of corn, which naturally cross-pollinates with its neighbors, this is easy. But where corn is promiscuous, quinoa is practically abstinent, what plant breeders call a “selfer”: the female part of the plant is fertilized almost exclusively by the male part of the same plant. In order for the two plants to be mated, then, the “female” must first be emasculated by the removal of its male reproductive organs. Because quinoa flowers are tiny and numerous, this is extremely difficult work.
  • hybrid quinoa,
  • Farmers in Bolivia were furious. The researchers had found the cytoplasm in plants they were growing in Colorado, but their seed had originated on the Altiplano.
  • “all the countries of the world not to recognize this patent because the male sterile plant, the knowledge and maintenance of its genetic diversity, is the property of the indigenous peoples of the Andes.” Read: quinoa belongs to us.
  • If the cytoplasm identified by Ward and Johnson allowed the efficient creation of hybrids, wouldn’t that serve as an incentive for seed companies to invest in improving quinoa? And wouldn’t the primary beneficiaries of that investment be the quinoa farmers themselves?
  • This thinking reflects the modern mind-set of American plant breeding. Until the 1980s, improving crops was a mostly public endeavor; in the United States, it was underwritten by tax-payers. But as public involvement with agriculture waned and intellectual-property rights began to generate much greater profits for seed companies, plant breeding became largely privatized. Today it is ownership, in the form of patents and licensing agreements, that makes the wheels of progress turn.
  • hey see intellectual-property rights as reasonable arrangements that allow those in the plant-breeding industry to recoup the often enormous sums they invest in research and development.
  • General Mills has declined to support the crop’s development until there’s sufficient supply for a cereal line.
  • Maughan has approached his former employers at Monsanto, making personal appeals for research support, but they are not interested. Even with its star on the rise, quinoa is still too small to be a good investment.
  • For instance, they have identified crucial genes that make possible quinoa’s extraordinary tolerance of salt. If that mechanism could be engineered into corn, it could revolutionize food production around the world. The same goes for quinoa’s ability to withstand drought. These innovations could be invaluable to global food security. They could also be stupendously profitable— and almost certainly patentable.
  • cytoplasm had proved of no commercial value.
  • No one I spoke with in Bolivia denied that poor communities around the world could benefit from quinoa. But once the germplasm is shared, there’s no way to ensure that it won’t be made into something that’s patented.
  • he Bolivians needed to own quinoa so that somebody else couldn’t.
  • Even state ownership, meant to protect a crop like quinoa from corporate predation, tends to work against the larger goal of promoting genetic diversity. Take Bolivia’s genetic-conservation program. In a shift mandated by the 2009 constitution, the government nationalized the quinoa gene bank, which had been overseen by PROINPA for more than ten years. Government supporters argue that a public entity is more likely to be a democratic custodian of those resources than is a private organization—especially one that accepts foreign funding. But researchers in Bolivia and around the world question the government’s ability to safe-guard the seeds.
  • “Quinoa doesn’t belong to the Bolivian government or to corporations,” he told me. “Any food, any seeds, they are very sacred—they are for serving humanity. And if you don’t have their diversity stored in other places, you are in trouble. Be
Benjamin McKeown

Nestlé admits slavery in Thailand while fighting child labour lawsuit in Ivor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ild-labour-lawsuit-ivory-coast

HL slavery TNC

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Yet last November Nestlé, the world’s largest foodmaker and one of the most recognisable household brands, went public with the news it had found forced labour in its supply chains in Thailand and that its customers were buying products tainted with the blood and sweat of poor, unpaid and abused migrant workers.
  • NGO the Freedom Fund, which has invested heavily in anti-trafficking initiatives in Thailand, believes Nestlé’s admission could be a considerable force in shifting the parameters of what can be expected of businesses when it comes to supply chain accountability.
  • Patagonia, which announced that it had discovered several points in its supply chain in Taiwan where forced labour and unethical recruitment practices were flourishing.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • US corporate accountability business Verité,
  • which works closely with organisations trying to help improve their supply chain transparency.
  • In the last six months Verité has been involved in two high-profile disclosures from major brands and one of the most important lessons for us to recognise is that in neither case did the companies suffer greatly in terms of being associated with these labour conditions. Instead, they received some credit [for] being bold enough to be associated with this.”
  • onsumers or workers using the legislation to launch legal actions against companies they accuse of making misleading public statements on their anti-slavery efforts.
  • Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, failed in its bid to get the US Supreme Court to throw out a lawsuit seeking to hold them liable for the alleged use of child slaves in cocoa farming in the Ivory Coast.
  • By the time Nestlé owned up to slavery in the Thai seafood industry it was accepted knowledge. It’ll be a brave new world when companies are actually doing the real investigation to probe into part of their supply chains that have remained outside the public domain.
Benjamin McKeown

UK government sets up £1bn fund to fight malaria - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/uk-34892921

prevention malaria disease food

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Of the total: £115m is earmarked for research into new drugs, diagnostics and insecticides for malaria, TB and other infectious diseases A further £188m will be spent on improving biodefences and rapid response systems to fast-spreading epidemics such as Ebola
  • a "healthy, prosperous world is in Britain's interest" and that preventing deadly diseases is a "smart investment".
  • The government is expected to continue spending 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid.
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  • 663 million cases of malaria have been prevented in Africa as a result of concerted efforts to tackle the disease since 2000.
Benjamin McKeown

Geoengineering Is Inevitable - 0 views

earther.gizmodo.com/ering-is-inevitable-1829623031

geoengeneering

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 14 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • But it will happen, and buried in chapter 4 of the new IPCC report is the reason why: it’s cheap, and it’ll probably work.
  • We have this same conversation about intentional, large-scale tinkering with the climate to counteract our ongoing, less-intentional tinkering with the climate because climate change is scary, and it is dangerous, and because we are paralyzed.
  • There is a danger that geoengineering will lead to complacency in the fight to transition away from fossil fuels. And finally, this would be a planetary-scale experiment with so many variables as to make firm predictions of the results nearly impossible.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Keeping it from soaring beyond that level and into the realm of the catastrophic “would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Does that sound like something humans are remotely planning on doing, given what we have seen to this point?
  • Accepting the inevitable could spur the development of a regulatory framework, for instance. In the absolute best case scenario, it could even convince some reluctant actors to push harder on mitigation efforts.
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