SURF REPORT
19 August 2010
Phaneuf doesn’t much want to go to the south shore again, but as he says, “it’s inevitable” that we will go because he knows I want to and because there is a south swell running and the north has quit at Hanalei. Inevitable since I have Jonesed over Kekaha since 1976 when I came over with Larry Craig on a Kona wind foray one February. We wandered around the south wondering what it might be like with waves. At the time there were none. We surfed the east shore on the Konas and went to Hanalei. Larry surfed the left at Cannons. I didn’t want any part of it. Seemed like it was breaking right on a reef at ten feet.
Since then I have stared at maps of the area from Barking Sands to Hanapepe wondering about possible agriculture there. In the 1970s the sugar plantations were still functioning. Now the Gay and Robinson Company land is given over to nemesis crops fostered by Syngenta, Pioneer and BASF. Monsanto left last year to consolidate on Maui. Maybe this means the GMO deal won’t succeed on Kauai, six thousand miles from where the seed grown here is eventually planted. We observe patches of experimental corn flourishing in emerald pockets bracketed by abandoned red sugar fields.
We don’t turn towards Poipu’s condolands, and head west toward Port Allen. A sideshore wind is blowing but a chunky south swell is striking the reefs. We can see ten foot faces out at sea, but the coast is not accessible. At Pikala, we are prohibited from entering, but down the highway observe dozens of cars parked on the side of the road and a pile of boogie boarders exiting the brush. It would a long hike through the haole koa to Pikalas, and what sort of pleasant windy beach would the women find there?
In Waimea we buy daikon, green beans, eggplant and mustard greens to cook for dinner, then drive to the beach to watch the shore pound on a desolate county park. We went out along the coast fronting Kekaha observing no breaks, just frothy reefs crashing in heaving peaks. A lone surfer contemplated the go-out. The beach frontage is rough, houses are beat and palm fronds age in piles, as if a year has passed since a disaster struck, but the calamity is manmade: sugar production has been in decline for years and nothing but diversified annual crop production can replace it, put people to work, fuel the engine of commerce, pay for society. Tourism and the defense department are the financial engines in the State of Hawaii, and both have natural deficiencies. Tourism is the first to fall when economies falter, as it has now, and changing defense priorities since the end of the Vietnam War has made Hawaii less important. But we have been foolish enough to commit to more land wars since then, so who am I to predict we would never invade Korea again.
Like running into an old, faded flame whose flab and wrinkles are a sudden surprise, disheveled Kekaha is no quiet paradise but mean and about as hopeful as any dust-covered pueblo in Baja. I don’t have any interest in seeing more bunions, my romance with the south is dashed, so I ask that we turn around. My girl is hooked up with Monsanto, and that kind of prostitution won’t pay very well.
Back in Kilauea, we hit the beach at Rock Quarry and wash off the dust and some of the evil memories, but not the residue of doubt. Growing genetically modified seed crops here certainly isn’t the best we can expect from ourselves. Yet it’s too obvious why we have this result: no other sector has the cash to invest in an experiment on alien ground. We are in America, but farther from Iowa than you can measure in miles.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Wake Up !
Scientists at them Genome Center at St. Louis’ Washington University announced a breakthrough with potential to alter the fate of billions: they decoded the genetics of corn.
Corn, or maize, is the most common crop on the planet. The ability to artificially tinker with its genetics ” make it easier to breed new varieties of corn that produce higher yields or are more tolerant to extreme heat, drought, or other conditions,” explained the centre’s director, Richard Wilson.
Monsanto is already engineering drought-tolerant breeds. Corn tailor-made for the most challenging growing conditions could bring bumper crops to perennially undernourished African regions. Only, as things stand, it won’t: Genetically modified (GM) crops are not legal most everywhere in Africa.
If there is anywhere desperate for better crops, it is Africa, where grain yields per acre, according to the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, are one-fifth that of those in Europe and the United States.
As Western harvests improve, Africa’s are shrinking: the World Resources Institute reported in 2006 that, per capita, African farms produced 19% less in 2005 than in 1970. Where the typical farmer devotes at least 90% of her small plot of land to simply feeding her family, the growth in Africa’s population, expected to nearly double by 2050 to 1.7 billion, will, without modern, high-yield agriculture techniques, mean vast wilderness lost to crude farms.
With access to engineered seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, the Center for Global Food Issues calculates Africa can produce twice the food as it does now. Yet, so degraded is that region’s soil that the UN’s Institute for Natural Resources predicts that using current methods, there could be only enough arable land by 2025 to grow food sufficient for 25% of Africans.
The West shoulders blame for this fiasco. Left-wing groups launched campaigns against the Green Revolution, opposing everything from its synthetic, commercial pesticides and fertilizers to the cultural cleansing of native farming traditions. Mr. Borlaug’s nervous sponsors, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, cancelled his African project funding.
Until the mid-1990s, some African governments were preparing to introduce the same genetically modified, pest-resistant, high-yield crops Americans and Canadians were adopting, when, again, environmental NGOs interfered, campaigning against what they branded Frankenfoods.
“Fifteen years after the first genetically-modified food has been commercialized and eaten in the United States, there isn’t a single person that has been sick. There is not a single person that has died. There’s been no environmental catastrophes,” Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen says.
Still, the European Union’s bans on GM imports, and Africa’s reliance on EU aid, makes it too economically risky for most African nations to try GM — a sin of the well-fed West against the starving that Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa, calls “an imperialism of rich tastes.”
Redirecting Africa from a dustbowl destiny to one of limited deforestation and increasing food output is no simple affair. When Mr. Borlaug finally located funding from Japanese benefactors to try his advances in sub-Saharan Africa — work that continues with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates, and the Howard Buffet Foundations — he found ways to double yields, but only in developed areas: lack of transportation and irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa added unique complications. The cost of transporting a tonne of goods one kilometre in Africa averages as much US$0.14, compared to a $0.03 average in other developing regions, the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa reported in November. It concluded that US$50-billion annual spending on road, water and power is necessary over the next decade to bring Sub-Saharan Africa into the 21st century — still cheaper than the Copenhagen climate treaty’s estimated cost to participating nations, which now tops US$300-billion a year.
Western funds, or loans, to deliver modern farming methods and materials to slash-and-burn regions is not only more likely to dramatically cut atmospheric carbon levels and preserve vital ecosystems than empty international emission pledges, it has actually been proven to work. If ecoconscious Westerners won’t redirect money from untested global cap-and-trade schemes and “green” funds to stop the spread of destructive farming, at the very least the West can push to reverse the bans we prompted on the GM crops that must be part of the solution. While we’re at it, we can shut down campaigns against chemically intensive agriculture and fish farms. And if, in the process, we end up not just helping the planet, but saving millions of lives, even better.
- Patrick Moore – Founder of Greenpeace
If there is anywhere desperate for better crops, it is Africa, where grain yields per acre, according to the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, are one-fifth that of those in Europe and the United States.
As Western harvests improve, Africa’s are shrinking: the World Resources Institute reported in 2006 that, per capita, African farms produced 19% less in 2005 than in 1970. Where the typical farmer devotes at least 90% of her small plot of land to simply feeding her family, the growth in Africa’s population, expected to nearly double by 2050 to 1.7 billion, will, without modern, high-yield agriculture techniques, mean vast wilderness lost to crude farms.
With access to engineered seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, the Center for Global Food Issues calculates Africa can produce twice the food as it does now. Yet, so degraded is that region’s soil that the UN’s Institute for Natural Resources predicts that using current methods, there could be only enough arable land by 2025 to grow food sufficient for 25% of Africans.
The West shoulders blame for this fiasco. Left-wing groups launched campaigns against the Green Revolution, opposing everything from its synthetic, commercial pesticides and fertilizers to the cultural cleansing of native farming traditions. Mr. Borlaug’s nervous sponsors, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, cancelled his African project funding.
-Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore is a PR hack for hire on everything from nuclear power to climate change denial to logging and of course, GMO foods.
From Moore’s partial bio on sourcewatch.org:
Good for him, at least he is trying to help people instead of being an obtructionist.
Brian, this is the same for-hire hack you bring up for climate change and nuclear power. He’s all you got and he’s a totally discredited hack. Give it up already.
You can’t debate the facts so you resort to calling names to anyone you disagree with. Screw your head on, this is not medieval times.
Like “eco-frauds”, “environmental frauds”, “greedy scientists” and on and on?
Brian, I’m just researching your claims. One of the first things one must do is find out who/what the source of the claim is and from who/where that source is drawing checks. In Mr. Moore’s case, he is a well known climate denier, nuclear power booster, logging lackey and GMO apologist for hire. He is still trading on long ago severed ties to the environmental movement and Greenpeace which makes his hackery particularly repellant.
Are you saying that your source doesn’t matter?
I guess we might as well go back to the horse and buggy days. He was one of the founding members, he put his life on the line in little rubber boats stopping the nuclear testing in the Pacific, and stopping the whaling as well. When greenpeace started becoming a business and started giving themselves pensions he got out.
Still no facts from the left.
BTW, that’s 5 tons of food from one acre of land. That would feed a lot of Africans.
So you’re for “cultural cleansing”? This is going to be the shortest Godwin thread evah.
Scientists at the Genome Center at St. Louis’ Washington University announced a breakthrough with potential to alter the fate of billions: they decoded the genetics of corn.
Corn, or maize, is the most common crop on the planet. The ability to artificially tinker with its genetics ” make it easier to breed new varieties of corn that produce higher yields or are more tolerant to extreme heat, drought, or other conditions,” explained the centre’s director, Richard Wilson.
Monsanto is already engineering drought-tolerant breeds. Corn tailor-made for the most challenging growing conditions could bring bumper crops to perennially undernourished African regions. Only, as things stand, it won’t: Genetically modified (GM) crops are not legal most everywhere in Africa.
Until the mid-1990s, some African governments were preparing to introduce the same genetically modified, pest-resistant, high-yield crops Americans and Canadians were adopting, when, again, environmental NGOs interfered, campaigning against what they branded Frankenfoods.
“Fifteen years after the first genetically-modified food has been commercialized and eaten in the United States, there isn’t a single person that has been sick. There is not a single person that has died. There’s been no environmental catastrophes,” Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen says.
Still, the European Union’s bans on GM imports, and Africa’s reliance on EU aid, makes it too economically risky for most African nations to try GM — a sin of the well-fed West against the starving that Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa, calls “an imperialism of rich tastes.” – Patrick Moore
PS – pardon my manners – I didn’t mean to so rudely interrupt this great post from Steve – thanks for sharing, farmer!