permaculture

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

This very AP article appeared in the Seattle P-I last week...AP doesn't hire
reporters (at least not investigative journalists) any more, apparently.  This
or similar claim has been used in various articles lately:

"Already, biotechnology has been credited with saving Hawaii's
$14-million-a-year papaya industry. A virus had wiped out 40 percent of the
crop and threatened to destroy the rest before seeds engineered to resist the
virus were introduced in 1998. Now the industry is thriving again."

Not true - the industry had a brief rebound for a couple years, until the GE
papayas began succumbing to blackspot fungus (rather than ringspot virus),
which they're particularly susceptible to.  Plus the Japanese (significant
market potential) won't buy them.  Plus some local folks won't buy them. 
Also, the GE papaya are contaminating both farmed and 'feral' non-GE papaya. 
This has been proven by local testing done by local organic papaya farmers on
both their own and feral papaya.

Also, some of that 40% was due to farmers being *forced* to cut down acres and
acres of not-yet-infected papayas to prevent the possibility of infection -
kinda like killing the Bison that "might" have brucellosis (sp?) in and near
Yellowstone to further subsidize cattle ranchers.

As usual, large scale monoculture is the main problem - I don't think they can
GE anything to be healthy in that context.  Mainstay non-GE papaya (such as
strawberry, solo and kapoho) grown in healthy polycultures or growing wild is
only minorly susceptible to ringspot virus - and there's proof on the ground
in Hawai'i.  This joker who calls himself a reporter (actually, he only calls
himself a Biotechnology Writer, which makes his bias pretty clear) obviously
didn't bother to check his sources...

There is a big push to plant GE papaya in Thailand...some Hawai'i organic
farmers and activists have gone there to give the Thai farmers some
information they probably won't get from the pushers...more info on the
Hawai'i GE/GMO resistance and situation here:

http://www.higean.org/



John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net