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of Eden AV-CD by secure
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Windows / Mac Compatible. Includes
live video seminars, enchanting renewal songs and a thousand page
illustrated codex.
Return to Genesis
The Hollywood Syndrome - Is the US the Global Satan ? Associated Press/NZ Herald Jun 2001
MAYBE George W. Bush has done the world a favour. When he renounced the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse emissions (because it would hurt America) he helped to peel away the mask of sanity from Uncle Sam, revealing him for what he is, in all his savagery and nonchalance a glutton and a psychopath. Forget the Taleban, Gaddafi or the beastly Saddain Hussein, it is the United States that is out of control the wildest rogue nation of all. The assertion of America's lifestyle rights, come what may, over any other consideration including the survival of future generations was made during the week of the Oscars. Catching a transit-lounge glimpse of this spectacle, I marvelled at its imperial might, its furious flame-fanning of consumer' desire. The desire for beauty (although of an exterior kind), wealth, fame,-luxury and crappy movies. The Oscars are Hollywood at its height: an off-camera underclass at beck and call, the comedians neutered, cosmeticians in the wffip, the cost of designer gowns ranging from susio,ooo to $US40,000 ($24,156 to $96,600) for each star, not to mention the diamonds. The confirmation of America's technical flair and export prowess came with the crowning of Gladiator, along with an unconscious identification with ImperW Rome. See, we rebuilt the Colosseum. And therein lies the beguiling genius of Uncle Sam the dissemination of illusions consumed as reality. Not just in movies, but in its products, politics and foreign policy. America is the land of the free. Really? How about an Oscar from the World Academy of Jailers for holding the highest proportion of its citizens in custody. Of the global prisoner total, onequarter is incarcerated in the US, minus the 152 inmates executed by George W. Bush when Governor of Texas a state that provides no ftmds for the defence of the poor. Much of Australia's pnson system is now in the managerial grip of a US correctional chain. America fosters unbridled competition which benefits all. In media, manufacturing; high-tech, entertainment, oil, groceries and much mor,e, the giants are on a roll. Four companies now control 87 per cent of American beef, another four control more than 84 per cent of its cereal, and just two comPanies control almost 80 per 't:ent of the world's grain trade. Almost all primary commodities are controlled by six or fewer companies.
From such an elite are drawn the President's puppeteers: $US2.3 million from Exxon Mobil helped to elect Bush, whose administration is awash with former oil executives. Another Bush supporter, Rupert Murdoch, is now seeking to bypass cross-media ownership restrictions in New York and extend his opinion-shaping domain. The man who pays the piper produces Gladiator as well as the daily news. As in the ecosystem, diversity is shrinking. Happhiess is honoured. How come the most prosperous nation on earth exhibits the highest rates of clinical depression? The country that wrote the happiness quest into its constitution reels from an epidemic of the malignant sadness. This, too, is a marketing opportunity. The annual report of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly chortles, "Prozac changed everything, and is just the beginning." America promotes the global expansion of human rights.
Not according to the record. Kyoto apart, the US has spumed vital intemational treaties on war cranes, land mines, the prohibition of the execution of juveniles, arms controls, test bans and even the Convention of the Rights of the Child (standing alone with Somalia). The refusal is based on a fierce assertion of US sovereignty. As law professor Peter J. Spiro noted in the journal Foreign Affairs: "Only free trade agreements, as long as they are ed limit to free trlade and do not include environment, labour issues or human rights, pass muster because they are thought to serve American interests." The nation so keen to safeguard its own identity is quick to submerge that of its trading partners. The key human right promoted abroad is the right to shop. The land of opportunity. Yes, but the deck is stacked. The richest 1 per cent has more fmmcial wealth than is possessed by the poorest 90 per cent Of Americans combined; the starkest inequality among major Westem nations. The net worth of Bill Gates, according to Ralph Nader, is equal to the combined net assets of the poorest 120 million Americans. The impact of such division percolates through the country. You see it the' moment you land at the airport and feed a credit card mto the trolley machine: the tattered touts, the stretch limos, the battered buses, the bright lights of Tiffany's. Whafs unseen is worse. About 40 million US citizens are not covered by any form of health insurance, a figure that is increasing each year. Public education and welfare are all on the decline. Basically, the US is a republic of lobbyists attached to a global public relations machine bent on fuming the whole of life into a series of paid-for, staged events, like guzzling fake food in themed restaurants, while displaying designer sportswear, and chattering about Gladiator's special effects as we wash down Prozac with a Starbucks soy latte, and remain largely oblivious to the deeper tragedy taking place on the late great planet Earth. George W. Bush is not an original. He is pursuing the doctrine formed by his father on the eve of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992, which laid the groundwork for Kyoto. Bush the elder said he was prepared to talk about the environment, but here's the rub "the American way of life is not negotiable." Got it? This mantra should be burned mto the, brains of six billion earthlings, because the American way of life is now diminishing the life of everyone else. In disaster-movie speak, it's Planet Hollywood versus the world. Already, with less than 5 per cent of the global population, the US uses almost 30 per cent of the planet's resources. Its emission record is the world's worst, spewing 20 tonnes of greenhouse gas a person a year a quarter of the world's total. (Australia. comes 'm second with 18 tonnes.) The US consumes a quarter of the world's oil, a third of its paper, and 40 per cent of its beef and veal.
The reason given the US President, G. W. (Global Warming abandomnent of Kyoto with commendable brevity: " do not apply to the developing world." So? In most cases, their energy use is Only 5 per cent of per capita emissions of the West, while its inhabitants are climate fodder already, living and dying, on the frontline of hurricanes and floods. Emissions from developing nations will rise, but let's not overlook the reason. Their farms, factories and infrastructure are throbbing to service the appetites of distant constuners, whether it's Kenya airlifting flowers to the Netherlands or Korea shipping cut-price cars. Thp. source of the ftirnes ascending from their smokestacks is us. Meanwhile, the aver-age American uses 10 times more coal than the average Chinese person and contributes over 50 times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The average American also requires four times as much grain and 27 times as much petrol as the average Indian. The land of the few is also the land of the fat its citizens are plagued with obesity. While many may deny the existence Of global manning, the overwhelning advice of the scientific community is that we should prepare now for rismg seas and ruptive weather. This year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reported that the 1990s were the hottest decade smoe the 1860s, when instrument records were taken, and that 1998 was the hottest year. It foretold "future large-scale and possibly irreversible changes in nature's systems." This report broke new ground by citing the cause of the warming as "mostly dud to human activity." And this activity is not about to wind down. The American way of life may not be negotiable but, more frightningly, it is inescapable. And the nation that runs the world is ruining the world as it runs amok in Amiani, dazzling us with Julia Roberts and gangsta rap, making us sick with fast food, workaholia and porno violence, as its hordes of silent seamstresses in tropic locations stitch Calvin IGem on to our Y-fronts. All for the glory of shareholder value. And yet, according to the Fconomic Policy Institute, "Eighty-five per cent Of the increase in the stockmarket since 1976 has accrued-to 1 per cent of the Population.11
It's worth it, you say, it's worth it On highways, at airports, at universities, for a splash of change I can slake my thirst with a Burger King strawberry milkshake. Even in Kathmandu, probably. It's the nearest thing to mother's milk, evoking dairy maids and Jersey cows, a singing and dancing Julie Andrews plucking the fleshiest bellies. Actually, this beverage contains more than 50 chemical flavours, including yummy amyl acetate, ethyl methyl-phenyl-glycidate and methyl anthranilate. Most of the flavour m most of the food eaten today in the US is concocted by scientists. Like the Oscars, it is the triumph of illusion over reality. It might be bad for our health, bad for the ecosystein, but it's good for shareholder value. The economy, stupid. The deeper you dig, the worse it gets.
As I write it, I hate that sentence. It's not that I think everything about America is appalling far from it Many of its products are delightfully irresisistible, like Augtin-Powers, jazz, literature, the First Amendment, Jewish humour and the PowerBook. On a dark, stormy highway with famished toddlers, I've even felt a rush of gratitude at the sight of the Golden Arches sure, we'll have fries with that, unaware that such an impulse serves to shrink the world's variety of crops. As with other food chains, according to the Worldwatch institute, McDonald's demands in each country it enters that the varieties of potatoes grown by local farmers be replaced by their standard, the Idaho Russet. Taste and technique must remain uniform, so the global potato harvest is now "precariously homogenous," dependent on pesticides of declining oomph. As climate warms, the range and resilience of the pests increase, invoking fears of a potato blight a global replay of the Irish famine. In my madder moments of reflection about America, it seems as if it's the Vietnam War all over again; except instead of "kffling gooks" it's about making a killing. Instead of poisoning the forest with Agent Orange, it's about despoiling the biosystem. Once a "peace probe" referred to the annihilation of a village; now the tenn "outsourcing" stands for a sweatshop. Once it was the Vietcong who were blitzed with US propaganda, now it is the rest of us who are blitzed with US propaganda. Maybe the old slogan is true after all: "We are all Vietcong." The ad biz is a friendly harbour for creative types and some of its output is witty and ftin. At its core, however, the industry is a volcanic eruption of lies: CDs wfll never scratch, you too can have the shiniest hair in the world, the stealth bomber is invisible, we appreciate your patience and will be with you. shortly. No longer confined to promoting products, advertising has insinuated itself into the culture in such a way as to be indistinguishable from everyday life. It is not just the commercials seen on TV, it is the lifestyle depicted by the TV: the logos, restaurants, cars, facelifts and how-to-solve-a-problem-witha-gun. The ads and the programmes are synonymous. Without being aware of it, we live inside a nonstop marketing event. As insistent and pervasive as it is piped into planes, buses, schools, motels, Bomeo its source is singular. Seinfeld and Friends are scre6ned on most international flights; the menu of movies-on-demand in hotels is almost exclusively from Hollywood. Does this matter? You be the judge. When did you last watch a sitcom from Brazil, a pop clip from India, a movie on love and marriage among Kurdish refugees in Paris? WhUe Us content lately honours ethnicety, to the Point of caricature, and even alternative attitudes, the slant is qumtessentially God Bless America. Back in 1924, Monsieur Costil, then head of the Fyench Gaumont cinema chain, told his countrymen it would be "a very long time" before French films found favour in America. They were "too strange and complicated." Success in the US required a formula. Three-quarters of a century later, Costills deconstruction of a Hollywood hit remains intact: "Voyages, sports, dances, records and audacious examples of force." Meanwhile, American movies and the values they embody have swept the world. FYom his grave, Costil's fmal caution has bite: "Remember, every American is at heart a businessman." And so, toO, nOw are we. Workaholia is not. the only Wall St export. Share options and pay for performance have also spread, ever sharpening wealth disparities. In the past decade, the salaries of CEOs in the US have jumped 481 per cent while worker pay has risen only 28 her cent. overall, American CEOs earn 419 times the pay of 'the, average Us worker. Everyone is desperate to be a millionaire, a superstar, a dot-com, a brand name even the teens. This trivialisation of desire reaches into our innermost of our psyche: "Teens have a keen sense of 'me'," notes an analyst, whether it's "selecting the colour of their laptop or customis ing the colour of their cell phones." Being aware of the latest fad has come to define what h means to be a child. Thin on the ground are the anti-heroes; the mystics and mavericks who proclaim alternative values and hold in Contempt the obsessive adulation of wealth today's Jack Kerouac, Martin Luther King, Ned Kelly, Timothy Leary, the young Germaine Greer. I Since I can remember, New York has hosted a profusion of wild young things, rebels without a super fund, or even a charge account at Gap, whose mission was to have fun and shatter the self-confidence of millionaires. They set alight dollar bills on Wall St, let buzzards loose in Macy's, raged, plotted and howled against the machine. While times a-change and all that, even so, during a brief visit last year I was taken aback by this fabulous city's capitulation to materialism and its brazen credo: get as much as you can as fast as you can. People pound pavements shouting nito mobiles; the skyscrapers double as billboards, the cafe dockets are emblazoned with bold reminders, "gratuity not included," each worthy recipient allotted a dotted line: chef, maitre d', waitperson, etc, plus tax. The fixed price is becoming obsolete, inciting haggling, even over the price of toothpaste. This is fine in Morocco, enfolded into a ritual of mint tea, pipe passing and Sydney Greenstreet, but wears a bit thin in an alcove at Macy's at rush hour. Don't imagine you can counter the vibe by cruising the Museum of Modem Art, where the "voluntary donation" is compulsor.v and the marketing relentless. (In the mid-1990s, gallery space at 120 large museums grew by 3 per cent while the @ount of space given to museum stores jumped by nearly 30 per cent.) Another light that's failed, at least during my visit, is environinentausm. The only endangered species that sparked concern was a trenchcoat by Yves Saint Laurent, costing $US 9250, which had been scooped from the stores. The coat is made from the skin of rainforest pythons. More than 10 million pythons have been taken from the wild in the past 15 years, over half from Indonesia. A pink python jacket from Chanel, with white chiffon frim and matching skirt, retailing at $US8455, had out of the boutiques. "Spokeswomen for four fashion houses that use python," the New York Times wryly noted, "said they had no idea where the skins come from." Hardly anyone knows or cares where anything comes from, or where it ends up, because it is only what's on show that matters, in the windows, in your face, on the billboards, at the Oscars, fame, riches, power; these are the drivers that seem to be shaping the third millennium, whether we like it or not, despite their ravaging of planet and personhood "Wealth beyond what is natural is of no more use than water to a container that is full," said the Epicurean philosophers of Ancient Greece, but the dazzling package Of modular culture proclaims the opposite bippiness depends on high consumption. We'll keep on splurging until the wells run dry. soon after the trip to New York, I visited Tonga, one of the poorest nations on earth. Its political system is uwust, resources are few, and yet I was surprised by joy. Not mine so much as that of the inhabitants. Laughter echoing through open doorways day and night, none of it canned (scarce TV), extended families and communal lifestyle ( babysitting), time plentiful, shops few, food fresh, a profusion of local poetry, song and dance, none of it tech-dependent, and the people not bent on turning every tourist into a meal ticket Not yet, anyway. Sure, most of us would prefer to live in pulsating New York than to emulate the Tongans, including the Tongans themselves, probably, and therein lies the dilenuna of our time.
If everyone lived like New Yorkers, what would be left alive? Perhaps the survivor TV shows are a subliminal playing out of this post-apocalypse vision. Solar panels and recycling are not much chop against melting ice caps, rising seas, gaping ozone holes and the mass extinction of species. Even if Kyoto is fully enforced, it wm reduce atmospheric carbon by only 5 per cent withm 10 years What is required to stabilise cumte is a reduction of between 60 and 80 per cent. The American way of Iffe is not negotiable. And it is not sustainable. The loss of biodiversity, according to Worldwatch's editorial director Ed Ayms, is "arguably the most dangerous of all threats to human security at large, and to the long-term sustainability of civilization." He cites an American Museum of Natural History survey of 400 biologiml scientists which found a large majority believe that during the next 30 years one of every five species alive today will become extinct It is no longer enough to have an ecological notion; we need to create an ecological seff. This is a hard call when you're wearing a trenchcoat stitched
from pythons. Sooner or later, the business community will need to come to its senses. It will need to go further than putting in skylights and greening its logos. Can we rely on its leadership. Corporate titans would much rather win a battle for market dominance than save a species from annihilation. But in the end, there may not be a market, unless the wholesale theft of the future is stopped. What Monsieur Costil foresaw as the philosophic failure of American movies all those years ago action, force, a formula was more recently echoed in the Harvard Business Review by consultant Gary Hamel as he skewered the lack of sight: "The future is left to largely unexplored and the capacity to act rather than to think or imagine becomes the sole measure of leadership.
Will globalisation accentuate futureblindness, or can it also trigger a countervailing wave of enlightenment? It will do both. Thankfully, a growing number of Americans share the above concerns, although few of them sit on Capitol HM. The global Green Party boycott of Exxon Mobil and other predators of the conunons is a clue to future strategy, as was the showdown over proprietary drug rights in Aids-stricken Africa. Global tax, global justice, a global environmental agency, are all on the horizon. The concept of sovereignty was already transcended by the UN Convention on the law of the Sea in 1982, which protects the ocean as "the conunon heritage of all mankind," in which all rights in the resources of the area are vested. By similar means, eventually, all arms trading can be ended and an agency can be established to distribute all surplus food to the starving. At its deepest level globalisation is about sharing, just like the intemet, and once understood win incite a value revolution of such sweep that within 100 year's the main business of business will no longer be business, and polities will no longer be about swapping preferences, placating nutters and jailing refugees. The total goal will be planetary restoration social, economic, ecologic. The question to ask ourselves as we journey into the 21st century is this: is each us at heart a businessman, or is each of us at heart a human being? The fate of the Earth wig hinge on our answer. 0 Richard Neville is a director of the Futures Foundation, a non-profitmaktiag company providing a forum for management and organisations to study emerging social and economic issues.
14 June, 2001,
BBC Summit fails to solve climate dispute
Mounted police drove back the protesters The European Union and the United States have failed to resolve their disagreement over the Kyoto protocol on global warming.
A joint communique issued after the summit of European leaders and US President George W Bush said that, while both sides recognised the need for strong leadership to reach a global solution on climate change, differences over the protocol had not been bridged.
As the summit proceeded, environmentalists and anti-globalisation activists clashed with Swedish riot police in Gothenburg.
Demonstrators hurled bottles and stones at police who were preventing them from converging on the European Union summit venue, and more than 200 people were arrested.
The BBC's correspondent Angus Roxburgh says that scuffles erupted in the early afternoon between activists who gathered at a school near the summit venue and police, who charged at them, armed with riot shields and truncheons.
The situation later calmed down and groups of protesters were sitting at road junctions around the school, facing riot police across the cordons.
In another part of town, protesters bared their backsides in an exhibition of their opposition to Mr Bush's policies.
At a news conference after the summit, President Bush said, "We agreed to create new channels of co-operation on this topic."
US War on Drugs has only Victims NZ Herald June 2001
Franci sits on the veranda and whimpers. The little girl is underweight, her armpits erupting in boils. Like most of her people, she has suffered ft-om respiratory problems and stomach pains since the planes and helicopters caine over at Christmas and again at New Year, dropping weedkiller on their villages. The tiny, indigenous Kofan community of Santa Rosa de Guamuez in Colombia had it hard enough with pressures from outside settlers on their reservation, without Roundup Ultra containing Cosmoflux 411F. The weedkffler is being sprayed on their villages in a concentration 100 times more powerful than is permired in the United States. Aurelio, a Kofan elder, shows us around his vilwe. The Kofan have been here for 500 years. Now it looks as though their time is up. Pineapples are stunted and shrivelled. The once green banana plants are blackened sticks. The remains of a few maize plants can be seen, but the food crops have been devastated. There is hunger at Santa Rosa, and Aurelio is close to despair. Colombian babies and children are falling ill. Peasants, already miserably poor, are getting hungrier. 'ribes are being tom apart and communities pushed into exile. The reason is Plan Colombia , initiated by President Bill Clinton and embraced by President George W. Bush. It is designed to elirnihate all cocaine production in Colombia, part of a twopronged drug control initiative. But Plan Colombia, promoted by the US and Colombian Governments and gingerly accepted by Britain and other European countries, is dissolving in failure, death and vast pollution of the Amazonian forest months after its December launch. Under the plan, Colombia's armed forces are being given US weapons and training. These are the same troops who over the decades have accumulated honours and medals for their battles with unarmed civilians and who have freuently conimitted atrocities. A key element in Colombia is the spraying from planes of a highly concentrated chemical toxin on the coca bushes, the leave of which provide the raw material for the drug. The coca bushes have generally survived. In the front line of America's war on drugs, it is humans and the envirorunent that have become the victims. Investigations by the Observer have revealed for the first tune the extent of the damage which the Colombian and American Governments have tried to keep secret.
Against a growing mass of evidence to the contrary, they claimed last month: "The aerial spraying did not cause any iwury or significant damage to the environment." The reality is that the results on the ground are disastrous. The small farmers in the rich tropical valley at Santa Rosa do not believe the official accounts as they wonder Ilow they can replace their poisoned'crops, chickens and fish. Meanwhile, coca bushes are sprouting anew. Wherever the farmers have been promise of new thrice-yearly harvests from which the drug will be manufactured again. Their flourishing mocks the politicians and soldiers in Washington and Bogota. At a village outside La Honniga, a group of sick children is gathered at the gates of the school whose tiny garden was ruined by the poison that rained down early on December 22 and January 6. "The planes came over at the height of a palm tree accompanied by helicopter gunships which circled around," said Juana, a young teacher. "The plants the children were tending in the school garden withered and the pullets they were looking after all died." Like other Colombians, she did not want her real name used for fear of reprisals by Government forces or their allies, the paramilitary death squads. Schoolchildren are showing signs of serious skin infections. Says Gloria, a teacher at El Placer: "About 230 of the 450 pupils at our school have gone down with diarrhoea, respiratory [complaints] and constantly recurring skin infections." Domestic animals have fared even worse. The tilapia fish that brought a new prosperity to fanners who had built flshponds are dying in their thousands, as are dogs, pigs and other livestock. Now Colombians, disillusioned alike with politicians, the increasingly ahffless guerrillas and the death squads, are becoming enraged at America's "war on drugs," where the front line is their lives. Thousands have fled Putumayo for neighbouring Ecuador, adding to the 2.1 million Colombians displaced within the country by war. Those who stay and who dare to criticise the war on drugs complain that Washington is seeking to halt the production of cocaine and heroin while doing nothing to stop the drug trade in the US itself, where the bulk of the profits are made. Senior racketeers go free while US prisons are filled with minor offenders from the ethnic minorities. Writing from New York, Herald correspondent Roger Frankhn says President Bush appears to be keeping a tradition of hypocrisy alive with the appomtrnent of a man called John P. Walters to the inner ranks of his senior advisers as the latest in the long line of muchballyhooed "drug tsars." The diehard drug warriors, the folks who have. so far spent more than $US50 billion in their fruitless attempts to wipe the dopey smile off the country's collective face, see W Walters as just the ticket. A throwaway-the-key kind of guy, he is the quintessential hardliner who believes that all drug users even mere marijuana smokers deserve to do hard time. "The evidence is that coerced treatment works at least as well as voluntary treatment," a grim Mr Walters said recently when asked to explain why he favours putting money into prison construction rather than treatment. What he does not seem to have noticed is that his prefer-red solution has not ortly failed in the past, it also contradicts the ftmdamentalist reverence for free markets to which Mr Bush and his team pay perpetual lip service.
After all, if a popular commodity is restricted, those with supplies to sell can charge a premium price. In the case of cocaine, for example, that means windfall profits for the traffickers of Columbia, Peru and Mexico. On the home front, the approach has led to the establishment of something that might best be described as the Prison-Industrial Complex. The f'@es are chilling. According to the best estimates, one in four black men under 25 is either in jail on probation, waiting to appear in court, or has been convicted at some point over the previous 10 years. The reason is the anti-drug crusade, which often seems like a second civil war, pitting white cops and politicians against blacks and browns rather than Union Blue against Confederate Grey. When Bill "I Never hihaled" Clinton left office, almost 450,000 people were doing time for drugs, a figure equal to the total prawn population in 1980. Now Mr Walters proposes to make the taxpayers come up with the money to put even more of their fellow citizens behind bars. Until the day Mr Bush announced the Walters nomination, there had been hope even in the Republican Party that the new President might abandon the drug war. He has consistently refused to deny using cocaine in his youth, so he seemed a likely candidate to view the matter from a different perspective. While the President mulled Mr Walters' appoinbnent, New Mexico's Republican Govemor, Gary Johnson, urged him to consider legalizing drugs, particularly marjihuana, which he dismissed as "largely harmless." "I didn't just experiment with grass when I was younger," Mr Johnson admitted, "I smoked it every chance I got and I ewoyed it, too." Other Republican luminaries share his view. Economist Milton Friedman, free marketeer without equal, has said it is "obvious" that legalising drugs "will reduce crane and diminish corruption in the ranks of law-enforcement agencies."
Then there is William Buckley, the conservative columnist, who has assailed the arrest every year of some 600,000 grass smokers as "absurdity verging on evil." Meanwhile, in Santa Rosa de Guamuez, what scares the villagers most is what the chemicals are doing to them. Consigmments of the poison used in Colombia contain labels warning that it causes damage to crops, which must be "shielded with screens from aerial spraying to prevent droplets falling on the green parts of useftil plants." The warning also says application must be done on windless days. The people who do the spraying in this valley do not supply screens, and the peasants could not afford them if they coidd find them. Nature does not often provide windless days in the tropical Andean valleys. And the coca bushes are often planted among other crops. The chemical, based on the compound glyphosate, is manufactured by the US Monsanto Corporation. It damages the human digestive system, the central nervous system, the lungs and the blood's red corpuscles. Another constituent causes cancer in animals and damage to the liver and kidneys of humans. The villagers' fears about the chemicals appear well founded. The World Health Organisation has found that glyphosate is easily transmitted to humans through foods such as raspberries, lettuces, carrots and barley and traces of the chemical have been found in crops sown a year after the soil was dosed with it. OBSERVER HERALD CORRESPONDENT