MAGAZINE REVIEWS

Reaping the seeds we sow

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 9, 1999)-- Now that spring has finally arrived, many of us are out in our gardens, working the soil and engaged in that age-old ritual of planting seeds. But if you've purchased those seeds from a store, you may have bought more than you bargained for.

Seeds are no longer the quaint little germs of plant life. They are now little Frankenstein monsters, the "intellectual property" of giant agrochemical corporations that are increasingly trying to control their use and manipulate their genetic code in any way that will increase the corporation's profits -- even if it means breeding a "suicide" gene into the plant to prevent farmers from harvesting seeds from the plant.

Harper's Magazine

"The Green Machine," in the April issue of Harper's Magazine, exposes the extreme lengths to which one corporation is going to control the use of its seeds and their ultimate biological destiny.

Monsanto is doing this by various means. For one, it prohibits farmers from saving and replanting naturally-occurring seeds produced by plants grown from Monsanto seed. The company actually requires farmers to sign a contract forbidding this practice, and in the event that they do it anyway, requiring them to pay "royalties" for "copyright infringement."

In order to help police these "seed pirates," Monsanto sends inspectors out into the fields to spy on farmers, and encourages farmers to spy on each other, appealing to their competitive Achilles heels in a make-or-break business.

Monsanto also breeds into its seeds bacteria that can only be defeated by Monsanto's own herbicides. No one knows what the long-term effects of such genetic tampering may be, but concerns are being raised that these will lead to the evolution of pesticide-resistant "super-bugs," in much the same manner that we are now vulnerable to antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections due to the overuse of antibiotics.

By the time you read halfway through the article, it comes as little surprise to learn that Monsanto once manufactured the bulk of the world's PCBs. From Pittsfield to you, thanks, Monsanto.

The Washington Monthly

What little locally-owned, locally-programmed radio we have left here in the Berkshires is under the threat of extinction, according to "The Death of Local Radio" by Lydia Polgreen in the April issue of the Washington Monthly.

With the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the floodgates were opened to national corporatization of our airwaves, and there are 1,000 fewer radio station owners today than there were in 1995.

It is hard to imagine that radio stations were once managed and programmed by local newspapers, colleges, labor unions, religious and community groups. College radio still exists, but few if any of the other organizations now have regular access to the airwaves.

Instead it is a white-bread world out there, with computerized, satellite programming the rule rather than the exception, and little opportunity for local voices to be heard.

This could change if the proposal to allow licences for low-power FM stations is approved, opening up new bandwith to community groups and other specialized interests. With limited financial and technical resources, these stations would hardly threaten the bottom lines of the commercial stations. Yet in spite of this, the powerful telecommunications lobby is opposing this measure in the halls of Congress.

Mother Jones

I hope some of my well-meaning but misguided friends, relatives and acquaintances who are always forwarding digital petitions via E-mail will read "Fwd: Fwd: Re: Read This Now" by Bronwyn Fryer and Lakshmi Chaudhry in the March/April issue of Mother Jones.

Fryer and Chaudhry blow the whistle on this peculiar, annoying feature of the online world. If you have E-mail, you've probably at one time or another received a petition with the subject line, "Save NPR and PBS." A worthwhile cause? Undoubtedly. A legitimate petition? In the beginning. But shortly after two students at the University of Northern Colorado sent out their original appeal, it took on a life of its own, and four years later -- long after the specific legislative threat that prompted the protest in the first place has passed -- it still circulates over the Internet, lost in an infinite spiral of electronic space.

As a rule, legislators on Capitol Hill view E-mail as just so much junk. They pay much more attention to letters and phone calls from constituents. The relative anonymity, low cost and ease with which anyone with access to E-mail can foment an electronic groundswell has devalued it beyond any political significance. In the language of the Internet, these petitions are just so much "spam."

The National Interest

"Kosovo: Only Independence Will Work," a short essay by Noel Malcolm, is worth looking up in the Winter issue of the National Interest, a conservative quarterly of political thought published in Washington.

Malcolm, who as the author of the book "Kosovo: A Short History" is obviously steeped in the region's history, makes the claim that Kosovo's short- and long-term history both support the majority Albanian population's desire for complete independence from Belgrade, and not the mere autonomy that NATO is fighting for.

In recent history, writes Malcolm, Kosovo was as much a federated republic within the former Yugoslavia as were Slovenia and Croatia, and thus like those territories is deserving of independence from the present-day Yugoslav state. And in spite of Serb propaganda to the contrary, Serbia's century-old ties to Kosovo are specious. Kosovo's legal relationship to any Serbian political nation is of recent, temporary vintage.

More to the point, Malcolm argues that it is in the Serbs' own interest to rid itself of Kosovo. The Muslim Albanians who until last week formed the majority of the population in the territory reproduce at a much faster rate than the Orthodox Serbs. If Serbia continues to rule over such a population, it will only be a few decades before there are more Albanians than Serbs in greater Serbia.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 10, 1999. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1999. All rights reserved.]