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The Dark Side of Globalization: What the Media Are Missing

An Essay by Jerry Mander



Economic globalization involves arguably the most fundamental redesign and centralization of the planet's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution. Yet the profound implications of these changes have barely been exposed to serious public scrutiny or debate. Despite the scale of the global reordering, neither our elected officials nor our educational institutions nor the mass media have made a credible effort to describe what is being formulated, to explain its root philosophies or to explore the multidimensionality of its effects.
The occasional descriptions or predictions about the global economy that are found in the media usually come from the leading advocates and beneficiaries of this new order: corporate leaders, their allies in high levels of government and a newly powerful centralized global trade bureaucracy. The visions they offer us are unfailingly positive, even utopian: Globalization will be a panacea for all our ills.

Meanwhile, the diverse opposition to globalization is lumped together in one ball -- whether they are environmentalists, or human rights advocates, or small businesses, or small and indigenous farmers, or people trying to sustain the vestiges of democratic governance; whether Perotites or Naderites or Buchananites, covering a wide political spectrum -- they are all combined into a single category, "protectionist," so as to be summarily dismissed. In the end, we are left with a public information climate that is exceedingly shallow and one-sided. Worse, we are left with a corporate protectionism that does not act to protect jobs, communities, democracy or the natural world. It works to protect and expand business freedoms, to circumvent democratic control and to establish effective transnational corporate governance.

The recent passage of the Uruguay Round of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), with its associated W.T.O. (World Trade Organization), was celebrated by the world's political leadership and transnational corporations as a sort of global messianic rebirth. They have proclaimed that these new ruling structures will bring on a $250 billion expansion of world economic activity, with the benefits trickling down to us all. "The new rising tide will lift all boats" has become the dominant economic-political homily of our time.

The global economy is new, but more so in scale than in form. It offers new global freedoms of mobility and investment to corporations and banks; it facilitates a technologically enhanced speedup of global development and commerce; and it produces a profound and abrupt shift in global political power beyond the reach of even large Western democracies. Surely it is something new that the world's democratic countries have voluntarily voted to subordinate their own democratically enacted laws to the W.T.O. Also new is the elimination of most regulatory control over global corporate activity, and the liberation of currency from any nation's controls, leading to what John Cavanagh has described as the "casino economy," ruled by currency speculators.

But the deeper ideological principles of the global economy are not so new; they are only now being applied globally. These rules include the absolute primacy of exponential economic growth and an unregulated "free market"; the need for free trade to stimulate the growth; the destruction of "import substitution" economic models (which promote economic self-sufficiency) in favor of export-oriented economies; accelerated privatization of public enterprises; and the aggressive promotion of consumerism, which, combined with global development, faithfully reflects the Western corporate vision. The guiding principles of the new economic structures assume that all countries -- even those whose cultures have been as diverse as, say, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Sweden and Brazil -- must row their (rising) boats in unison. The net result, as Helena Norberg-Hodge argues on page 20, is a global monoculture -- the homogenization of culture, lifestyle and level of technological immersion, with the corresponding dismantlement of local traditions and self-sufficient economies. Soon, everyplace will look and feel like everyplace else, with the same restaurants and hotels, the same clothes, the same malls and superstores, the same TV, the same streets choked with cars and the same universal materialistic values. There'll scarcely be a reason ever to leave home.

But can this system work? Will the promised economic expansion resulting from GATT actually happen? If so, can it sustain itself? Where will the resources -- the energy, the wood, the minerals, the water -- come from to feed the increased growth? Where will the effluents of the process -- the solids and the toxics -- be dumped? Who benefits from this? Will it be working people, who, in the United States at least, seem mainly to be losing jobs to machines and corporate flight? Will it be farmers, who thus far, whether in Asia, Africa or North America, are being maneuvered off their lands to make way for huge corporate monocultural farming -- no longer producing diverse food products for local consumption but coffee, grains and beef for export markets, with their declining prices? Will it be city dwellers, now faced with the immigrant waves of newly landless peoples desperate to find -- someplace -- the rare and poorly paid job? Can ever-increasing consumption be sustained forever? When will the forests be gone? How many cars can be built and bought? How many roads can cover the land? What will become of the animals and the birds? Are we -- as individuals, as families and as communities and nations -- made more secure, less anxious, more in control of our destinies? Can we possibly benefit from a system that destroys local and regional governments while handing real power to faceless corporate bureaucracies in Geneva and Brussels? Will people's needs be better served from this?

The German ecological philosopher Wolfgang Sachs argues in his book The Development Dictionary that the only thing worse than the failure of this massive global development experiment would be its success. For even at its optimum performance level, the long-term benefits will go to only a tiny minority of people who sit at the hub of the process and to a slightly larger minority that can retain an economic connection to it, while the rest of humanity is left landless and homeless, groping for fewer jobs, living in violent societies on a ravaged planet. The only boats that will be lifted are those of the owners and managers of the process; the rest of us will be on the beach, facing the rising tide.

Given the above, one would expect massive efforts by media and educational institutions to explore all the dimensions of this subject. Yet when the mass media report on some aspect of globalization, rarely does the story express the connections between the specific crisis it describes and the root causes in the globalization process itself.

In the area of environment, for example, we read of changes in global climate and occasionally of their long-term consequences, such as the melting polar icecaps (the real rising tide), their expected staggering impact on agriculture and food supply, or their destruction of habitat. We read too of ozone-layer depletion, the pollution of the oceans and the wars over resources such as oil and, perhaps soon, water. But few of these matters are linked directly to the imperatives of global economic expansion, the tremendous increase in ecologically devastating global transport (caused by universal conversion to export-oriented production), the overuse of raw materials or the commodity-intensive lifestyle that corporations are selling worldwide via the culturally homogenizing technology of television and its parent, advertising. Obfuscation is the net result.

I personally have had some harsh experience of this obfuscation. While working with Public Media Center in the run-up to the vote on GATT, my colleagues and I were preparing educational ads about GATT's environmental consequences, particularly the way it can challenge existing major environmental laws, such as recently happened to the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Clean Air Act. We collaborated on the project with fifteen environmental groups who signed the ad, among them the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth, Earth Island Institute and the Rainforest Action Network. The groups felt the campaign was important precisely because the media had carried so few stories about environmental opposition to GATT, and did not take it seriously.

Shortly after our first ad appeared in The New York Times, a report in Newsweek advised its readers that the advertisement was not really from the environmental community at all; it was secretly funded by labor union "protectionists." Public Media Center protested loudly, and finally Newsweek ran a small corrective notice. But the damage was done. A good opportunity to broaden the public's thinking about economic globalization was undermined.

Other notable examples of media misunderstanding include the coverage of the Barings bank debacle of 1995 and the Mexican financial crisis of 1994-95. Rarely has any medium made clear the role that the new global computer networks play in creating the capability for instantaneous transfer anywhere on the planet of astounding amounts of money; nor do the media describe the consequences of deregulating financial markets or the role that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund play in creating the conditions that encourage currency speculation. The Mexican story was carried in the U.S. press as if the United States' "bailout of Mexico" was some kind of do-gooder act on our part: good neighbors coming to the aid of our Mexican friends. In fact, the main people bailed out were Wall Street investors, who, with the direct complicity of the World Bank and the I.M.F., largely brought on the crisis in the first place. For middle-class and working-class Mexicans, the bailout was disastrous. That story has yet to be told by the mass media.

Some publications did do stories about "corporate greed" as expressed by the firing of thousands of workers while corporate profits and executive salaries soared. Even those stories missed the crucial point that corporate restructuring is directly hooked to the imperatives and mobilities provided by the new rules of globalization, and that it is happening all over the world. Obfuscation yet again.

The media like to speak of immigration crises, but there is no mention of the role of trade agreements in making life impossible for people in their countries of origin. NAFTA, for example, was a knockout blow to the largely self-sufficient, small-scale corn-farming economy of Mexico's indigenous peoples -- as the Zapatista rebels said in 1994 -- making previously inviolate indigenous lands vulnerable to corporate buyouts and foreign competition. In India, Africa and Central and South America, World Bank schemes have displaced whole populations of relatively prosperous peoples to make way for giant dams and other mega-projects. Millions of small farmers have thereby been turned into landless refugees seeking nonexistent urban jobs.

As for the role of technology, we now have global computer networks that enable global corporations to keep their thousand-armed enterprises in constant touch. Biotechnology brings the corporate patenting of new life forms and the voracious global search for indigenous seeds and plants to patent and market, with devastating effects on Third World agriculture, ecology and human rights. Where are the reports on this?

As for reportage about corporations themselves, the media treat corporate figures mainly as glamorous celebrities and speak respectfully in the new language of consolidation -- efficiency, structural engineering and downsizing -- rarely attempting to present such activities within their economic and social context. The media have still less to say about global media corporations that place Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and very few others in a position to transmit their Western images and commercial values directly into the brains of 75 percent of the world's population. The globalization of media imagery is surely the most effective means ever for cloning cultures to make them compatible with the Western corporate vision.

But if the media have failed to connect the dots and show how many of the global crises of today have their roots in the globalization process, they have been still worse in analyzing the economic theories that underly it, and their expression in practice. We may find references to World Bank loans to Third World countries, but there is scant effort to reveal the draconian "structural adjustment" rules forced on recipients, leaving their local economies decimated and their governance under the dominion of transnational corporations and banks.

And when have mass media ever challenged the preposterous idea that, on a finite earth, an economic arrangement based on limitless growth can possibly be sustained?

The point is this: The media do not help us to understand that all these issues -- overcrowded cities, unusual and disturbing new weather patterns, the growth of global poverty, the lowering of wages while stock prices soar, the elimination of social services, the destruction of wilderness and wildlife, the protests of Maya Indians in Mexico -- are products of the same global policies. They are all connected to the economic-political restructuring now under way in the name of accelerated free trade and globalization. This restructuring has been designed by economists and corporations, encouraged by subservient governments and will soon be made mandatory by international bureaucrats in Brussels and Geneva who are beyond democratic control. All claim that society will benefit from what they are doing. But the authors in this special issue of The Nation believe the opposite is true.

In such a deprived information environment it is truly a wonder that significant numbers of people are already conscious of what economic globalization means to them, and to the planet, and that resistance is necessary. Aside from the example of the Zapatistas, we have seen the strike by hundreds of thousands of French public service workers in 1995, who brought the French economy to a halt. They may soon do it again, if the French government proceeds with its plan to cut wages, benefits and jobs to "harmonize" them with Europe's single-currency agreement, itself an integral part of the restructuring and corporatizing of the European economy for global compatibility.

In Japan, tens of thousands of rice farmers protested when supports were removed from traditional farming to open the country to the global market. In India there have been a series of tremendous demonstrations by farmers. A half-million protested the new GATT rules on intellectual property that allow for transnational seed companies to patent and own indigenous seeds. In another demonstration, farmers burned the offices of agribusiness giant Cargill, and in a third, they damaged a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet for its role in undermining India's very diverse poultry farm economy, to replace it with factory farms for exporting chickens.


Throughout Asia and South America, indigenous people have been fighting World Bank dam and irrigation projects that cause the displacement of people from their land; and a new international Native movement is opposing the taking of Indian blood and skin samples by corporations prospecting for commercially applicable and patentable genetic traits.

In the United States, meanwhile, dozens of organizations that worked to oppose NAFTA and GATT have spent the past two years broadening their sights to encompass globalization itself. Environmental, consumer, human rights, labor, small business and economic justice groups are now grasping that their issues are directly affected by globalization, and are forming new partnerships here and across borders. Organizations like the International Forum on Globalization have found that events planned for 300 people are bringing out thousands.

A growing tendency among many groups is to take it as axiomatic that we must turn away now from globalization to a new relocalization with economic, financial and political power rooted in place. This is sometimes viewed as too utopian for the modern world, but that puts the case backwards. What is truly utopianism, corporate utopianism, is the belief that centralized economic models that defy natural limits and social equities can ever sustain themselves. It's far more practical to fight such schemes in all of their manifestations, while encouraging alternative solutions.







Jerry Mander is a senior fellow with the Public Media Center, San Francisco, and co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization.

He is co-editor, with Edward Goldsmith, of The Case Against the Global Economy, forthcoming from Sierra Club Books in September. This article was adapted from the book. Copyright 1996 Sierra Club Books.



Copyright (c) 1996, The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Electronic redistribution for nonprofit purposes is permitted, provided this notice is attached in its entirety. Unauthorized, for-profit redistribution is prohibited. For further information regarding reprinting and syndication, please call The Nation at (212) 242-8400, ext. 226 or send e-mail to Max Block

The Imposition of Technology
Kirkpatrick Sale
(This is a chapter excerpt of Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels Against The Future: The Luddites and their War on the Industrial Revolution)
The steam engine, especially as it was perfected by the Watt and Boulton shop in the experimental years after 1776, was the iron heart of the Industrial Revolution. No matter that it was surrounded by thousands of other ingenious machines and inventions, some more immediately practical--294 patents were issued in Britain in the 1770s, 477 in the 1780s, and 647 in the 1790s, almost twice as many as in the preceding hundred years of patenting--it was the first manufacturing technology in human history that was, in a sense, independent of nature, of geography and season and weather, of sun or wind or water or human or animal power. It allowed humans for the first time, restricted only by available supplies of coal (and metal), to have a constant, unfailing source of power at their command, capable of producing an almost infinite variety of objects with a minimum of personal effort or time. And thus it permitted the extraordinary shift from what had been an organic economy based on land and labor and local exchange to a mechanical economy based on fuel and factory and foreign trade, an empowerment of the machine in human society such as had never before been attempted.
All technologies have consequences, inevitable and built in, and imperatives, just as inevitable, essentially separate from human dictates and desires. Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who was the founder of modern cybernetics, has written about "technical determinants" dictated by "the very nature" of machines, and of the steam engine he noted that it automatically leads to large and ever larger scales because it can power so many separate machines at once, to ever increasing production because it must pay back its high investment and operating costs, and to centralization and specialization because factors of efficiency and economy supersede those of, say, craftsmanship or esthetic expression. He might have added that it also necessarily leads to a reduction in face-to-face contacts, social discourse, human autonomy, individual choice, and personal skills, none of which is especially important as far as the operation of the machine goes.
There is, then, a kind of technological logic connected to this iron monster with a pulse of steam"--what Clark Kerr and his team in the 1960s called "the logic of industrialism," which they say is why all industrial societies look pretty much alike--and by extension of course to the other machinery of the Industrial Revolution. It did not take more than a few decades for contemporaries to start observing where it led: large-scale units of production governed by regimentation and control, increasing refinement and complexity of machinery, a division of labor and hence of training and hence of social status, expanding markets, expanding resources, expanding wastes--all phenomena that the Kerr investigators found wherever they followed industrialism a century and a half later. It also led, and leads, though Kerr lays less emphasis here, to social and political consequences: the squeezing of farm populations and the uncontrollable growth of cities, the evisceration of self-reliant communities, the enlargement of central governments, the enthronement of science as ruling ideology, a wide and increasing gap between rich and poor, and ruling values of profit, growth, property, and consumption. It was so in the early 19th century of Britain, the late19th century of the United States, the 20th century of Japan, and seems indeed to be so in the process of industrialism everywhere.
That may seem like a lot of weight to load on Watt's simple machine--a restatement in metal, by the way, of a device known to the Greeks two thousand years before*--but contemporaries who lived within the sound of its roar had no doubts. "One of the most striking revolutions ever produced in the moral and social conditions of a moiety of a great nation," said Peter Gaskell in his survey of The Manufacturing Population in EngLand in 1833, "is that which has been consequent to the application of steam to machinery." By then steam power was doing what Gaskell calculated to be the work of 2.5 million people-and since the 1831 census had identified no more than 3 million people engaged in manufacturing overall, that meant steam machinery was nearly equivalent to the whole manufacturing workforce, just four decades after its introduction. Indeed, Gaskell warned, "vast and incessant improvements in mechanical contrivances, all tending to overmatch and supersede human labour [threaten] ere long to extirpate the very demand for it," making the English worker, except for those making the machines, obsolete.
Steam made its impact primarily in the textile industries, most of them traditionally located in that Luddite triangle where streams running from the Pennine hills had long provided the water needed to wash and prepare yarn and the weather systems in from the Irish Sea had long provided the damp climate suit-able to its processing into cloth. When the first factories appeared they used the Pennine streams for power, but since this source was so uncertain--many mills were idle in the summer months when the streams dwindled to trickles--the attraction of the steam engine and its ceaseless energy was irresistible, especially since by a whim of Albion the region was replete with coalfields to fire the steam. By 1800, a little more than a decade after their introduction into the factory, some 2,191 steam engines were thought to be at work in Britain--those "Stygian forges, with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers" that Carlyle wrote of--some 460 of them in the textile trades and responsible for as much as a quarter of all cotton production. By 1813 there were an estimated 2,400 textile looms operating by steam, but that burgeoned to 14,150 by 1820 and exploded to more than 100,000 just a decade later, as factory production came to dominate cotton and moved steadily into wool, silk, and other branches. By then, according to a contemporary expert, one man could do the work that two or three hundred men had done at the start of the Industrial Revolution, "the most striking example of the dominion obtained by human science over the powers of nature, of which modern times can boast."
Although large industrial organizations had been known for some time--the famous arsenal in 16th-century Venice was in most respects a factory, right down to division of labor and mass production~it was the Industrial Revolution, driven by the steam engine, that produced the first factory system--an operation both immense and intense, in which not only the machine but the entire production process, humans included, was made up of more or less isolated and interchangeable parts. Very shortly it took this shape, as a German visitor wrote from Manchester in 1823:
The modern miracles, my friend, are to me the machines here and the buildings that house them, called factories. Such a block is eight or nine stories high, sometimes has 40 windows along its frontage and is often four windows deep. Each floor is twelve feet high, and vaulted along its whole length with arches each having a span of nine feet. The pillars are of iron, as is the girder which they support. . . . A hundred of them are now standing unshaken and exactly as they were erected thirty and forty years ago. A number of such blocks stand in very elevated positions which dominate the neighbourhood; and in addition a forest of even taller boiler-house chimneys like needles, so that it is hard to imagine how they remain upright; the whole presents from a distance a wonderful spectacle especially at night, when thousands of windows are brilliantly illuminated by gaslight.
The human appendages to the machines thus housed were leaden drudges. A Leeds doctor said in 1831:
While the engine works, the people must work. Men, women, and children are thus yoke-fellows with iron and steam; the animal machine--fragile at best, subject to a thousand sources of suffering, and doomed, by nature in its best state, to a short-lived existence, changing every moment, and hastening to decay--is matched with an iron machine insensible to suffering and fatigue.
This is the factory system, these two machines working together in "a vast automaton," in the words of the great apologist for it, Andrew Ure, in 1835, "composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in an uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulating moving force."
"Subordinated" is the key word here, though Ure seems to feel there is no distinction to be made between the mechanical and intellectual kind. The task for the factory owner was to make sure that workers would be disciplined to serve the needs of the machines-"in training human beings," Ure said, "to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton"-and for this the principal strategies were threefold. First, long and inflexible hours, behind locked doors, twelve and fourteen hours a day being the rule for the first several decades, sometimes as many as sixteen or eighteen, and never less than ten; next, a regimen of shop-floor penalties, such as these (out of a list of nineteen) posted in a cotton mill in 1824--
Any spinner found with his window open 1 shilling
Any spinner found dirty at his work 1 shilling
Any spinner heard whistling 1 shilling
Any spinner being five minutes after the last bell rings 2 shillings
--and assessed on wages that averaged no more than 24 shillings a week; and finally by outright physical force, more commonly used against women and children but available to all, typified by the foreman "kept on purpose to strap," whose job was continually walking up and down with the strap in his hand," as a Parliamentary inquiry was told in 1833, beating children "late at their work" in the morning or falling asleep at their work in the afternoon--"very cruel strapping," too, and "some have been beaten so violently that they have lost their lives in consequence.
But there was another, wider discipline of the labor force as well: by government policy, sanctioned somehow by laissez-faire ideology, the workers of Britain were made effectively powerless to resist the demands of their employers. Laws passed in 1799 and 1800 that consolidated long-standing antiunion statutes made it illegal to organize, or "combine," to try to get higher wages or shorter hours or better conditions, even to raise funds or attend meetings as a unit; and though certain trades in certain towns could evade some of these restrictions, many employers made full use of the laws (or threat of them) whenever they felt resistance mounting among their workers. Government policies also helped expand the labor pool, especially during the first decades of industrialism (largely by facilitating the immigration of Irish laborers and forcing agricultural workers from the countryside), which worked as it always does to undercut any functional bargaining power of the workers. This was compounded by the fact that there were no restrictions on employing women and children, starting at ages as young as 4 and 5, who came to make up roughly four fifths of the textile labor force by 1833, a population both easier to exploit and cheaper to hire than adult men. Taken together, all this served quite well to make the workers, particularly in the large manufacturing towns where numbers were greater and owners more powerful, for the most part effectually "subordinated" to the larger interests of the new industrialism.
Thus did the "logic of industrialism" work, following out the imposition of its technology with a sweep and power that transformed lives and landscapes within just a few decades to a degree never seen, not even imaginable, before The steam engine was, as Andrew Ure boasted, "the controller general and mainspring of British industry, which urges it onwards at a steady rate, and never suffers it to lag or loiter, till its appointed task be done."

* Hero of Alexandria designed, and probably built, a steam engine in the first century B.C. that used fire-heated cauldrons and tubes. The Mediterranean world of the time, however, had all the labor power it needed in slaves, and Hero's machine was ignored; in an England of the 18th century where slaves were outlawed and cheap labor hard to control and manipulate, great energy was put into creating just such a device.

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«Saúdo os loucos, os inadaptados, os rebeldes, os desassossegadores. (…) Os que vêem as coisas de modo diferente. Eles não apreciam regras rígidas e tampouco têm respeito pelo status quo. Podemos citá-los, discordar deles, glorificá-los ou vilipendiá-los. Quase a única coisa que não conseguimos é ignorá-los – porque eles mudam as coisas. Eles empurram a humanidade para a frente. E enquanto muitos vêem-nos apenas como aluados, nós vemos a chispa da genialidade , porque as pessoas que são suficientemente loucas como para pensar que podem mudar o mundo, são aqueles que o conseguem.» - Jack Kerovac

Sementes para a Agricultura Biológica: salvaguardar a diversidade

Os agricultores dependem da diversidade genética das culturas para garantirem a produção a longo prazo e a resposta a alterações das condições ambientais. Discute-se aqui o papel da Agricultura Biológica na salvaguarda da biodiversidade.


O declínio da diversidade de espécies sem todo o mundo é um fenómeno alarmante. Não tem sido dada muita atenção à perda de diversidade genética na agricultura. No entanto, a diversidade das espécies cultivadas está a diminuir rapidamente. Desde o início do século XX, a diversidade genética das espécies cultivadas foi reduzida em 75%, em todo o mundo.

As causas não são difíceis de encontrar. O melhoramento moderno de plantas, que visou aumentar o rendimento com a ajuda de fertilizantes e pesticidas químicos, teve muito sucesso. Com a adopção generalizada das variedades modernas os métodos culturais mudaram e diminuiu a procura de variedades tradicionais. As condições naturais de uma paisagem ou a diversidade local deixaram de ser o factor decisivo para a escolha de uma cultura, de forma que os agricultores consideraram que não era compensador manter a mistura diversificada criada pelos seus antepassados. Nas poucas variedades que ainda existem, a diversidade genética é reduzida, dado que frequentemente descendem das mesmas linhas parentais.


O desaparecimento de variedades regionais

As variedades e raças regionais caracterizam-se por uma grande gama de diversidade e riqueza. A maioria foi, no entanto, substituída por um número relativamente pequeno de variedades modernas, que são o produto de melhoramento convencional de plantas, a maioria das quais se disseminou pelo mundo inteiro. A competição e a pressão económica reduziram o número de melhoradores e de programas de melhoramento. Por exemplo, a centena de diferentes melhoradores de alface, no início deste século, foi reduzida para apenas cinco. O aparecimento da engenharia genética contribuiu para acelerar este processo. Como resultado, a diversidade cultural e regional e também a diversidade genética praticamente desapareceram. As poucas variedades regionais que nos restam foram preservadas em bancos de germoplasma. A maioria perdeu-se.





Convenções internacionais

O público e os decisores políticos estão cada vez mais conscientes da gravidade do desaparecimento da diversidade genética e da necessidade de cooperação internacional. O futuro das nossas culturas está em causa. A Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre Ambiente e Desenvolvimento, que teve lugar no Rio de Janeiro, em 1992, trouxe o declínio mundial da diversidade genética à atenção de um público alargado. Sob a Convenção de Biodiversidade, os Estados da UE comprometeram-se à conservação da biodiversidade e à protecção do ambiente natural. Em 1996 uma conferência internacional sobre recursos genéticos vegetais teve lugar sob o auspício da FAO, em Leipzig. Um Plano Global de Acção foi delineado, listando vinte pontos para a conservação e uso de recursos genéticos. A implementação deste plano, no entanto, é da responsabilidade de cada estado membro e não aconteceu muito desde então.


Biodiversidade – oportunidade para a Agricultura Biológica

Uma das características da Agricultura Biológica é uma longa rotação de culturas, incluindo muitas espécies diferentes. Isto ajuda a prevenir o uso unidireccional do solo e o seu esgotamento. Os elementos naturais da exploração, tais como as margens dos campos com plantas aromáticas e flores e as sebes vivas, atraem os insectos predadores e parasitóides que ajudam a controlar as pragas. Os métodos químicos de combate a doenças e infestantes não são autorizados em Agricultura Biológica, pelo que os agricultores devem encontrar um equilíbrio natural entre os diferentes elementos que compõem a exploração. A diversidade é uma importante condição para esse equilíbrio.

Um dos princípios da Agricultura Biológica é que as explorações devem ser conduzidas como um ecossistema. Deste ponto de vista, a exploração é vista como um organismo, cuja vitalidade – como em todos os organismos complexos – depende de uma sincronização óptima entre todas as componentes (órgãos). O desafio para o agricultor reside em alcançar um equilíbrio são entre todos os elementos da exploração: gado, estrume, culturas cerealíferas, hortícolas, pastagens, margens dos terrenos, etc. Quanto mais complexo e variado o organismo da exploração, mais refinada a interacção entre os órgãos individuais e mais saudável e estável a totalidade do organismo. Esta perspectiva garante igualmente que cada exploração preserve o seu carácter individual único.

A diversidade biológica, que inclui tanto a diversidade de espécies como a diversidade varietal, é uma componente central de todos os processos que têm lugar no ecossistema agrícola.

Conceitos diferentes, variedades diferentes
Os critérios da Agricultura Biológica para as variedades e provimento de sementes diferem substancialmente dos conceitos da agricultura convencional. Tal é uma consequência directa do "conceito de organismo". Deveria ser possível aos agricultores biológicos multiplicarem sementes de culturas de trigo e centeio normais, sem terem de aceitar compromissos de qualidade. O critério da uniformidade, uma característica padrão das variedades de trigo convencionais, não é essencial para uma colheita de sucesso. De facto, uma certa dose de variabilidade genética dentro de uma variedade é sempre desejável, dado que lhe permite adaptar-se de forma óptima a condições locais específicas.

A primeira preocupação em Agricultura Biológica consiste sempre em encontrar uma variedade adequada para uma dada localização. Os agricultores devem ter em conta as diferenças de solo e clima, bem como aspectos de gestão, como as rotações culturais, que definem o carácter de uma exploração agrícola.

Devido às condições muito diferenciadas em que se pratica a Agricultura Biológica, deveria existir uma vasta gama de variedades para os agricultores poderem escolher; daí o princípio do melhoramento biológico de procurar obter variedades regionais. A eficácia deste princípio foi confirmada por uma colectividade de melhoradores biodinâmicos de cereais (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der biologisch-dynamische Getreiderzüchter), que compararam o desempenho de variedades de trigo cultivadas em diferentes locais, ao longo de muitos anos. As linhas que ainda estão em desenvolvimento dão, frequentemente, melhores resultados quando cultivadas no local de origem.



A preocupação do melhoramento biológico com as variedades regionais não é a única diferença relativamente aos objectivos do melhoramento convencional. Assim sendo, o rendimento não é a única característica importante: o melhoramento biológico dá grande valor a outras características das plantas, tais como a qualidade de panificação. Os agricultores biológicos aperceberam-se de que as variedades de trigo convencionais modernas têm elevado rendimento, mas este foi conseguido à custa da perda de qualidade de panificação. As padarias biológicas não recorrem a aditivos para melhorar o pão, pelo que existe um bom potencial de mercado para trigo biológico com boa qualidade de panificação.

Os agricultores biológicos preferem variedades de cereais com forte crescimento vegetativo. Estas plantas têm um raizame bem desenvolvido, pelo que são mais capazes de extrair nutrientes a partir de fertilizantes orgânicos. Esta característica está frequentemente subdesenvolvida nas modernas variedades de palha curta. Também é importante que as variedades biológicas tenham uma resistência genética ampla a doenças e pragas e tenham uma boa cobertura do solo para limitar o crescimento de infestantes. Nos cereais, ambos os objectivos podem ser conseguidos com variedades de palha alta.

O acima enunciado demonstra claramente que o melhoramento convencional não produz variedades óptimas para cultivar nas condições da Agricultura Biológica. O melhoramento biológico deve ter como objectivo obter uma vasta gama de variedades com muito mais variabilidade nas suas características do que as variedades actualmente homologadas.

As colecções de variedades tradicionais reflectem toda a variabilidade existente numa cultivar. As variedades actualmente catalogadas incorporam apenas uma fracção dessa variação total. É improvável que estas variedades sejam as únicas adequadas ao desenvolvimento de novas cultivares. A este respeito, a Agricultura Biológica, ao valorizar a criação de variedades específicas para cada região, pode ser a base do melhoramento para uma nova diversidade.

O objectivo de conservar o material genético vegetal na exploração, ou in situ, é alcançar a máxima diversidade varietal sob todas as condições agrícolas. Da perspectiva da Agricultura Biológica, o desenvolvimento de cultivares exige que estas sejam expostas às condições culturais reais. No entanto, deve ser claro que as variedades do século XIX já não têm lugar na Agricultura Biológica de hoje. A preocupação dos melhoradores biológicos não é "Como poderemos preservar estas variedades históricas?", mas antes "Como poderemos melhorar variedades regionais, incluindo variedades tradicionais dos melhoradores, para que possam ser proveitosas na prática agrícola moderna?" A palavra proveito neste contexto tem várias dimensões. O rendimento máximo não é o único critério, contanto que a variedade apresente outras qualidades.

Condições

Como pode conseguir-se uma gama suficientemente vasta de variedades menores? É uma tarefa quase impossível para as empresas de melhoramento estabelecidas, que financiam as suas actividades de melhoramento exclusivamente com base na venda de sementes. É também uma tarefa impossível para os melhoradores que querem registar as suas variedades nos Catálogos Nacionais de Variedades: os custos de homologação de uma variedade são demasiado elevados quando existe apenas um pequeno grupo de (futuros) utilizadores. A obtenção de diversidade varietal implica, pois, o desenvolvimento de novos sistemas de melhoramento e multiplicação, em conjugação com nova legislação e medidas de incentivo governamentais. Abaixo são enumeradas quatro condições essenciais que têm de ser reunidas para a realização do melhoramento e multiplicação biológicos, baseados na diversidade varietal.





1. Liberalização do Decreto sobre Variedades de Plantas e Sementes, para permitir o comércio de variedades menores, especificamente desenvolvidas para uma certa região ou objectivo, sem restrições em termos de registo e controlo oficial.



2. Modificação da legislação existente, que proíbe o comércio de sementes do agricultor e que proíbe o agricultor de multiplicar sementes de uma variedade catalogada (direitos do melhorador). Muitos agricultores, especialmente nos círculos biodinâmicos, preferem utilizar sementes da última colheita de cereal. Esta prática assegura que as variedades se adaptam gradualmente às condições locais e se tornam parte integrante do organismo da exploração agrícola. A legislação actual impede o desenvolvimento de diversidade varietal por esta via.



3. As cooperativas regionais devem trabalhar em colaboração com um melhorador para fornecer sementes aos agricultores que não querem multiplicar a sua própria semente. De novo, nos círculos biodinâmicos, várias iniciativas têm sido lançadas visando conservar e multiplicar a reserva de sementes. Melhoradores e agricultores trabalham em estreita colaboração, trocando informação para optimizar a relação entre a conservação e o melhoramento. A Sativa Genossenschaft, na Suíça, pode servir como exemplo disso. Existem, além deste, outros casos bem sucedidos de melhoramento e multiplicação descentralizados para o provimento de sementes de hortícolas.



4. O apoio governamental é necessário para os programas de melhoramento e investigação em Agricultura Biológica , dado que as vendas de variedades menores nunca poderão gerar fundos suficientes. Até aqui, as iniciativas de provimento de sementes têm sido financiadas principalmente por entidades privadas e são limitadas, na sua actividade, pelos seus modestos recursos financeiros. A criação de diversidade na exploração agrícola, no entanto, depende de medidas de incentivo de muito maior alcance. Os Governos deveriam realizar os seus compromissos à Convenção de Biodiversidade e à Conferência de Leipzig, garantindo apoio financeiro para a conservação in situ de recursos genéticos, que actualmente é levada a cabo principalmente com fundos privados por colectividades de melhoradores pioneiros, agricultores e iniciativas de provimento de sementes.

Alexandra Costa

Texto adaptado de: Heyden, B.; Bueren, E. L. (2000). Biodiversity of vegetables and cereals: opportunities for development in organic agriculture. NABU, Bonn/Überlingen

«As nossas vidas, fora da esfera pública, encontram línguas nas árvores, livros nos regatos cantarolantes, exortações nas pedras e bondade em tudo.» - William Shakespeare

«A melhor altura para plantar uma árvore foi há 10 anos. A segunda melhor altura é agora.» (Provérbio Chinês.)

Música que aproxima gerações e culturas.

O cartaz no «Fórum Viseu» diz que aquele é “habitat natural” da carneirada consumidora e que aquela “Meca” recebeu uma qualquer certificação ambiental. Curiosamente estava mesmo ao lado de um “rio”, ou melhor, de uma linha d’água com as margens muradas e para onde vertem os esgotos fedorentos – para indiferença dos que por ali andam a namorar artigos nas montras…

A Comida, as Compras e a Engenharia Genética

Os consumidores europeus têm vindo a rejeitar de forma crescente os produtos que contêm plantas geneticamente modificadas, porém mais de 90% dos OGM em circulação destinam-se a rações animais e aqui os consumidores compram produtos não rotulados…

Margarida Silva - Plataforma Transgénicos Fora do Prato


Ninguém esperava encontrar dificuldades. Nos Estados Unidos os resultados confirmavam o sucesso dos planos, os governos europeus mostravam-se deslumbrados, os produtos estavam a postos e o lucro em perspectiva excedia o dos melhores períodos da história destas empresas. Por isso a surpresa foi ainda maior quando o desastre se materializou.
Falamos das plantas geneticamente modificadas (OGM), ou transgénicas. E quais os "culpados" pelo desaire que levou ao colapso deste mercado na Europa? Nada mais nada menos que os consumidores anónimos, apoiados na fundamentação técnica de algumas estruturas ambientalistas e de agricultores.

O resultado? Actualmente 27 dos 30 maiores retalhistas europeus (incluindo o Carrefour, Auchan, etc.) assumiram políticas de exclusão dos OGM. Estas 30 empresas representam um total de vendas que atinge os 500 mil milhões de euros. Por outro lado, das 30 principais empresas da área alimentar e bebidas (Nestlé, Unilever, Danone...), cujas vendas anuais representam cerca de um quarto do total de vendas deste sector na Europa, 22 têm igualmente o compromisso de não empregar ingredientes transgénicos. Tais números significam que o mercado para os OGM dirigidos ao consumidor encontrou um verdadeiro beco sem saída.
Esta história teria um final rápido e feliz se todos os OGM fossem sujeitos à escolha do consumidor, mas tal não é o caso. Mais de 90% dos OGM em circulação têm por destino as rações animais, e aqui os consumidores compram produtos (leite, ovos, carne) não rotulados - a não ser que tenham certificação biológica, ninguém sabe se os animais foram ou não alimentados com rações transgénicas (o mais provável é que tenham sido).
Este aspecto da ausência de rotulagem de produtos animais não é o único "buraco" da legislação europeia nesta matéria, mas é certamente o mais grave e vai directamente contra o artigo 153 do Tratado que institui a Comunidade Europeia onde se estabelece o direito dos consumidores à informação. Como consequência desta falha fica também em causa o direito à escolha, uma vez que sem a devida rotulagem os produtos não se distinguem e o acto de comprar decorre "às cegas".
A rotulagem, tal como está legislada a nível europeu, só se aplica aos produtos vegetais directamente adquiridos pelo consumidor. Por exemplo: se comprarmos Corn Flakes transgénicos no supermercado a embalagem tem de indicar a presença de milho geneticamente modificado. Mas se os mesmos Corn Flakes forem comidos no restaurante de um hotel ou numa cantina, o consumidor já não tem acesso a qualquer informação. Absurdo? Pois é.


A pouca rotulagem existente apresenta um pecado adicional: quando a lista de ingredientes não refere matérias geneticamente modificadas, isso não equivale a 0% de OGM. Por muito que seja essa a interpretação normal dos consumidores, na verdade é permitida a presença de contaminação até aos 0,9%. Ou seja, na verdade os consumidores estão a ser convidados a escolher... entre produtos muito ou pouco contaminados.
Esta contaminação "aceitável" ou "inevitável" é um sintoma de um dos males piores dos OGM: são incontroláveis. Contaminam, espalham-se, inviabilizam outras formas de produção - é uma tecnologia de má qualidade! Infelizmente, reconhecendo a inevitabilidade e a irreversibilidade da contaminação por OGM, os poderes europeus optaram por a aceitar e legalizar, em vez de a proibir até que se demonstrasse a viabilidade de uma segregação permanente.
Os OGM representam o oposto do que qualquer cidadão deseja para a sua comunidade. Todos defendemos a soberania e segurança alimentar, preponderância de mercados locais e regionais (assim como os respectivos postos de trabalho), menos agrotóxicos, livre troca de sementes, conservação do património agrícola, etc. Mas os OGM arrastam-nos para o mundo das patentes, da monocultura e uniformização global, das tecnologias de alto risco, do controlo hegemónico de toda a cadeia alimentar por menos de 10 mega-empresas mundiais, da manipulação da química da vida sem respeito pela sua complexidade e equilíbrios naturais.


O desafio é vasto mas, tal como os europeus já têm vindo a mostrar, o destino não está traçado. Depois do desaparecimento dos OGM da esmagadora maioria dos produtos alimentares vegetais à venda no supermercado, é fundamental agora conseguir igual vitória para os produtos animais. Isto não é uma campanha - terá de ser um esforço de fundo, permanente, do tipo "água mole em pedra dura". E cada um de nós, consumidores, tem um papel fundamental e, ao mesmo tempo, muito simples: trata-se de preencher as fichas de sugestões/reclamações disponíveis nos supermercados com o fim de perguntar...

... se os produtos animais, da marca própria desse supermercado, vêm de animais alimentados com rações transgénicas;

... quais as marcas comerciais onde os produtos animais têm garantia de ausência de rações transgénicas.
As empresas portuguesas podem usar legalmente as rações transgénicas - e só se os consumidores fizerem ouvir a sua voz colectiva é que deixarão de o fazer. Tome a decisão de não consumir produtos transgénicos, directa ou indirectamente! Colabore activamente para o enterro do mercado dos OGM na Europa - é a agricultura, o ambiente e as gerações futuras que agradecem.
Para mais informações e para nos mostrar as respostas dos supermercados às suas perguntas, contacte-nos:
Plataforma Transgénicos Fora do Prato
info@stopogm.net
www.stopogm.net
fax: 22 975 9592

Lindoso
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Potro Garrano (selvagem, pois claro) que conseguiu sobreviver a um ataque de lobo...
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Vaca Barrosã numa paisagem minhota

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Drosera rotundifolia, uma planta carnívora em acção. Tudo o que se vê nesta foto caberia na (bem aparada) unha do meu dedo anelar. São criaturas deveras minúsculas, mas extremamente interessantes.

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Gerês...

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Os que têm muita ânsia em entrar para S. Bento costumam suplicar aos padrinhos políticos que lhes dêem um empurrãozinho…

Aquilegia vulgaris subesp. dichroa

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O J. Cristo expulsou os cambistas do templo para lá colocar o seu mealheiro?! Não seria mais honesto, prático, directo e lucrativo se a Igreja instalasse nos seus templos máquinas de registar o Totoloto e o Euromilhões?...

Azenha.

Galiza.

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