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The Shape of Water is a feature documentary that tells the stories of powerful, imaginative and visionary women confronting the destructive development of the Third World with new cultures and a passion for change. The film takes us to Senegal, Israel/Palestine, Brazil, and India where these new cultures, alongside old traditions, end female genital cutting (FGC), offer innovative forms of opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and show how women are spearheading the implementation of renewable resources and rainforest preservation by tapping trees to obtain rubber. The Shape of Water also takes us to a vast co-operative of rural women in India (SEWA) and, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to a farm, Navdanya, set up to preserve biodiversity and women’s role as seed keepers. By interweaving images, words, and the actions of Khady, Bilkusben, Oraiza, Dona Antonia, and Gila The Shape of Water offers fresh and nuanced insights into the lives of women in the Third World.

Narratives of rescue and salvation often underlie documentaries about women’s lives in the Third World. In contrast, The Shape of Water offers a complex look that is simultaneously inspiring and yet candid about the contradictions that face women in the Third World as they make change. The rise of globalization, the end of the Cold War, environmental degradation, and failed development in the Third World have increasingly feminized poverty despite women’s entry into the labor force in unprecedented numbers. In contrast to many documentaries about the lives of Third World women which present the women as passive victims of their circumstances, this film explores women’s efforts to generate vibrant alternatives which dispel apathy by addressing the root causes of poverty.
It traces the vital efforts of women who are pioneering social justice and celebrates their success while probing the tensions in their lives.MORE

Monsanto, a corporation, might be more powerful than the nation of Germany!

Germany has banned the cultivation of GM corn, claiming that MON 810 is dangerous for the environment. But that argument might not stand up in court and Berlin could face fines totalling millions of euros if American multinational Monsanto decides to challenge the prohibition on its seed.

So let me get this straight. A nation cannot simply ban Monsanto's product, even after said nation decides that it's bad for the environment? Even though EU law says that they, indeed, can ban such things? Wow.

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1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.
The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine.

I'm sure there's no connection between the crops failing due to a water shortage, and GM crops being planted that require twice as much water as the traditional varieties. MORE

Goldman Sachs, where former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was once CEO, switched from an investment bank to a bank holding company last year so it could qualify for $10 billion in bailout funds. They then spent $6.8 billion on bonuses for their financial staff. Goldman's recklessness is one of several scandalous stories of Wall Street giants abusing the bailout at the expense of taxpayers and the economy. But in this case, Goldman's excessive spending has had an immediate and profound impact on the American work force.




Who's Keeping Burger King Workers Below the Poverty Line?

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Some 36 million Americans do not have enough to eat. Globally, the number of people considered hungry is close to one billion, what the UN has called a breaking point. And even as oil prices have come down the global food crisis continues to worsen. So what's driving the crisis at home and abroad?

Joel Berg, the author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? Arun Gupta, Editor of The Indypendent, Max Fraad Wolff, an economist and freelance writer, and Kathy Ozer Executive Director of the National Family Farm Coalition discuss possible solutions.

Kathy Kelly, the author of Other Lands Have Dreams and a co-founder of Voices for Creative Non-Violence, discusses her recent trip to Gaza. As the United States continues to supply Israel with billions in weapons and military hardware the public remains largely in the dark as to how those weapons are used. A tenuous ceasefire may have been reached in Gaza but the violence hasn’t stopped. What can be done? Kelly, who has been an advocate of non-violent resistance for decades, shares her stories.

Now it's official: Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, will be the new Treasury Secretary's chief of staff despite Barack Obama's supposedly strict new rules on lobbying and ethics. Patterson lobbied for Goldman from 2005 until April of last year on a whole host of issues including credit default swaps, credit rating agencies, and sovereign wealth funds, the bank-driven deregulation of which brought us to the current debacle. Now Patterson will be the point person on who gains access to the Treasury Sec's ear. But Patterson is hardly the heart of the problem. Geithner's ear is. To give a bit of background. Geithner's first job was with Kissinger Associates, where he worked with the former Secretary of State. From there, he went to the U.S. Treasury Department, where he rose in esteem and became an aide to Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin -- two pro-bank, pro-deregulation Treasury Secretaries. MORE

The simplest and easiest act of food independence is to join a coop or visit your nearest farmers market at least twice a week for fresh and locally grown produce: support your local farmer! (check the coop link for one near you)
First let's go through a list of foodstuffs you can buy in bulk and store in your larder. Always read the labels before purchasing.

Pulses and legumes: more than forty species and countless varieties of grain legumes are cultivated throughout the world: peas, soyabeans, chickpeas (garbanzo), pinto, black bean, red kidney bean, lentils (all kinds: Puy, red, yellow and green), adzuki bean, cowpea (also known as black-eyed pea), mung bean (also called Oregon pea), lima bean (broad, fava or butter bean), cannellini bean and many more. All make excellent stir-fries and can be easily stored (dry beans will keep indefinitely if stored in a cool, dry place, but as time passes, their nutritive value and flavor degrade and cooking times lengthen so make sure you rotate your dry goods on a regular basis if you keep a large supply).

Rice kinds: White rice can last but brown rice has a shelf life of just a few months, because it still has a bran layer. Rice is an excellent source of folate, and a good source of iron, niacin and thiamin. And the choices are amazing: black rice, red rice from Camargues, Louisiana rice, Jasmine rice, arborio (for that earthy risotto!), wehani, then you have short grain rice, enriched rice, instant rice, converted rice (riceroni), and of course wild rice, native of North America (it's really a grass but don't tell anyone!)

Grains: not everyone can eat wheat. Wheat has become dominant in the diet of the modern world not because of its nutritional value but because of its convenience commercially. The opposite is the case with spelt, amaranth (which can be used as a high-protein grain or as a leafy vegetable) and quinoa (whose green leaves can also be eaten though commercial availability of quinoa greens is severely limited). These grains have a much higher nutritional value than wheat but lack the commercial convenience of wheat and therefore have become less prevalent, which is a pity. Other grains of note: couscous, rye, polenta (cornmeal), barley (great grain, very useful in soups, stews and stir-fries), buckwheat, bulgur wheat (both great in tabouleh), and oats for breakfast and crusty breads. More food stuff and recipes after the break

‘Behind Closed Doors’
U.S. farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled efforts to simplify aid deliveries, leaving Africans to starve when they might have been saved, said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who led USAID, the Agency for International Development, from 2001 to 2006.

“No one can take the high moral ground against it, so they hide behind closed doors and kill it,” he said. “It’s all done behind the scenes.”

The shortcomings of the half-century-old humanitarian program show how efforts to protect American shareholders can have unintended consequences. After approving $2.62 billion of food aid in June, Congress has since authorized 267 times that much in the $700 billion financial system bailout and begun debate on requests from U.S. automakers for billions more.
Lawmakers this year failed to pass President George W. Bush’s January proposal to buy food closer to starving people rather than shipping American produce. In May, Bush renewed his request to spend 25 percent of the program locally after food riots broke out in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean.
Companies Benefit
Cargill Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Bunge Ltd. accounted for 47 percent of 2007 commodities spending for aid, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program was created in the 1950s, partly to reduce domestic surpluses. The regulations require that almost all the peas, corn and other crops come from American sources, effectively steering the bulk of the business to the biggest food-trading companies.

The rules also stipulate that 75 percent of the food must be transported on U.S.-flagged vessels, benefiting ship operators, including Liberty Maritime Corp., based in Lake Success, New York, and Sealift Inc., of Oyster Bay, New York. In 2007, the program’s shipping contracts were worth $385 million, according to the USDA.

Politics isn’t the only manmade cause of the disaster that befell Ayako and his family in Ethiopia. Dozens of interviews on six continents show that the global food crisis also has roots in the failure by governments of developing countries to invest in agriculture, in a three-fold jump in fertilizer prices over two years and in speculators who doubled bets on grain futures and drove prices to records.

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ADM, the world’s largest grain processor, spent $1.78 million to lobby Congress and federal agencies though Dec. 3 this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non- partisan research group in Washington that tracks spending on campaigns and lobbying. Over the past two decades, the company’s campaign contributions amounted to $8.2 million, 91st among political donors, the center said. ADM declined to comment for this story.
Cargill, a closely held company that is the world’s largest agricultural business, spent $660,000 on lobbying this year, the center said. ADM, Cargill and Bunge lobby on other issues besides the aid programs. Cargill favors the added flexibility of local purchase, spokesman Bill Brady said in an e-mail.
Bunge, the biggest oilseed processor, devoted $395,000 to lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company advocates the use of U.S. crops to ensure quality, said Deb Seidel, a company spokeswoman.
‘Support Not There’
“The support is not there in the Congress” to overhaul the system, said Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat who is chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.
Peterson, mentioned as a possible Agriculture Secretary under President-elect Barack Obama, received the second-most donations from crop processors and farm groups among non- presidential candidates in this election cycle, $236,500, according to the center. He ranked behind Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, with $304,349.
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But I also understand that Obama is living in a fantasy world. Power concedes nothing without a demand. And closing ones eyes to enormous problems and the special interests who help create them is no way to bring about fundamental change. So what Obama was up against in this moment was the basic contradiction between the brilliance of his campaign strategy, and it's total inadequacy for addressing a whole range of fundamental problems. Pollan realizes this, of course. He's thought a lot about the power relations involved, and he knows that the powerful entrenched interests cannot simply be wished away or ignored:

BILL MOYERS: What you won't find in his writings is a Shermanesque-like statement saying that if nominated he will not serve. But let's watch my guest Michael Pollan turn pale as I ask him suppose Obama did yield to legions of admirers and name you Secretary of Agriculture instead of yet one more advocate of industrial farming? Where would you start? MICHAEL POLLAN: I'm ready for the Shermanesque statement.
BILL MOYERS: Make it. We'll make some news on this.
MICHAEL POLLAN: It's not from me. It's - this is - I would be so bad at this job.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
MICHAEL POLLAN: I have an understanding of my strengths and limitations. Well, you have to understand that that department of the government, the $90 billion a year behemoth is captive of agri-business. It is owned by agri-business. They're in the room making policy there. When you have a food safety recall over meat, sitting there with the Secretary of Agriculture and her chief of staff or his chief of staff is the head of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
It's all worked out together. So, I don't know I mean, I think that the department, in a way, is part of the problem. And they're also very dependent on the legislation that the House and Senate Agricultural Committees cobble together. And so I think you'd get swallowed up there very easily. I think that and I don't want this job either. What Obama needs to do, if he indeed wants to make change in this area and that isn't clear yet that he does at least in his first term I think we need a food policy czar in the White House because the challenge is not just what we do with agriculture, it's connecting the dots between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education.
So you need someone who can take a kind of more you know, global view of the problem and realize that it's an interdisciplinary problem, if you will. And if you do hope to make progress in all these other areas, you have to make sure that if the Surgeon General is, you know, going on about the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, you don't want to be signing farm bills that subsidize high fructose corn syrup at the same time. So you have to kind of align

Now that's the kind of guy you want in the room when you're trying to create real change. He understands the entrenched forces, he understands the need to do an end run, if any progress is to be made, he understands that the problem is interdisciplinary, he understands, in short, that it's all about strategy, and there's a need to take existing forces and reconfigure them for a unified purpose.
This is the same exact situation with the ongoing economic debates, by the way. It's not that the folks Obama is appointing aren't sincere in the moment or won't willingly carry out his policies. It's that they simply don't see the interconnections that a progressive critic sees. They don't see how responding to the crisis of the moment is intricately interconnected to a dozen different other concerns that need to be coordinated with one another. That's the kind of mentality that Pollan represents with respect to food policy, and how it connects with a myriad other concerns, and the same can be said about the entire policy array, not least, economics.MORE

This is truly the stuff of nightmares. As someone who lived through years of infertility and miscarriage misery, I can't imagine being in the shoes of a desperate-to-be-mother who found out that an ingredient in our food -- unmarked because of government bowing to the lobbying interests of farming giants like Monsanto who don't want you knowing that there is frankenfood in your meal -- was the cause?
Via Gourmet:
...Yet none of our regulatory agencies required long-term animal feeding studies before allowing all that test-tube corn to enter our food supply, according to the Center for Food Safety, and much of the short-term research that has been done was sponsored by the biotech companies that stood to profit from GE crops.
Which is why it was particularly chilling late last week to read the results of an experiment that was both long term and not conducted under the auspices of a big chemical company.
Dr. Jurgen Zentek, a professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, reported that he fed one group of laboratory mice traditional corn and another group GE corn made by the Monsanto Company. The GE crop is bred to survive being sprayed by herbicide and to produce its own insecticide. The mice maintained their diets for 20 weeks, long enough to produce four litters of offspring.
Zentek found that the mice who dined on modified corn had fewer litters, fewer offspring, and more instances of complete infertility than those receiving a conventional diet. Not only that, but the infertility of the GM-corn-fed rodents became more pronounced with each passing litter.
Zentek said that further studies to corroborate his results were “urgently needed.

A book by author Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette, distributed to members of congress last year, documents 65 serious health risks of GM products, including similar fertility problems with GM soy and GM corn: Offspring of rats fed GM soy showed a five-fold increase in mortality, lower birth weights, and the inability to reproduce. Male mice fed GM soy had damaged young sperm cells. The embryo offspring of GM soy-fed mice had altered DNA functioning. Several US farmers reported sterility or fertility problems among pigs and cows fed on GM corn varieties. Additionally, over the last two months, investigators in India have documented fertility problems, abortions, premature births, and other serious health issues, including deaths, among buffaloes fed GM cottonseed products.