Should India adopt GM crops?

Get the facts before you dive in.

At first, Genetically Modified(GM) crops sound as a technological break through to provide a better food security to mankind. The promises range anywhere from increased yield, pest resistance to exotic things like enhanced vitamin and protein content.

But once you scratch the surface, the ugly reality crops up. With genetic modification, one could insert human gene into rice plant. The impacts of such changes to natural plant are many fold. It could:

1. Alter the toxicity and nutritional value of the plant. It could take decades to see the impact of such toxins on human consumers and their offspring.
2. It could cause ecological disaster. GM plants could kill beneficial and vital insects and bacteria. It could cross pollinate and contaminate the non-GM crops.
3. Threaten food security. The introduction of GM crops is irreversible. Once they pollinate and render all the non-GM crops in the surrounding fields to be toxic, then there would nothing that is non-GM. If then, we find that the GM crops are bad to humans, there will be nothing of that crop left for human consumers. Imagine not being able to eat rice or wheat for eternity.

GM crops marketed as resistant to herbicide, providing an easy way of weed control. But that resistance of the GM crops only works if the farmer uses the herbicide sold by the company that also sells the seeds. GM crop is resistant to pests because a toxin is created in the seed that kills the pests. How safe is that toxin to humans?

USDA (US Dept. of Agriculture) has clearly stated that GM crops have not shown significant increase in yield from GM crops compared to traditional crops.

All the safety tests done by major GM seed manufacturers are never fully published and kept under a tight lid. They even sue the poor farmers whose field gets contaminated by the GM pollen. Read the story of Percy Schmeiser.

Only 12 countries in the world have opted to adopt GM crops. USA, Argentina and Canada account for 90% of the GM crop. Cotton, Maize, Soybean and Canola account for almost all of the GM crops in these countries.

More details at the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA) article.

Most countries in Europe require marking on GM products. In USA, products that are marked "Organic" are GM free. There is no such thing in India yet. Indian consumers should be aware of the changes in government policy with adopting GM crops and voice their concern before it is too late. It is our kids' future we are talking about.

Finding a day care for the baby

So far, the baby has been getting full attention and care from her grand parents. After another 3 months she has to go to a day care. For one, she will be old enough that she needs and enjoys the company of other toddlers. Another is we don't have a choice, but to send her to day care.

It is always a tough transition for parents and kids. Both have a tough time adjusting to the change. It is tough for us as we have to trust some one we don't know to take care of the baby. It is a lot more tough for the baby as she has to get adjusted to new place, new company and reduced attention. Thinking of what the baby has to go through makes it tough for us.

So, coming to the actual meat of the topic, we started by identifying good day cares based on references from friends and colleagues that are in the 5 mile radius from our work. We found 4 good ones:

1. Mission college child care
2. Kinder care
3. Children's creative learning center
4. Rainbow Montessori

Making a spread sheet of all the questions, we set off to visit them one by one. After all the visits, we found Mission college to be on the top, followed by Rainbow Montessori.

Our conclusion could have been biased by the person who gave us the tour and what we saw on the day of the visit. Some of the differentiating factors we used to come to the conclusion. I say the differentiating factors because they all ranked similarly on many other important factors.

1. The level of congestion of the baby room and the cleanliness of the facility
2. How happy did the kids, care givers appear and were they having a good time
3. Is the day care open to parents coming in at any time to spend some time with the kids
4. Is the day care flexible to incorporate cloth diapers and potty training
5. Are they using/trying new child developmental methods like sign language, etc.
   

We will know the reality once we get past the waiting list (which is as long as 1 year at Mission college child care) and our baby starts going there.

There is also an option of licensed home day care where there is more flexibility. There you are trusting an individual rather than an organization. We visited a couple of home day cares. The kids to care giver ratio and space were not as good as the institutional day cares. So, dropped the idea of home day care.

Potty training an infant

This is a highly debated topic with two orthogonal thought groups. One says that babies as young as a month have the ability to communicate about nature calls, provided we watch and encourage such communications. Other group says that the baby should be old enough to talk and tell by herself before she is ready to be potty trained.

We agreed more with the first camp, but with a little twist. We waited for 6 months, till her back was a little strong to sit on the little potty. Making a "pissss..." sound tells her to pee. After a few days, she started to take the cue and pee whenever we seat her on the potty. Going to poop was also similarly trained in a few days. Between every diaper change, we make sure she gets to sit on the potty for a pee. While our parents were taking care of her, they made sure that the potty training was encouraged and maintained. In fact we even carry it along if we go out of town.

It has been about 5 months now and she has been consistently using potty for poop. She still pees a little bit in her diapers, but holds most of it for the potty time.

Cloth diapers for the baby

Before the baby was born, we started thinking about cloth diapers. At AID, many volunteers had already tried them and posted their experiences at AID forums. There is also a wealth of information on-line.

The reasons for going for cloth diaper:

1. They save the landfill from the hazardous waste. We used some disposable diapers during the first 1 week and had to throw a bucketful of used diapers in the landfill each day. It was a pitiful sight.


2. Unlike what they seem, the disposable diapers are not made of cotton, but polyester and other petroleum extracts. Then they are filled with Sodium Polyacrylate, the magical super-absorbent chemical. Sodium Polyacrylate is rumored to be cancer causing. FDA as usual has stayed quiet.


3. Cloth diapers are cheaper even after including the cost of laundry costing about a 1/3 to 1/2 of disposable diapers. A baby uses on average about 5000 diapers.

Unfortunately, the age old cloth diaper is now available mostly on-line and not in the local stores. We narrowed down to two brands of pocket diapers: bumgenius and haute pockets. We got them at cottonbabies.com They are out-standing (absorbent, easy to wash, sturdy adjustable size and leak proof). For the wipes, my mother-in-law (Atha) stitched a bunch of four layered cloth wipes which were softer and more absorbent than the synthetic wipes. We haven't looked at disposable diapers or wipes since.

During the baby's first three weeks, we used small dual layered cloth diapers that Atha brought from India. They were not as easy as the fleece lined pocket diapers. They did not keep the baby's butt dry and had to be changed in less than an hour. The weather being cold at that time also made them uncomfortable for the baby. Although Atha was persistently changing the dual layered diapers every hour (sometimes 3 in an hour) and washing them, we decided to move to pocket diapers as soon as the baby's butt fit in them.

Vinegar and baking soda help in cleaning. Soiled diapers are washed in water and placed in diaper pail (a huge bucket). The diaper pail is filled with few tumblers of water mixed with baking soda. Baking soda removes odors and neutralizes the acid in urine. During the first rinse cycle, couple of table spoons of vinegar is added to neutralize the alkaline baking soda and also helps remove the stains and lint.

Adopting cloth diapers was made easy with a lot of support from my mother-in-law who makes sure that the right quantity of baking soda and vinegar is used. She also makes sure that diapers are washed, dried and ready for the baby every morning.

So, far this experiment seems successful, although it is too soon to judge.

Here is a very good article by Aravinda on cloth diapering.

Avoiding the elevator

For the past month and half, we have tried to avoid the elevator and take the stairs. Most elevators in high rise buildings have a counter weight and efficient electric design. So, a lot of energy is burnt as they go up compared to when they come down. The hydraulic elevators in most apartments are very inefficient power hogs. At the end of the day, a lot of energy could be saved and exercise gained by avoiding the elevator.

It was easy at home as it was only two flights of stairs from the apartment to garage. At work, it is a different story. Mayuri was able to manage well as her office is mostly on the 1st floor. My office is on 9th floor. For about 3 weeks, I avoided the elevator. That meant up and down 9 floors twice a day as I go home for lunch. It was great initially. I was feeling more energetic with all the work out I was getting.

After 3 weeks, my knees decided to give up. I think it was mostly the climbing down that hurt the knees. So, I started taking the elevator again at work. The plan is to take the stairs up and elevator down once the knees get back to normal in a couple of weeks. At the apartment, it is still the stairs.

After the knees returned back to normal, I started taking the stairs on the way up and elevator on the way down.

This experiment was mixed success.

Baby is almost two months now

Our baby started smiling, laughing, whining, cooing, responding to humans, eating more, sleeping almost 7 hours at night, playing in her gym and above all occasionally demanding us to carry her around. All this is normal development. But for first time parent, each development is new and exciting.

A few interesting things to report after observing our little one:

• It is very delightful to be a parent. It gets interesting after the 1st week when the baby has mostly adjusted to the outside world.


• Babies grow so fast. She put on over a pound every month.


• After the first few days, unable to bear seeing a bucketful of hazardous waste going to landfill each day, we switched to cloth diapers. More on that in another post.


• Mother's milk seems to provide lot of resistance in addition to the nourishment and satisfaction.


• Our baby loves being carried around in sling. She seems to fall sleep quickly in it. It maks it easy for us to carry her around when we go outside.


• Babies become all the more fun when they are about 5 weeks old. That is when they start responding, smiling and soon start cooing. Best of all, they are easy to handle(less delicate) after a month. Haven't started tossing her around yet.


• The Vivaldi "Four Seasons" music that we are using to soothe the baby has not caught up yet. She seems more calm when we make the humming sound. Vivaldi notes are probably not simple enough to soothe her compared to humming white noise.


• We are slacking on responding to phone calls and emails. I am occasionally slacking on AID tasks, sometimes causing frustrations to other volunteers.

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

I recently read the book on Ladakh "Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh" by Helena Norberg-Hodge. She illustrates the changes taking place in Ladakh over the past 30 years.

Some of the interesting observations from the book that I wanted to share:

Ladakh was once a completely self contained, sustainable and happy society in a harshest environment. But it is rapidly adopting an unsustainable model that is destroying their community and identity.

Industrial development, the western way:
"Most westerners have come to believe that ignorance, disease and constant drudgery were part of the pre-industrial societies and developing countries need to industrialize to get around them. The fact is, however that many, if not most of the problems of 3rd world are to a great extent the consequences of colonialism and misguided development.

We treat technological change as more natural than the changing weather, and seem locked in the belief that where ever scientific inventiveness goes, we must follow. But Ladakh has shown that this process exacerbates greed, competition and aggression while vastly increasing the potential for destruction. Development (western) causes artificial scarcity, which inevitably leads to greater competition, and puts pressure on people to conform to a standard western model that they simply cannot emulate. The resulting dissatisfaction and inferiority complex leads to more problems."

Buddhism as a way of life in Ladakh:
There is nothing that has independent existence. Everything is interdependent. We need to accept that and respect it.

As long as there is ignorance, there is a need for ritual. It is a ladder that may be discarded once we have attained a certain level of spiritual development.

Attitude to life and death seems to be based on an intuitive understanding of impermanence and a consequent lack of attachment. Rather than clinging to the idea of how things should be, they seem blessed with an ability to actively welcome things as they are. Even death is more readily accepted.

Future Sustainability:
Neglect of rural and agricultural economy has created destitution on a massive and unprecedented scale.

Economists and technological optimists assume that we will be able to invent our way out of any resource shortage, that science will somehow stretch the earth's bounty ad infinitum.

Human race would probably survive no matter what, but the question is how many will perish in the process and how many more will have to endure the suffering before perishing.