Attack of the Magic Seeds

Sometimes I wonder if we are sheltered from really, really bad news or if there is just so much bad news that we can’t consume it all. And then I see the weekly Lindsay Lohan update (OMG! she spent the night at her ex’s) and I know it’s the former.

The other day @sonnyjohl pointed me toward a story in the UK’s Daily Mail about 125,000 Indian farmers whose suicides were being blamed on genetically modified crops.

Here’s a brief story of one farmer:

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts – and no income.

Shankara, like most of the other killed himself by drinking pesticide. This is gruesomely recalled in the story written by Andrew Malone, “most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

“…the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.

Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.”

Twenty dollars buys 1,000 times more traditional seeds than GM seeds, which take twice the water and are still susceptible to bollworms and parasites. They also employ Terminator Technology, which sucks just like Terminators:

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.

As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

And yes Malone points his finger at US. And by US I mean the U.S. biotech company Monsanto.

Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.

I don’t think this is a very balanced story. The suicides are a tragedy of monumental proportions that don’t deserved to be dismissed as Monsanto tried, “there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and …suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.”

But what if any good has come from the Magic Seeds? Are there any success stories?

Just as we are sheltered from Bad News, I think Good News is often kept out of the headlines because it doesn’t sell papers.

I don’t mind subjective journalism and, as such, Malone’s piece is powerful and you should go read it right this minute. Everyone should know about this. But subjective journalism dressed up like objective journalism is a disservice to the people written about and the reader.

Decide for yourself which this is.

Chinese Heirs as phoney as Milli Vanilli

In the comment thread of this recent post, long time WAIW follower Kent pointed us toward this BBC News piece, “China Database to Track Children.”

It’s good to see that something is being done to help reunite kidnapped children with their parents.

A few passages of interest:

Correspondents say the children of migrant workers are usually targeted. They are traded for a few hundred dollars and few are ever found.

As if life for migrant workers isn’t tough enough.

And…

In a society that favours male heirs, it is often boys who are taken.

I understand the heir thing. Our children are our thoughts and ideals, our immortality. But kidnapping your heir? That can’t come with the gut-level sense of continuity. I’m not saying that heirs are less “heiry” when they aren’t flesh and blood. Adopted children can carry a family’s torch just as well as unadopted children.

It’s just that stealing your heir is cheating in my book, like…

Winning Best in Show with someone else’s dog.

A bully wining the science fair with the nerd’s volcano.

Winning a Grammy for lip-syncing, “Blame it on the Rain.”

Got any other analogies you’d like to share?

Obama Masks: Made in china

I exchanged a few emails with a reader that works at a costume shop. I asked her where most of the costumes are made. She told me that they have a lot of vintage costumes and make many of them themselves. Of course, the ready-made costumes mostly come from China. Part of her response:

It was fun during the election to tell people that we didn’t know when we would get Obama masks back in stock because they were working on them in China and they had yet to ship. Some people got really mad, but they just didn’t make them here, they didn’t even try. They were ONLY made in China.

You just gotta wonder what the workers think while they are producing and packaging Obama masks or Mardi Gras beads or dashboard buddhas or dashboard Hula dancers or ________. The workers I met in China produced shoes. How shoes will be used is no mystery. But masks? Obama masks. Do they think we parade around dressed up like our Presidential candidates? The thing is, we do. Even superstars like Seal with supermodel wives do…

Book bloggers

I had a speaking engagement today. It went awesome. I overheard several compliments:

“He’s like Matthew McConaghey, but not so flaky.”

“Best speaker we’ve had.”

In the words of @garyvee, “I crushed it.”

In other news…

One of these days I intend to getting around to writing about book bloggers and independent reviewers. Unfortunately, today isn’t that day. Until then, here is one of the most in depth reviews of WAIW? that I’ve seen.

It’s Monday. Dance.

Harper and I like to dance to this song. This is one of the coolest renditions you’ll ever hear. I think I’ll go order the Playing for Change CD now.

Happy eighth anniversary WorldHum!

Online or in print, WorldHum has some of the best travel writing around. Of course, I am little biased. They highlight my piece Adventure Dad as one of their eight favorite family travel stories.

People with skills do cool things; this is one of them…

Here’s a sneak peak of a promo video that JD Schuyler of Cantalopue TV is producing:

It’s nice when people with skills support your work. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

Today I’m at Rule29 for a photo/video shoot. It should be fun, but I just learned that there might be makeup involved. I grew a big zit for the occasion. I hope it smiles.

WAIW at IUPUI

Tomorrow I’m doing a signing on the campus of IUPUI in Indianapolis at the University Barnes & Noble. It’s from 11-1.

Be there.

Where clothes.

Know where they were made.

Here’s a campus map if you need one.

How much will you give me for my son?

Just the other day I wrote about how travel makes the news more relevant: “If I have gained anything from my travels it’s not a well-traveled savviness, envied by others, but an increased caring.”

That being the case, when I read this story in the NY Times by on Chinese boys being bought, stolen, and sold, I couldn’t help but think of Dewan and Zhu Chun’s son Li Xin.

The crazy thing about this story is a man who bought a son didn’t think there was anything wrong with paying money for another human being until he learned that the child had been kidnapped. I try to look at the world with an open mind. My first reaction to this was repulsion, but then I try to be culturally sensitive: “I should respect different ways of thinking.” Before long I circle back around to repulsion.

(A big thanks to Larry at Wiley for pointing out this article)

Anyhow here are a few excerpts:

They dragged us by our hair and said, ‘How dare you question the government,’ ” said Peng Dongying, who lost her 4-year-old son. “I hate myself for my child’s disappearance, but I hate society more for not caring. All of us have this pain in common, and we will do anything to get back our children.”

In some cases, local officials may even encourage people desperate for a son to buy one. After their 3-month-old son died, Zhou Xiuqin said, the village family planning official went to her home and tried to comfort her and her husband, who was compelled to have a vasectomy after the birth of the boy, their second child. “He said, ‘Don’t cry, stop crying, you can always buy another one,’ ” Ms. Zhou recalled.

Their love for their new son was boundless. They bought him new clothing and had their daughter drop out of middle school to take care of him. They did not think much of the fact that Jiabao did not understand the dialect spoken in that part of Fujian and seemed indifferent to the local cuisine. Mr. Su insisted that he never imagined that the boy had been stolen.

Last August, Mr. Su learned the truth after the police in Sichuan Province arrested the man who had sold them the child. The man, part of a ring of seven people who had abducted 11 children, had sold four of them to families in their township. The man, according to the police, has since been given a 12-year sentence.

By the time the couple got home from work the day they got the news, their son and the three other stolen children in their village had already been taken away by the police. The couple was inconsolable. “We were lied to, we were swindled,” Mr. Su said as his wife’s eyes welled up.
There was, however, a small consolation. A sympathetic policeman in Sichuan, the province where the boy was stolen, helped put them in touch with his birth parents. The two couples have since been in frequent contact; Mr. Su said the real parents held no grudge, acknowledging that the family had cared for their son well.

The father was so grateful, he told Mr. Su he would be on the lookout for local families who had two sons but were too poor to care for them. “He said that way I don’t need to deal with child traffickers anymore,” Mr. Su said.

Li Xin and Me at his village near Chongqing:

Spirit of Soccer

After seeing Spirit of Soccer operate first hand in Cambodia, I’ve become a big fan of their work. Here’s their latest video: