Captured by vested corporate interests … ?

Soil advice must be earthy – and impartial

In the end it’s about trust. With food scarcity snapping at the world’s heels, the need to increase both yield and sustainability of food-growing has never been more pressing. To do it, we need knowledge – of soils, hydrology, microbes, nutrition. But it is getting harder to know where to find it. Whom do we (really) trust?

Ever since the Enlightenment, science – especially government science – has had our trust. Now this is under attack on several fronts.

CSIRO stands for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Its recent headlines have been for bullying, but scarier by far is its recent appointment as head of its food health and life science industries division of Maurice Moloney, whose CV, while impressive, also boasts the development of Roundup Ready seed for the US group Monsanto.

Estimates vary as to how much CSIRO research is funded or otherwise controlled by Monsanto, Bayer CropScience and other big pharmas. Most put it around 75-80 per cent.

We trust science precisely because it doesn’t itself do trust. At the heart of the scientific method sits Descartes’ determination to doubt everything doubtable in order to trust what remains.

It’s as if science does our doubting for us, using scepticism to sieve out the gold dust of truth. This idea, that science will do whatever it takes to reveal truth, is the founding faith of modernity. It’s what we have instead of God.

But it is eroding, and not only because so many scientific institutions are apparently captured by vested corporate interests.

As well, as if to highlight post-modernism’s undermining of the very idea of objective truth, are science’s very public wars over the crucial issues of our time: climate change, genetic modification, nuclear power, peak oil, nutrition.

Just when we need science most, then, it has become shrouded in dissent, forcing us to wonder. Is it still telling us the truth?

…

But few of the best minds see this as the future. Glaswegian astro-physicist-turned-soil-guru John Crawford, who has held the prestigious Judith and David Coffey Chair in Sustainability and Complex Systems at Sydney University since 2007, does not believe in the techno-fix. “What we need is a revolution in thinking,” he argues. “The trade-off between breadth and depth is critical, and the recognition of reality as non-linear.”

An expert in soil as a complex system, Crawford sees soil both mathematically and holistically, in its multifarious connections to the whole of life. “Everything,” he says, “is connected.”

Sadly, in October, Crawford returns to Britain. Instead, we’ll have Moloney. The switch is entirely unorchestrated, but it’s hard not to see it as significant.

Yet out there in the paddocks – even as our institutions shuffle backwards into the future – it seems Crawford’s revolution in thinking might already be under way.

A commonly voiced corollary of science-based farming is that yield is sustainability, by definition. “If it wasn’t sustainable,” goes the rationale, “we wouldn’t be getting the yields.”

I put this argument to Australia’s new Advocate for Soil Health, former governor-general Major-General Michael Jeffery, AC, AO, on the line from Canberra. Is yield intrinsically sustainable? Could yet more techno-intervention be the answer? His response is swift and ruthless.

“Nonsense,” he expostulates. “Simply not true. It’s like taking heroin. You feel good for a while … but meanwhile, 60 per cent of our arable land is degraded in one form or another.”

Some play golf in retirement, or breed budgies. Jeffery and businessman Marvin Weinman set up Outcomes Australia, a not-for-profit designed to apply business and military problem-solving to good causes; namely, organ donation, obesity, soils.

Why soils?

“I worked as a farmhand as a boy in Western Australia,” Jeffery explains, “and could easily have been a farmer. As governor-general, and as a soldier, I travelled a lot and saw that food security and water would be the next big wars. So I started reading.”

Now this John Howard-appointed military man sounds suspiciously like a greenie

Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/soil-advice-must-be-earthy–and-impartial-20130828-2sqmy.html#ixzz2dP98YLNZ

• Estelle: It is vital that Tasmania retains the ban on GM crops.

Worldwide there are problems with GM crops; all thanks to the monopoly of the giant corporations such as Monsanto.

We have to retain our GM free status to ensure the premium price for our produce and so that any organic farms are not contaminated by nearby GM crops.

Why not make a submission …

DEPARTMENT of PRIMARY INDUSTRIES, PARKS, WATER and ENVIRONMENT

Review of the Moratorium on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in Tasmania (2013)

Call for Public Submissions

Since 2001 Tasmania has had a moratorium on the use of GMOs in primary industries for marketing purposes. The Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment invites public submissions as part of a review of the moratorium. All submissions must be in writing and should address the following Terms of Reference.

1. Domestic and international gene technology policy relevant to primary industries.
2. Research and development relevant to the use of gene technology in primary industries.
3. The potential market advantages and disadvantages of allowing or not allowing the use of gene technology in Tasmanian primary industries, including food and non-food sectors.
4. Any other relevant matters raised during the review.

Further information and an Issues Paper is available from the Department’s website www.dpipwe.tas.gov.au. A hard copy of the Issues Paper can be
requested by phoning: 6233 4031 or by email: gmo.review@dpipwe.tas.gov.au
Submission close 5pm, Friday 11 October 2013

Send your submission by post to:
The Project Team – Review of the moratorium on GMOs in Tasmania (2013)
Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment
GPO Box 44, Hobart TAS 7001
or by email to: gmo.review@dpipwe.tas.gov.au

or online via the submission form on the Department’s website at www.dpipwe.tas.gov.au

• Last week on Tasmanian Times: UK GM wheat trial boss joins CSIRO