India | the irresistible fleet of bicycles

Greenhorns Blog reader John D. Galuska, Ph.D., followed up our post on the cold-hearty Asian citrus the Yuzu, by sending us some pictures and information about the Flying Dragon fruit. The Flying Dragon is a dwarf cultivar of Trifolate orange, native to China and Korea, and supposedly hearty to USDA zone 6. Galuska, who runs Grown In Town Farmstead in Bloomington, IN, writes:

I’ve been growing Flying Dragon at my urban farm in Bloomington, Indiana for about 6 years (outside year round in Zone 6). The photos I’ve attached are from one of the larger trees I have now. It had a great deal of fruit this year and seems to be thriving. I know of only a few other growers who have mature Flying Dragon trees in Indiana, but the word is spreading.

There are a few other reports of this citrus around the internet. By some accounts, it is not very tasty, but but there are people out there that use it for a variety of things including a citrus-ade, marmalade, allergy-aid, and syrups.

Do you grow a cold-heart citrus or other rare fruits? We’d love to keep hearing from readers who are pioneering rare fruit varieties in their communities and bio-zones.

Seed Freedom and Food Democracy

An Open letter to Prime Minister Modi and President Obama from democratic, concerned citizens of India and the US

We, as concerned and democratic citizens of India, and the US, welcome the coming together of two of the largest democracies of the world to work together to protect the rights of their citizens and their biodiversity. Both nations were founded on the principles of freedoms of our people, and the unacceptability of colonialism and subservience to Empire.

President Obama, you have been invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to India’s Republic day celebrations on 26th Jan, 2015. In 1930, on 26th January, the people of India pledged to demand Purna Swaraj or complete self-rule independent of the British Empire. (Literally translated from Sanskrit, purna, “complete”; swa, “self”; raj, “rule”.)

The people of India observed 26 January as Independence Day. The flag of India was hoisted publicly, across India, by Congress volunteers, patriots and the citizens of India. The declaration stated the following:

We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities of growth. We believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them the people have a further right to alter it or to abolish it. The British Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj, or complete independence.

We write this letter in the spirit of Swaraj-of Bija Swaraj (Seed Freedom) and Anna Swaraj (Food Democracy), with the hope that your visit to India will enhance and deepen the common freedoms of the people of India and the US, not the freedoms of the Corporations undermining the freedoms of citizens in both countries. Your visit coincides with pressure being put by the US, on behalf of its corporations, to undermine seed freedom in India. Our particular concern is Intellectual Property Rights in the area of biodiversity, seeds , and living biological resources

On 30 September 2014, the US & India issued a Joint Statement on the occasion of Prime Minister Modi’s meeting with President Obama,in the US.

(a)greeing on the need to foster innovation in a manner that promotes economic growth and job creation…committed to establish an annual high-level Intellectual Property (IP) Working Group with appropriate decision-making and technical-level meetings as part of the Trade Policy Forum.

We hope that fostering innovation refers to real innovation and not theft from nature or other parts of the world.

LIFE IS NOT AN INVENTION

IPRs expanded to cover living systems and organisms is a distortion of “Innovation” and “invention”. This distortion was introduced by corporations such as Monsanto in the TRIPS(Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement of WTO. Corporate influence on Patent Law began with the drafting of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement of the WTO by the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC) of the multilateral corporations.

James Enyart of Monsanto is on record illustrating just how deeply the TRIPs agreement is aligned to corporate interest and against the interests of nations and their citizens:

“Once created, the first task of the IPC was to repeat the missionary work we did in the US in the early days, this time with the industrial associations of Europe and Japan to convince them that a code was possible….

Besides selling our concepts at home, we went to Geneva where [we] presented [our] document to the staff of the GATT Secretariat. We also took the opportunity to present it to the Geneva based representatives of a large number of countries… What I have described to you is absolutely unprecedented in GATT. Industry has identified a major problem for international trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal and sold it to our own and other governments… The industries and traders of world commerce have played simultaneously the role of patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing physicians.” Continue reading →