Food & Water

Scientific Freedom in the Age of Biotechnology

With Arpad Pusztai, Tyrone Hayes, John Losey and Ignacio Chapela
This program is about academic freedom, independent thinking, corporate intervention into science, the buying of academia, the collusion of regulatory agencies with the very corporations they are to oversee and maybe – most frightening of all – the invasion of the DNA, the inner spaces and the self organization of life.
Arpad Pusztai was an advocate of genetic engineering until his research with rats showed serious damage to their immune system and organ growth when they were fed with genetically engineered potatoes. He was fired from his job as Principal Scientific Officer at the Rowett Institute in Scotland, a job he had held for 30 years.
Tyrone Hayes did research on the effects [ . . . ]

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Food That Kills: The Politics Of Obesity

A panel at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism called attention to the role of the food industry in our current obesity crisis.
The media and the food industry – even government agencies – tell us that the serious current obesity crisis is our own fault and that we need to exercise more. Of course exercise is good for us but nobody tells us that the food industry, with the help of huge government subsidies, through advertising and addictive ingredients promotes ill health by feeding us grease, sugar and starch.
There is talk of law suits targeting fast food chains patterned after the law suits against the tobacco corporations. They also claimed that there was no health risk associated with smoking. The food [ . . . ]

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Fatal Harvest: Andy Kimbrell and Vandana Shiva

Kimbrell talks about the transformation of nature via biotechnology to make life fit a dangerous system rather than changing technology to make it appropriate to life. Vandana Shiva reports on rural resistance and WTO free zones in India. Taking back the seed from the 5 corporations that now control the source of food of the planet is for her the symbol of the new freedom.
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Vandana Shiva: Biopirates VS The Peasants of India

Vandana Shiva is a physicist, philosopher of science, feminist and campaigner against globalization, the patenting and ownership of life, and the WTO. She now is an internationally acclaimed speaker and author and uses her growing influence to champion the cause of the poor in India. During her speech at the University of San Francisco she spoke not about philosophy or science but of the plight of the peasants in India who see their knowledge taken away, their seeds poisoned and their local economies destroyed by multinational food corporations. The small farmers, she reports, are fighting back and declaring zones that are free of genetically modified seeds.
code: A173   To order a copy click here: $8.00
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Organic Farming and Globalization

code: ECO 401 >To order a copy click here: $8.00
Mark Ritchie heads the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. He highlights globalization’s challenge to organic agriculture. Taped at the Ecological Farming Conference, Asilomar, Calif., 1998 40 minutes

Gardens in Jail

code: ECO 402 >To order a copy click here: $8.00
The love and work that make a garden grow can heal and empower a person. Cathrine Sneed is the founder of the innovative Greenhouse Project (est. 1982) at the San Francisco County Jail. Asilomar, Calif., 1998 60 minutes

Successful Organic Farmers

code: ECO 403 >To order a copy click here: $8.00
Organic farms are no longer an endeavor on the edge of sustainability. They range from a 4-1/2 acre market garden near Santa Cruz to 1,500 acres of organic herbs in southern Washington. Asilomar, Calif., 1998 60 minutes

Genetic Engineering of Human Beings

code: A212 To order a copy click here: $8.00
Paul Billings, Marcy Darnovsky, Andrew Imparato
What really is the nature of the human genome project?  It is a rough draft, with an error rate of 30%.  The human genome is not a blueprint for making a human being. Our genes are not particularly different from those in mice and dogs. As genetic engineering progresses, issues from the past return to the fore, among them eugenics, genetic discrimination, classification of people as uninsurable or unemployable. These violate the fundamental right to privacy, including genetic privacy.
There is a new twist in human genetic engineering, techno-eugenics, a technology involving human clones that makes “designer babies” possible. This technology would employ direct manipulation of [ . . . ]

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Science & Genetic Engineeering and Biowarfare & Bioweapons

Martha Crouch & Ricarda Steinbrecher / Ed Hammond
code: A210 To order a copy click here: $8.00
Dr. Martha Crouch, retired professor of biology, closed her lab when she realized that her research was being used to develop terminator technology. She says that our cycle of life has depended on the health of plants, seeding and  fruiting naturally, for the last 10,000 years. With genetic engineering we are able to change that relationship so that we are now forcing other organisms to respond in ways that may be inimical for their own lives.
Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher is a retired genetic scientist and outspoken critic of genetic engineering. When the Human Genome project was completed, she says, scientist had to admit to [ . . . ]

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Patents, Biopiracy & Globalization – Should Life be Owned?

Andy Kimbrell, Andres Barreda, Vandana Shiva, Victoria Tauli Corpuz & Chaia Heller
code: A209 To order a copy click here: $8.00
Andrew Kimbrell is a public interest attorney and author. He calls mechanization and marketing of life, and the corporate enclosure of the entire living commons, the most disturbing aspects of genetic engineering. Andres Barreda, a scholar and activist from Mexico says that in 1994, when NAFTA was signed, “the war began in my country.” Indigenous peoples in Mexico now find that the key to any hope for autonomy is the struggle against biodevastation.
Vandana Shiva from India says that the first colonialism was about land. Now bodies and lives are being appropriated and exploited. Life is not an area of [ . . . ]

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Food & Genetic Engineering – Organic Food VS Genetic Engineering

code: A208 To order a copy click here: $8.00
Part A: Peter Rosset, Brewster and Cathleen Kneen
Side B: Vandana Shiva and Brian Leahy
The program begins with a list of myths about genetic engineered food presented by Food First director Peter Rosset. Brewster Kneen, former goat farmer and publisher of the Ramshorn says that our foods and the systems by which they are grown and distributed are being deliberately contaminated by genetic pollution. His wife, Cathleen Kneen, reminds us that eating is very personal. The food becomes our body. Food is the basis of culture and community.
Vandana Shiva from India reminds us of the impact of the Green Revolution that was imposed on the Third World. She found in her [ . . . ]

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