Green Gleanings - November 07

This is, I hope, the first in a series of monthly jottings I have gleaned from various sources. If you have an event or issue you think could be usefully jotted here, please email me. This is how I learned about items 1 & 2.

1. Grain Blog reports that the push to plant hybrid rice seeds is more hype than hope.

Both the government and the seed industry are well aware of the susceptibility of hybrid rice to diseases and pests. In the decrees authorising the 31 hybrid rice varieties approved for commercialisation in the country, all are listed as having, to various degrees, susceptibility to brown planthopper, tungro, and bacterial leaf blight.

2. Report (.pdf) on a field monitoring trip by Riza Tjahjadi of Biotani Indonesia Foundation giving details of item 1 in greater depth.

3. Today Greenpeace launched the Forest Defenders Camp Satellite Station (FDCSS) at Monas Park in Jakarta.

The event will disseminate information compiled by Greenpeace's Forest Defenders Camp in Riau, stationed near a peatland forest cleared for palm oil plantations, and support the organization's campaign to include deforestation talks in the next phase of the Kyoto agreement.

The FDCSS will showcase the beauty and destruction of the pristine rain forests of Indonesia, highlighting their impacts on biodiversity and climate in an exhibit of photos, cultural performances, lectures and short films. With support from the Jakarta administration, the event will feature local artists and musicians from Nov. 3 to 11.

I hope visitors can find a gate open so they can enter the park. Hint: it's near Gambir train station and nowhere near the Busway stop.

4. This coming Thursday (8th November), KEHATI, the Indonesian Biodiversity Foundation founded by the eminent Prof. Dr. Emil Salim, is holding a seminar on Business and Biodiversity, also in Jakarta.

Many plants and microbes in the forests, on high lands and in the bed of the oceans of Indonesia are hiding magical cure for deadly deceases such as cancer, HIV/Aids, cardiovascular, not to mention plants for food security, cosmetics, natural coloring and preservation etc. This is not a wishful thinking. It's already a fact to be commercially and sustainably utilized. Come and listen to the facts disclosed by senior researchers and practitioners.

If you are in pharmaceutical, food or beauty business, or you want to try a new core, then biodiversity is your fortune in waiting.

As much as I am not a believer in the accumulation of personal wealth, because the oceans and forests surely belong to us all and thereby represent our communal wealth, this seminar could be another way forward. Hopefully it's a wedge keeping a door open into a new way of thinking for humanity, albeit an ancient way.