Chronicle
GM Crops - the Bad News and the Good News
The Irish Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, admitted to the Dáil that he was instructed by the Taoiseach to get his department to vote in favour of a GM crop as a result of US lobbying. The vote took place at a crucial meeting of the EU on the 18th of March 1998. At this meeting, Agr-Evo's GM maize was approved.
For its part, Monsanto has done a historic U-turn and promised not to commercialise its Terminator Technology (sterile seeds) as a result of the concerns of farmers in developing countries. This is not the end of the Terminator since other companies have patents pending for similar products, but it is a significant turning point.
Meanwhile in Brazil, the Brazilian court has ruled that Monsanto must conduct a full environmental impact assessment before it can commercially plant its GM soya in the country. Brazil, the world's second largest soya producer has entered the new millennium GM-free.
Source: Genetic Concern News and Greenpeace Campaign Report.
Guidelines for Sustainable Development
1. Stop counting the consumption of natural capital as income.
2. Tax labour and income less, and tax resources throughput more.
3. Maximise the productivity of natural capital in the short run, and invest in increasing its supply in the long run.
4. Move away from the ideology of global economic integration by free trade, free capital mobility and export led growth and toward a more nationalist orientation that seeks to develop domestic production for internal markets as the first option, having recourse to international trade only when clearly much more efficient.
Herman Daly. Source: Feasta Newsletter.
Employers are Greed Driven But Employees Have Others Values
In 1986 the US Chamber of Commerce conducted a series of polls among workers and their employers. The purpose of the research was to determine how much correspondence existed between the real desires of employees and the assumptions of their bosses about what their workers wanted. The research turned up total dissonance between leaders and the led. Ten items of 'worker desire' were listed in the left hand column in the order of their importance according to polls among employees. In the right hand column those same desires were ranked according to what employers assumed their employees wanted. (from SERVANTHOOD, Cowley Publishing, Boston, 1997, page 121).
|
Employee Ranking |
Employer Ranking |
|
| Appreciation |
1 |
8 |
| Feeling 'in on things' |
2 |
10 |
| Help with personal problems |
3 |
9 |
| Job security |
4 |
2 |
| Good wages |
5 |
1 |
| Interesting work |
6 |
5 |
| Promotions |
7 |
3 |
| Management loyalty to workers |
8 |
6 |
| Good working conditions |
9 |
4 |
| Tactful disciplining |
10 |
7 |
Note that the first three dominant desires of workers are ranked as the last three by their employers. But see the good news in this. Workers value relationships of concern and inclusion far ahead of money. The bad news is that leaders, too often driven by monetary gain as the whole purpose of free enterprise, project their own values as characteristic of the people they lead. But the good news is better than the bad because the good news portends the breakdown of an unsustainable greed-driven culture and its replacement by an emerging relational value system
Source: Institute for Servant Leadership Newsletter, Oct99.
Sustainable Village Project.Sustainable Projects Ireland Ltd. is a charitable company set up to create an ecological settlement of about 35 to 40 houses on an 80-acre rural site within one hour of Dublin. The village is to be a model of sustainable development for the new millennium. Its objective: to lead the way in ecological building techniques, local enterprise, renewable energy, rural regeneration, worthwhile job creation, waste management, and social/environmental education.
The Sustainable Village Project is a positive solution to our present housing crisis. it will allow for homes that are affordable and attractive, built within a village designed for the deeper human needs of community and self-expression. The project will allow people to take control of their own housing and working requirements within a supportive network of other people, working together to create a unique living environment.
If you would like more information on Sustainable Projects Ireland Ltd., you can phone Gavin or Gregg at 088-2522880 or 087-2448776 or write to 19 Grantham Street, Dublin 8. Web: http://www.sustainable.buz.org; E-mail: gavinharte@hotmail.com
Trning Nuclear Submarines into Ploughshares
On June 8th 1999, three women broke through security barriers at the Trident Nuclear weapon system in Loch Goil, Scotland and tried to disarm it. Angie Zelter from England, Ulla Roder from Denmark and Ellen Moxley from Scotland left a statement on the barge 'Maytime' and were subsequently arrested. Their arrest brings the total of arrests to 350 in just over a year.
The three women are members of Trident Ploughshares 2000, a campaign group that has links to similar anti-nuclear weapons campaigns in the United States. In their statement they say: "Our actions are based primarily on the legal and ethical premise that the UK's Trident nuclear weapon system is a system preparing for the mass murder of innocent civilians over untold generations and we believe that the Trident system is ethically unjustifiable as well as being unlawful in international law".
"We have tried all manner of ways to stop this terrible threat to ours and others' lives and environment but have failed. Each person or institution that we have encountered along our way have agreed that nuclear weapons in general are terrible, that the world would be a better and safer place without them, but each have denied their own personal responsibility, saying the responsibility lies with another. We do not agree. Each of us must take responsibility and not just pass it on to someone else."
"Therefore we can see no alternative to taking direct disarmament action ourselves. We have thus, each in our separate ways, come to this point, where we have decided to disarm equipment essential to the full deployment of the UK's Trident submarine based nuclear weapon system."
Source: Coracle, Iona Community Magazine.
World Bank and IMF Change of Heart
The IMF and the World Bank are at last responding to the worldwide criticism of their structural adjustment programmes and are proposing a new approach:
- national plans with poverty reduction at the centre will be drawn up by the indebted governments
- civil society in these countries will participate in developing these plans
- the IMF and the World Bank state that the voice of the poor must be heard within this process.
Source: Irish Debt and Development Coalition.