جاره سه كردني نه خوشيه كا ني جاو هه و لير



Tranlated from English to Kurdish by Goran Abdallah- Edinburgh University. Most grateful

مزارعو بعشيقة يجرفون مزارع الزيتو ن لتحويلها الى اراضي سكنيه

الخميس, 23 أيار/مايو 2013 14:26

مزارعو بعشيقة يجرفون مزارع الزيتون تزامنا مع مساعي بغداد واربيل لزراعة الملايين منها

 

        شفق نيوز/ كشف مسؤول زراعي في نينوى، عن قيام عشرات الفلاحين بتجريف مزارع الزيتون في بعشيقة لتحويلها الى اراضٍ سكنية، لافتا الى ان هذا يأتي في وقت تسعى فيه حكومتا بغداد واربيل لزراعة عشرات الملايين من شتلات الزيتون خلال خططهما الزراعية المقبلة.

وقال المنسق العام لجمعية الزيتون للتنمية الزراعية اياد البناء، في حديث لـ"شفق نيوز"، ان "العشرات من مزارعي الزيتون في ناحية بعشيقة يقومون بتجريف مزارعهم وقلع الاشجار لتحويلها الى اراضٍ سكنية"، مضيفا ان "هناك من يجرف اشجار عمرها 20 سنة، والمصيبة هو ان هناك من يجرف اشجار يفوق عمرها المائة عام."

ولفت الى ان "عمليات التجريف مستمرة للمزارع، لانه ليس هناك اية محاسبة او ردع لهؤلاء المزارعين، ودوائر الزراعة تبدو كأنها غير معنية بالامر"، مبينا ان "بعض الفلاحين يتعمدون قطع الماء على مزارعهم، لكي يدّعوا لاحقا ان الجفاف قضى على اشجارهم".

وبحسب البناء فان "حكومتي بغداد واربيل لديهما خطط ستراتيجية لدعم زراعة الزيتون في المناطق التي تتلاءم لزراعتها"، مشيرا الى ان "بغداد تعتزم زراعة 30 مليون شتلة، فيما تقدم اربيل دعما غير مسبوق لمزارعي الزيتون".

وتابع ان "اربيل تقدم شتلات زيتون عالية الزيت مجانا وتدعم حفر الابار، وتطمح لزراعة كل شبر من ارض الاقليم يصلح لزراعة الزيتون".

واستدرك بالقول "لكن للاسف، نحن نرى اشجار الزيتون المثمرة والمعمرة تتهاوى بسبب جشع بعض الفلاحين"، منوها الى ان "الاستيراد غير المنضبط لثمار الزيتون من تركيا ومصر وغيرها، اساء للمزارع العراقي والحق الضرر باشجار الزيتون".

وتضم ناحية بعشيقة أكثر من 30 الف شجرة زيتون مثمرة من ضمن 450 الف شجرة زيتون في محافظة نينوى.

وبحسب أهالي المنطقة فان بساتين الزيتون في بعشيقة تم تجديدها مطلع عام 1904 بعد هبوب عاصفة ثلجية قضت على غالبية الأشجار وبضمنها أشجار الزيتون



وه زيره كاى وزاه رتى كشتوكال\حكو مه تى هه ربم



GMOs: Fooling – er, "feeding" – the world for 20 years خرافة الاغذيه المعدله وراثيا

Doctors Warns, Eat this and you will look 5 years older.
 الاطباء يحذرون بان اكل الذره المعدله وراثيه لها مخاطرهاا

GRAIN

15 May 2013

Myths and outright lies about the alleged benefits of genetically engineered crops (GE crops or GMOs) persist only because the multinationals that profit from them have put so much effort into spreading them around.

They want you to believe that GMOs will feed the world; that they are more productive; that they will eliminate the use of agrichemicals; that they can coexist with other crops, and that they are perfectly safe for humans and the environment.

False in every case, and in this article we’ll show how easy it is to debunk these myths. All it takes is a dispassionate, objective look at twenty years of commercial GE planting and the research that supposedly backs it up. The conclusion is clear: GMOs are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

1. MYTH: GE crops will end world hunger.

FACT: GE crops have nothing to do with ending world hunger, no matter how much GE spokespeople like to expound on this topic. Three comments give the lie to their claim:

• FAO data clearly show that the world produces plenty of food to feed everyone, year after year. Yet hunger is still with us. That’s because hunger is not primarily a question of productivity but of access to arable land and resources. Put bluntly: Hunger is caused by poverty and exclusion.

• Today’s commercial GE crops weren’t designed to fight hunger in the first place. They aren’t even mainly for human consumption. Practically the entire area planted to GE crops consists of soybeans, corn, canola, and cotton. The first three of these are used almost exclusively to make cattle feed, car fuel, and industrial oils for the United States and Europe, while cotton goes into clothing.

• More damning, there appears to be an iniquitous cause-and-effect relationship between GE crops and rural hunger. In countries like Brazil and Argentina, gigantic “green deserts” of corn and soybeans invade peasants’ land, depriving them – or outright robbing them – of their means of subsistence. The consequence is hunger, abject poverty, and agrotoxin poisoning for rural people. The truth is that GE crops are edging out food on millions of hectares of fertile farmland.

In the year GMO seeds were first planted, 800 million people worldwide were hungry. Today, with millions of hectares of GMOs in production, 1 billion are hungry. When exactly do these crops start “feeding the world”?

2. MYTH: GE crops are more productive

FACT: Not true. Look at the data from the country with the longest experience of GMOs: the United States. In the most extensive and rigorous study, the Union of Concerned Scientists analyzed twenty years of GE crops and concluded that genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant soybeans and corn are no more productive than conventional plants and methods. Furthermore, 86% of the corn productivity increases obtained in the past twenty years have been due to conventional methods and practices. Other studies have found GE productivity to be lower than conventional.

Crop plants are complex living beings, not Lego blocks. Their productivity is a function of multiple genetic and environmental factors, not some elusive “productivity gene.” You can’t just flip a genetic switch and turn on high productivity, nor would any responsible genetic engineer make such a claim. Even after all this time, GE methods are quite rudimentary. Proponents of the technology count it a success if they manage to transfer even two or three functional genes into one plant.

The bottom line is that twenty years and untold millions of dollars of research have resulted in a grand total of two marketable traits – herbicide tolerance and Bt pest resistance (see below). Neither has anything to do with productivity.

3. MYTH: GE crops will eliminate agrichemicals
FACT: It’s the reverse: GE crops increase the use of harmful agrichemicals. Industry people try to put this myth over by touting the “Bt gene” from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria, which produces a toxin lethal to some corn and cotton worms. The plants produce their own pesticide, supposedly obviating the need to spray. But with such large areas planted to Bt monocultures, the worms have quickly developed resistance to Bt; worse, a host of formerly unknown secondary pests now have to be controlled with more chemicals.

The other innovation trumpeted by the “genetically modified corporations” consists of plants that can withstand high doses of herbicides. This allows vast monocultures to be sprayed from the air, year after year on the same site. It’s a convenience for industrial farmers that has abetted the spectacular expansion of soybeans in recent years. Thirty years ago there were no soybeans in Argentina; now they take up half the country’s arable land. Concurrently, the amount of the herbicide glyphosate sprayed in Argentina has skyrocketed from 8 million litres in 1995 to over 200 million litres today – a twentyfold increase, all for use in GE soy production.

The same thing is happening in the United States. Herbicide-tolerant GMOs have opened the floodgates, and glyphosate and other herbicides are pouring through onto farmers’ fields. In 2011, US farmers using this type of GMO sprayed 24% more herbicides than their colleagues planting conventional seeds. Why? For reasons any evolutionary biologist could have predicted: the weeds are evolving chemical resistance. In short, the GE “revolution” is an environmental problem, not a solution.

4. MYTH: Farmers can decide for themselves. After all, GMOs can peacefully coexist with other crops.

It sure doesn’t look that way. GE boosters may claim nobody’s forcing farmers to use GMOs, but a pesky little fact of basic biology implicates non-GE farmers against their will. It’s called cross-pollination: Plants of the same species interbreed, and sooner or later the genes artificially inserted in the GE crops cross into the conventional crops.

In Canada, the widespread growing of genetically engineered canola has contaminated nearly all the conventional canola and in so doing wiped out organic canola production. Similar contamination has been found in corn crops around the world.

The introduction of GE seed is especially alarming when there is potential for contamination of local varieties. Mexico is the centre of origin and diversification of corn. For years now, Mexican indigenous communities have been noticing odd traits appearing in some of their varieties. Various studies confirm that this is because of contamination by GE corn imported from the United States. Now, the Mexican government is proposing to allow multinationals to plant up to 2.4 million ha of GE corn in the country. If this project goes ahead, it will not only be an attack on the food sovereignty of the Mexican people: it will be a threat to the biodiversity of one of the world’s most important staple food crops.

In the Spanish state of Aragón, farm and environmental organizations have been complaining since 2005 that over 40% of organic grain has traces of GE content and can no longer be sold as organic or GMO-free.

What’s really perverse about this fake “freedom to farm” argument is that certain transnationals have been forcing farmers to pay for seeds they never planted. In the United States, Monsanto has taken hundreds of farmers to court for supposedly infringing its intellectual-property rights. Monsanto detectives roam the countryside like debt collectors, looking for “their genes” in farmers’ fields. In many cases, the genes got there because the farmers either purchased contaminated seed or had their own crops contaminated by a neighbour’s field. Whatever the case, it’s a lucrative strategy that has brought in millions of extra dollars for the corporation. And it has the added benefit of scaring farmers away from buying anything but Monsanto seeds. Sounds a lot more like the “freedom” to do exactly what the multinationals tell you to.

Genetic engineering: a stalled science

GE crops are in the hands of very few companies. Monsanto most notoriously, along with Dupont, Syngenta, BASF, Bayer and Dow, dominate GE research and patents, corner 60% of the world seed market, and control 76% of the world agrichemical market.

Yet all the profitable “science” owned by these companies comes down to two and only two traits: herbicide-tolerance and Bt.

In 2012, 59% of the area planted to commercial GE crops consisted of crops resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, a product originally patented by Monsanto, while 26% consisted of insecticidal Bt crops and 15% consisted of crops carrying both traits.

Two traits. That’s all these multinationals have to show for twenty years of research and mega-millions of dollars invested. Some revolution! The real measure of what GE technology has produced is to be found in damaged ecosystems, potential health harms, farmer dependency – and big profits for the companies.

5. MYTH: GE crops pose no threat to health and the environment.

At the very least, the biosafety of transgenic crops is an open question. Do we really want to entrust our health to an industrial agriculture system in which GE purveyors control food security offices and dictate their own standards? I don’t think so. Food sovereignty requires that the people, not the companies, have control over what we eat.

Nevertheless, our plates are now filling up with food items from plants with altered DNA and heavy pesticide loads, and we are told to simply shut up and eat. Concerns have been heightened by a number of credible reports on GMOs and their attendant herbicides:

• The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) stated in 2009 that genetically engineered foods “pose a serious health risk.” Citing various studies, it concluded that “there is more than a casual association between GE foods and adverse health effects” and that these foods “pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health.”

• The latest studies by Dr. Gilles-Éric Séralini looked at rats fed glyphosate-tolerant GE maize for two years. These rats showed greater and earlier mortality in addition to hormonal effects, mammary tumors in females, and liver and kidney disease.

• A recent study at the University of Leipzig (Germany) found high concentrations of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, in urine samples from city dwellers – from 5 to 20 times greater than the limit for drinking water.

• Professor Andrés Carrasco of the CONICET-UBA Molecular Embryology Lab at the University of Buenos Aires medical school (Argentina) has unveiled a study showing that glyphosate herbicides cause malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses much lower than those used in agriculture. The malformations were of a type similar to those observed in human embryos exposed to these herbicides.

Finally, there is the incontrovertible evidence that glyphosate can have a direct impact on human beings, causing abortions, illnesses, and even death in high enough doses, as explained by Sofía Gatica, the Argentine winner of the latest Goldman prize.

Our health is ours to defend, and so are our farms, and so is the health of the food supply that will nourish the generations to come. Food sovereignty now!



مؤتمر دولى يناقش: سياسات المياه والأمن الغذائى فى المناطق الجافة

 

تحت رعاية وزارة الزراعة واستصلاح الأراضى ومنظمة الأغذية والزراعة (الفاو) والصندوق الدولى للتنمية الزراعية (إيفاد) والمركز الدولى للزراعة فى المناطق الجافة (إيكاردا) تشهد القاهرة انعقاد المؤتمر الدولى الأول حول سياسات المياه والأمن الغذائى فى المناطق الجافة فى الفترة من 24 ـ 26 يونيه القادم.
ويناقش المؤتمر العديد من المحاور حول مدى فعالية خيارات السياسة الحالية للمياه والغذاء فى المناطق الجافة، فضلاً عن السياسات والاستراتيجيات لتعزيز إنتاجية الأراضى والمياه، والأمن الغذائي، وتوفير فرص العمل وسبل العيش للمزارعين.
وذكر د. فوزى كراجة المدير الإقليمى للمركز الدولى للبحوث الزراعية فى المناطق الجافة (إيكاردا) أن المركز لا يزال يجمع العديد من البحوث والآراء لعرضها أمام المؤتمر، ومن المتوقع أن تكون هذه الأوراق موجهة نحو السياسات الزراعية والمائية فى المناطق الجافة وأن تشمل المدخلات التقنية التفصيلية ذات الصلة لاتخاذ قرار صنع السياسات فى البلدان المستهدفة.
ومن المتوقع أن يشهد المؤتمر تنفيذ سياسات محددة للتعامل مع استخدام الموارد، وقضايا العمالة والأمن الغذائى بمشاركة الخبراء من أحد عشر بلدا من منطقة الشرق الأوسط بالإضافة إلى الصين والهند.

 

المصدر:المجلة الزراعية (الاهرام)مايو 2013

بقلم: هانى البنا



South Kurdistan rain up to 6th, May 2013 & % of change between this and last year.كوي باران ئم سال





The precipitation of snow are ignored.

another glossy plan and called 'The Second Strategic Plan for Agriculture in Kurdistan.'

Dear Sir,

I am a retired biologist with a life long interest in agriculture and the environment who, as a student, met Kurdish students and became aware of the situation faced by the Kurdish people under Saddam’s rule. Over the years I have followed the developments within Iraq and like so many others in different countries welcomed the fall of Saddam and a new future for those who suffered under his rule. Now I am retired I have more time to ‘surf the net’ and I have become a follower of your blogs to give me some insight into developments in Kurdistan from your articles in English.

Naturally, because of my line of work, I have maintained a particular interest in the country’s agriculture and environment and I became aware of the Kurdistan regional Government’s five year plan to increase agricultural output. Food production throughout the world must be increased to meet the needs of the constantly growing human population but, in endeavouring to do so, we face the problems of finite resources of agricultural land and water, plant and animal diseases, environmental damage and the increasing unpredictability of the weather as the earth’s atmosphere is affected by greenhouse gases and global temperatures rise. The last twelve months have seen record breaking levels of rain in countries in Europe followed by a cold winter and delayed spring giving poor harvests in 2012 and a bad start to this year’s production.

Some media sources are already warning of the possible effects the climate will have on this year’s world harvests and it has made me wonder about the situation in Kurdistan as the grain harvest approaches. In the five year plan for agriculture (2009) it was predicted that the wheat harvest this year would be 500,000 tonnes is this still the case? Have fruit and vegetable production levels increased to the plan’s predicted levels for 2013? The KRG’s decision to invest billions of dollars in agriculture from 2009 onwards must be ‘bearing fruit’ now as increasing amounts of the grain produced in other countries is now utilised for fuel production. Likewise the development of maize, soybean and olive production to give projected 2013 harvests of 200, 9, and 240 thousand tonnes should ensure some degree of self sufficiency in these for oil and animal feed production. The development of the latter was, of course, required to assist in the 2013 target of increased poultry production to 98,000 tonnes and red meat to 200,000 tonnes. In wake of the international red meat scandal that has involved so many countries this year increasing home production must again be considered as most welcome.

Could you post an article, in English, with regard to this year’s harvest and the success of the five year agricultural plan? I am sure that it will be interesting.

Kind Regards,

Biologist

North Wales

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Dr Appelton,

To keep it short the 10.6 billion US$ allocated for the five year plan never materialised, it goes without saying that the plan remained only a paper plan!. Rumour has it that a second strategic plan is in the preparation stage. I hope that it is not being prepared by the same band of “experts” and all that is produced is another glossy plan and called 'The Second Strategic Plan for Agriculture in Kurdistan.'

We are not sure what is going on, In the meantime we thank you for your interest in Kurdistan, its people and its agriculture.

Kind Regards

Kurdistanfoodsecurity

Erbi-l9.5.2013