With scarcely a day going by without further bad news about declines in global flora and fauna and increases in greenhouse gas emissions, it is no longer so easy to dismiss ‘end of the world’ myths in indigenous culture as quaint relics of outmoded cultures.

Indeed many of these myths seem uncannily relevant as we move steadily closer towards environmental catastrophe.

The ‘falling sky’ in the title of this book refers to the Yanomami belief that, after the death of the last shaman, no one will be left to hold up the sky so it will collapse on top of the earth again, as in the beginning of time. Davi Kopenawa, himself a Yanomami shaman, has a clear idea of the sequence of events:

“When the white people tear dangerous minerals out of the depths of the earth, our breath becomes too short and we die very quickly … If the breath of life of all our people dies out, the forest will become empty and silent. Our ghosts will then go to join all those who live on the sky’s back, already in very large numbers.

“The sky, which is as sick from the white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart. … It will truly be terrifying! The back of the sky bears a forest as vast as ours, and its enormous weight will brutally crush us all.”

Davi is one of the leading representatives of the 32,000 Yanomami Indians, who inhabit the frontier region between Brazil and Venezuela, and over the years he has spoken out time and again against the damage being inflicted on his people and his beloved forest.

The gift of apt expression …

He has a great knack for finding a telling word or image and, as one reads this engrossing book, it becomes clear that this skill stems in part from his personal trajectory, which means that, while maintaining the eye of an outsider, he knows ‘white’ society well.

Davi was brought up deep in the Amazon forest, but in 1967 he became an orphan at the age of 11, when his mother died in a measles epidemic, brought in by the evangelical New Tribes missionaries.

These missionaries, hell-bent on converting the Yanomami, even took advantage of the fact that the epidemic carried off far more Indians than white missionaries to drive home the superiority of their God (whom the Yanomami called Teosi, from the Portuguese Deus).

In his review of Davi’s book, the ethnobotanist Glenn H. Shepherd quotes from the diary written at the time by the missionary Keith Wardlaw (whose daughter brought the measles into the village):

“God never makes a mistake and, now that the crisis is passed, we can see how the Lord is working in hearts through the things that have happened … The power of God is at work and it is a great and marvelous thing to behold.” Indeed! – as Shepherd drily observes.

Disoriented by grief, Davi was converted, if only for a brief period. He recalls the missionaries’ treatment of his mother’s corpse: “I was never able to learn where my mother was buried. The people of Teosi never told us, so we could not gather the bones of our dead.

“Because of them, I was never able to mourn my mother the way our people usually do. It is a very bad thing. It made me feel a deep sorrow and the anger from her death has persisted in me since that time. It hardened little by little and will only end with my own end.”

The way of the shaman, the way of the campaigner

After several years he returned to the forest and went through the long and arduous process of training to become a shaman. In time, he decided to take on the role of spokesperson for his people, making journeys to Brasília and abroad in an effort to save the forest from destruction.

In one powerful passage, he describes the moment when he realised that he had to take on this role, on meeting the garimpeiros (gold prospectors) for the first time: “These fierce men appeared in the forest suddenly, coming from all over the place, and quickly encircled our houses in large numbers. They were frenetically searching for an evil thing that we had never heard about and whose name they repeated unceasingly: oru, gold.

“They started digging into the ground in every direction like herds of peccaries. They soiled the rivers with yellowish mire and filled them with xawara epidemic fumes from their machines. Then my chest filled up with anger and worry again when I saw them ravage the river’s sources with the avidity of scrawny dogs. All this to find gold, so the white people can use it to make themselves teeth and ornaments or keep it locked in their houses!

“At the time, I had just learned to defend our forest’s limits. I was not yet used to the idea that I also needed to defend its trees, game, watercourses, and fish. But I soon understood that the gold prospectors were land eaters who would destroy everything.

“These new words about protecting the forest came to me gradually, during my trips in the forest and among the white people. They settled inside me and increased little by little, linking up to each other, until they formed a long path in my mind. I used them to start speaking in the cities, even if in Portuguese my tongue still seemed as tangled as a ghost’s!”

He was on one of these journeys in June 2014 that he spoke to The Ecologist. And it was on an earlier trip that he was befriended by the French anthropologist, Bruce Albert, who became a regular visitor to his village, and ultimately his co-author.

This book is the result of over 100 hours of taped conversation, in the Yanomami language, between Davi and Albert. The serendipity of this friendship means that Davi’s rich exposition of Yanomami culture and his biting criticism of ‘white civilisation’ can now reach a broad audience.

A talent for seeing what we do not

Time and again Davi’s observations make us squirm: “The houses in the centre of this city [New York] are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people who live in those places have no food and their clothes are dirty and torn. When I took a walk among them, they looked at me with sad eyes. It made me upset.

“These white people who created merchandise think they are clever and brave. Yet they are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. … They do not even look at them and are satisfied to keep their distance. And they call them ‘the poor’ [Davi uses the Portuguese word]. They even take their crumbling houses from them … It scared me to see such a thing.”

Not all of this book is easily digestible. In particular, there is a complex section at the beginning, in which Davi talks about the Yanomami’s spiritual world and the journeys he makes, flying above the forest with the xapiri (forest spirits) while under the influence of yãkoana (hallucinatory snuff). The most accessible section is Davi’s account of his personal journey.

Davi has an uncanny way of making us question the way we live, be we anthropologists in search of baskets, bow and arrows: “Why do they so often ask us for these objects? Do they want to get them in anticipation of our deaths? Will they also want to take our bones to their cities? Once dead, will we also be exhibited in the glass cases of a museum?”

Or environmental activists: “The lives of white people who hurry around all day like xiri na ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient and anxious not to get to their job [another word in Portuguese] late. They barely sleep and run all day in a haze.”

Davi believes that the world has lost its way. It is hard to disagree.

Sue Branford is an editor at Latin America Bureau. She has written five books, mainly on Brazil, including (with Jan Rocha) ‘Cutting the Wire – the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil’. Formerly she worked at the BBC World Service as a Latin America analyst.

The book: ‘The Falling Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman‘ is by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, and published by the Berknap Press of Harvard University Press 2013 [ISBN 978-0-674-72468-6].

The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

The papers:

• ‘Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains‘ is published in Sciences Advances AAAS.
• ‘The changing nature of flooding across the central United States‘ is published in Nature Climate Change.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Speaking at a public meeting organised for farmers in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo Region entitled “GMOs the truth and misconceptions”, Professor Walter Sandow Alhassan advised farmers to avoid being misled by anti-GMO groups, telling them:

“We should get away from this misinformation and try to see how we can revolutionize our agriculture and move with modern trends.”

He is also quoted as calling for groups opposing GMOs and corporate seed-grabbing like Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) to be “abhorred”, because, according to him, “those groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology.”

We at FSG are shocked by Alhassan’s reported pronouncements urging farmers to reject our warnings and stand by our position that accepting GMOs will result in seed colonisation and seed slavery. In truth, what Ghanaian farmers need to abhor and reject is scientists laden with conflicts of interest.

Because ultimately, genetic engineering is about private corporate control of the food system. Monsanto and Syngenta are particularly greedy to get their hands on Ghana’s agriculture and control the seed market here – and Professor Alhassan is a key servant of the global GMO establishment helping to make this resource grab possible.

The meeting itself also deserves examination. It was organised by the Ghana Chapter of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) in collaboration with the GMO-pushing, Gates Foundation-supported African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) which itself created OFAB in 2006.

OFAB’s purpose is to “positively change public perceptions toward modern biotechnology. This will lead to increased adoption of GM products in Africa and the rest of the world.” So it iis hardly an impartial voice of science!

Another co-sponsor of the meeting was CSIR, the South African-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which works in biotech, GMOs and synthetic biology – and which notoriously ‘biopirated’ the Hoodia plant – appropriating and patenting the traditional knowledge of the San people of southern Africa.

Who pays the piper …

Alhassan, now a consultant, is himself a former Director General of CSIR, and much of his career has been funded by the biotech industry – some by Monsanto, particularly his education and early history, and more lately by Syngenta and the Syngenta Foundation.

Naturally he supports GMOs. He has spent his entire life in their service. He is Syngenta’s man in Ghana. And he exemplifies the close links forged by Big Ag with key figures in the academic world. As Kamil Ahsan writes in his article ‘The New Scientism‘:

“Today, large numbers of scientists are in the employ of Big Pharma, Big Ag, and all kinds of corporations with anti-environmental and anti-social justice agendas.”

And while academics are still largely publicly funded, “many receive grants or training fellowships from biotech, pharmaceutical, or agricultural companies; serve on advisory panels and committees; oversee and participate in industry-funded events and colloquiums; and rely on industry links as funnels for outgoing graduate students or postdoctoral candidates. GMOs are a good example of how academics function as cheerleaders for Big Ag.”

Big Ag is not afraid to lie about the GMOs they are pushing. For example Monsanto has just been forced to withdraw advertisements in South Africa because of unsubstantiated information and false claims that GMO crops “enable us to produce more food sustainably whilst using fewer resources; provide a healthier environment by saving on pesticides; decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase crop yields substantially.”

Yet we hear Professor Alhassan and his network repeating these same untruths over and over again and calling them ‘science’. When he warns that anti GMO groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to GMO technology, he is surely trying to suppress scientific inquiry, knowledge and debate.

More information on the dangers of GMO pesticide plants comes out every day, this despite the fact that the biotechnology industry has done its best to suppress any studies or information that does not support industry claims.

GMO cowpeas a threat to all of Africa

Right now Professor Alhassan and his corporate and academic cronies are trying to get Bt cowpeas into the Ghanaian market. Bt cowpeas are laden with pesticides as are all Bt GMO plants. When Ghanaians eat Bt cowpeas they will be eating pesticides.

In the US Bt plants are registered as pesticides by the USDA. When you eat any part of a Bt plant, you are eating a toxic pesticide – one aimed at insects, but which also impacts on humans. Although Bt does occur in nature, that is quite different than having a plant which contains Bt toxin in every cell of the plant.

With Bt in nature, and when used as a dust or spray in agroecological farming, the active toxin can only be found in the gut of the insect. The plant itself contains no Bt. If there is any residual spray or dust on the surface of the plant it can be washed off.

However, with the Bt in GMO cowpeas and all other Bt GMO plants, as GM Watch points out, “active toxin is in every plant cell and tissue, all the time and cannot be washed off … active toxins are not easily degraded by gut enzymes and, since they are lectins, they all are very likely to bind to the wall of the mammalian / human gut.”

And that means they are likely to be processed into your body creating who knows what short term or long term health risks and dangers.

Those insects that are controlled and killed by the Bt in Bt GMO plants evolve a tolerance for the Bt toxin and come back stronger over time, as recently observed in Brazil where BT corn is actually less resistant to the Fall Armyworm than conventional varieties.

Other opportunistic insects will take advantage of the lack of competition and move in to take the place of the former pests creating new super pests. That is happening in the US where GMOs have been around for 20 years.

And it’s leading to more and stronger pesticides being used every year, endangering the health of humans and livestock, degrading and polluting the soil, water, and air across US farmlands.

It is particularly worrisome to have Bt cowpeas growing in Ghana, a species indigenous to West Africa, as the GMO crops will contaminate neighboring crops with their pollen. If grown in quantity, GMO cowpeas could contaminate the entire region of West Africa. Because of this kind of contamination, Mexico has banned growing Bt corn – a ruling fiercely fought by Monsanto.

Cowpeas are one of the most important food crops in Africa’s drylands: they survive high temperatures with little water, even on very sandy soils, fix nitrogen, and are shade tolerant, allowing them to be used in agroforestry systems.

We must unite to fight this evil law!

If the Ghana Plant Breeders Bill is passed, it would allow the corporate GMO owners to claim all offspring of that contamination as their own property according to their intellectual property rights.

They could force a farmer whose crop is contaminated – against the farmer’s will, and providing no benefit to the farmer – to pay for the contaminated crop, to pay damages to the corporation! They could also force farmers to destroy their crops.

This is happening across the United States and in Canada where GMO corporations are winning huge financial judgements against farmers. It is happening in other countries that have passed UPOV laws such as Ghana’s Plant Breeders Bill. This is what Professor Alhassan intends to bring to Ghana’s farmers, claiming it is ‘progress’ and calling it ‘science’. It is just old fashioned corporate greed.

Contamination of the West African cowpea means the destruction of Ghana’s heritage, destruction of the seed DNA Ghana’s farmers, going back generations and centuries, have laboured to develop and preserve.

This is biopiracy, made legal by the Plant Breeders Bill. Professor Walter Alhassan may believe that this destruction is simply ‘science’, but it is in truth a tool by which foreign corporations aim to profit and re-colonize Ghana, West Africa, and the entire continent of Africa.

Would you trust Professor Walter Alhassan to make decisions about what you eat? Do you trust Professor Alhassan and his recommended scientific cronies to tell you what to plant, or what seeds you are required to use? Whose best interests does Professor Alhassan really represent?

Edwin Kweku Andoh Baffour is Acting Director of Communications with Food Sovereignty Ghana. The original article has been expanded and edited by The Ecologist.

Twitter: twitter.com/FoodSovereignGH
Facebook: facebook.com/FoodSovereigntyGhana

With scarcely a day going by without further bad news about declines in global flora and fauna and increases in greenhouse gas emissions, it is no longer so easy to dismiss ‘end of the world’ myths in indigenous culture as quaint relics of outmoded cultures.

Indeed many of these myths seem uncannily relevant as we move steadily closer towards environmental catastrophe.

The ‘falling sky’ in the title of this book refers to the Yanomami belief that, after the death of the last shaman, no one will be left to hold up the sky so it will collapse on top of the earth again, as in the beginning of time. Davi Kopenawa, himself a Yanomami shaman, has a clear idea of the sequence of events:

“When the white people tear dangerous minerals out of the depths of the earth, our breath becomes too short and we die very quickly … If the breath of life of all our people dies out, the forest will become empty and silent. Our ghosts will then go to join all those who live on the sky’s back, already in very large numbers.

“The sky, which is as sick from the white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart. … It will truly be terrifying! The back of the sky bears a forest as vast as ours, and its enormous weight will brutally crush us all.”

Davi is one of the leading representatives of the 32,000 Yanomami Indians, who inhabit the frontier region between Brazil and Venezuela, and over the years he has spoken out time and again against the damage being inflicted on his people and his beloved forest.

The gift of apt expression …

He has a great knack for finding a telling word or image and, as one reads this engrossing book, it becomes clear that this skill stems in part from his personal trajectory, which means that, while maintaining the eye of an outsider, he knows ‘white’ society well.

Davi was brought up deep in the Amazon forest, but in 1967 he became an orphan at the age of 11, when his mother died in a measles epidemic, brought in by the evangelical New Tribes missionaries.

These missionaries, hell-bent on converting the Yanomami, even took advantage of the fact that the epidemic carried off far more Indians than white missionaries to drive home the superiority of their God (whom the Yanomami called Teosi, from the Portuguese Deus).

In his review of Davi’s book, the ethnobotanist Glenn H. Shepherd quotes from the diary written at the time by the missionary Keith Wardlaw (whose daughter brought the measles into the village):

“God never makes a mistake and, now that the crisis is passed, we can see how the Lord is working in hearts through the things that have happened … The power of God is at work and it is a great and marvelous thing to behold.” Indeed! – as Shepherd drily observes.

Disoriented by grief, Davi was converted, if only for a brief period. He recalls the missionaries’ treatment of his mother’s corpse: “I was never able to learn where my mother was buried. The people of Teosi never told us, so we could not gather the bones of our dead.

“Because of them, I was never able to mourn my mother the way our people usually do. It is a very bad thing. It made me feel a deep sorrow and the anger from her death has persisted in me since that time. It hardened little by little and will only end with my own end.”

The way of the shaman, the way of the campaigner

After several years he returned to the forest and went through the long and arduous process of training to become a shaman. In time, he decided to take on the role of spokesperson for his people, making journeys to Brasília and abroad in an effort to save the forest from destruction.

In one powerful passage, he describes the moment when he realised that he had to take on this role, on meeting the garimpeiros (gold prospectors) for the first time: “These fierce men appeared in the forest suddenly, coming from all over the place, and quickly encircled our houses in large numbers. They were frenetically searching for an evil thing that we had never heard about and whose name they repeated unceasingly: oru, gold.

“They started digging into the ground in every direction like herds of peccaries. They soiled the rivers with yellowish mire and filled them with xawara epidemic fumes from their machines. Then my chest filled up with anger and worry again when I saw them ravage the river’s sources with the avidity of scrawny dogs. All this to find gold, so the white people can use it to make themselves teeth and ornaments or keep it locked in their houses!

“At the time, I had just learned to defend our forest’s limits. I was not yet used to the idea that I also needed to defend its trees, game, watercourses, and fish. But I soon understood that the gold prospectors were land eaters who would destroy everything.

“These new words about protecting the forest came to me gradually, during my trips in the forest and among the white people. They settled inside me and increased little by little, linking up to each other, until they formed a long path in my mind. I used them to start speaking in the cities, even if in Portuguese my tongue still seemed as tangled as a ghost’s!”

He was on one of these journeys in June 2014 that he spoke to The Ecologist. And it was on an earlier trip that he was befriended by the French anthropologist, Bruce Albert, who became a regular visitor to his village, and ultimately his co-author.

This book is the result of over 100 hours of taped conversation, in the Yanomami language, between Davi and Albert. The serendipity of this friendship means that Davi’s rich exposition of Yanomami culture and his biting criticism of ‘white civilisation’ can now reach a broad audience.

A talent for seeing what we do not

Time and again Davi’s observations make us squirm: “The houses in the centre of this city [New York] are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people who live in those places have no food and their clothes are dirty and torn. When I took a walk among them, they looked at me with sad eyes. It made me upset.

“These white people who created merchandise think they are clever and brave. Yet they are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. … They do not even look at them and are satisfied to keep their distance. And they call them ‘the poor’ [Davi uses the Portuguese word]. They even take their crumbling houses from them … It scared me to see such a thing.”

Not all of this book is easily digestible. In particular, there is a complex section at the beginning, in which Davi talks about the Yanomami’s spiritual world and the journeys he makes, flying above the forest with the xapiri (forest spirits) while under the influence of yãkoana (hallucinatory snuff). The most accessible section is Davi’s account of his personal journey.

Davi has an uncanny way of making us question the way we live, be we anthropologists in search of baskets, bow and arrows: “Why do they so often ask us for these objects? Do they want to get them in anticipation of our deaths? Will they also want to take our bones to their cities? Once dead, will we also be exhibited in the glass cases of a museum?”

Or environmental activists: “The lives of white people who hurry around all day like xiri na ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient and anxious not to get to their job [another word in Portuguese] late. They barely sleep and run all day in a haze.”

Davi believes that the world has lost its way. It is hard to disagree.

Sue Branford is an editor at Latin America Bureau. She has written five books, mainly on Brazil, including (with Jan Rocha) ‘Cutting the Wire – the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil’. Formerly she worked at the BBC World Service as a Latin America analyst.

The book: ‘The Falling Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman‘ is by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, and published by the Berknap Press of Harvard University Press 2013 [ISBN 978-0-674-72468-6].

The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

The papers:

• ‘Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains‘ is published in Sciences Advances AAAS.
• ‘The changing nature of flooding across the central United States‘ is published in Nature Climate Change.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Speaking at a public meeting organised for farmers in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo Region entitled “GMOs the truth and misconceptions”, Professor Walter Sandow Alhassan advised farmers to avoid being misled by anti-GMO groups, telling them:

“We should get away from this misinformation and try to see how we can revolutionize our agriculture and move with modern trends.”

He is also quoted as calling for groups opposing GMOs and corporate seed-grabbing like Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) to be “abhorred”, because, according to him, “those groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology.”

We at FSG are shocked by Alhassan’s reported pronouncements urging farmers to reject our warnings and stand by our position that accepting GMOs will result in seed colonisation and seed slavery. In truth, what Ghanaian farmers need to abhor and reject is scientists laden with conflicts of interest.

Because ultimately, genetic engineering is about private corporate control of the food system. Monsanto and Syngenta are particularly greedy to get their hands on Ghana’s agriculture and control the seed market here – and Professor Alhassan is a key servant of the global GMO establishment helping to make this resource grab possible.

The meeting itself also deserves examination. It was organised by the Ghana Chapter of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) in collaboration with the GMO-pushing, Gates Foundation-supported African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) which itself created OFAB in 2006.

OFAB’s purpose is to “positively change public perceptions toward modern biotechnology. This will lead to increased adoption of GM products in Africa and the rest of the world.” So it iis hardly an impartial voice of science!

Another co-sponsor of the meeting was CSIR, the South African-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which works in biotech, GMOs and synthetic biology – and which notoriously ‘biopirated’ the Hoodia plant – appropriating and patenting the traditional knowledge of the San people of southern Africa.

Who pays the piper …

Alhassan, now a consultant, is himself a former Director General of CSIR, and much of his career has been funded by the biotech industry – some by Monsanto, particularly his education and early history, and more lately by Syngenta and the Syngenta Foundation.

Naturally he supports GMOs. He has spent his entire life in their service. He is Syngenta’s man in Ghana. And he exemplifies the close links forged by Big Ag with key figures in the academic world. As Kamil Ahsan writes in his article ‘The New Scientism‘:

“Today, large numbers of scientists are in the employ of Big Pharma, Big Ag, and all kinds of corporations with anti-environmental and anti-social justice agendas.”

And while academics are still largely publicly funded, “many receive grants or training fellowships from biotech, pharmaceutical, or agricultural companies; serve on advisory panels and committees; oversee and participate in industry-funded events and colloquiums; and rely on industry links as funnels for outgoing graduate students or postdoctoral candidates. GMOs are a good example of how academics function as cheerleaders for Big Ag.”

Big Ag is not afraid to lie about the GMOs they are pushing. For example Monsanto has just been forced to withdraw advertisements in South Africa because of unsubstantiated information and false claims that GMO crops “enable us to produce more food sustainably whilst using fewer resources; provide a healthier environment by saving on pesticides; decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase crop yields substantially.”

Yet we hear Professor Alhassan and his network repeating these same untruths over and over again and calling them ‘science’. When he warns that anti GMO groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to GMO technology, he is surely trying to suppress scientific inquiry, knowledge and debate.

More information on the dangers of GMO pesticide plants comes out every day, this despite the fact that the biotechnology industry has done its best to suppress any studies or information that does not support industry claims.

GMO cowpeas a threat to all of Africa

Right now Professor Alhassan and his corporate and academic cronies are trying to get Bt cowpeas into the Ghanaian market. Bt cowpeas are laden with pesticides as are all Bt GMO plants. When Ghanaians eat Bt cowpeas they will be eating pesticides.

In the US Bt plants are registered as pesticides by the USDA. When you eat any part of a Bt plant, you are eating a toxic pesticide – one aimed at insects, but which also impacts on humans. Although Bt does occur in nature, that is quite different than having a plant which contains Bt toxin in every cell of the plant.

With Bt in nature, and when used as a dust or spray in agroecological farming, the active toxin can only be found in the gut of the insect. The plant itself contains no Bt. If there is any residual spray or dust on the surface of the plant it can be washed off.

However, with the Bt in GMO cowpeas and all other Bt GMO plants, as GM Watch points out, “active toxin is in every plant cell and tissue, all the time and cannot be washed off … active toxins are not easily degraded by gut enzymes and, since they are lectins, they all are very likely to bind to the wall of the mammalian / human gut.”

And that means they are likely to be processed into your body creating who knows what short term or long term health risks and dangers.

Those insects that are controlled and killed by the Bt in Bt GMO plants evolve a tolerance for the Bt toxin and come back stronger over time, as recently observed in Brazil where BT corn is actually less resistant to the Fall Armyworm than conventional varieties.

Other opportunistic insects will take advantage of the lack of competition and move in to take the place of the former pests creating new super pests. That is happening in the US where GMOs have been around for 20 years.

And it’s leading to more and stronger pesticides being used every year, endangering the health of humans and livestock, degrading and polluting the soil, water, and air across US farmlands.

It is particularly worrisome to have Bt cowpeas growing in Ghana, a species indigenous to West Africa, as the GMO crops will contaminate neighboring crops with their pollen. If grown in quantity, GMO cowpeas could contaminate the entire region of West Africa. Because of this kind of contamination, Mexico has banned growing Bt corn – a ruling fiercely fought by Monsanto.

Cowpeas are one of the most important food crops in Africa’s drylands: they survive high temperatures with little water, even on very sandy soils, fix nitrogen, and are shade tolerant, allowing them to be used in agroforestry systems.

We must unite to fight this evil law!

If the Ghana Plant Breeders Bill is passed, it would allow the corporate GMO owners to claim all offspring of that contamination as their own property according to their intellectual property rights.

They could force a farmer whose crop is contaminated – against the farmer’s will, and providing no benefit to the farmer – to pay for the contaminated crop, to pay damages to the corporation! They could also force farmers to destroy their crops.

This is happening across the United States and in Canada where GMO corporations are winning huge financial judgements against farmers. It is happening in other countries that have passed UPOV laws such as Ghana’s Plant Breeders Bill. This is what Professor Alhassan intends to bring to Ghana’s farmers, claiming it is ‘progress’ and calling it ‘science’. It is just old fashioned corporate greed.

Contamination of the West African cowpea means the destruction of Ghana’s heritage, destruction of the seed DNA Ghana’s farmers, going back generations and centuries, have laboured to develop and preserve.

This is biopiracy, made legal by the Plant Breeders Bill. Professor Walter Alhassan may believe that this destruction is simply ‘science’, but it is in truth a tool by which foreign corporations aim to profit and re-colonize Ghana, West Africa, and the entire continent of Africa.

Would you trust Professor Walter Alhassan to make decisions about what you eat? Do you trust Professor Alhassan and his recommended scientific cronies to tell you what to plant, or what seeds you are required to use? Whose best interests does Professor Alhassan really represent?

Edwin Kweku Andoh Baffour is Acting Director of Communications with Food Sovereignty Ghana. The original article has been expanded and edited by The Ecologist.

Twitter: twitter.com/FoodSovereignGH
Facebook: facebook.com/FoodSovereigntyGhana

With scarcely a day going by without further bad news about declines in global flora and fauna and increases in greenhouse gas emissions, it is no longer so easy to dismiss ‘end of the world’ myths in indigenous culture as quaint relics of outmoded cultures.

Indeed many of these myths seem uncannily relevant as we move steadily closer towards environmental catastrophe.

The ‘falling sky’ in the title of this book refers to the Yanomami belief that, after the death of the last shaman, no one will be left to hold up the sky so it will collapse on top of the earth again, as in the beginning of time. Davi Kopenawa, himself a Yanomami shaman, has a clear idea of the sequence of events:

“When the white people tear dangerous minerals out of the depths of the earth, our breath becomes too short and we die very quickly … If the breath of life of all our people dies out, the forest will become empty and silent. Our ghosts will then go to join all those who live on the sky’s back, already in very large numbers.

“The sky, which is as sick from the white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart. … It will truly be terrifying! The back of the sky bears a forest as vast as ours, and its enormous weight will brutally crush us all.”

Davi is one of the leading representatives of the 32,000 Yanomami Indians, who inhabit the frontier region between Brazil and Venezuela, and over the years he has spoken out time and again against the damage being inflicted on his people and his beloved forest.

The gift of apt expression …

He has a great knack for finding a telling word or image and, as one reads this engrossing book, it becomes clear that this skill stems in part from his personal trajectory, which means that, while maintaining the eye of an outsider, he knows ‘white’ society well.

Davi was brought up deep in the Amazon forest, but in 1967 he became an orphan at the age of 11, when his mother died in a measles epidemic, brought in by the evangelical New Tribes missionaries.

These missionaries, hell-bent on converting the Yanomami, even took advantage of the fact that the epidemic carried off far more Indians than white missionaries to drive home the superiority of their God (whom the Yanomami called Teosi, from the Portuguese Deus).

In his review of Davi’s book, the ethnobotanist Glenn H. Shepherd quotes from the diary written at the time by the missionary Keith Wardlaw (whose daughter brought the measles into the village):

“God never makes a mistake and, now that the crisis is passed, we can see how the Lord is working in hearts through the things that have happened … The power of God is at work and it is a great and marvelous thing to behold.” Indeed! – as Shepherd drily observes.

Disoriented by grief, Davi was converted, if only for a brief period. He recalls the missionaries’ treatment of his mother’s corpse: “I was never able to learn where my mother was buried. The people of Teosi never told us, so we could not gather the bones of our dead.

“Because of them, I was never able to mourn my mother the way our people usually do. It is a very bad thing. It made me feel a deep sorrow and the anger from her death has persisted in me since that time. It hardened little by little and will only end with my own end.”

The way of the shaman, the way of the campaigner

After several years he returned to the forest and went through the long and arduous process of training to become a shaman. In time, he decided to take on the role of spokesperson for his people, making journeys to Brasília and abroad in an effort to save the forest from destruction.

In one powerful passage, he describes the moment when he realised that he had to take on this role, on meeting the garimpeiros (gold prospectors) for the first time: “These fierce men appeared in the forest suddenly, coming from all over the place, and quickly encircled our houses in large numbers. They were frenetically searching for an evil thing that we had never heard about and whose name they repeated unceasingly: oru, gold.

“They started digging into the ground in every direction like herds of peccaries. They soiled the rivers with yellowish mire and filled them with xawara epidemic fumes from their machines. Then my chest filled up with anger and worry again when I saw them ravage the river’s sources with the avidity of scrawny dogs. All this to find gold, so the white people can use it to make themselves teeth and ornaments or keep it locked in their houses!

“At the time, I had just learned to defend our forest’s limits. I was not yet used to the idea that I also needed to defend its trees, game, watercourses, and fish. But I soon understood that the gold prospectors were land eaters who would destroy everything.

“These new words about protecting the forest came to me gradually, during my trips in the forest and among the white people. They settled inside me and increased little by little, linking up to each other, until they formed a long path in my mind. I used them to start speaking in the cities, even if in Portuguese my tongue still seemed as tangled as a ghost’s!”

He was on one of these journeys in June 2014 that he spoke to The Ecologist. And it was on an earlier trip that he was befriended by the French anthropologist, Bruce Albert, who became a regular visitor to his village, and ultimately his co-author.

This book is the result of over 100 hours of taped conversation, in the Yanomami language, between Davi and Albert. The serendipity of this friendship means that Davi’s rich exposition of Yanomami culture and his biting criticism of ‘white civilisation’ can now reach a broad audience.

A talent for seeing what we do not

Time and again Davi’s observations make us squirm: “The houses in the centre of this city [New York] are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people who live in those places have no food and their clothes are dirty and torn. When I took a walk among them, they looked at me with sad eyes. It made me upset.

“These white people who created merchandise think they are clever and brave. Yet they are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. … They do not even look at them and are satisfied to keep their distance. And they call them ‘the poor’ [Davi uses the Portuguese word]. They even take their crumbling houses from them … It scared me to see such a thing.”

Not all of this book is easily digestible. In particular, there is a complex section at the beginning, in which Davi talks about the Yanomami’s spiritual world and the journeys he makes, flying above the forest with the xapiri (forest spirits) while under the influence of yãkoana (hallucinatory snuff). The most accessible section is Davi’s account of his personal journey.

Davi has an uncanny way of making us question the way we live, be we anthropologists in search of baskets, bow and arrows: “Why do they so often ask us for these objects? Do they want to get them in anticipation of our deaths? Will they also want to take our bones to their cities? Once dead, will we also be exhibited in the glass cases of a museum?”

Or environmental activists: “The lives of white people who hurry around all day like xiri na ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient and anxious not to get to their job [another word in Portuguese] late. They barely sleep and run all day in a haze.”

Davi believes that the world has lost its way. It is hard to disagree.

Sue Branford is an editor at Latin America Bureau. She has written five books, mainly on Brazil, including (with Jan Rocha) ‘Cutting the Wire – the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil’. Formerly she worked at the BBC World Service as a Latin America analyst.

The book: ‘The Falling Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman‘ is by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, and published by the Berknap Press of Harvard University Press 2013 [ISBN 978-0-674-72468-6].

The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

The papers:

• ‘Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains‘ is published in Sciences Advances AAAS.
• ‘The changing nature of flooding across the central United States‘ is published in Nature Climate Change.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Speaking at a public meeting organised for farmers in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo Region entitled “GMOs the truth and misconceptions”, Professor Walter Sandow Alhassan advised farmers to avoid being misled by anti-GMO groups, telling them:

“We should get away from this misinformation and try to see how we can revolutionize our agriculture and move with modern trends.”

He is also quoted as calling for groups opposing GMOs and corporate seed-grabbing like Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) to be “abhorred”, because, according to him, “those groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology.”

We at FSG are shocked by Alhassan’s reported pronouncements urging farmers to reject our warnings and stand by our position that accepting GMOs will result in seed colonisation and seed slavery. In truth, what Ghanaian farmers need to abhor and reject is scientists laden with conflicts of interest.

Because ultimately, genetic engineering is about private corporate control of the food system. Monsanto and Syngenta are particularly greedy to get their hands on Ghana’s agriculture and control the seed market here – and Professor Alhassan is a key servant of the global GMO establishment helping to make this resource grab possible.

The meeting itself also deserves examination. It was organised by the Ghana Chapter of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) in collaboration with the GMO-pushing, Gates Foundation-supported African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) which itself created OFAB in 2006.

OFAB’s purpose is to “positively change public perceptions toward modern biotechnology. This will lead to increased adoption of GM products in Africa and the rest of the world.” So it iis hardly an impartial voice of science!

Another co-sponsor of the meeting was CSIR, the South African-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which works in biotech, GMOs and synthetic biology – and which notoriously ‘biopirated’ the Hoodia plant – appropriating and patenting the traditional knowledge of the San people of southern Africa.

Who pays the piper …

Alhassan, now a consultant, is himself a former Director General of CSIR, and much of his career has been funded by the biotech industry – some by Monsanto, particularly his education and early history, and more lately by Syngenta and the Syngenta Foundation.

Naturally he supports GMOs. He has spent his entire life in their service. He is Syngenta’s man in Ghana. And he exemplifies the close links forged by Big Ag with key figures in the academic world. As Kamil Ahsan writes in his article ‘The New Scientism‘:

“Today, large numbers of scientists are in the employ of Big Pharma, Big Ag, and all kinds of corporations with anti-environmental and anti-social justice agendas.”

And while academics are still largely publicly funded, “many receive grants or training fellowships from biotech, pharmaceutical, or agricultural companies; serve on advisory panels and committees; oversee and participate in industry-funded events and colloquiums; and rely on industry links as funnels for outgoing graduate students or postdoctoral candidates. GMOs are a good example of how academics function as cheerleaders for Big Ag.”

Big Ag is not afraid to lie about the GMOs they are pushing. For example Monsanto has just been forced to withdraw advertisements in South Africa because of unsubstantiated information and false claims that GMO crops “enable us to produce more food sustainably whilst using fewer resources; provide a healthier environment by saving on pesticides; decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase crop yields substantially.”

Yet we hear Professor Alhassan and his network repeating these same untruths over and over again and calling them ‘science’. When he warns that anti GMO groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to GMO technology, he is surely trying to suppress scientific inquiry, knowledge and debate.

More information on the dangers of GMO pesticide plants comes out every day, this despite the fact that the biotechnology industry has done its best to suppress any studies or information that does not support industry claims.

GMO cowpeas a threat to all of Africa

Right now Professor Alhassan and his corporate and academic cronies are trying to get Bt cowpeas into the Ghanaian market. Bt cowpeas are laden with pesticides as are all Bt GMO plants. When Ghanaians eat Bt cowpeas they will be eating pesticides.

In the US Bt plants are registered as pesticides by the USDA. When you eat any part of a Bt plant, you are eating a toxic pesticide – one aimed at insects, but which also impacts on humans. Although Bt does occur in nature, that is quite different than having a plant which contains Bt toxin in every cell of the plant.

With Bt in nature, and when used as a dust or spray in agroecological farming, the active toxin can only be found in the gut of the insect. The plant itself contains no Bt. If there is any residual spray or dust on the surface of the plant it can be washed off.

However, with the Bt in GMO cowpeas and all other Bt GMO plants, as GM Watch points out, “active toxin is in every plant cell and tissue, all the time and cannot be washed off … active toxins are not easily degraded by gut enzymes and, since they are lectins, they all are very likely to bind to the wall of the mammalian / human gut.”

And that means they are likely to be processed into your body creating who knows what short term or long term health risks and dangers.

Those insects that are controlled and killed by the Bt in Bt GMO plants evolve a tolerance for the Bt toxin and come back stronger over time, as recently observed in Brazil where BT corn is actually less resistant to the Fall Armyworm than conventional varieties.

Other opportunistic insects will take advantage of the lack of competition and move in to take the place of the former pests creating new super pests. That is happening in the US where GMOs have been around for 20 years.

And it’s leading to more and stronger pesticides being used every year, endangering the health of humans and livestock, degrading and polluting the soil, water, and air across US farmlands.

It is particularly worrisome to have Bt cowpeas growing in Ghana, a species indigenous to West Africa, as the GMO crops will contaminate neighboring crops with their pollen. If grown in quantity, GMO cowpeas could contaminate the entire region of West Africa. Because of this kind of contamination, Mexico has banned growing Bt corn – a ruling fiercely fought by Monsanto.

Cowpeas are one of the most important food crops in Africa’s drylands: they survive high temperatures with little water, even on very sandy soils, fix nitrogen, and are shade tolerant, allowing them to be used in agroforestry systems.

We must unite to fight this evil law!

If the Ghana Plant Breeders Bill is passed, it would allow the corporate GMO owners to claim all offspring of that contamination as their own property according to their intellectual property rights.

They could force a farmer whose crop is contaminated – against the farmer’s will, and providing no benefit to the farmer – to pay for the contaminated crop, to pay damages to the corporation! They could also force farmers to destroy their crops.

This is happening across the United States and in Canada where GMO corporations are winning huge financial judgements against farmers. It is happening in other countries that have passed UPOV laws such as Ghana’s Plant Breeders Bill. This is what Professor Alhassan intends to bring to Ghana’s farmers, claiming it is ‘progress’ and calling it ‘science’. It is just old fashioned corporate greed.

Contamination of the West African cowpea means the destruction of Ghana’s heritage, destruction of the seed DNA Ghana’s farmers, going back generations and centuries, have laboured to develop and preserve.

This is biopiracy, made legal by the Plant Breeders Bill. Professor Walter Alhassan may believe that this destruction is simply ‘science’, but it is in truth a tool by which foreign corporations aim to profit and re-colonize Ghana, West Africa, and the entire continent of Africa.

Would you trust Professor Walter Alhassan to make decisions about what you eat? Do you trust Professor Alhassan and his recommended scientific cronies to tell you what to plant, or what seeds you are required to use? Whose best interests does Professor Alhassan really represent?

Edwin Kweku Andoh Baffour is Acting Director of Communications with Food Sovereignty Ghana. The original article has been expanded and edited by The Ecologist.

Twitter: twitter.com/FoodSovereignGH
Facebook: facebook.com/FoodSovereigntyGhana

With scarcely a day going by without further bad news about declines in global flora and fauna and increases in greenhouse gas emissions, it is no longer so easy to dismiss ‘end of the world’ myths in indigenous culture as quaint relics of outmoded cultures.

Indeed many of these myths seem uncannily relevant as we move steadily closer towards environmental catastrophe.

The ‘falling sky’ in the title of this book refers to the Yanomami belief that, after the death of the last shaman, no one will be left to hold up the sky so it will collapse on top of the earth again, as in the beginning of time. Davi Kopenawa, himself a Yanomami shaman, has a clear idea of the sequence of events:

“When the white people tear dangerous minerals out of the depths of the earth, our breath becomes too short and we die very quickly … If the breath of life of all our people dies out, the forest will become empty and silent. Our ghosts will then go to join all those who live on the sky’s back, already in very large numbers.

“The sky, which is as sick from the white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart. … It will truly be terrifying! The back of the sky bears a forest as vast as ours, and its enormous weight will brutally crush us all.”

Davi is one of the leading representatives of the 32,000 Yanomami Indians, who inhabit the frontier region between Brazil and Venezuela, and over the years he has spoken out time and again against the damage being inflicted on his people and his beloved forest.

The gift of apt expression …

He has a great knack for finding a telling word or image and, as one reads this engrossing book, it becomes clear that this skill stems in part from his personal trajectory, which means that, while maintaining the eye of an outsider, he knows ‘white’ society well.

Davi was brought up deep in the Amazon forest, but in 1967 he became an orphan at the age of 11, when his mother died in a measles epidemic, brought in by the evangelical New Tribes missionaries.

These missionaries, hell-bent on converting the Yanomami, even took advantage of the fact that the epidemic carried off far more Indians than white missionaries to drive home the superiority of their God (whom the Yanomami called Teosi, from the Portuguese Deus).

In his review of Davi’s book, the ethnobotanist Glenn H. Shepherd quotes from the diary written at the time by the missionary Keith Wardlaw (whose daughter brought the measles into the village):

“God never makes a mistake and, now that the crisis is passed, we can see how the Lord is working in hearts through the things that have happened … The power of God is at work and it is a great and marvelous thing to behold.” Indeed! – as Shepherd drily observes.

Disoriented by grief, Davi was converted, if only for a brief period. He recalls the missionaries’ treatment of his mother’s corpse: “I was never able to learn where my mother was buried. The people of Teosi never told us, so we could not gather the bones of our dead.

“Because of them, I was never able to mourn my mother the way our people usually do. It is a very bad thing. It made me feel a deep sorrow and the anger from her death has persisted in me since that time. It hardened little by little and will only end with my own end.”

The way of the shaman, the way of the campaigner

After several years he returned to the forest and went through the long and arduous process of training to become a shaman. In time, he decided to take on the role of spokesperson for his people, making journeys to Brasília and abroad in an effort to save the forest from destruction.

In one powerful passage, he describes the moment when he realised that he had to take on this role, on meeting the garimpeiros (gold prospectors) for the first time: “These fierce men appeared in the forest suddenly, coming from all over the place, and quickly encircled our houses in large numbers. They were frenetically searching for an evil thing that we had never heard about and whose name they repeated unceasingly: oru, gold.

“They started digging into the ground in every direction like herds of peccaries. They soiled the rivers with yellowish mire and filled them with xawara epidemic fumes from their machines. Then my chest filled up with anger and worry again when I saw them ravage the river’s sources with the avidity of scrawny dogs. All this to find gold, so the white people can use it to make themselves teeth and ornaments or keep it locked in their houses!

“At the time, I had just learned to defend our forest’s limits. I was not yet used to the idea that I also needed to defend its trees, game, watercourses, and fish. But I soon understood that the gold prospectors were land eaters who would destroy everything.

“These new words about protecting the forest came to me gradually, during my trips in the forest and among the white people. They settled inside me and increased little by little, linking up to each other, until they formed a long path in my mind. I used them to start speaking in the cities, even if in Portuguese my tongue still seemed as tangled as a ghost’s!”

He was on one of these journeys in June 2014 that he spoke to The Ecologist. And it was on an earlier trip that he was befriended by the French anthropologist, Bruce Albert, who became a regular visitor to his village, and ultimately his co-author.

This book is the result of over 100 hours of taped conversation, in the Yanomami language, between Davi and Albert. The serendipity of this friendship means that Davi’s rich exposition of Yanomami culture and his biting criticism of ‘white civilisation’ can now reach a broad audience.

A talent for seeing what we do not

Time and again Davi’s observations make us squirm: “The houses in the centre of this city [New York] are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people who live in those places have no food and their clothes are dirty and torn. When I took a walk among them, they looked at me with sad eyes. It made me upset.

“These white people who created merchandise think they are clever and brave. Yet they are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. … They do not even look at them and are satisfied to keep their distance. And they call them ‘the poor’ [Davi uses the Portuguese word]. They even take their crumbling houses from them … It scared me to see such a thing.”

Not all of this book is easily digestible. In particular, there is a complex section at the beginning, in which Davi talks about the Yanomami’s spiritual world and the journeys he makes, flying above the forest with the xapiri (forest spirits) while under the influence of yãkoana (hallucinatory snuff). The most accessible section is Davi’s account of his personal journey.

Davi has an uncanny way of making us question the way we live, be we anthropologists in search of baskets, bow and arrows: “Why do they so often ask us for these objects? Do they want to get them in anticipation of our deaths? Will they also want to take our bones to their cities? Once dead, will we also be exhibited in the glass cases of a museum?”

Or environmental activists: “The lives of white people who hurry around all day like xiri na ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient and anxious not to get to their job [another word in Portuguese] late. They barely sleep and run all day in a haze.”

Davi believes that the world has lost its way. It is hard to disagree.

Sue Branford is an editor at Latin America Bureau. She has written five books, mainly on Brazil, including (with Jan Rocha) ‘Cutting the Wire – the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil’. Formerly she worked at the BBC World Service as a Latin America analyst.

The book: ‘The Falling Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman‘ is by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, and published by the Berknap Press of Harvard University Press 2013 [ISBN 978-0-674-72468-6].