December 29th 2002

Charles puts his dukes up for British farming. Prince Charles, Duke of the Duchy of Cornwall (where I am currently sojourning), champion of rural life and the organic way (agricolae defensor?), is now calling for institutions such as schools, hospitals and the army to help save UK agriculture by buying British food. When challenged that this may be against EU competition laws, he suggested that there may be ways around that and that others within the EU do more to protect their agriculture.
Needless to say, the National Farmers Union enthusiastically endorsed the Prince's comments, which he made in an interview in the current edition of the Farmers Weekly. 
The ever-vigilant British press however today accuses the monarch-in-waiting of "hypocrisy". They unearthed the shattering fact that the Prince has just ordered a new Audi for himself.
A St. James' Palace spokesperson this noon-time said "The Prince was referring to food, not industrial goods".
A common complaint I hear in Britain - I have to be careful not to call Cornwall, " England "- is that Britain is too compliant i.e. she obeys EU rules and regulations whereas the French (agriculture) and the Spanish (fishing) and some others (Ireland? Unthinkable!) do not. I find myself continually urging them  to milk the EU system - like the rest of them! It's a lost cause though, I fear, as our Celtic-old traditions of horse-dealing and cattle-stealing equip us immeasureably better than them for running rings around the Eurobureaucrats and returning home with pots of gold. "That's not cricket" they tell me. 

The GM cat's out of the bag. A report on the results of monitoring GM crops in the UK over a six year period is proving enormously embarassing, indeed, "politically explosive" to the British gov. Tales of careless harvesting, cross-contamination and the creation of "super-weeds" abound. Civil Servants sneaked it on to the DEFRA website on the quitest news day of the year, Christmas Eve. 
But award-winning, environment journalist Geoffrey Lean, of the Independent, was not too befogged by Christmas over-indulgence and is hot on the case. See his article in today's paper. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=365021&dir=58&host=3  

Ireland organics. There is some interest in organics sprouting again in the corridors of our own Ag. Min - DAFRD. Following the long-awaited Organic Report last May the new (post-June election and the ejection of my fox-hunting cousin, Davern) Junior Ag Min Noel Treacy has at last appointed a chairman to the National Steering Group for the Organic Sector.
John Duggan, former chairman of Ireland's giant dairy co-op Glanbia (Gaelic for "clean food) and veteran of other food boards, is the new appointee.
I know little about Mr Duggan yet but I will try to interview him for this column as soon as I get back to the ould sod. A chat with Min Noel about organics is also envisaged. 

Teagasc, in an otherwise depressing report of farmer's attitudes to EU policies, says that 2% of farmers would be interested in converting to organic.
From this, Min Noel deduces that as there " are just one per cent of farmers in the organic sector as of now, so the Teagasc figure represents a trebling of that". What!!!

Tasmania organics. A recent 8-week study tour in Northern Europe by a Tasmanian ag. scientist says "reduced pesticide use and organic is the way to go". "Reduced pesticide farming was the norm in Northern Europe and organic farming was just the next step for many" is one of his many conclusions. Continuing with his analysis of where we are at - or where he imagines we are! - he says, "Although synthetic pesticides were still being used in some areas, farmers were not dependent on them." For a more informed view of where Tasmania is at, see Ned Kelly Masterpieces on the same page or indeed, It's All Ferry (sic) Frustrating. http://www.themercury.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,5647793%255E3462,00.html 

Bond Knight fights Windmills. Sir Sean Connery is taking to the lists in opposition to Scottish Power's giant, wind-power station development in Argyllshire. Opponents of the 22, 300 foot-high pylons sent briefing documents to the ex-Bond actor in his Bahamas' home and were delighted when he offered his support and his name to their campaign. They claim that the scale of the development  will "destroy wildlife" in the beautiful area. SP's claim, "There has been thorough consultation with the local community" sounds as hollow as that of the proposers of a similar development on Slievenamon, a mountain in Tipperary, eight years ago (that scheme was scotched after a lively campaign - in which I was proud to take a leading part - made the developers very uncomfortably aware of the views of the majority of that local community). 

McCarthy's Bar. I finally succumbed to the inevitable - McCarthy's Bar is as inescapable as a winter flu, it's everwhere! - and began reading my brother's copy of the run-away bestseller during my break here in Penzance. Half-Irish, Peter McCarthy has certainly tapped into a vein of scatho-comment-stand-up-comedy tourism journalism that is mostly well informed - he knows his garda from gardai - and not only entertaining to his targetted British audience but is largely welcomed here in the Emerald Isle itself. 
How times change! An American who tried to tell it as it was, especially in relation to the Irish Roman Catholic Church, in the Ireland of the 1950s, was lucky to get out alive! (I will trace the author and the book for anyone interested - I remember he particularly had a go at the hierarchy over the Mother and Child Scheme and the Papal Nuncio Insult. His book may have been called "Catholic Power"). 
Pete instead gets universally great press and even tumultuous applause on that great entertainment organ of the masses,The Late Late Show. 
Incidentally, the pub featured on the cover of his first book is in Castletownbere, my current home town - and, sorry to disillusion you, the nun is a model!
Another McCarthy's pub, in Tipperary, mentioned in his second book, is the local watering hole for the Coolmore Boys. I was told that the pub owner was offering up Novenas that Fin Min Charlie would not tax the Boys in his recent budget. She obviously has His ear. 
She will need to say a few rosaries against the incinerator too (see several previous items) if her prosperity is to continue at its present rate.

Work for a life. David White runs a website,  www.environmentjob.co.uk that provides information on paid and volunteer jobs in the environment sector, including organics. Email: david@environmentjob.co.uk 

December 14th 2002

Self-Congratulation. On a Saturday morning trawl of the Web I was pleasantly surprised to find in the Google search engine (the only one that matters) that Planorganic is No 1 of 139,000 sites when "organic food Ireland" is typed in. In the past Planorganic.com has been listed first for a "organic food industry" search - from 600,000 world-wide sites. I have also been high up in many other organic search combinations. But I don't always stay there - sometimes I am pushed many pages down the search.
The gas thing is that I have no idea why I get such high ranking - and sometimes relegation. Some web businesses spend fortunes trying to improve their ratings on search engines and we are all bombarded with emails promising, for a fee of course, to submit us "professionally" to anything up to 15,000 (are there really that many search engines?) of these engines. I have, and I'm sure very unprofessionally, submitted to three. If anyone has insights into the arcane workings of these amazing search indices, and why a humble site like mine gets up there with the big boys, please enlighten me?

They're out to get us. There are still some that think I suffer from conspiracy theory syndrome when I talk about "Organic Attacks"and such like. Lest there be the slightest lingering doubt that organic food and farming is not coming under concerted, well organised, and well funded propaganda attacks from the trans-national agri-business corporate sector, then look at the multitude of files on the Norfolk Genetic Engineering Network (NGIN) website, especially at  http://ngin.tripod.com/organic.htm. Click down the list on, Godfathers, Denis Avery, Stossel and my old friend Prof.Trewavas. 
And, whilst you'e there, from the Home page, click on Ngin Lists and Archives and check the 13th Dec entry, The Three Mile Island of Biotech. A "biopharming" accident in Nebraska is going to cost the GM company ProdiGene more than $6 million in USDA imposed fines and costs.

December 13th 2002

All Change There are organic rumblings in the land. In the UK at least (Ireland may follow - after the usual time-lag of about ten to twenty years).The head of the Food Safety Agency, Professor Sir John Krebs, whose pronouncements in the past on organic food and farming have been decidedly hostile, is being whipped in by the Environment Minister, Michael Meecher. He wrote to Krebs asking him whether he could make "a positive but factual statement on the pesticide, additive, GM and regulatory assurance benefits that are associated with organic food". Krebs' replied, with his now standard chestnut; "the Agency's position on organic food is that it is not significantly different in terms of food safety and nutrition from food produced conventionally". The Soil Association and others are calling for his head which may not be too long in coming; the position as head of the FSA is now being advertised.
This week too, the most swinging changes in UK agriculture in modern times are being introduced. £500million is being allocated to a scheme, "Framework for Change" to redirect agricultural grants and subsidies towards promoting conservation and raising food quality. Initially the scheme will be piloted for two years in four areas in the UK before going nationwide.The scheme comes on the back of the Sir Donald Curry Report (see Archives) and a general dismay amongst politicians and the public about the state of industrial agriculture brought about by the scenes from the FMD outbreak last year. The NFU will be fiercely resisting but there is a new air of determination in the gov. about these new policies. 

Committing Pesticide. Best article on organic food I have seen in the past week is that by Moyra Bremner* in The Ecologist, issue Dec2002/Jan 2003. Her focus is on pesticides in farming which she claims are "linked to infertility, suicidal depression and the most horrific birth defects imaginable." They are, she claims, "the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction" and the scale and the type of human misery that pesticides cause "calls in question our right to be called civilised."
"It is time" Ms Bremner says, "that we realised that organic food is not simply a 'lifestyle' choice but a matter of life over death." 
The article is backed up by references to a host of websites with supporting information.
I said similar things, and with the same emphasis, in my Killing Fields article but Ms Bremner puts it much better and addresses an international audience.
*Moyra Bremner is a former presenter of Science Now and the BBC's Money Programme and Newsweek. She wrote a well-received book GE: Genetic Engineering and You. 

Sperm Counts The Irish (organic?) bloodstock industry is off  the tax hook again. Fin Min Charlie, a horse-racing enthusiast himself, is said to have succumbed to persuasive lobbying by the Coolmore Stud boys who threatened to withdraw from Ireland to a more favourable regime - is there one? - if stallion fees were taxed. They are also threatening to pull out of Ireland if an incinerator is built in Tipperary, home to the Coolmore equine empire. For normally consummate gamblers, I think they are playing that particular card much too much. 

December 4th 2002
    
One of the Good Gals. Ellen Straus, 75, died in Calfornia on Saturday last. Ellen fled Europe in 1940, and after marriage in New York settled on a farm in California.  Inspired by Rachel Carson's, Silent Spring, she became a dedicated environmentalist. Described as "a living question mark", she was awarded the Steward of the Land award in 1998. The Holocaust shaped her views; "If there was one thing that WW II brought home to me, it was that we, as individuals, are responsible for what's happening in our commmunities and that we must become activists." In 1994 she and her husband Bill became the first organic dairy farmers "west of the Mississippi River".
From her son, Michael, Office@StrausCom.com 

New Internationalist - "The people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice" - is my favourite magazine. See side bar above for Special Offer from their Dublin office. If you have to get involved in the Christmas fest, it's Gifts and Publications catalogue has something to entice even the most curmudgeonly of you organic-activist types. How about "We know where you live. Live! " video or DVD of live Amnesty comedy show at Wembley - hosted by Eddie Izzard. U2 are in there somewhere too. My favourite from the catalogue, apart from a wind-up radio that might work properly (my experiences with Freeplay is not good) would be a copy of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. This book is not a description of Ireland today, but a collection of award-winning investigative journalist, Grega Palast's best recent cases. His focus is on the bigger players in the bought-democracy stakes, the US and the UK. He has been described as George Bush's and Tony Blair's "nightmare". www.newint.org 

Organic Stud? A correspondent in Tipperary has been keeping a weather-eye on Coolmore Stud. He questions my description of their farming methods as "organic". Over the hedge, immaculately manicured as is the style of publically-supported bloodstock industry stud farms, he saw "two guys in near space suits with sprayers on their backs zapping whatever could be found in the grass that was not grass." Could this be a cause for investigation by an organic inspector? If, that is, one could be found that wasn't on strike! 

Northern Ireland Organic. Adrian Saunders, Organic Development Adviser at Greenmount College, Co.Antrim has brought my attention to an organic website, that I hadn't listed before. www.ruralni.gov.uk/bussys/organic/ 

Missing Link. I'm not the only one to miss links.Teagasc, the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority still has still not listed the Organic College, Dromcollogher, www.organiccollege.com in the Training/Colleges section of their website. This, despite the fact that two other things I commented on about the website in a recent article did elicit almost immediate action.

Two Tales of Moby. The first concerns the American pop star, Moby who attacked the Irish fur trade during his concert at the Point Depot theatre recently. Ireland is one of the few European countries that has no plans to ban fur farming. And though it is little known, we do still have fur farms here; about six licensed mink farms which yielded 140,000 pelts in 2001, and a fox fur farm in Donegal which, apparently, does not even require a license.  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Peta, is to submit a petition to the Dept.of Agriculture before Christmas calling for a complete ban on fur farming www.peta.org and www.ciwf.ie.

The second Moby tale relates to the well known fictional book of the white whale that took its ghastly revenge on whalers. Melville's story, was, I have just discovered from the book, In the Heart of the Sea*, based on the real tragedy of the Nantucket whale-ship, Essex, deliberately rammed by a sperm whale in 1820. The 85 foot whale's second attack hit the ship in its most vulnerable quarter and in a short time it sunk. The crew took to the row boats used for chasing down and harpooning their cetacean quarry. Their fight for survival in three open boats in the vastness of the Pacific is one of greatest, and gruesome! sea-dramas of all time.
The Nantucketers and their Yankee neighbours almost fished the sperm whale to extinction in the 19th century in pursuit of its oil-yielding blubber and spermacetti. The aggressive attack on the Essex by a whale was the first ever recorded but in subsequent decades there were many similar rammings.
It was almost as if the whales were fighting back.
However it was the discovery of fossil oil in the States in the 1850s that largely saved the whales' bacon. 
Despite a resurgence of whaling in modern times, peaking in 1964 when almost 30,000 sperm whales alone were killed (this contrasts with the almost 7,000 killed by American whale-men in their "best year"of 1837), the sperm whale population today, at 1.5 to 2 million, is the highest ever recorded. 

*In the Heart of the Sea by Nataniel Philbrick is published by HarperCollins, 2000 at £16.99.

December 2nd 2002

One of the Good Guys. A crusader, an indefatigable democrat and a champion of social justice, Jim Mitchell, died today at the age of 56. A member of the second largest party in Ireland, Fine Gael, he had in recent years become the scourge of the corrupt in our society, especially in his roles as the chairman of the Dirt Enquiry and chief inquisitor of the Public Accounts Committee. The Irish media today is voluminous in its coverage and plaudits of this irreplaceable Good Guy; "a social democrat"; "his outstanding contribution to Irish politics"; exceptional politician"; "fearless"; "immensely talented"; "never afraid of controversy"; "was in politics for all the right reasons". There will be few obituaries of Irish politicians that will ever again attract these epithets. 
I extend my deepest sympathy to his family, friends and colleagues.