Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Food & Farming

Causes of Honey Bee Decline

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bees 4 I visited Hidcote Manor Gardens in Warwickshire earlier today. They have several honey bee hives and a notice board claiming three different reasons for the decline in honey bee colonies across the UK.

“The number of honey bee colonies in the UK has halved in recent years. This is probably due to:
1. The use of agricultural pesticides and chemicals;
2. Varroa mites, blood sucking parasite which seriously weaken or even wipe out whole colonies; and
3. Cold wet summers which prevent bees from leaving the hives to gather food.”

I wonder how much evidence there is for the three possible causes and which might be having the most impact?

Sarah Ferguson Defends Abattoir Footage of Dubious Origin

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IN June 2011 the Australian government halted all live cattle exports to Indonesia after ABC Four Corners broadcast disturbing footage of Australian cattle being mistreated in Indonesian abattoirs. As I wrote in May 2012, Australians were lead to believe that this footage, that shocked the nation, was typical of what occurs inside many abattoirs in Indonesia and that the footage was taken by Lyn White from Animals Australia [1]. However, according to British filmmakers Gem and Ian from ‘Tracks Investigations’ they were responsible for the footage that sparked massive public opposition [2]. Nowhere in the Four Corners program is the involvement of these professional filmmakers declared; activists who for a fee “offer a comprehensive global investigation and film production service to conservation, environmental and animal protection groups.”[3]

In the following email, which Sarah Ferguson from ABC Four Corners has asked me to publish, she explains that my recent column in The Land on the same topic is “mischievous” [4]. In particular she claims a first hand knowledge of the situation in Indonesia and that half the abattoir footage in the program was filmed by Four Corners.

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Away with Rio+20: The Voice of the Peasant

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‘GOVERNMENTS from all over the world will meet in Río de Janeiro, Brasil from June 20-22 2012, to supposedly commemorate 20 years since the “Earth Summit”, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, that established for the first time a global agenda for “sustainable development”. During this summit, in 1992, three international conventions were adopted: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention to Fight Desertification. Each of these promised to initiate a series of actions destined to protect the planet and all of the life on it, and to allow all human beings to enjoy a life of dignity.

At that time , many social organizations congratulated and supported these new conventions with hope. Twenty years later, we see the real causes of environmental, economic, and social deterioration continuing without being attacked. Worse still, we are profoundly alarmed that the next meeting in June will serve to deepen neoliberal policies and processes of capitalist expansion, concentration, and exclusion that today have enveloped us in an environmental, economic, and social crisis of grave proportions. Beneath the deceptive and badly intentioned term “green economy”, new forms of environmental contamination and destruction are now rolled out along with new waves of privatization, monopolization, and expulsion from our lands and territories.

La Via Campesina will mobilize for this event, representing the voice of the peasant in the global debate and defending a different path to development that is based on the well being of all, that guarantees food for all, that protects and guarantees that the commons and natural resources are put to use to provide a good life for everyone and not to meet the needs for accumulation of a few.
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Who filmed the video clip of Australian cattle in the Indonesian abattoirs?

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IN June 2011 the Australian government halted all live cattle exports to Indonesia after ABC Four Corners broadcast disturbing footage of Australian cattle being mistreated in Indonesian abattoirs. 

Australians were lead to believe that this footage, that shocked the nation, was typical of what occurs inside many abattoirs in Indonesia: that the footage was real.

We were told the footage wasn’t taken by Four Corners or the ABC.  Lyn White from Animals Australia is the face of the campaign against live cattle export and she starred in the documentary. She was at pains to tell us it was easy enough to get the footage. So we were lead to believe she had taken it herself.

Of course professionals could have staged something like this. The footage could have been totally contrived. We could have been looking at a work of fiction: a setup, a horror film.

Interestingly there is an organisation that specialises in film production for environmental, conservation and animal protection groups. In the ‘Tracks Investigations, Annual Review 2011-12’ the UK-based directors, Gem and Ian, claim responsibility for the footage shown on ABC TV. They boast that their work was “aided” by the screening on “Australia’s main TV station ABC in May”. They also claim it was their most successful project in their 18 year history:

“Some 40,000 media stories followed, sparking massive public opposition to the live export trade and awakening the consciences of a nation to the plight of animals.”

What I’m curious to know is: if it was so easy to get the footage as claimed by Lyn White, why did Animals Australia contract Tracks Investigations to do the work? And if it was indeed Track Investigations, and not Lyn White, who were responsible for the shocking video clips, why wasn’t this declared in the ABC Four Corners program?

Bad Farmers Produce More Food

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You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs and you can’t grow food without water – and lots of it. That’s reality. But fashion dictates that farmers pretend otherwise.

Consider the ‘Rice and the Environment’ page at the Ricegrower’s Association of Australia website. It says that the rice industry was “the first to initiate a project to return water to the environment through the Living Murray initiative, delivering more than 12,000 megalitres to the river system.”

Why is an industry that is so totally dependent on the availability of water boasting that its given water back to the environment?

Imagine if West Australian mining giant Ghina Rhinehart, said she was giving back Iron Ore to mother earth? We don’t expert Ms Rhinehard to give back Iron Ore, we expert her to mine it and sell it to China. So, why do we expect farmers to give back water and to a river system that is either in chronic drought or flood?

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Great Barrier Reef ‘Research’ – A Litany of False Claims

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WE may live in the information age, but how true are many of the scientific claims we read and hear?  For ten years the World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF, has been campaigning to ‘Save the Great Barrier Reef’. [1,2,3] When the WWF campaign was first launched in June 2001 it was claimed Diuron was killing seagrass and dioxins were killing dugongs and so both these pesticides should be banned.  Ten years on and the ban on Diuron appears imminent, but the chemical is probably no more harmful than the dioxin that was found to be natural.[4]

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