Czechs reject ‘son of star wars’

On 18 March, the tiny Czech village of Trokavec, 40 miles west of Prague, voted to reject proposals to build a US radar station, part of the US Missile Defence Shield, in their immediate environs.
The vote, an informal referendum that is not legally binding, was hardly close - 71 voted against and only one voted in favour.
Jan Neoral, mayor of Trokavec, and himself trained in radar systems, comments of the poll:
“The main reason is health and the negative effect of radiation from the radar facilities on the inhabitants of Trokavec and other villages.”
The Brdy hills are dotted with small settlements - Trokavec has a population of only 100 - and the area is a restricted military zone used by the Czech army for target practice and manoeuvres.
Neoral continues, saying there are also “political reasons” for the no vote.
“Building this radar station will help to create a new arms race, new mutual suspicions and will violate agreements that existed when the Czech Republic joined NATO, in particular the agreement on short and medium range missiles.
“In other words, it’s craziness and we can’t see a reason for it.”
George W Bush and his cronies - funnily enough, known as the ‘crazies’ - can see a reason, however.
The Missile Defence Shield is necessary, they claim, to prevent attacks on the US by ‘rogue nations’ such as Iran and North Korea.
But in truth, Son of Star Wars (Star Wars being the original pipe dream of Ronald Reagan) is an apparatus that, once established, will enable the biggest rogue state of them all to nuke its enemies without comeback, in what is euphemistically referred to as ‘limited nuclear war’.
The vehemence of Trokavec’s opposition is reflected across the Czech Republic, where some two thirds of the population are opposed to US military expansionism in Eastern Europe.
While villagers voted, protesters marched through Prague, gathering in the Old Town Square to form a giant peace symbol using flaming torches.
But, according to film director Vaclav Marhoul, who is a big fan of American nuclear missiles apparently, the peaceniks just don’t know what they’re talking about, and have listened to too much “gossip”.
Only “scientists and technicians” can hope to understand radar - people like Jan Neoral, perhaps?
Although the centre-right Czech government has agreed in principle to the US proposals, it is not a done deal by any means.
For one, the Czech parliament has to agree, as the proposal would mean having a military base manned by foreign personnel on Czech soil.
The government’s majority within parliament is far from assured.
Secondly, US Congress, who would release the money for the project, have to agree - and so far, they haven’t even discussed it.
Miroslav Hrabacka, a Trokavec resident, told a local radio station:
“If anything happens, we will be the first to be wiped off the map.
“If gentleman (Prime Minister Mirek) Topolanke and co praise it, let them build it in Prague, and they can sunbathe in its vicinity.
“We had (Soviet) missiles here for 20 years and the Americans targeted us.
“Now Russians and mad Bin Ladens will aim at us?”
Concerns have been raised about suspected cancer clusters around similar radar stations, notably at Cape Cod, in the US, where a base identical to that at RAF Fylingdales, on the North York Moors, is sited.
Around the Cape Cod area, approximately 70 miles from Boston, incidence of breast cancer and lung cancer has risen sharply amongst young women.
Radiation emissions are within legal limits, but questions have been raised over whether the complex waves of electro-magnetic radiation should be subject to tighter regulation.
Dr Richard Albanese, a scientist with the US Air Force and a member of the team which first established the link between the use of agent orange in the Vietnam war and cancers in Vietnam veterans, says radar emissions could have carcinogenic properties.
Asked if, were he buying a house in North Yorks, he would be happy to live near Fylingdales, he admitted, “I would prefer to live outside the beam.”
The people of Trokavec, however, have no such choice.

...and San Francisco says bye-bye to plastic bags

The city of San Francisco is set to become the first in the US to ban non-biodegradable plastic bags.
No, you won’t get pulled over in the street by angry cops for having your cheese pieces wrapped up in a Superdrug bag, but supermarkets with an annual turnover of more than $2million (£1million) and pharmacies with more than five outlets could be in serious bother if they don’t get their act together within six months (or a year, in the case of pharmacies) and replace regular, non-biodegradable bags - made of petroleum products - with something a little more compostable, such as bags made from corn starch.
The California Grocers’ Association is up in arms, because plastic bags are a major form of cheap advertising for them, and biodegradable bags are more expensive to produce - 10 cents a pop, as compared to 2 to 3 cents.
But San Francisco has a major plastic bag problem.
The city uses some 180million a year, and they can be viewed any time of the day or night snarled up in trees, choking water courses or blowing down the street. More problematic even than their sheer ugliness is the fact that they choke animals and birds, take up precious space in landfill, and can block sewage systems.
Bangladesh banned plastic bags when it discovered this propensity to block sewage systems, greatly exacerbating the effects of flooding.
But is San Fran’s measure enough?
Smaller outlets are exempt, and they’re responsible for 95,000 bags a year.
Furthermore, supermarkets may turn to paper bags, which wreak their own form of environmental havoc by using up trees.
Perhaps only a complete ban, including of paper bags, is required.
Or a tax, such as that levied in Ireland, which saw plastic bag usage shrink by over 90 per cent as shoppers returned to string and canvas bags.
California has initiated programmes to encourage the use of reusable canvas bags - though this has engendered much ridicule from those who clearly believe traipsing round with a tatty bag blaring the merits of ASDA-Walmart is somehow cool.

Give your food some thought

Food surrounds us everyday - the shops are full of it, TV chefs are forever on the telly cooking it and we need it to survive.
But how much do we really know about it?
Lindsay Keenan looks at its production, distribution and explains why food is political.
Food? Don’t you just love it? I certainly do. So much so, I eat it three times a day with snacks in between.
Give me fish’n’chips, chicken Tikka Masala, a good bowl of home-made soup, some mashed turnip with a wee bit black pepper on, and I’m happy.
Give me grapes and bananas, strawberries in the summer, crunchy green apples in the autumn, even a few peach slices with custard or creamed rice, and I’m delighted.
Give me carrot cake, birthday cakes with thick gooey icing, or one of those dense fruity Dundee cakes you get at Hogmanay, and I’m ecstatic.
Food isn’t just something to rave about. We need it to survive.
Regardless of your politics, you need to eat. Except for the occasional fast or diet, we will all eat food every day of our lives, maybe even three times a day, if we’re lucky.
Like water and shelter, food is one of the bare necessities of life.
Human society has developed around these essentials, and they form the basis of society and economy.
If you have control over these bare necessities then you can relax and, as the Jungle Book song has it, forget about your worries and your strife.
In some countries, people are starving to death from lack of food, while in others, they throw away a third of their food, yet are also dying of obesity.
In figures, that’s 854million people going hungry across the world, and one child dying every five seconds, either directly as a result of starvation, or indirectly, as a result of hunger-related disease.
Meanwhile, in the UK, we throw away 6million tonnes of food every year, over half of which is edible. This squander costs us
15 pence in every pound we spend on food, and almost all of it goes to landfill, where it breaks down to form greenhouse gases.

Obesity
This notwithstanding, adult obesity rates have quadrupled in the UK in the last 25 years.
Some food is grown organically, without dangerous chemicals that kill the insects and the birds and poison the farmers and the consumers, while other food is grown with so much chemical assistance, it is barely fit for consumption.
In 2004, some 40 per cent of fruit, veg and bread tested in the UK contained pesticides, rising to 85 per cent in school fruit and veg.
There are 447 different chemicals available to farmers to spray produce, including such horrors as organophosphates, which are linked with cancer, decreasing male fertility, chronic fatigue syndrome in children and Parkinson’s disease.
Some food is fairly traded, while other food is grown by bonded labour in terrible conditions.
Bonded, or indentured, labour is used extensively in agriculture, particularly in developing countries.
In hybrid cottonseed production in India, for example, female children are often used as indentured labour, secured through high interest loans to their parents (which their chronically low wages ensure they will never pay off), to ensure a constant supply of workers too young and helpless to organise and stand up for themselves.
Such child labourers miss out on family and education, and are often poorly nourished and suffering the ill-effects of constant exposure to poisonous pesticides.

Fair food
Fairtrade, on the other hand, guarantees growers a decent price for produce, cutting out the middleman, enabling them to feed their families, nurture their communities, and plan ahead. It also enables many farmers to make the conversion to organic production.
The systems of growing food, the processing and distribution of these foods, the availability of these foods and the price we pay for these foods, fundamentally affect our lives and those of everyone else in the food chain.
Knowing where your food will come from today, tomorrow and each day for the rest of our lives is something we should all pay attention to, if we do not want to go hungry in the future.
For people who want to build a more just, fair and ultimately sustainable society, knowing how to feed the people, or how the people can feed themselves, is a basic issue that cannot be ignored.
Most of our food comes courtesy of a few big multinational companies who, between them, control a large percentage of the food sold in the UK each day.
Right now, an ever-decreasing number of companies has control of the vast majority of the food that we eat.
The food chain is a funny shape.
It is long and broad at the top (that’s where you and me are), then it gets slimmer in the middle until it is almost anorexic (that’s where the meat companies and commodity traders are), before getting fatter again (where the farmers are), finally resting on top of a wee pointy bit at the bottom (where the seed companies are).
There are exceptions, such as foods that reach us directly, the stuff you buy at the farm gate for example, but most follows this tortuous route.
At the top end, where the money goes in and the food comes out, there are millions of people.
Below them are a few hundred very big food companies who dominate retail and production.
Below them are even fewer big meat and dairy producers, and below them are even fewer food processors, ingredient suppliers and commodity traders.
Then there are ten of thousands of farmers and finally, below them, at the bottom of the food chain, is the agro-chemical companies that increasingly control the production of seeds, which are the basis of agriculture.

Market control
Just 60 food companies control over 60 per cent of the total food and drink sales in the entire European Union.
These include companies like Tesco, ASDA/Walmart, Safeway, Aldi, Morrisons, Kellogs, Heinz, Mars, Nestle, Unilever, Danone, Campbells, Chiquita, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Cadbury Scweppes, Arla, Sara-Lee, Muller and McCains.
Tesco alone control about 30 per cent of supermarket food sales in the UK.
Then there are the fast-food companies like McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut and, one step back down the food chain from these companies, are others that control much of the meat production, food processing and food transportation.
For example, meat producers like Grampian, Nutreco, Bernard Matthews, ABF, Danish Crown, who between them control the breeding and slaughter of literally million of pigs, chickens and cows each week and others such as Wisemans, The Kerry Group and Dairy Crest who dominate the dairy industry.
Below them in the food chain are the less well-known names like Archer Daniel Midland (ADM), Bunge and Cargill, who control much of the processing and bulk handling of all manner of basic food grains and cereals for use as human food ingredients and as animal feed.
Then come the farmers and below them, the agro-chemical companies like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta, who are starting to dominate the seed supply.
Bio-tech giant Monsanto already pretty much controls the sale and use of all crop seed in the US, merging with or buying all the other major seed companies to ensure that almost no other seed is available to farmers.

Genetically modified
GM contamination of non-GM crops does the rest, undermining certified and traditional seed stocks. Farmers whose non-GM crops are contaminated with Monsanto crops actually have to pay Monsanto a premium for the privilege!
On top of which, Monsanto forces farmers to buy new seed every year, through ‘terminator technology’ in GM seed, which means it does not reproduce. Thus the time-honoured practice of saving seed from one year to the next, which ensures diversity and food security, is eradicated at a stroke.
GM, of course, is a racket. Billed as pest-resistant, it actually requires a whole new world of pesticides to guarantee its survival to harvest. In 2003, Monsanto made $1.6billion in seed sales - and $3.1billion in pesticide sales.
As you can see, a few hundred companies between them control how most of our food is grown, how it is processed, how it is distributed, how and where it is sold and at what price.
They control this not only in the UK but also all across Europe, Latin America, and beyond.
Maybe my chips come from organic potatoes produced a few miles away from Glasgow by a happy Scottish farmer, or maybe they were heavily sprayed with herbicides or pesticides and transported half way around the world.
In the UK alone, 31,000 tonnes of chemicals are sprayed on produce every year; the average Cox’s Orange Pippin is sprayed 18 times, with a whole variety of different chemicals, before it is harvested.
Was the chicken in my tikka masala running around a field all day or was it in a big grey shed with millions of other chickens, never seeing the light of day from birth to slaughter?
Factory farming of chickens is a nightmare. For a start, as male chickens are no use to the broiler industry, they are exterminated. Thus, half of all chicks born into this pitiless industry are disposed of.
Life is hardly preferable. The natural lifespan of 15 years is contracted to just 42 days, during which birds have their beaks and toes cut off, and live in darkness, to prevent fighting provoked by massive overcrowding. Up to 50,000 birds can be herded into one featureless barn, fed with automatic feeders and waterers, and medicated to increase growth to the extent that their legs soon cannot support their distended bodies.
For the workers too, factory farming is a soul-destroying business.
The food we eat each day shapes our lives and those of millions of workers in the food trade in a great many ways. We should be making very conscious choices about the money we put each day into the food supply system and what it supports.
Why should we care?
Because of the impact that the current systems of growing, processing and distribution of food have on our health - is it good food we are eating, or is it laden with chemicals and full of salt and fats?

Human impact
What impact does it have on our fellow human beings, on the farmers both here and in other countries who grow our food?
Is the happy picture of farmers working in the fields real, or are monoculture crops heavily sprayed with agro-chemicals and developing country farmers living on barely subsistence wages closer to the reality?
We should be concerned because of the inhuman treatment of animals, which leads to disease, suffering, waste and environmental damage.
We should be concerned because the oceans are being emptied of fish at an alarming rate. A 2003 report, first published in Nature magazine, found that 50 years of industrial fishing had wiped out 90 per cent of the world’s largest predator fish, such as tuna, halibut and swordfish, while a study published late last year in Science magazine warned that, if we continue as we are doing, the seas will be barren wastelands by the middle of this century.
We should be concerned about the loss of biodiversity caused by current agricultural practises and about the reduction in variety of seeds being produced, and the corporate control over those seeds.
We need to be concerned because the future of our food, both its availability and its price, are increasingly dependant on intrinsically unreliable multinational companies who are driven solely by the profit motive with little concern for human need, fairness or sustainability, never mind taste or quality.
We need to be concerned because we need to eat and we need to be able to feed our kids and future generations.
We need to make conscious food choices, because our choice of food fundamentally shapes our live and our society.
Eating is political.
Every mouthful comes from somewhere and every mouthful has an impact on people and planet.

Political
When we want to shape our world to be fairer, more sustainable, healthier, we should remember that we have a vote three times a day, with every meal.
Politicians, we only get a chance to vote for every four years, but when we shop, we can vote for a better world with every penny that we spend on food.
Do we choose to support faceless multinationals that exploit people, animals and the environment? Or do we choose to support diversity, organic farming methods, small family farms and fair trade? Do we support community development, local services, quality jobs and quality food? Or mindlessly pour our hard-earned wages into financing unhealthy food, human misery and environmental destruction?
In my 42 years, I have never grown any of the food that I have eaten.
Neither have I hunted nor gathered any of that food, except for one season many years ago, when I was backpacking around New Zealand, and picked fruit for a summer to pay my way.
Oh yeah, and a few times when I was younger and we picked berries that used to grow in the country lanes around the town where I was brought up.
These few and far examples aside, I am a townie, who has lived in apartments with barely enough room for a window box.
But I love my food and I care about where it comes from, so always try to buy at least some of my food from independent wholefood shops and I buy local, organic, fairtrade food when I find it and can afford it.
Likewise, when I can, I buy my food from companies that I know are workers’ cooperatives, because I want to support community development and empower people to take control over their own lives.
Affordability is a key issue for so many people, and one of the reasons why supermarkets, with their ‘loss leaders’ - you know, 7 pence bread and cheap milk - have such pulling power, and can ruthlessly undercut their smaller, more local rivals, who operate on a much tighter profit margin.
Not only are supermarkets temptingly cheap, not to mention convenient in that everything’s under one roof, they are ubiquitous.
We have all seen with our own eyes the rise of the supermarkets in the last 20 years and their dominance of the food retail market.
We have seen the way in which this draws trade away from local shops, forcing them out of business, and how that in turn requires people to travel longer and longer distances to shop at big, out-of-town outlets, still a major growth area in the grocery retail sector, despite angry local protests up and down the country.
We also know, deep down, that whilst those supermarkets may be pushing cheap food at the moment, the prices will go up as soon as the competition disappears.
Then we will have no choice and they’ll be naming their price.
Faced with blanket supermarket coverage, your best bet is the Co-op.
It’s a big company, and not nearly as caring as it makes out, but it has at least some greater degree of accountability to its members and some basic ethics behind it, however well those are delivered in reality.
There is a degree of membership participation and some kind of commitment to maintaining local stores.
Far from perfect no doubt, but certainly a few steps ahead of the Tescos and Morrisons of this world.

Community co-op

While the big Co-op is one of the better options when it comes to supermarkets, there is a better option yet, and that is a local community co-op.
At its most basic level, this is about a few people in an area getting together and bulk-buying produce that they can sell to each other and to their neighbours.
In doing so, they often get cheaper prices but perhaps more importantly, they start to wrest back control over their own food.
That is one of the initiatives that I would encourage us all to start or to support.
Community co-ops empower people and breathe life back into local communities. They give friends and neighbours a common purpose and a common reward. They provide a local service that you do not necessarily need to travel a long way to access.
Some years ago, when I got involved in the campaign to stop the introduction of GM food, it was the network of workers and community food co-ops in Scotland and throughout the UK that were amongst the first and most pro-active groups and individuals to take action.
It was the fact that they had buying power, and that they understood how the market worked, and it was the fact that they used their control over their food supply to strongly apply pressure - down through the food chain all the way back to the farmers and the seed suppliers - that proved one of the key strengths of the campaign against GM food.
Where these local groups led, the big retailers were forced to follow.
Individuals like you and me have been getting together for many years, in fact for centuries, around food. To grow it, to transport it, to process it, to cook it and, best of all, to enjoy eating it.
That basic relationship to our food has been broken for many of us and it is a vital link that we need to re-establish.
I don’t think I would make much of a farmer.
I know nothing about agriculture, but I would love the chance to try. I would love, even once in my life, to have even just a wee garden where I could grow a couple of veggies; just to plant the seed, tend the plant, see it grow, pick it, cook it, enjoy it with friends - and taste that wee bit of freedom.