FRITOS IS CAREFULLY WATCHING THE CONSUMER RESPONSE.
PLEASE send them an email
Tell them you applaud their decision. Tell them that you do NOT want to eat foods that have been genetically engineered to act as an insecticide. Tell them that you don't believe that genetically engineered food is safe for consumer or environmental health and you commend the direction they are taking. And that it would be a big disappointment if they cave in and reverse their decision. Tell them that now they should go certified organic!!
Write them at Frito-Lay, P.O. Box 660634, Dallas, TX, 75266-0634
The Steps of Agent Blue
The prospect of being on the receiving end of a biological attack is not alluring to countries such as
Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. The Peruvian government has already banned the testing and or
deployment of the fungi. The Colombian government is similarly queasy, but has been sharply
admonished by the project's supporters in the US Congress that if Colombia wants its $1.8 billion
aid package, it had better take the fungi too.
Meanwhile, back at the lab, USDA researchers have been working to create genetically modified
strains of the fungi, including the cloning of fusarium strains that attack potatoes, in order to
produce something still more vicious. However, in their search for instruments of what is officially
known as "bio-control", the govt's researchers have also, it seems, reached back into the past.
Sometime before 1969, according to documents supplied to Hammond under the FOIA, a team
from APHIS, the USDA's plant & animal inspection service, found a virus on a Datura tree
imported from Cauca, Colombia. Someone, it is not clear who, determined that the virus could be
useful as an anti-opium poppy agent, and it was dispatched to the US biological warfare center at
Ft Detrick, Maryland under the label D-437.
Biological warfare was integral to the US war against Vietnam. CounterPunchers will recall Agent
Orange, the hellish brew deployed to defoliate the jungle. Agent Blue, targeted on rice production,
is less well known. The aim was to wipe out the NLF's food supply. Rice plantations deemed to be
servicing the enemy were duly sprayed and obliterated. Professor Matthew Meselsen recalls how,
early in 1970, he was taken by a US Army Chemical Corps colonel to survey a valley in an upland
area that had been sprayed with Agent Blue some weeks before. As they flew over the devastated
valley, the colonel proudly explained to Meselsen that this had obviously been an NLF food supply
area since there were no houses to be seen.
Biowar
in the Andes
At the Institute for Genetics in Kazakhstan, former Soviet biowarriors are being financed by the US
and Britain to test mycoherbicides. Fusarium oxysporum strains that infect coca plants are closely
related to those that attack yams, a staple in the Andean diet.
CIA's Next Secret Weapon ~ Genetic Engineering & Chemical Biological Warfare
Andrew Cockburn CounterPunch v.7#11 6/2000 A.Cockburn &
Jeffrey St.Clair ed.
McCaffery's Plague
Along with the other enormities presently perpetrated in the name of the War on Drugs, the United
States is now actively preparing to deploy biological weapons. The weapons consist of plant
pathogens designed to attack coca, cannabis and opium poppy crops. Research into the project
has involved the resurrection of biological agents developed long ago at Fort Detrick, Maryland,
center for the US biowar program closed down by President Nixon in 1969. Deep-frozen at the
time of the program's termination, they are now being thawed out and readied for assault on
producer countries in the third world. Also involved are veterans of the Soviet biological warfare
effort, now being funded by the US through the connivance of an obscure UN agency, employed
for this purpose in order to shield the U.S. from well-deserved charges of violating the
internationally negotiated biological weapons convention.
The work is proceeding despite well attested evidence that the weapons, if deployed, will have
profound and disastrous impact on the ecologies of the countries in which they are used.
Furthermore, the USDA is now researching the use of genetic modification to enhance the potency
of these bio-weapons. The principal agents under development are microbial pathogens. At the
Institute for Genetics in Kazakhstan, former Soviet biowarriors are being financed by the US and
Britain to test mycoherbicides, fungi, specifically Pleospora, to kill opium poppies & marijuana
plants. In the Andes and western Amazon, the U.S. is planning the testing and widespread
application of fusarium oxysporum, an anti-coca fungus. The FY 2000 budget contains at least $23
million for these programs, although further appropriations are almost certainly buried in covert
military and intelligence budgets.
Last March, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., added an
amendment to the Colombian aid bill requiring President Clinton to certify that the Colombian
government "has agreed to and is implementing a strategy to eliminate Colombia's total coca and
opium poppy production" using, among other means, "tested, environmentally safe
mycoherbicides." The amendment is still in the bill (which is still stalled in the senate) despite a
submission by Colombian scientists to the Colombian Ombudsman for the Environment that the
use of mycoherbicide agents in Colombia represents "a great danger both for Colombian humans
as well as for the Colombian environment and biodiversity".
It is easy to see why the Colombians are worried. The absolute requirement of this sort of weapon
is that it should be "host specific", ie. that it should attack only the intended victim and nothing
else. According to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, which has researched & publicized
this enormity, tests conducted by USDA-contracted researchers in 1994 and 1995 using the
favored strain of the fungus fusarium oxysporum-EN4-resulted in two non-coca species
becoming infected.
Furthermore, fusarium oxysporum strains that infect coca plants are closely related to those that
attack yams, a staple in the Andean diet. This is hardly surprising, Hammond points out, in view of
the fact that EN4 is designed to attack different strains of coca and therefore cannot be entirely
host specific. Thus the rare and beautiful Agrias butterfly may soon fall as one more casualty of
the War on Drugs, since its larvae feed and mature on wild relatives of the coca plant. One of the
few remaining areas where Agrias can be found is the upper Putamayo river region, a center both
of guerrilla activity and coca cultivation in Colombia and therefore a prime target for the US fungus
spraying campaign.
Following Nixon's order to close the place down, D-437 was not destroyed but put in deep frozen
storage, forgotten by all but the researchers who had worked so happily at Detrick. On April 12 this
year, Hammond caught a brief mention of D-437 on a US Army website, along with the fact that it
was being studied by a Dr Vernon Damsteegt, himself a Detrick veteran. Following enquiries by
Hammond, all mention of the virus and its custodian was hurriedly removed from the site, which
now carried a fraudulent notification that it had last been updated on April 6.
1969 was the year Richard Nixon launched his war on drugs, using it to set up what was intended
to be his very own secret police force - the Drug Enforcement Agency, a story chronicled in
Edward J. Epstein's great book Agency of Fear.
Later, they landed at a nearby village that turned out to be thronged with refugees from the valley.
The refugees explained that they had fled because the Americans had just destroyed their rice
crop. Scrutinizing photographs he had taken from the air, Meselsen later detected numerous
houses that had been invisible while flying overhead at speed. A simple calculation revealed that
the amount of rice under cultivation in the valley had been just sufficient to feed the locals, with
none left over to feed hungry Vietnamese guerrillas. Meselsen wrote a report that prompted some
political qualms in the US command in Vietnam, which recommended to Washington that Agent
Blue be terminated. The recommendation was leaked to the Washington Post, whereupon Nixon
cancelled the program forthwith.
It is a measure of the obtuse barbarity of our present generation of drug warriors that they make
Richard Nixon look sane. Despite abundant evidence of the dangers of deploying bioweapons
such as the fungi in the wild, the US appears determined to press ahead.
Counterpunch is published twice monthly except Aug.
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Terminator
SeedWatch forum Kiwi chaos math prof on bioengineering: Chris King's Genesis of Eden Bio WorldWatch Lederberg video clip "I was rather fearful when the first positive results came in." U.S. eugenics program EugenicsWatch ¹ higher order mammal clonemeister Neil First, UWisconsin, at work Howard Garber OC eugenicist candidate for 46th Cong. Dist. |
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Nierika, healer & first order morlock.
Currently seeking evidence of horizontal gene transfer as causing prions & resultant disease vectors
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On March 23, 1971, Richard Nixon received a $3 million dollar cash gift from the dairy industry. The giving of that gift was recorded on a Watergate tape. A few months later, Nixon set price controls for milk that guaranteed the price farmers receive for 100 pounds of milk would never fall below $9.90. In November 1999, dairy farmers were receiving $16.49 for 100 pounds of milk. One month later, the price of milk fell $4.77, a traumatic financial event for dairymen and their families.
In January, 2000, the wholesale price of milk fell below the governmental support price for the first time in history. As demand for liquid milk decreases, farmers continue to produce more milk. Genetic engineering was a deception. The promise of more milk as a "dairy management tool" was a mere deception meant to betray the small dairyman.
So far, I've eliminated: All canned, processed, packaged convenience foods, fast foods, cooked
foods (except steamed veggies and homemade whole-grain breads), meat, eggs, dairy, caffene,
all store beverages, tap water, refined grains, white flour, refined sugars, artificial sweetners,
hydrogenated oils, margarines. So, what do I eat ? |
Price Fixing at Kraft 3.97 John E. Peck Z Magazine
5.17.01 Reuters Tomkins & other research scientists in Bangladesh did an analysis of the sachets which is published in The Lancet medical journal. 35 women in Bangladesh urban areas found they were easy to use and took about 4© hours to work. "We have shown that mothers in urban Bangladesh can be successfully trained in the use of the osmotic sachets for the preparation of microbiologically safe therapeutic milk," SK Roy, of the Ctr for Health & Population Research in Dhaka, said in a report in the journal. The sachets, produced by British-based UCB Films Plc, can be used to produce food for malnourished children or without the feed to purify contaminated water. |
Ruth Rathbun
6.19.00 Alexander Cockburn The Nation p8 By the mid-nineties, S. California's coastal sage scrub had almost disappeared; so had 97 per cent of the vernal pools. Southern maritime chapparal had been reduced to 2400 acres in California. The chapparal has gone, and so too, as a site for anything but high-priced real estate, has poor, bulldozer-carved Carmel Mountain.
So far as coastal habitat in S. California is concerned, the destruction is virtually complete, but head south from Los
Angeles, turn east after Oceanside and head for Ramona or Julian. You'll discover that at the heart of San Diego
County are mountains forming a blue wall between the coast and the deep desert. Rising from these peaks, and
buffering them from the cities, are the magnificent rolling grasslands and oak-covered foothills of what San
Diegans call the back country, its pastures carrying not only cattle but live oak and golden eagles, profuse other
bird life, cougar. The country looks dry but it is an enormously important watershed, supplying the coastal cities
with as much as 15 per cent of their water.
Over the past 10 years, Save Our Forest & Ranchlands (SOFAR) run by Duncan McFetridge, a woodworker
living in Descanso, forty miles east of San Diego, has been waging a stubborn campaign against the
suburbanization of the back country. We're not talking firebrands here. We're talking League of Women Voters,
surfers, San Diego Baykeeper and assorted defenders of snakes, salamanders, lions and oaks. SOFAR put
together a coalition of enviro & community groups and sued the county for failing to protect the back country.
In 1996, Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell found San Diego County grossly negligent and in violation of
several state laws and its own environmental standards. McConnel gave tiny SOFAR authority over hundreds of
thousands of back-country acres. The real future under the county plan
would be luxury ranchettes and theme parks linked by new freeways and serviced by off-ramp commerce. In other
words, exactly the sort of unsmart growth that everyone from Vice-President Gore to the San Diego Association of
Governments has been complaining about. |
Lawmaker wants federal regulators to assess fines 6.16.01 Eric Rosenberg Hearst News Service The congressman acknowledged that he faces an uphill struggle to build support in the Republican-controlled House for the measure. Co-sponsors include liberal Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi of California, Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Diana DeGette of Colorado. "This is a tough bill to pass," Filner said at a news conference here. "It will not happen overnight." He added that the military has been environmentally "unaccountable" for the last several decades. In a letter to House colleagues seeking their support, Filner said, "Communities bordering military bases have less environmental protection than other cities in the nation just because they are hosts to the U.S. military."
A Pentagon spokesman could not be reached for comment. The Military Toxics Project, a Lewiston, Maine-based
environmental cleanup organization, charged that the military has created an "environmental catastrophe" in many
communities by dumping pollutants that have seeped into ground water or by releasing harmful emissions into the
air. For example, it said, Cape Romanzof Long Range Radar Station in Alaska, 460 miles west of Anchorage,
contains contaminated landfills, fuel-spill areas and leaking underground storage tanks, all of which pose a threat to
nearby communities. Another polluted area is the region surrounding Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the region has substantial ground-water contaminants,
including heavy metals, solvents and fuels. People's Rally for Military Environmental Responsibility Act (MERA)! Cong. Filner, Peace Resource Ctr, Ocean Beach People's Co-op, HERE Local 30 Environmental Health Coalition 6.16.01 Port Planning Ctr Plaza, 585 Harbor Ln SD proposed federal legislation sponsored by Bob Filner would remove all exemptions of the Dept of Defense from environmental and health & safety laws. Rally part of National Day of Action for Military Accountability Connie Garcia, Environmental Health Coalition 1717 Kettner Blvd ste 100 SD CA 92101 619.235.0281 "We have had great success in this nation in the 1970s and 80s enacting environmental laws, and yet it turns out the military, one of the biggest, most economically powerful and most capable organizations of doing damage to the environment, is not fully subject to these laws." MERA sponsor Congressman Bob Filner |
In fact, Woo had not misinterpreted any significant part of the plan. But, crucially, in her second letter, she did not
advise the board to withhold approval pending further study. The supervisors were off the hook and delightedly
passed the amendment that could mean San Diego's back country will disappear into condo land, interspersed with
Indian casinos. But the game is not quite over. Because the county is still under court supervision, the plan can't go
ahead until Judge McConnell signs off on it.
So here we have a major environmental disaster in the making, one that is an obvious test case for any
supposed commitment by local, state and federal government to bar insane squandering of natural resources. We
have county government acting as a creature of the big developers. We have a weak regulatory agency, with the
nature-rapers held in check only by a stubborn group like SOFAR.
This is but one episode in a dire national story. I don't want to be construed as offering endorsement or encouragement, but what drives groups like Earth Liberation Front to court lifetime prison sentences by burning a ski-condo development in Vail, or Boise Cascade offices in Oregon? The people who drive them to it, who are convinced that the fix is in, that the govt is always bought, have been these past eight years men like Gore and Babbitt, so much more supple and therefore dangerous than Reagan's Interior Secretary James Watt, who was such a dunderhead he set back the course of environmental destruction by a decade.
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A House on Fire ¹ excerpt Connecting Biological & Linguistic Diversity Crises Kieran Suckling exec. dir., Ctr for Biological Diversity courtesy of Student Ethnobotany Network |
per 1899 Old Farmer's Almanac The odor of the sweet pea is so offensive to flies that it will drive them out of a sickroom, though not in the slightest disagreeable to the patient. † |
Kenneth Hale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"We are accelerating toward a calamity unparalleled in planetary history … These are crucial years for
us to act, as the Library of Life burns furiously around us, throughout the world."
Gregory Benford, UCIrvine
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Linguistic Extinction The diversity of co-existing languages & cultures prior to the ongoing colonization of the globe by a small number of dominant nations was astounding. In what is now California, indigenous peoples once spoke over100 distinct languages. This small area supported more linguistic diversity than all of Europe. Over 300 native languages were spoken in whatis now the United States. Meso-America had 80 distinct languages, S.America over 500. At least 250 distinct languages were spoken in aboriginal Australia. The rate of eradication of these languages, and often the people who spoke them, is equally astounding. Sixty-five percent of California's indigenous languages are extinct, with many of the remaining spoken by fewer than 10 people. Only two or three of California's indigenous languages are spoken by more than 150 people. None are spoken by children at home.
Just as "first world" societies replace diverse plant communities with monoculture crops, they are replacing a
tremendous and ancient linguistic diversity with vast mono-languages. There are approximately 6,500 languages
on Earth today. About 50% of all humans, however, speak and think in one often globally dominant languages.
That means 0.2% of all existing languages hold sway over 50% of all humans and likely upwards of
85% of the land surface of the globe. Not surprisingly, these are the languages of the cultures primarily
responsible for the global extinction crisis and the eradication/marginalizing of indigenous cultures.
These cultures no longer recognize a limit to their beliefs or exploitation rights, because they
no longer genuinely encounter and become situated by a diversity of other languages, ideas,
cultures and species. The external world is simply a modulation of their own desires. If we allow diversity to decline within human cultures and between cultures, we throw away the necessary mental tools to reverse the decline in biological diversity. |
UN key agreement to save crop diversity
¹
² 7.1.01 Reuters
ROME The U.N. world food body reached a landmark agreement on Sunday to try to save the
world's diversity of agricultural crops, officials said. The pact followed an anguished debate pitting many poor
countries and environmentalists against multinational corporations and wealthier nations. After a week of touch-
and-go talks, delegates said the United States had agreed for the first time in a public forum to mandatory
payments by plant breeders and geneticists developing new crop varieties in return for access to public seed
banks. The seed banks lend out crop seeds at no charge, enabling research into new varieties of plants to increase
resistance to disease and ameliorate some of the impact of global warming. In turn, this helps alleviate hunger in
poorer nations.
no consensus on patents |
Until now, seed exchanges have operated informally on the principle of "common heritage" -- an agreement that they are a shared international resource. Change has been forced by the U.N. Convention for Biological Diversity, which made nations responsible for their own genetic resources. FAO's November conference is expected to adopt Sunday's agreement, which will then be submitted to national governments for ratification, delegates said.
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Saving crop diversity key to winning war on hunger 7.3.01 Reuters
MACCARESE, Italy Agricultural biodiversity must be saved in order to guarantee global food security
as the population grows and the planet warms up, a leading plant geneticist said on Tuesday. "Around 25% of
all plant species are in some way under threat," Geoffrey Hawtin, director general of the International Plant Genetic
Resources Institute (IPGRI), said. Speaking at the inauguration of IPGRI's new headquarters at Maccarese outside
Rome, he said that research was urgently needed to save crop diversity as an insurance policy against global
warming and a rapidly growing population. Some 800 million people go to bed hungry, according to the United
Nations.
search for stronger plants |
StarLink Bio-Corn found in white corn products 7.4.01 Wash.Post
WASHINGTON StarLink corn, the genetically modified yellow variety whose presence in food
products last fall resulted in widespread recalls, has been found for the first time in a white corn product. FDA
discovered genetic material from StarLink corn in Kash n' Karry White Corn Tortilla Chips last month in response to
a complaint from a consumer in Florida. An FDA official said the agency did not request a recall, but both the Kash
n' Karry and Food Lion grocery chains pulled the house brand product from their shelves on Tuesday, according to
the paper. No immediate comment was available from FDA officials or Aventis SA, the Franco-German
pharmaceutical group that makes the biotech corn. Last fall, many corn chip and tortilla makers switched to white
corn, which makes up less than 3% of U.S. corn market, to reassure consumers concerned about the possible
presence of StarLink in their taco shells and corn chips.
At the time, producers said the use of white corn eliminated the risk of inadvertently introducing StarLink into their
products. StarLink, genetically modified by Aventis CropSciences to be resistant to insects, was barred by U.S.
regulators for human use because of concerns it might trigger allergic reactions such as rashes, diarrhea or
breathing problems. EPA in 1998 approved the biotech corn variety, used by farmers to protect young plants from
destructive plants, only for feed use. But traces of StarLink corn found their way into taco shells, chips and other
food products, triggering the eventual recall of more than 300 U.S. foods. Dozens of people initially reported
experiencing allergic reactions linked to StarLink-tainted food products last year. U.S. govt last month released a
report showing that 17 people who had complained of possible allergy attacks after eating corn products had failed
to show any signs of antibodies to StarLink's key component. But environmentalists said the report was flawed and
inconclusive. FDA found the StarLink gene in the white corn chips after being notified by Keith Finger, a Florida optometrist who was one of the 17 tested earlier. Finger said his wife bought the white corn chips after hearing reports that it could not contain StarLink. He said he ate some, suffered another, milder reaction and immediately contacted the FDA. An FDA official as saying the agency was "continuing to follow up on the situation." White corn is grown & distributed separately from yellow corn, and industry observers said there are no genetically modified varieties. But they also said it has proven impossible to prevent some commingling of conventional and modified, as well as white and yellow, corn. The mixing, they said, could happen at processing plants, during transportation and through cross-pollination in fields. An EPA advisory panel of experts will meet in Washington on July 17 to review new StarLink information and recommend whether or not to grant a request by Aventis to retroactively approve StarLink for human consumption. |
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UN report: progress needs technology 7.8.01 AP
MEXICO CITY Govts will have to take advantage of genetically engineered food, cutting-edge
medicine and technology to combat poverty in a world that comes far from meeting basic development goals, a
United Nations report has concluded. The 11th annual Human Development Report, scheduled to be
released in Mexico City on Tuesday, found that the world's richest countries are holding back scientific
breakthroughs key to eradicating hunger and stamping out poverty. "The current debate in Europe & U.S. over
genetically modified crops mostly ignores the concerns of the developing world,'' the report says, adding that crops
altered to produce higher yields could revolutionize farming in Africa, Latin America and across the underdeveloped
world. It further argues that the developed world's push to cap technology once widely available has hurt the
world's poor, highlighting how the campaign to ban DDT has left tropical countries battling a new breed of Malaria-
carrying mosquitos.
Stolenberg's country was followed in the rankings by Australia and Canada, the latter having topped the report 6
years in a row. African nations made up 29 of the report's 36 worst performers, with war-ravaged Sierra Leone
lodged at rock bottom for the second-straight year. A baby born in Sierra Leone today will likely die before it turns
39, compared to Norway's life expectancy of 79. U.S. slipped from third to sixth in this year's report. Ranked at 134,
Haiti was the Americas' least-developed nation. At last year's unprecedented U.N. Millennium Summit, countries
pledged to reduce mortality rates for children under 5 by two-thirds, cut poverty in half, and reduce the percentage
of their citizens living without drinking water by 50% all by 2015. |
As gulf grows, some nations make high-tech leap ¹ 7.9.01 Reuters
UN The gulf between the world's plugged-in and the shut-out is widening, but scores of developing
nations are using technology to keep from falling further behind in the global economy, a new report has found.
The Human Development Report 2001 commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
argues that information and communications technology can help overcome barriers of social, economic and
geographic isolation. While Silicon Valley and similar tech centers in Europe and Japan are now legendary, world-
class hubs also have emerged in Campinas and Sao Paulo, Brazil, Bangalore, India, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
Gauteng, South Africa and El Ghazala, Tunisia.
The 264-page study highlights new options for poor people using the Internet for political empowerment, such as
with the global e-mail campaign in January that helped topple Philippine President Joseph Estrada. Other
examples include distance learning projects in Thailand and Turkey and job growth created by technology exports
from Costa Rica, India and South Africa. "Often those with the least have the least to fear from the future, and
certainly their governments are less encumbered by special interests committed to yesterday's technology," the
report said of opportunities developing countries now have. But the report also concludes that most important
technology advances bypass the world's poor because of lack of market demand, inadequate public funding and
focus of innovative research efforts on high-income consumers.
technology offers hope to fast-moving countries
Potential leaders range from Portugal and Spain to Greece in southern Europe, eastern European nations such as
Poland and the Czech Republic, Asian tiger economies such as Hong Kong and Malaysia and Mexico, Costa Rica
and Chile in Latin America. Dynamic adopters include countries with little prior technology investment who are
seeking to adopt the latest advances in technology to potentially catapult themselves to the front of the pack in the
next generation of technologies. |
The Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, local company Midas Communications Technologies and U.S.-based circuit maker Analog Devices Inc. < ADI.N > have cooperated to develop a low-cost Internet access system that requires no modem and eliminates the need for expensive copper lines. The wireless local phone system is already in use from Fiji to Yemen to Nigeria and other nations are considering introducing it.
marginalization faces countries that fail to keep pace
The list of marginalized countries includes many of those torn by civil strife in recent decades, ranging from
Nicaragua, with 39 phone lines per 1,000 people, to Mozambique, with no known Web connections and only five
phones per 1,000 people. Developing countries continue to struggle with the high cost of basic electronic
infrastructure that is the precondition for enjoying any benefits of high technology.
Africa has less international bandwidth than Sao Paulo, Brazil, a city of 10 million people. More fundamentally,
electric power generation is not available to 2 billion, or fully one-third of the world's people. A little under half of the
globe have no access to basic sanitation, the report said. Monthly Internet access charges amount to 1.2% of
average monthly income for a typical U.S. user, compared with 614% in the island nation of Madagascar,
278% in Nepal, 191% in Bangladesh and 60% in Sri Lanka. Wealthy industrial nations, with under
20% of the world's people, accounted for 79% of Internet links and 91% of the 347,000 new patents
issued in 1998, according to the U.N. survey.
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Poor nations to gain free access to biomedical research
7.9.01 Reuters
The initiative follows similar moves by pharmaceutical companies to improve access and reduce prices of life-
saving drugs in poor countries. It is part of a wider United Nations-led incentive to bridge the health gap between
wealthy & poor nations. Many doctors and scientists in the developing world have little access to medical
journals, which until now were sold for the same price throughout the world. Annual subscriptions range from
hundreds of dollars to more than $1,000 a year. "Nearly 100 developing countries will gain access to vital scientific
information they could otherwise not afford," Brundtland added.
green payments in next bill?
Dr. Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, described the initiative as having the potential to transform
the medical environment in developing nations from a desert into a garden. The project is due to be up and running
in the beginning of 2002 and expected to last for at least three years while its progress is monitored. Anglo-Dutch
publishing group Reed Elsevier, the U.S. Harcourt Worldwide STM Group, American health care publisher
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Germany's Springer Verlag, John Wiley & Sons Inc of the United States and Britain's
Oxford-based Blackwell Sciences Ltd. will work with the British Medical Journal and the Open Society Institute of
the George Soros foundation network on the project. All the publishers said the journals will be free online in the
poorest countries and at reduced prices, which are still to be set, in lower-income nations. None of the publishers or
the Soros Foundation, which will assist with the project, could say how much it will cost.
agriculture
Slowing economy may ignite U S. farm-law cash race
WASHINGTON As the U.S. economy slows, lawmakers from farm states have begun pushing for
Congress to pass a new farm bill this year for fear of losing tens of billions of dollars earmarked for subsidies.
Rather than wait until next year as initially planned, farm-state lawmakers are launching an ambitious bid to have
the scheduled rewriting of long-term farm policy completed before the end of the year in case shrinking tax
revenues force Congress to make budget cuts. "If you wait around too long, there won't be any money left," said
Tom Buis of the National Farmers Union. Under the budget blueprint approved by Congress this spring, farm
outlays would rise by $73.5 billion, or 78 percent, for fiscal 2002-11. But there is concern that might be revised in
light of the economic slowdown.
7.8.01 Reuters
Written every few years, so-called farm bills are omnibus legislation, tying together farm subsidy, public nutrition,
research, conservation and export promotion programs. The last one, dubbed "Freedom to Farm," deregulated
farming in 1996 and capped farm subsidies at a few billion dollars a year. This time, there are calls to double or
triple outlays on conservation and to write a formula -- potentially costing billions of dollars -- to automatically send
more money to farmers when prices slump. Congress has enacted nearly $25 billion in bailouts to offset low prices
since October 1998.
House to tackle bill soon
"We expect to bring that bill to the floor before the end of the year and hope to have it in place for next year's crop,"
Agriculture Committee chairman Larry Combest told the House shortly before its Independence Day recess. The
Texas Republican intends to circulate an outline of items for inclusion in the farm bill early this week. It would be
immediately followed by hearings to gather reaction from farm groups. The committee would write its bill in late
July, finishing before Congress begins its month-long summer recess on Aug. 3. When Congress reconvenes in
early September, Combest will gauge the pace in the Senate with the hope the House could pass the bill "in time
for the bill to go to the president before Congress leaves for the year," a committee staff worker said.
"That's his goal. He's been told repeatedly all his goals are ambitious." Leaders have set Oct. 5 as the target for
ending this year's congressional session. There was skepticism the target could be met since many must-do bills
needed action. Senators initially planned to assemble their farm bill next year, so it would first apply to 2003 crops.
Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin, newly installed as Agriculture Committee chairman, has declined to set a timeline for
action. But he says bill-drafting might begin as early as this fall. "The farm bill should be completed this year --
because the funding may not be available next year," Vermont Democrat Sen. Pat Leahy said during the first
hearing called by Harkin, an overview of farm bill issues 10 days ago. A spokesman for Indiana Sen. Richard
Lugar, the Republican leader on the Senate committee, said Harkin and Lugar "are in general agreement. They
aren't going to rush this." "We'd all like to have it done before election year, but I'm not sure there's time," said Sen.
Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican.
If House hearings are an indicator, the outline circulated by Combest will realign crop support rates, propose a
mechanism for "counter-cyclical" payments when markets wilt and offer a guaranteed annual subsidy to growers.
Those were common requests from farm groups, as well as so-called planting flexibility -- the power to switch crops
in pursuit of profits without jeopardizing eligibility for subsidies. Harkin was the sponsor of a plan to pay farmers up
to $50,000 a year for making land, water and wildlife conservation part of their operations. The idea of "green"
payments was attractive to fruit and vegetable growers, who do not get direct subsidies as grain, cotton and
soybean farmers do. A major issue in the farm bill debate may be how to divide money between traditional crop
subsidies and conservation programs that have become popular since the 1985 farm law.
Requests for more than $260 billion in new spending have been handed to the House Agriculture Committee, says
its Democratic leader, Charles Stenholm of Texas. "We want the debate to get going," said Bob Stallman, president
of the American Farm Bureau Federation. The group does not "want to run a risk of losing those budgeted dollars,"
he said, but not if it meant a poorly thought-out bill. Dave Orden, co-author of book analyzing the 1996 law, said
there may be a financial downside to locking up funding now. "Farm bills tend to get more generous" the longer
Congress works on them, he said. While the pace in Congress was picking up, "My betting is still on next spring or
later" for sending the bill to the president for enactment.
Cong. McKinney
7.25.01contra … "petition that Frontiers
of Freedom (FF), a conservative front group for various natural resource industries, has presented to the IRS. FF is
seeking to destroy Rainforest Action Network (RAN) by revoking their tax-deductible 501(c)(3) status on the
grounds that RAN engages in activities that publicly pressure corporations, in particular Boise Cascade Corporation
(BCC). …
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OCIAL JUSTICE |