by Common Ground staff

BC Liberals drop Working Forest initiative

The BC Liberal government last month backed down from implementing its proposed Working Forest initiative after less than 1 percent of people at public forums over the last 18 months supported the plan.
In order to save face, the government claims it will implement the Working Forest under existing planning tools. This is the first big victory the conservation movement has achieved under the BC Liberals. This goes to show it is always the sheer force of numbers of concerned citizens that makes the difference in the end according to Western Canada Wilderness Committee.
The government may still attempt to establish legally binding Timber Targets, that is, the guaranteed logging zones of the Working Forest and also a mechanism for Crown land selloffs to private real estate developers. www.wildernesscommittee.org

Save our precious water

Contrary to common perception, water is a limited resource. Less than 3 percent of the Earth’s supply is fresh, and two-thirds of that is locked up in glaciers and polar icecaps, leaving us only 1 percent to use. Seeding clouds doesn’t increase the amount, it just moves around the area where it falls.
We humans already use more of the planet’s available freshwater than our share. According to United Nations estimates, our take is currently 54 percent and will rise to 90 percent in 25 years, if current trends continue. That would leave only 10 percent for all the other living things that need freshwater. What to do? We need to start using water more efficiently. Since agriculture is the single largest user and waster of water, most of the savings need to happen there. But there’s plenty of room for improvement on the home front, too. Remember, water savings are not an all-or-nothing proposition, every little bit really does help.

They don’t want Vancouver’s garbage

Joan is almost 78 years old. She has been a schoolteacher and a businesswoman in the village of Ashcroft, BC for more than 50 years. In April, she spent two long nights at the dead chicken blockade just up the highway at the Cache Creek landfill.
Joan believes the practice of dumping waste out of district is a foul use of taxpayers’ money. She believes instead of trucking trash to the province’s interior, the Vancouver region must become more responsible for waste by enforcing aggressive recycling, reuse and composting programs.
The recent chicken blockade put the Greater Vancouver Regional District landfill at Cache Creek in the national news. When the tiny interior town first opened its doors to Vancouver garbage, more than half the residents fought against it. The BC emergency response order to truck avian flu-infected chickens was a slap in the face to the sanitary side of big business landfilling. Now, as the Cache Creek landfill is nearly full, the GVRD is looking forward to its next out-of-sight and out-of-mind dumping grounds just 13 kilometres down the Trans-Canada Highway at beautiful Ashcroft Ranch. The public comment period ends on October 15.
To state your views on the proposed Ashcroft landfill contact project assessment manager
Alan Calder at the environmental assessment office, Box 9426, Stn Prov Govt, Victoria, BC V8W9V1 eaoinfo@gems5.gov.bc.ca

Sustainable better than transgenic

Resource-poor rural communities in Kenya are using the “push-pull” program in Nyanza Province to control the stemborer, which causes an estimated loss of 15 percent of maize and other cereals. Kenya is one of the countries under intense pressure to adopt transgenic agriculture, which so far has been a failure in that country.
Push-pull is a repellent and attraction strategy that uses different plants for the management of cereal stemborers. The insects are repelled from the main plant (maize or sorghum) and are simultaneously attracted to a trap plant, usually napier or Sudan grass, where they lay their eggs.
But push-pull is not only about controlling stemborers. It also controls Striga hermonthica, one of the most noxious weeds in the world.
The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology at the University of Nairobi, which specializes in sustainable agriculture, developed the program.
The push-pull system relies on a carefully selected combination of companion crops to be planted around and among the maize or sorghum plants for the manipulation of pests and their natural enemies. Both domestic and wild grasses, often plowed under in modern single-cropping practice, can help protect the cereals by attracting the stemborers.
The grasses are planted in a border round the maize or sorghum fields, where invading adult moths become attracted to chemicals emitted by the grasses themselves. Instead of landing on the maize plants, the insects head for what appears to be a tastier meal. The grasses thus provide the “pull.” They also provide a haven for the borer’s natural enemies, where they are devoured as they seek refuge.
The “push,” which is the repellent effect, is provided by a nitrogen-fixing leguminous plant, Desmodium uncinatum, which also provides fodder for cattle. Where desmodium was planted, the maize fields had less striga germinating. Striga causes maize losses of between 50 and 80 percent.
A ground cover of desmodium, interplanted among the maize, reduces striga growth by a factor of 40. The desmodium groundcover also reduces soil erosion, conserves water by acting as a mulch and provides fodder for cattle.
More than 2,000 small-scale farmers covered by the push-pull program have significantly increased their maize yields and milk production. Fodder produced by this method contributes to production of one million litres of milk annually in Kenya. www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4226

Deaths and injuries common at Japanese nuclear plants

A fatal accident killed four people in August at the Mihama nuclear power plant in Japan. There was no leak of radioactivity but it is the deadliest accident in a catalog of nuclear scandals in Japan. INCLUDEPICTURE "http://www.greenpeace.org/images/shim.gif" \* MERGEFORMATINET Seven workers were also injured due to the steam leak, possibly caused by a lack of cooling water in the reactor. This latest accident follows the explosion at Tokaimura plant in 1999, where workers mixed radioactive material in a bucket, causing a reaction that killed two workers, injured several more and irradiated hundreds of civilians. In 1997, also at Tokaimura, a fire and explosion released radioactive gas into the atmosphere. In 1995 a serious accident at the Monju fast breeder reactor led to its shut down. In 1991 another reactor at the same Mihama plant suffered a serious radioactive leak.
Japan is heavily reliant on dangerous nuclear power for its electricity. While the government recklessly backs the nuclear industry come what may, public opposition to nuclear power is growing due to the appalling safety record of the industry. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is still trying to recover from the recent scandal it caused by falsifying safety inspections, which forced it to shut down all of its 17 nuclear reactors. Kansai Electric Power Company, the owner of Mihama, was also implicated in that scandal. TEPCO has also just shutdown a nuclear power generation unit at its Fukushima-Daini plant because of a water leak.
Kansai Electric was also at the centre of a nuclear scandal in 1999, when nuclear fuel delivered by British Nuclear Fuels was found to contain falsified safety data. The resultant scandal set back Japan’s plans to use large amounts of plutonium as fuel in its reactors.
Japan’s nuclear reactors are ageing - many are almost 30 years old. Rather than increasing safety measure and closing old reactors the government is doing the exact opposite - reducing regulation of the industry. As nuclear power is so expensive many of the generating companies have huge debts and have cut plant safety measures to save money.
At the same time, hundreds of billions of yen are being sought to cover the costs of a new plutonium reprocessing plant at Rokkasho-mura in northern Japan, which is hugely uneconomic, environmentally polluting, and increases the risk of nuclear proliferation in east Asia.
While there remain many uncertainties as to the exact cause of this accident at Mihama, one thing is certain - there will be more and worse to come.
This avoidable loss of life comes on the 59th anniversary of the dropping of the US nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
Despite the legacy of Nagasaki, this Mihama accident, the appalling safety record of the nuclear industry, and with low public trust in the country’s nuclear program, the government and industry is pressing ahead with more new nuclear power plants and new nuclear facilities.
Alternatives sources of energy, such as wind, are not only safe, but are also cleaner and cheaper than nuclear power. A suitable response to these deaths would be the ditching of the dangerous, expensive and polluting menace of nuclear power in favour of alternative energy sources. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3548192 www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20040812a3.htm

Serious GM pollution found in Japan

Imported GM canola seeds have been spilled around Kashima port in Ibaraki prefecture, and GM canola pollution has been spreading. The Japan Wildlife Research Centre and others have established 13 checkpoints within a 5-kilometre radius of the port. The tests were conducted for two years at 48 locations.
According to an investigation in February 2003, western oilseed rape was confirmed at 23 out of 48 locations. There was possible GM canola reseeding at 17 out of 23 confirmed locations.
www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4224

Thais demand GM probe

Greenpeace campaigners in Thailand recently revealed that GM papaya has been grown illegally for at least 12 months on a farm in the province of Khon Kaen in a GM contamination scandal. It was grown from papaya seeds purchased from a Thai government research station in June 2003. Tests show the seeds have become contaminated, almost certainly, by GM field trials carried out by the Thai government. Negative health effects and lack of a market for the transgenic papaya are two of the principal reasons behind efforts to halt its spread.
For a map showing the spread of contamination in Thailand: http://weblog.greenpeace.org/ge/archives/Map-contamination.jpg
Now, Thailand’s agriculture department has ordered a halt to the distribution of papaya seeds from its research station in Khon Kaen in an effort to disprove Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s claims that GM papaya seeds slipped through to farmers. Chakan Saengraksawong, director general of the department, said the halt would allow his department to investigate whether farmers possessed GM papaya seeds. A group of NGOs threatened to sue the Thai government if it failed to stop distribution of the contaminated seeds. www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4211

US produces dangerous weeds

An interesting article from US agricultural magazine Delta Farm Press reports on how just a few years after its adoption of GM crops, North America has a serious problem with herbicide resistant weeds. A debate has sprung up about how to deal with them. Experts variously recommend mixtures of chemicals, older, more toxic chemicals, or as yet undiscovered new chemicals. Some believe the weed plague may spell the end of so-called conservation tillage or no-till. This is a no-plow method which relies on burning off weeds with liberal amounts of herbicide, pushed by chemical and GM companies as a way of preventing soil erosion and, of course, selling more chemicals.
Note the Syngenta man’s promise at the end that the company will deliver a chemical answer to the problem, at a not insignificant cost to the farmer!
Dan Reynolds, a professor of weed science at Mississippi State University, was not surprised the first cases of resistant horseweed were in Tennessee because of that area’s wide spread adoption of conservation tillage. Glyphosate didn’t kill it; producers weren’t plowing; and at first, they weren’t using a residual or herbicide combination that suppresses the horseweed. That started the resistance in the horseweed and from there it’s gone through its own selection process.
“Many of these concerns with resistant weeds are realistic,” says Eric Palmer with Syngenta. “But with good product stewardship, we will have the products it takes to control these weeds. The question will be if the grower is willing to spend US $20-25 an acre for that control.” www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4223

GM and farm subsidies

A Saskatoon biotech group supporting the Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference, being held September 12-15 in Germany, is pushing GM for Europe. The ABIC 2004 cheerleaders from Saskatchewan argue that GM crops are a necessity for “agricultural efficiency” in Europe. They say now that the WTO has at last found its teeth and claims to be dismantling subsidies in developed countries, it will result in “long-lasting implications for the future of agricultural biotechnology.”
If this is so, we wonder why, since the introduction of GM crops into the US, farm subsidies have risen exponentially. These subsidies have, for instance, pushed down the price of cotton on the world market, leading to spiraling debt for farmers in West Africa and developing countries which do not have the benefit of such subsidies. And all that for the sake of the USA’s “efficient” GM cotton farmers who apparently have no need of subsidies!
Trade analyst Devinder Sharma points out that claims by developed nations that the WTO is dismantling farm subsidies are untrue. “The devil is in the detail,” he says. The reformed framework is complicated but appears to consist in redefining subsidies rather than removing them. Sharma says, “The [new] framework actually provides a cushion to the US and the EU to raise farm subsidies ... No wonder the so-called phase-out of subsidies has not snowballed into a political crisis in Europe.” www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4209

Teflon trouble sticking to Dupont

“Our story is not a good one,” says John Bowman, a lawyer for DuPont. The US Environmental Protection Agency filed a complaint in July charging chemical and biotech giant DuPont with “withholding evidence of its own health and environmental concerns” about an important chemical used to manufacture Teflon. That would be a violation of US federal environmental law, compounded by the possibility that DuPont covered up the evidence for two decades.
Teflon has been hugely successful for DuPont, which over the last half-century has made the material almost ubiquitous, putting it not just on frying pans but also on stain resistant carpets, fast-food packaging, clothing, eyeglasses and electrical wires, even the fabric roofs covering football stadiums.
Now DuPont has to worry that Teflon and the materials used to make it have become too ubiquitous. Teflon constituents have found their way into rivers, soil, wild animals and humans, according to government environmental officials and others. Evidence suggests that some of the materials, known to cause cancer and other problems in animals, may be making people sick.
While it remains one of the company’s most valuable assets, Teflon has also become a potentially huge liability for DuPont, the second-biggest US chemical maker, which operates in more than 70 countries and sells products from electronics to clothing.
The suspect chemical, commonly known as PFOA, has turned up in the blood of more than 90 percent of Americans.
The company acknowledges that fumes from Teflon pans subjected to high heat can release gases, which can kill pet birds and cause a flu-like condition in humans known as polymer fume fever. PFOA is known to cause cancer in some animals, and has been linked to liver damage in animals. Effects on humans have been little studied.
A class-action lawsuit filed in Wood County, home of the Washington Works plant where DuPont has made Teflon for decades, has turned up a series of documents that DuPont had sought to shield as proprietary information. The latest came to light in May, when the West Virginia Supreme Court voted unanimously to unseal several DuPont memorandums from 2000 in which John Bowman, a company lawyer, warned two of his superiors, Thomas Sager, a vice-president and assistant general counsel, and Martha Rees, an associate general counsel, that the company would “spend millions to defend these lawsuits.”
He added that other companies that had polluted drinking water supplies near their factories had warned him that it was cheaper and easier to replace those supplies and settle claims than to try to fight them in court. And those companies, he noted, had spilled chemicals that did not persist in the environment the way that PFOA does.
“Our story is not a good one,” he wrote in one memo. “We continue to increase our emissions into the river despite internal commitments to reduce or eliminate the release of this chemical into the community and environment because of our concern about the biopersistence of this chemical.” www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4212

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