Despite its sleek interior, the Beta Lounge caters to the budget conscious.
There's nothing quite so conducive to friendly interaction as opening a bottle of lovingly nurtured grape juice and sharing it with one's fellow bipeds. It's even better when good food and a convivial setting — a tapas bar, a sidewalk cafe — enter the equation. Despite its 21st-century proto-IKEA design, Berkeley's new Beta Lounge belongs to the tradition of the cozy pub and the neighborly taverna where noshes are nibbled and vino is quaffed and there's plenty of ho-paaa! to go around.
Opened in March by Sonoma natives Gabriel Duran and Elon Khelif, the sleek downtown wine bar boasts a clean loft atmosphere, with concrete walls, exposed piping, and a silvery-gray color scheme. The minimal design accents include a Siamese fighting fish (aka — aha! — the betta fish) slumbering in a bowl on the bar, which also features a large and attractive wine rack crafted at San Rafael's IK Design, a woodworks owned by Khelif's father. There are frosted windows draped in burgundy velvet, a lounge with red leather sofas and ottomans tucked away at one end of the room, and a hip indie-electronica sound design soft enough to encourage conversation.
Be warned, though: For a wine bar, the vino selection here is pretty minimal. This isn't the sort of place where you plow through a hundred pages of rare and perfunctory vintages in search of that perfect Pinot. Instead there are just seventeen wines on the premises, six white, eleven red, each priced at $8 per glass and $30 per bottle, with a couple of sparklers at $32 and $40 per bottle each. While this sort of setup restricts one's imbibing options considerably, it also simplifies things a great deal. The owners' desire is to serve what they know and like as inexpensively and unpretentiously as possible, and their selections — primarily midlevel wine-country vintages with the odd organic and import thrown in — fill the need.
The venue offers several other alcoholic possibilities as well. Beers include draft Lagunitas and Pyramid Hefeweizen, plus bottled Newcastle, Red Stripe, and Guinness. There's sake by the carafe and bottle in several variations, from the crisp and dry to the sweet, milky, and unfiltered. And an extensive menu of cocktails crafted from sake and soju include a few that are nearly as good as the real thing. Among those that weren't was a pallid margarita — you really need honest-to-God tequila when it comes to margaritas — and the mojito, which tasted like a tall glass of overly lime-y seltzer without its depth charge of rum. But the Cosmopolitan's underpinning of pomegranate juice complemented the high-octane soju in a pleasant and refreshing way, and the Cloud 9, a Beta Lounge original, mixed up lychee-flavored sake and creamy unfiltered nigori to excellent effect. (A blueberry-limned variation, the Blue Moon, wasn't quite as satisfying.) One night, the bartender, an affable sort, also served up complimentary shots of cocktails still in the planning stages: the Pink Pearl, a refreshing draught of champagne barely sweetened with grenadine; and the Beta Sunset, a concoction of pineapple juice, grenadine, and agave wine not unlike a mild tequila sunrise.
To complement the libations there's a menu of snack items and light meals that's as easygoing as the wine list. The hummus plate was simply constructed of whole-wheat pita wedges, kalamata olives, and a unique house-made hummus that was rich and hearty without being too citric or garlicky. Another platter featured a soft, aromatic triple-cream brie, a mildly nutty sheep's-milk cheese, and a wonderfully smoky and buttery aged Gruyère with a selection of crackers, grapes, and olives — the perfect wine-country snack. The spinach salad was bountiful with artichoke hearts, red onions, candied walnuts, and a marvelous spinach-Dijon dressing. And a couple of two-handed sandwiches — tomato-avocado and turkey-tomato-pesto — served on freshly baked rolls were delectable.
Some of the selections are a little too easygoing. The bread sticks turned out to be your basic focaccia with olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the side. The Beta Pizza was tasty enough — parmesan, mozzarella, tomato sauce, and your choice of pepperoni or roasted peppers and eggplant on a ciabatta roll — but it's the sort of thing you can whip up in the kitchen in ten minutes. The limpid guacamole wasn't particularly spicy or even avocado-y, relying on an overabundance of lime and cilantro for its flavor. But the spring rolls burst with the crisp, spiky flavors of fresh mint, sprouts, bell pepper, and richly seasoned tofu, and were especially yummy dunked in an earthy, creamy peanut-coconut dipping sauce.
Dessert is simplicity itself: sizable scoops of Ciao Bella's incomparable gelato in three flavors. If it had been up to me I'd have opted for at least one dark chocolate option as well as something in the seasonal-sorbetto arena; instead, there's a perfectly creamy vanilla, an irresistibly oomphy espresso flecked with bits of coffee bean, and a green tea complemented with big luscious chunks of white chocolate that offset the gelato's medicinal-herbaceous taste.
Vegetarians will find plenty to nibble on between all that quaffing and tippling. Flesh-free options include steamed and salted edamame, the "bread sticks" with oil and vinegar, the chips and guac, the tofu spring rolls, a mixed green salad in addition to the spinach varietal, the hummus, the cheese platter, the avocado sandwich plus another sandwich stuffed with roasted vegetables, and the plain cheese and the roasted vegetable pizzas.
In keeping with recessionary 2009's resurgent obsession with happy hour, the Beta Lounge offers $3 beers and $5 glasses of wine and sake every night from 4 to 7 p.m. alongside the house salad at $4, the hummus platter at $6, and the pizzas at $5 to $7 apiece. Cocktails are $5 all night Monday, bottles of wine are $20 all night Wednesday, and on Sunday nights sake bombs are $3.50, with large carafes half off. In addition, the staff is relaxed yet attentive, hip yet friendly (did we mention the free champagne shots?). This is an attractive and welcoming place to schmooze, snack, and sip.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Flower Poaching is rampant in Rockridge
By Sarah Williams
In Rockridge, a Rarefied Crime: Flower Poaching - Unprosecuted because it's not a high priority, the crime can nonetheless be fatal.
Spring has sprung in Oakland's beautiful Rockridge district, and the front-yard gardens that are the pride of so many homeowners there are in full bloom. But the seasonal bounty comes with a price in this affluent neighborhood. For here a rarefied criminal act goes underreported: flower poaching.
For decades, Rockridge residents have awoken to evidence that nighttime flower poachers have raided their street-side gardens for fragrant lilacs, roses, and hydrangeas. Whole bushes have been ripped from the ground in the wee hours. The poachers don't stop there, clipping entire branches from Japanese maples and — most sought-after at this time of year — the regionally scarce dogwood blooms that last just a few weeks. The trees are often left mutilated. Some have even been taken up by the roots and carried away whole.
Victims guess flower poaching is a black-market enterprise for small-time crooks looking to make a quick dollar. Much like stolen iPods and cell phones, which fetch a decent resale value on the black market, the plants have supposedly been recognized at local retailers and among curbside merchants' sundries. While community members say they've made crime reports to the Oakland Police Department for years, local cops have yet to nab a single poacher.
Despite a flurry of complaints that crop up on community-run Internet message boards as regularly as hay fever, each spring the issue is pushed aside for Oakland's more serious crime concerns. Even in Rockridge, stolen flowers don't stand up to budget crises, grand theft, and gun violence. So the crime goes mostly unreported — and the criminals unfettered in their illicit trade.
Nora, a fourteen-year resident of lower Rockridge, has a glorious Kentucky dogwood in the front yard of her home, along with a couple of young Japanese maples and a large, healthy hydrangea bush that blooms each summer. Dogwood species flourish on the East Coast and in the South, but trees like Nora's are relatively rare in this climate, making its brief springtime bloom the pride of her small garden, where her two children play. Neighbors re-route their daily strolls this time of year just to catch a glimpse of its bright, white clustered flowers.
But Nora, a perennial flower-poaching victim, derives no such joy from her tree. "Every time I look at the tree in bloom it breaks my heart because I know it's going to be poached," she said, standing in the dappled light beneath her dogwood's full-blossomed splendor on a recent Saturday morning. She caressed the tree's scars, some years old now but still visible to the naked eye. "It's just a really ugly shape," she said with a sigh.
Nora, who asked not to be identified with her last name so that she would not increase her risk of theft, remembers well the first morning she walked outside to find the telltale signs of a violent poach. Dogwood blossoms were scattered across the grass; gaping and seemingly random wounds dotted the trunk. Since that morning more than a decade ago, "we're just hoping it will grow back," she said. Hacked dogwood limbs damage a tree severely, and blooming branches can take years to regenerate. While many dogwood owners might clip a small branch or two each season to adorn their dining room table, Nora never does, for this very reason. She recently refused a request from her own mother for just a slight trimming.
After filing several police reports over the years, Nora and her husband decided to take matters into their own hands, installing a trip-wire along the narrow entry to the yard. Each night, they suspend a metal wire between two short posts at a height of about six inches. Awaking some mornings to find nearby tulips "scrunched" and the wire unlatched — but no dogwood blossoms scattered — the couple believe their poacher-preventative measure has been successful. And this year, the tree has yet to be molested, she reports.
Others haven't been so lucky. During the week of April 13, two separate Rockridge dogwoods were poached. One of those — a six-foot dogwood — was stripped of 80 percent of its blooming branches, according to a neighbor. The tree, which belongs to homeowners who were out of town during the poach, will likely die.
This story is common around lower Rockridge, where foot traffic is heavy and front yards are typically less than fifteen feet deep off the sidewalk. West of College Avenue, it's hard to find a solid block of houses without poaching tales that go back decades. Research for this story — door-to-door interviews and solicitations on popular local message boards — returned dozens of similar accounts from area residents. Poacher booty reportedly runs the gamut of all the fragrant and beautiful blooms the Bay Area climate can sustain. East of College, in upper Rockridge, no fewer than five separate dogwoods have been continually poached throughout the years. One attack on a baby tree proved fatal.
Residents have dreamed up preventive methods including installing security cameras, painting branches bright colors to dissuade reselling, leaving visible lamps and overhead lighting on all night, contracting with private security companies, and installing wireless sensors set to activate sprinklers. Some have requested more frequent police patrols at night.
While Nora would like to see law enforcement crack down on this crime, she knows Oakland police have bigger fish to fry, with higher-value burglaries and robberies a constant problem in the neighborhood. Just a few weeks ago, Nora's fourteen-year-old son was held up for his cell phone at gunpoint, not three blocks from the family's home. So the flowers become less of a concern.
"What can you do?" Nora asked. "It's city living."
Officer Patrick Gerrans has served the Rockridge district as its problem-solving officer for the past year and a half. As PSO, Gerrans acts as a liaison between the police department and area residents, attending monthly Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council meetings, where residents voice their concerns over area crime.
With that résumé, Gerrans should be something of an expert on flower poaching. But before receiving an interview request for this story, he had not heard of a single instance of this crime. Flower poaching has yet to be made a priority at NCPC meetings, longtime community activists report.
Gerrans said the regular community concerns are thefts, robberies, and burglaries on and around College Avenue. He guessed he hadn't been briefed on reports of flower poaching because they get lost in the mix of the hundreds of similar minor theft reports the department receives from Rockridge. "In any nice neighborhood you tend to see more robberies and burglaries than in other parts of the city," Gerrans said.
According to statistics obtained from the police department, during a recent seven-day period just one vehicle theft, one burglary, and one act of vandalism were reported in the half-mile scrim around the Rockridge BART station. From mid-March to mid-April, twelve thefts, seven burglaries, and nine vehicle thefts were reported in the same area, along with several cases each of assault and vandalism, and one of arson.
Gerrans said that a "crime of opportunity" like flower poaching is difficult to fight. "It's hard to plan out where a guy's going to be and where he's going to commit his crime," he said. Enforcement challenges only multiply during spring and summer's clement climes, when foot, car, and bicycle traffic increases significantly around the commercial stretch of College and minor thefts tend to spike. And since flower poachers work at night, the police's capacity to dissuade them through increased presence is reduced.
In the local shops where the stolen flowers might end up there's no evidence of poaching, and a strong ethic against it. Julia Lojo owns Market Hall's Bloomies flower shop, where she has worked for more than 22 years.
"I feel quite strongly about this," an apron-clad Lojo said, adding a few last young blooms to a blown-glass vase, with a dogwood branch providing the centerpiece for the arrangement. A home gardener herself, Lojo said she abhors the act of poaching. "It's just devastating to come out and see everything stripped."
As long as she has been in the neighborhood, Lojo has listened to customers' poaching horror stories. She said she buys her dogwood trimmings in bundles of five small (two- to three-foot long) branches, which cost her anywhere between $12.50 and $17 wholesale. With the rare blooms coming at that premium price, one can imagine flower shop owners might jump at dogwood bargains — maybe even be willing to turn a blind eye to a dubious source. "People with bad habits" have approached her in the past, offering small batches of magnolias and other flowers for sale out of their cars for a quick $20. But Lojo said she won't do business with them.
Instead, she buys exclusively from San Francisco Wholesale Flower Mart, a consortium of about fifty growers and buyers, all of whom own their businesses, carry business licenses, and can tell you with confidence where it comes from, she said. And while she most prefers to buy locally grown materials, Lojo's dogwoods currently come from Oregon, and her hydrangeas (a summer bloom in the Bay Area) from Colombia.
With not a single arrest on the books for flower poaching, the profile of the criminal perpetrating these strange acts is elusive. Are Rockridge's poachers expert small-time crooks, dialed into some complex black-market commerce that subverts the checks and balances of resale law? Or are they fine-flower hoarders, stealing all the blooms they can for some personal use? Simple vandals? Is this flower laundering, or outright flower marauding?
Victims claim to have recognized their garden growths for sale at BART stations, and in nearby restaurant displays, but there's no evidence of widespread reuse in Rockridge, where relations between local residents and retailers tend to be civil. The crime scenes indicate the acts of poaching are committed by flower amateurs, with no calm, and in the dead of night. Often flowers are inexpertly cut or, in the case of Nora's dogwood, left in such poor condition the knowledgeable criminal would have little hope for next year's score.
In Rockridge, a Rarefied Crime: Flower Poaching - Unprosecuted because it's not a high priority, the crime can nonetheless be fatal.
Spring has sprung in Oakland's beautiful Rockridge district, and the front-yard gardens that are the pride of so many homeowners there are in full bloom. But the seasonal bounty comes with a price in this affluent neighborhood. For here a rarefied criminal act goes underreported: flower poaching.For decades, Rockridge residents have awoken to evidence that nighttime flower poachers have raided their street-side gardens for fragrant lilacs, roses, and hydrangeas. Whole bushes have been ripped from the ground in the wee hours. The poachers don't stop there, clipping entire branches from Japanese maples and — most sought-after at this time of year — the regionally scarce dogwood blooms that last just a few weeks. The trees are often left mutilated. Some have even been taken up by the roots and carried away whole.
Victims guess flower poaching is a black-market enterprise for small-time crooks looking to make a quick dollar. Much like stolen iPods and cell phones, which fetch a decent resale value on the black market, the plants have supposedly been recognized at local retailers and among curbside merchants' sundries. While community members say they've made crime reports to the Oakland Police Department for years, local cops have yet to nab a single poacher.
Despite a flurry of complaints that crop up on community-run Internet message boards as regularly as hay fever, each spring the issue is pushed aside for Oakland's more serious crime concerns. Even in Rockridge, stolen flowers don't stand up to budget crises, grand theft, and gun violence. So the crime goes mostly unreported — and the criminals unfettered in their illicit trade.
Nora, a fourteen-year resident of lower Rockridge, has a glorious Kentucky dogwood in the front yard of her home, along with a couple of young Japanese maples and a large, healthy hydrangea bush that blooms each summer. Dogwood species flourish on the East Coast and in the South, but trees like Nora's are relatively rare in this climate, making its brief springtime bloom the pride of her small garden, where her two children play. Neighbors re-route their daily strolls this time of year just to catch a glimpse of its bright, white clustered flowers.
But Nora, a perennial flower-poaching victim, derives no such joy from her tree. "Every time I look at the tree in bloom it breaks my heart because I know it's going to be poached," she said, standing in the dappled light beneath her dogwood's full-blossomed splendor on a recent Saturday morning. She caressed the tree's scars, some years old now but still visible to the naked eye. "It's just a really ugly shape," she said with a sigh.
Nora, who asked not to be identified with her last name so that she would not increase her risk of theft, remembers well the first morning she walked outside to find the telltale signs of a violent poach. Dogwood blossoms were scattered across the grass; gaping and seemingly random wounds dotted the trunk. Since that morning more than a decade ago, "we're just hoping it will grow back," she said. Hacked dogwood limbs damage a tree severely, and blooming branches can take years to regenerate. While many dogwood owners might clip a small branch or two each season to adorn their dining room table, Nora never does, for this very reason. She recently refused a request from her own mother for just a slight trimming.
After filing several police reports over the years, Nora and her husband decided to take matters into their own hands, installing a trip-wire along the narrow entry to the yard. Each night, they suspend a metal wire between two short posts at a height of about six inches. Awaking some mornings to find nearby tulips "scrunched" and the wire unlatched — but no dogwood blossoms scattered — the couple believe their poacher-preventative measure has been successful. And this year, the tree has yet to be molested, she reports.
Others haven't been so lucky. During the week of April 13, two separate Rockridge dogwoods were poached. One of those — a six-foot dogwood — was stripped of 80 percent of its blooming branches, according to a neighbor. The tree, which belongs to homeowners who were out of town during the poach, will likely die.
This story is common around lower Rockridge, where foot traffic is heavy and front yards are typically less than fifteen feet deep off the sidewalk. West of College Avenue, it's hard to find a solid block of houses without poaching tales that go back decades. Research for this story — door-to-door interviews and solicitations on popular local message boards — returned dozens of similar accounts from area residents. Poacher booty reportedly runs the gamut of all the fragrant and beautiful blooms the Bay Area climate can sustain. East of College, in upper Rockridge, no fewer than five separate dogwoods have been continually poached throughout the years. One attack on a baby tree proved fatal.
Residents have dreamed up preventive methods including installing security cameras, painting branches bright colors to dissuade reselling, leaving visible lamps and overhead lighting on all night, contracting with private security companies, and installing wireless sensors set to activate sprinklers. Some have requested more frequent police patrols at night.
While Nora would like to see law enforcement crack down on this crime, she knows Oakland police have bigger fish to fry, with higher-value burglaries and robberies a constant problem in the neighborhood. Just a few weeks ago, Nora's fourteen-year-old son was held up for his cell phone at gunpoint, not three blocks from the family's home. So the flowers become less of a concern.
"What can you do?" Nora asked. "It's city living."
Officer Patrick Gerrans has served the Rockridge district as its problem-solving officer for the past year and a half. As PSO, Gerrans acts as a liaison between the police department and area residents, attending monthly Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council meetings, where residents voice their concerns over area crime.
With that résumé, Gerrans should be something of an expert on flower poaching. But before receiving an interview request for this story, he had not heard of a single instance of this crime. Flower poaching has yet to be made a priority at NCPC meetings, longtime community activists report.
Gerrans said the regular community concerns are thefts, robberies, and burglaries on and around College Avenue. He guessed he hadn't been briefed on reports of flower poaching because they get lost in the mix of the hundreds of similar minor theft reports the department receives from Rockridge. "In any nice neighborhood you tend to see more robberies and burglaries than in other parts of the city," Gerrans said.
According to statistics obtained from the police department, during a recent seven-day period just one vehicle theft, one burglary, and one act of vandalism were reported in the half-mile scrim around the Rockridge BART station. From mid-March to mid-April, twelve thefts, seven burglaries, and nine vehicle thefts were reported in the same area, along with several cases each of assault and vandalism, and one of arson.
Gerrans said that a "crime of opportunity" like flower poaching is difficult to fight. "It's hard to plan out where a guy's going to be and where he's going to commit his crime," he said. Enforcement challenges only multiply during spring and summer's clement climes, when foot, car, and bicycle traffic increases significantly around the commercial stretch of College and minor thefts tend to spike. And since flower poachers work at night, the police's capacity to dissuade them through increased presence is reduced.
In the local shops where the stolen flowers might end up there's no evidence of poaching, and a strong ethic against it. Julia Lojo owns Market Hall's Bloomies flower shop, where she has worked for more than 22 years.
"I feel quite strongly about this," an apron-clad Lojo said, adding a few last young blooms to a blown-glass vase, with a dogwood branch providing the centerpiece for the arrangement. A home gardener herself, Lojo said she abhors the act of poaching. "It's just devastating to come out and see everything stripped."
As long as she has been in the neighborhood, Lojo has listened to customers' poaching horror stories. She said she buys her dogwood trimmings in bundles of five small (two- to three-foot long) branches, which cost her anywhere between $12.50 and $17 wholesale. With the rare blooms coming at that premium price, one can imagine flower shop owners might jump at dogwood bargains — maybe even be willing to turn a blind eye to a dubious source. "People with bad habits" have approached her in the past, offering small batches of magnolias and other flowers for sale out of their cars for a quick $20. But Lojo said she won't do business with them.
Instead, she buys exclusively from San Francisco Wholesale Flower Mart, a consortium of about fifty growers and buyers, all of whom own their businesses, carry business licenses, and can tell you with confidence where it comes from, she said. And while she most prefers to buy locally grown materials, Lojo's dogwoods currently come from Oregon, and her hydrangeas (a summer bloom in the Bay Area) from Colombia.
With not a single arrest on the books for flower poaching, the profile of the criminal perpetrating these strange acts is elusive. Are Rockridge's poachers expert small-time crooks, dialed into some complex black-market commerce that subverts the checks and balances of resale law? Or are they fine-flower hoarders, stealing all the blooms they can for some personal use? Simple vandals? Is this flower laundering, or outright flower marauding?
Victims claim to have recognized their garden growths for sale at BART stations, and in nearby restaurant displays, but there's no evidence of widespread reuse in Rockridge, where relations between local residents and retailers tend to be civil. The crime scenes indicate the acts of poaching are committed by flower amateurs, with no calm, and in the dead of night. Often flowers are inexpertly cut or, in the case of Nora's dogwood, left in such poor condition the knowledgeable criminal would have little hope for next year's score.
Organics: Are They Worth It?
By M H Ahssan
Warning: Consuming organic foods could be hazardous to your health.
That, I recently discovered, is the startling message being promoted by a nonprofit group that calls itself the Center for Consumer Freedom. A report featured on CCF’s website warns that manure, which organic farmers use instead of synthetic chemicals to fertilize crops, could prove deadly. Sure manure’s natural; but it’s also a “luscious breeding ground for all kinds of nasty microbes,” according to the report—including the dreaded bacteria E. coli. The natural pesticides used by organic farmers, the report even warns, may be more dangerous than synthetic chemicals.
The debate over “organic” versus “conventional” has always been contentious. Lately, it’s turned almost surreal. In a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where nothing is quite what it seems, proponents say organic farming protects the environment. Critics insist it’s so inefficient that most of the remaining forests would have to be felled to feed the planet organically. Organic advocates say pesticides can kill. Critics say organically grown plants have to produce their own natural defenses against insects, substances which could be many times more toxic than pesticides. Both sides accuse the other of fear-mongering—and then turn around and sow more fears.
When I read that warning from CCF—a group funded in part by agricultural chemical companies and fast-food giants—I laughed in disbelief. Then I got angry.
We shouldn’t have to fret about every bite we eat. Yet maddeningly, that’s exactly what has resulted as vested interests from global agribusiness to increasingly powerful organic trade associations have turned what should be an honest and open discussion into a frenzy of skewed information.
Caught in the middle are those of us whose only vested interest is putting a healthy meal on the table for our families—who simply want to shield our children from toxins, and do our small part to protect the environment and perhaps support a local farmer. All we’re asking, really, are a few simple questions. Is organic produce safer? Is it more nutritious? Is it friendlier to the environment than conventional agriculture? Is it worth spending more for organically grown food?
A few months ago I decided to try to look for answers. I knew at the outset they weren’t likely to be as easy as yes or no. The controversies run far too deep for that. Still, I set out in hopes of finding at least a small patch of common ground. What I discovered often surprised me. There are good reasons to buy organic—but also a few compelling ones to favor conventional.
Is organic produce safer?
Most people choose organic produce for one simple reason: to avoid consuming pesticides. Organic farmers are prohibited from using virtually all synthetic chemicals, either to kill weeds or pests or to fertilize plants. Conventional farmers in this country can use around 200 approved synthetic chemicals—fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.
No one disputes the fact that at least some of those chemicals end up on the fruits and vegetables we take home from the market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture regularly tests hundreds of samples of fresh and processed foods for pesticide residues and posts the results on its website (www.ams.usda.gov). The samples are gathered from a variety of markets around the country and represent a cross-section of what’s available to consumers, including both organic and conventional produce. According to the latest results, which included 13,208 samples, 76 percent of fresh fruit and vegetables and 40 percent of processed fruits and vegetables had detectable residues. All of the milk tested, both organic and conventional, showed residues. Overall, about 30 percent of the samples were pesticide-free, 30 percent contained one pesticide and 40 percent had traces of more than one chemical. To be sure, the detected levels were very low in most samples, measured in a few parts per billion. According to the USDA, only 0.2 percent of the contaminated samples exceeded tolerance levels set by the federal government.
Even organic produce isn’t necessarily pesticide-free. Synthetic chemicals can drift over from nearby fields or leach into groundwater. All the same, organic produce is consistently lower in residues. In the USDA’s samples, for instance, 76 percent of conventionally grown fruits and vegetables had detectable pesticide levels, compared to only 23 percent of organically grown produce. California does its own testing, independent of the USDA, I discovered. Its analysis found residues in 31 percent of conventionally grown samples and only 6.5 percent of organics.
How dangerous are those residues likely to be? To find out, I put in a call to Chensheng Lu, a food scientist at Emory University. “Almost everybody has some pesticide in their body, which can be measured in urine samples,” Lu told me. As it happens, while studying a group of preschool kids a few years ago, he and some colleagues found an exception to that rule: a child who had no detectable levels of a class of common pesticides called organophosphates. When the scientists followed up, they discovered that the parents served almost nothing but organic food at home.
That unexpected finding inspired the research team to undertake an ingenious experiment. They followed 23 children who were eating mostly conventionally grown foods. For a period of five consecutive days they switched the children to organic foods—including organic fresh fruits, vegetables, juices, processed fruit or vegetables, pasta, dairy, cereal and even chips. The study concentrated on preschool kids because if pesticides on foods do pose a danger, young children are likely to be the most vulnerable. Because they are growing, they consume more food per pound of body weight than adults, which means higher exposure to pesticide residues. And since many modern pesticides are neurotoxins, designed to kill bugs by interfering with their nervous systems, even low levels could be potentially dangerous in children, whose brains are developing.
The results were clear cut. “While the kids were on conventional diets, it was easy to measure the presence of organophosphate pesticides in their urine,” Lu told me. “But within 24 hours after switching to organic diets, the metabolites for organophosphates fell to nondetectable levels. And as soon as the kids switched back to conventional diets, the levels rose again.”
If there was ever an emotionally compelling reason for choosing organic, this would seem to be it. But for scientists, one more crucial question needs to be resolved. Are the miniscule levels of pesticide residues found in our bodies enough to cause any harm?
The more I asked that question, the more elusive a reliable answer seemed to be. “The exposure levels are so low they’re not worth worrying about,” Robert Hollingworth, a toxicologist and former director of Michigan State University’s National Food Safety and Toxicology Center, told me. “I’d be more concerned about food additives than pesticide residues.” As a measure of his confidence, he said, “I don’t have any concerns about my grandchildren eating conventionally grown produce.”
Manfred Kroger, an expert in toxicology at Pennsylvania State University, agreed. “The levels of pesticide residue are insignificant. Not eating plenty of fruits and vegetables poses a far greater threat than any danger of chemicals in food.”
But Aaron Blair, an epidemiologist who studies links between pesticides and cancer risk at the National Cancer Institute, was more cautious. Of the 100 main pesticides used in agriculture, he told me, only two or three have been shown to cause cancer in animal studies—and then only when they are delivered at doses far higher than anyone eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables could possibly be exposed to. Still, a few epidemiologic studies have found some evidence of an association between pesticide use and health problems in agricultural workers—lymphoma, prostate cancer and Parkinson’s, for instance. Those findings amount to “hints and leads,” according to Blair, not definitive evidence of risk. Still, he thinks it’s reasonable to be cautious. “After all, these are chemicals that were designed to cause harm,” he told me. “Let me put it this way. If you had a choice, you wouldn’t add them to food at the table.”
Does that mean he chooses organic over conventional when he goes shopping? “Not religiously, I have to admit,” he said. But then he added the crucial caveat. “Except when my grandchildren are visiting. Then I definitely do.”
Two grandfathers. Two experts. Two very different assessments of the risk. How can that be? The simple answer is that no one really knows because the data aren’t there. Short-term exposure may not be hazardous at all. But what are the consequences of being chronically exposed to a little every day, month after month, year after year? “That’s what we don’t know,” Lu told me, “and it’s a very hard thing to find out, because it means studying one group of people for a very long time.”
For now he offered what seemed like the best guidance in the face of so much uncertainty. “Since we know these chemicals are neurotoxins, the less you’re exposed to, it seems to me, the better.”
What about those natural toxins produced by organically grown plants? Is it possible, as the Center for Consumer Freedom warns, that they, too, could pose a risk? The researchers I talked to were skeptical. For starters, there’s no evidence that organic crops are consistently higher in natural plant toxins than conventional. Organic farmers may not use synthetic pesticides, after all, but they do use a wide variety of natural strategies to ward off bad bugs; their plants don’t have to defend themselves entirely on their own. What’s more, at least some of the substances that plants use for defense, including antioxidants, are precisely the ones that have been associated with better health.
As for microbes swarming in manure: It’s true that manure can harbor disease-causing bacteria. But when food scientists at the University of Georgia compared 54 samples each of organic and conventional salad greens, the organically grown greens were actually a little less likely to be contaminated with E. coli than conventional. And the best way to avoid problems, the study showed, was simply to wash the greens, no matter how they’re grown.
Is organic more nutritious?
For years, organic activists have insisted that foods grown organically are more nutritious. But that claim, I discovered, is more an article of faith than a scientific fact. Scientists have only recently begun to compare organic and conventional head to head, as it were. Leading that research is Alyson Mitchell, a crop scientist at the University of California, Davis. In 2003, she and her team compared food grown in two adjacent test farms—one organic, one conventional. Their findings showed that marionberries (a type of blackberry), strawberries and corn grown organically had consistently higher levels of antioxidants, including vitamin C. More recently, organically grown tomatoes were found to have more flavonoids, a class of plant-based compounds that are believed to protect against heart disease and possibly cancer.
So naturally when I reached Mitchell in her office, I expected her to wax rhapsodic over the nutritional benefits of organically grown produce. But while she agreed that her findings were “provocative” and “exciting,” she was also quick to say that it’s far too early to know if every organic tomato or peach is likely to have a nutritional edge. Many variables affect the nutrient content of a pepper or a pear, she pointed out—soil quality, sunlight, rainfall, even which pests happen to invade a field. Specific food crops may also be more or less influenced by different farming methods. While the UC Davis studies have shown that organic tomatoes are generally higher in flavonoids, for example, bell peppers appear to be nutritionally identical whether grown organically or conventionally.
And even where there is a nutritional advantage, it may not be enough to matter—at least in terms of public health. Let’s say organic tomatoes are a little higher in flavonoids. In most markets they’re also a lot higher in price. Given the price tags at my local market, for instance, I could eat twice as many conventional tomatoes, dollar for dollar, as organic ones. Having affordable conventionally grown tomatoes available means more people will be able to buy them, which in turn is likely to have a much bigger payoff than the little extra flavonoids an organic tomato might contain.
Is organic friendlier to the environment?
By choosing organic, I’ve always assumed I’m doing my small part to reduce the amount of pesticides percolating into the soil and flowing into streams and rivers. I’m not alone. Health may be the number one reason most people buy organic produce but environmental concerns run a close second, surveys show.
To my surprise, several of the toxicologists I spoke to downplayed concerns about agricultural chemicals in the environment. “The experience with DDT taught us how disastrous toxins in the environment can be,” the NCI’s Blair explained. “But DDT was especially dangerous because it has a long half-life, which means it persists for a long time in the environment. Almost all of us, for that reason, have DDT in our bodies. In fact, the newer pesticides are much more toxic than DDT, but they have very short lives, measured in days instead of years. Any chemical that persists in the environment would never be allowed to be used these days.”
Some chemicals banned in the U.S. are still used in other countries—including even DDT (although for mosquito control, not agriculture). And in countries where government oversight is lax, overuse and misuse of pesticides may pose a risk both to the environment and to workers who have to handle these toxic chemicals. For that reason, choosing organic may be especially important when you’re buying imported produce from places where environmental regulations may not be strictly enforced. Imported organic produce is required by the USDA to meet the same federal standards as organic produce grown in the U.S.
Here at home, though, the real environmental advantage of organic is as basic as dirt. “Conventional farmers feed their plants. Organic farmers feed the soil,” John Reganold, Regents professor of soil science at Washington State University, told me when I reached him by phone. Synthetic fertilizers may create rapid growth, but they don’t replenish the soil nearly as much as organic fertilizers do.
“Open any introductory textbook on soil and it will tell you that if you add organic material to soil, you’ll have healthier soil,” Reganold said. Because organic farming uses compost and other natural fertilizers, the soil typically teems with abundant microbial life, which helps nourish and sustain plants. “And that’s good for the environment in many ways,” Reganold said. “Organic farming results in less pollution of groundwater. By creating better soil, it increases water holding capacity, which reduces erosion. When you look at the research comparing organic and conventional farming systems, on every environmental measure, organic farming comes out ahead.”
For years, though, critics have argued that organic farming may be great for supplying the kitchens of high-end restaurants and well-to-do consumers, but it can’t produce enough food, at low cost, to feed the world. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, after all, allowed modern agriculture to keep pace with the world’s rapidly growing population. If the world depended on organic methods, critics say, most of the world’s remaining forests would have to be chopped down to create fields and pastureland.
When I mentioned that criticism to Reganold, he leaped on it the way a gardener might snatch a particularly noxious weed. “That’s a bogus issue,” he told me. “At the moment, we’re not asking organic farmers to feed the world. We’re only saying that increasing the amount of acreage farmed organically would be a good thing.”
In truth, organic farming may not be as efficient, acre for acre, as conventional large-scale farming. A 2002 study by Paul Mäder and his colleagues at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture in Switzerland found that crop yields were about 20 percent lower in organic systems. But his study also found that, in some cases, organic farming methods used less than half the fertilizer and energy of conventional methods. Thus, organic farming methods may ultimately be more sustainable than chemical-intensive farming.
“Most research in the past 30 years has been on conventional farming,” Reganold pointed out. “The leading crop varieties have been chosen because they’re suited to conventional farming. The organic movement is growing, and its yields are increasing as we learn more about the science of organic farming. Some of our own studies have shown that organic apple orchards in the Pacific Northwest can get the same yield as conventional orchards.”
Is conventional ever a better choice than organic?
Imagine, for a moment, that your local market is offering both organic and conventionally grown apples. Both look delicious. And wonder of wonders, both are $1.99 a pound. Is there ever any reason to buy the conventional variety?
I would have thought the answer was obvious—until I called Michelle Miller, who coordinates the Pesticide Use and Risk Reduction Project at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. “Have you ever eaten an heirloom variety of apple called an orange pippin?” she asked me.
I hadn’t, though the name alone made me want to.
“They’re my absolute favorite. They’re delicious. And the problem here in Wisconsin is that they’re almost impossible to grow economically without using at least some pesticides.” When Miller was a kid, Wisconsin’s apple orchards were going strong, producing a wide range of varieties, including local heirlooms. But as consumer demand for organic apples grew, local orchards began to struggle. “It’s fairly easy to grow apples organically in the Pacific Northwest because of the climate. But in Wisconsin, with our summer heat and humidity, apples—including some heirloom varieties, like orange pippins—are susceptible to many more pests.”
If the good people of Wisconsin wanted to have locally grown apples available, she came to understand—and if they also wanted to support local family farms and preserve heirloom varieties that were in danger of disappearing—they might have to live with apples that contained some pesticide residues.
Miller’s mission, working with local farmers, is to make sure the residue levels are as low as possible. The approach, called integrated pest management, or IPM, tries to take full advantage of the effective methods of organic farming but also allows farmers the option of using some pesticides when necessary. “Farmers don’t want to use toxic chemicals,” Miller told me. “Everyone hears stories about farmers with cancer or Parkinson’s disease, and even if you can’t say synthetic pesticides are to blame, you worry. And synthetic pesticides are expensive. If farmers can cut down the number of sprays, they’ll actually save money.”
Over the past two years, farmers in Miller’s program have been able to reduce what she calls “pesticide risk”—a measure that takes into account both the amount of pesticides used and their particular toxicity—by 58 percent. Some farmers have cut their operating costs too. All of them can assure customers that their fruit is being grown locally with a minimal use of pesticides.
Similar groups are promoting sustainable agriculture and pesticide reduction around the country. A group called Red Tomato is gaining ground in the Northeast. Another, Protected Harvest, focuses on reducing pesticide use on farms that grow peaches, potatoes, carrots, green beans, wine grapes and other crops. Some of these groups have created their own eco-labels, offering consumers choices that go beyond organic versus conventional. (For more information, check out eco-labels.org.)
“Organic farming is a great thing,” explained Scott Exo, who heads up Food Alliance, an Oregon-based group that has created its own alternative certification program for farmers committed to sustainable agricultural practices. “Organic farmers are making a huge contribution. But organic isn’t everything. Organic certification is a series of prohibitions—a long list of chemicals that can’t be used. Certified-organic farmers often use organically derived pesticides like sulfur. But in some regions, it’s almost impossible to grow certain crops without synthetic pesticides.” What’s more, he pointed out, an organic label doesn’t tell you whether the food was grown locally or flown halfway around the world. It doesn’t tell you if workers on a farm are paid fairly or given decent living conditions. It doesn’t tell you whether animals are treated humanely, or whether a farm or ranch is doing anything to protect wildlife habitat or conserve soil and water.
To be sure, many small organic farmers do all those things. They’ve led the revolution in sustainable agriculture, after all. But even organic farmers worry that big players moving into the organic market may be living up to the letter of the regulations but betraying the spirit—thus diluting a more essential meaning of organic. As an example, a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group called the Cornucopia Institute reported in April that at least some organic milk sold by a major nationwide brand comes from industrial-style dairy farms with thousands of cows who are kept confined rather than being allowed to graze. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, recently announced that it will double its organic produce offerings—sparking new worries that the original notion of organic farming as small and local has been lost to big business.
Most Food Alliance-certified farms, in contrast, aren’t organic. The group bans 13 of the most toxic chemicals but allows the use of others if organic approaches aren’t working. Certified farms also commit themselves to fair treatment of farmworkers, humane treatment of animals and stewardship of the land. More and more farms and ranches on the West Coast and in the Midwest are signing on, Exo told me.
To find out why, I spoke to Connie and Doc Hatfield, founding members of the Food Alliance, who live outside of Bend, Oregon. The Hatfields are ranchers, not farmers. Their “Country Natural Beef” is sold in many markets that feature organic produce. The cattle are raised without growth hormones or antibiotics. They’re free to roam the range. But they’re not strictly organic.
When I asked Doc Hatfield, a veterinarian by training, why not, he said, “We’ve got 14,000 acres of our own, but our cattle also range over land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, and the BLM sometimes uses pesticides to clear weeds away from the roadside.” For that reason, his cattle can’t qualify as organic. But the Hatfields have come to believe that letting the animals roam over as much land as possible is more important to their health—and contentment—than restricting them to organic acreage.
Connie Hatfield put it this way: “I could park a cow here in our living room and feed it only organic feed. That cow would be organic. But it wouldn’t be very happy.”
What really matters?
After talking with Exo and the Hatfields, I began to realize that the choice isn’t nearly as simple as conventional versus organic. There are issues that go beyond those handy categories. And there are far more questions to weigh. Is it local? How far has it come to reach my table? Who grew it? How was it grown? In the case of milk or meat, were the animals treated humanely?
I know, I know. Not many of us have the time or inclination to interrogate grocery managers about every basket of blueberries or brisket of beef. But in my conversations with farmers and ranchers and scientists, I began to understand that by learning just a little more about the food I’m putting on the table, I could use my food dollars to cast a small but meaningful vote not only for the health of my family but for the kind of world I want to preserve.
I’m lucky to live in Sonoma County, California, where I can jump on my bike and, in five minutes, be riding through some of the most beautiful countryside in the world, a patchwork of dairylands, vineyards and small vegetable farms. Because I want to protect that open space and the economic vitality of local farming, I’ve begun to see that it’s important to support locally produced foods—sometimes more important than being a stickler for organic. Agricultural diversity also matters. I discovered that firsthand when I saw and tasted heirloom tomatoes at the local farmers’ market—Cherokee Purples, Green Zebras and Nebraska Weddings. Now I go out of my way to support small farmers who grow these heirloom varieties, even if they aren’t certified organic.
I’ve also come to understand that organic isn’t always hands-down the best choice for the planet—a fact brought home to me the last time I went shopping for dinner. Our local market was featuring gorgeous organic red peppers. A quick glance at the label revealed that they’d been shipped halfway around the world—from greenhouses in Holland to California. Fresh from the garden they weren’t. And whatever pesticides were spared in growing them were more than made up for by the petrochemicals used to get them here.
I settled for some fresh locally grown green bells.
Of course abundant local produce isn’t available all-year-round in most places, as my sister in Minnesota is quick to remind me (“You Californians,” she says, and I can almost see her rolling her eyes). Not everyone can choose between organic and conventional. But many places in the country do have bustling farmers’ markets in the summer—and there’s no better place to meet the people who are growing your food and preserving local agriculture. Some grow organically. Others may integrate organic and conventional techniques. Ask them and they’ll tell you exactly how they farm—and why.
Among the farmers I talked to was Kristie Knoll, whose small farm east of San Francisco supplies greens and other produce to Chez Panisse, the world-famous restaurant in Berkeley. Knoll also sells her produce at San Francisco’s farmers’ market on Saturdays, where I caught up with her on a drizzly morning. She offered me a sample of arugula and a bitter green I’d never tasted before, called puntarella. She also insisted that I try an arugula blossom—the small cream-colored flower that appears long after most arugula has been harvested. It was superb—sweet and peppery and beautiful to behold.
Knoll’s produce isn’t certified organic. “When the feds got into organic, we got out,” she told me, explaining that she didn’t want some bureaucrat telling her how to farm. Even so, everything she and her husband produce is grown entirely without chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Their farm goes beyond organic in its commitment to sustainable agriculture. “Sometimes that means losing something to bugs,” she said with a shrug, “but it’s the risk you take.”
Risky or not, she loves her work. All morning she dashed around answering customers’ questions, identifying unusual vegetables—puntarella, cardoons, broccoli rabe—and suggesting ways to prepare them, even passing out printed recipes. Before I said goodbye, I bought a generous bag full of arugula and a bunch of puntarella.
Back in my own kitchen, I chopped the puntarella into thin ribbons and mixed it with olive oil, finely chopped green garlic and anchovies to create a savory spread—a traditional Italian recipe that Knoll had given me. Maybe it was knowing how the greens were raised. Maybe it was the fact that they’d been picked fresh that morning. Maybe it was simply the memory of Kristie Knoll’s almost manic passion for everything she grows. Whatever the reason, it was absolutely delicious.
Where to put your money
Organic produce often costs 50 percent more than conventional produce and that can add up on your grocery bill. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, pored over the results of more than 100,000 USDA and FDA tests for pesticides on 46 popular produce items. The list below is ranked from most to least commonly contaminated produce to help you decide which fruits and vegetables to buy or not buy organic.
Warning: Consuming organic foods could be hazardous to your health.
That, I recently discovered, is the startling message being promoted by a nonprofit group that calls itself the Center for Consumer Freedom. A report featured on CCF’s website warns that manure, which organic farmers use instead of synthetic chemicals to fertilize crops, could prove deadly. Sure manure’s natural; but it’s also a “luscious breeding ground for all kinds of nasty microbes,” according to the report—including the dreaded bacteria E. coli. The natural pesticides used by organic farmers, the report even warns, may be more dangerous than synthetic chemicals.The debate over “organic” versus “conventional” has always been contentious. Lately, it’s turned almost surreal. In a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where nothing is quite what it seems, proponents say organic farming protects the environment. Critics insist it’s so inefficient that most of the remaining forests would have to be felled to feed the planet organically. Organic advocates say pesticides can kill. Critics say organically grown plants have to produce their own natural defenses against insects, substances which could be many times more toxic than pesticides. Both sides accuse the other of fear-mongering—and then turn around and sow more fears.
When I read that warning from CCF—a group funded in part by agricultural chemical companies and fast-food giants—I laughed in disbelief. Then I got angry.
We shouldn’t have to fret about every bite we eat. Yet maddeningly, that’s exactly what has resulted as vested interests from global agribusiness to increasingly powerful organic trade associations have turned what should be an honest and open discussion into a frenzy of skewed information.
Caught in the middle are those of us whose only vested interest is putting a healthy meal on the table for our families—who simply want to shield our children from toxins, and do our small part to protect the environment and perhaps support a local farmer. All we’re asking, really, are a few simple questions. Is organic produce safer? Is it more nutritious? Is it friendlier to the environment than conventional agriculture? Is it worth spending more for organically grown food?
A few months ago I decided to try to look for answers. I knew at the outset they weren’t likely to be as easy as yes or no. The controversies run far too deep for that. Still, I set out in hopes of finding at least a small patch of common ground. What I discovered often surprised me. There are good reasons to buy organic—but also a few compelling ones to favor conventional.
Is organic produce safer?
Most people choose organic produce for one simple reason: to avoid consuming pesticides. Organic farmers are prohibited from using virtually all synthetic chemicals, either to kill weeds or pests or to fertilize plants. Conventional farmers in this country can use around 200 approved synthetic chemicals—fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.
No one disputes the fact that at least some of those chemicals end up on the fruits and vegetables we take home from the market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture regularly tests hundreds of samples of fresh and processed foods for pesticide residues and posts the results on its website (www.ams.usda.gov). The samples are gathered from a variety of markets around the country and represent a cross-section of what’s available to consumers, including both organic and conventional produce. According to the latest results, which included 13,208 samples, 76 percent of fresh fruit and vegetables and 40 percent of processed fruits and vegetables had detectable residues. All of the milk tested, both organic and conventional, showed residues. Overall, about 30 percent of the samples were pesticide-free, 30 percent contained one pesticide and 40 percent had traces of more than one chemical. To be sure, the detected levels were very low in most samples, measured in a few parts per billion. According to the USDA, only 0.2 percent of the contaminated samples exceeded tolerance levels set by the federal government.
Even organic produce isn’t necessarily pesticide-free. Synthetic chemicals can drift over from nearby fields or leach into groundwater. All the same, organic produce is consistently lower in residues. In the USDA’s samples, for instance, 76 percent of conventionally grown fruits and vegetables had detectable pesticide levels, compared to only 23 percent of organically grown produce. California does its own testing, independent of the USDA, I discovered. Its analysis found residues in 31 percent of conventionally grown samples and only 6.5 percent of organics.
How dangerous are those residues likely to be? To find out, I put in a call to Chensheng Lu, a food scientist at Emory University. “Almost everybody has some pesticide in their body, which can be measured in urine samples,” Lu told me. As it happens, while studying a group of preschool kids a few years ago, he and some colleagues found an exception to that rule: a child who had no detectable levels of a class of common pesticides called organophosphates. When the scientists followed up, they discovered that the parents served almost nothing but organic food at home.
That unexpected finding inspired the research team to undertake an ingenious experiment. They followed 23 children who were eating mostly conventionally grown foods. For a period of five consecutive days they switched the children to organic foods—including organic fresh fruits, vegetables, juices, processed fruit or vegetables, pasta, dairy, cereal and even chips. The study concentrated on preschool kids because if pesticides on foods do pose a danger, young children are likely to be the most vulnerable. Because they are growing, they consume more food per pound of body weight than adults, which means higher exposure to pesticide residues. And since many modern pesticides are neurotoxins, designed to kill bugs by interfering with their nervous systems, even low levels could be potentially dangerous in children, whose brains are developing.
The results were clear cut. “While the kids were on conventional diets, it was easy to measure the presence of organophosphate pesticides in their urine,” Lu told me. “But within 24 hours after switching to organic diets, the metabolites for organophosphates fell to nondetectable levels. And as soon as the kids switched back to conventional diets, the levels rose again.”
If there was ever an emotionally compelling reason for choosing organic, this would seem to be it. But for scientists, one more crucial question needs to be resolved. Are the miniscule levels of pesticide residues found in our bodies enough to cause any harm?
The more I asked that question, the more elusive a reliable answer seemed to be. “The exposure levels are so low they’re not worth worrying about,” Robert Hollingworth, a toxicologist and former director of Michigan State University’s National Food Safety and Toxicology Center, told me. “I’d be more concerned about food additives than pesticide residues.” As a measure of his confidence, he said, “I don’t have any concerns about my grandchildren eating conventionally grown produce.”
Manfred Kroger, an expert in toxicology at Pennsylvania State University, agreed. “The levels of pesticide residue are insignificant. Not eating plenty of fruits and vegetables poses a far greater threat than any danger of chemicals in food.”
But Aaron Blair, an epidemiologist who studies links between pesticides and cancer risk at the National Cancer Institute, was more cautious. Of the 100 main pesticides used in agriculture, he told me, only two or three have been shown to cause cancer in animal studies—and then only when they are delivered at doses far higher than anyone eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables could possibly be exposed to. Still, a few epidemiologic studies have found some evidence of an association between pesticide use and health problems in agricultural workers—lymphoma, prostate cancer and Parkinson’s, for instance. Those findings amount to “hints and leads,” according to Blair, not definitive evidence of risk. Still, he thinks it’s reasonable to be cautious. “After all, these are chemicals that were designed to cause harm,” he told me. “Let me put it this way. If you had a choice, you wouldn’t add them to food at the table.”
Does that mean he chooses organic over conventional when he goes shopping? “Not religiously, I have to admit,” he said. But then he added the crucial caveat. “Except when my grandchildren are visiting. Then I definitely do.”
Two grandfathers. Two experts. Two very different assessments of the risk. How can that be? The simple answer is that no one really knows because the data aren’t there. Short-term exposure may not be hazardous at all. But what are the consequences of being chronically exposed to a little every day, month after month, year after year? “That’s what we don’t know,” Lu told me, “and it’s a very hard thing to find out, because it means studying one group of people for a very long time.”
For now he offered what seemed like the best guidance in the face of so much uncertainty. “Since we know these chemicals are neurotoxins, the less you’re exposed to, it seems to me, the better.”
What about those natural toxins produced by organically grown plants? Is it possible, as the Center for Consumer Freedom warns, that they, too, could pose a risk? The researchers I talked to were skeptical. For starters, there’s no evidence that organic crops are consistently higher in natural plant toxins than conventional. Organic farmers may not use synthetic pesticides, after all, but they do use a wide variety of natural strategies to ward off bad bugs; their plants don’t have to defend themselves entirely on their own. What’s more, at least some of the substances that plants use for defense, including antioxidants, are precisely the ones that have been associated with better health.
As for microbes swarming in manure: It’s true that manure can harbor disease-causing bacteria. But when food scientists at the University of Georgia compared 54 samples each of organic and conventional salad greens, the organically grown greens were actually a little less likely to be contaminated with E. coli than conventional. And the best way to avoid problems, the study showed, was simply to wash the greens, no matter how they’re grown.
Is organic more nutritious?
For years, organic activists have insisted that foods grown organically are more nutritious. But that claim, I discovered, is more an article of faith than a scientific fact. Scientists have only recently begun to compare organic and conventional head to head, as it were. Leading that research is Alyson Mitchell, a crop scientist at the University of California, Davis. In 2003, she and her team compared food grown in two adjacent test farms—one organic, one conventional. Their findings showed that marionberries (a type of blackberry), strawberries and corn grown organically had consistently higher levels of antioxidants, including vitamin C. More recently, organically grown tomatoes were found to have more flavonoids, a class of plant-based compounds that are believed to protect against heart disease and possibly cancer.
So naturally when I reached Mitchell in her office, I expected her to wax rhapsodic over the nutritional benefits of organically grown produce. But while she agreed that her findings were “provocative” and “exciting,” she was also quick to say that it’s far too early to know if every organic tomato or peach is likely to have a nutritional edge. Many variables affect the nutrient content of a pepper or a pear, she pointed out—soil quality, sunlight, rainfall, even which pests happen to invade a field. Specific food crops may also be more or less influenced by different farming methods. While the UC Davis studies have shown that organic tomatoes are generally higher in flavonoids, for example, bell peppers appear to be nutritionally identical whether grown organically or conventionally.
And even where there is a nutritional advantage, it may not be enough to matter—at least in terms of public health. Let’s say organic tomatoes are a little higher in flavonoids. In most markets they’re also a lot higher in price. Given the price tags at my local market, for instance, I could eat twice as many conventional tomatoes, dollar for dollar, as organic ones. Having affordable conventionally grown tomatoes available means more people will be able to buy them, which in turn is likely to have a much bigger payoff than the little extra flavonoids an organic tomato might contain.
Is organic friendlier to the environment?
By choosing organic, I’ve always assumed I’m doing my small part to reduce the amount of pesticides percolating into the soil and flowing into streams and rivers. I’m not alone. Health may be the number one reason most people buy organic produce but environmental concerns run a close second, surveys show.
To my surprise, several of the toxicologists I spoke to downplayed concerns about agricultural chemicals in the environment. “The experience with DDT taught us how disastrous toxins in the environment can be,” the NCI’s Blair explained. “But DDT was especially dangerous because it has a long half-life, which means it persists for a long time in the environment. Almost all of us, for that reason, have DDT in our bodies. In fact, the newer pesticides are much more toxic than DDT, but they have very short lives, measured in days instead of years. Any chemical that persists in the environment would never be allowed to be used these days.”
Some chemicals banned in the U.S. are still used in other countries—including even DDT (although for mosquito control, not agriculture). And in countries where government oversight is lax, overuse and misuse of pesticides may pose a risk both to the environment and to workers who have to handle these toxic chemicals. For that reason, choosing organic may be especially important when you’re buying imported produce from places where environmental regulations may not be strictly enforced. Imported organic produce is required by the USDA to meet the same federal standards as organic produce grown in the U.S.
Here at home, though, the real environmental advantage of organic is as basic as dirt. “Conventional farmers feed their plants. Organic farmers feed the soil,” John Reganold, Regents professor of soil science at Washington State University, told me when I reached him by phone. Synthetic fertilizers may create rapid growth, but they don’t replenish the soil nearly as much as organic fertilizers do.
“Open any introductory textbook on soil and it will tell you that if you add organic material to soil, you’ll have healthier soil,” Reganold said. Because organic farming uses compost and other natural fertilizers, the soil typically teems with abundant microbial life, which helps nourish and sustain plants. “And that’s good for the environment in many ways,” Reganold said. “Organic farming results in less pollution of groundwater. By creating better soil, it increases water holding capacity, which reduces erosion. When you look at the research comparing organic and conventional farming systems, on every environmental measure, organic farming comes out ahead.”
For years, though, critics have argued that organic farming may be great for supplying the kitchens of high-end restaurants and well-to-do consumers, but it can’t produce enough food, at low cost, to feed the world. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, after all, allowed modern agriculture to keep pace with the world’s rapidly growing population. If the world depended on organic methods, critics say, most of the world’s remaining forests would have to be chopped down to create fields and pastureland.
When I mentioned that criticism to Reganold, he leaped on it the way a gardener might snatch a particularly noxious weed. “That’s a bogus issue,” he told me. “At the moment, we’re not asking organic farmers to feed the world. We’re only saying that increasing the amount of acreage farmed organically would be a good thing.”
In truth, organic farming may not be as efficient, acre for acre, as conventional large-scale farming. A 2002 study by Paul Mäder and his colleagues at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture in Switzerland found that crop yields were about 20 percent lower in organic systems. But his study also found that, in some cases, organic farming methods used less than half the fertilizer and energy of conventional methods. Thus, organic farming methods may ultimately be more sustainable than chemical-intensive farming.
“Most research in the past 30 years has been on conventional farming,” Reganold pointed out. “The leading crop varieties have been chosen because they’re suited to conventional farming. The organic movement is growing, and its yields are increasing as we learn more about the science of organic farming. Some of our own studies have shown that organic apple orchards in the Pacific Northwest can get the same yield as conventional orchards.”
Is conventional ever a better choice than organic?
Imagine, for a moment, that your local market is offering both organic and conventionally grown apples. Both look delicious. And wonder of wonders, both are $1.99 a pound. Is there ever any reason to buy the conventional variety?
I would have thought the answer was obvious—until I called Michelle Miller, who coordinates the Pesticide Use and Risk Reduction Project at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. “Have you ever eaten an heirloom variety of apple called an orange pippin?” she asked me.
I hadn’t, though the name alone made me want to.
“They’re my absolute favorite. They’re delicious. And the problem here in Wisconsin is that they’re almost impossible to grow economically without using at least some pesticides.” When Miller was a kid, Wisconsin’s apple orchards were going strong, producing a wide range of varieties, including local heirlooms. But as consumer demand for organic apples grew, local orchards began to struggle. “It’s fairly easy to grow apples organically in the Pacific Northwest because of the climate. But in Wisconsin, with our summer heat and humidity, apples—including some heirloom varieties, like orange pippins—are susceptible to many more pests.”
If the good people of Wisconsin wanted to have locally grown apples available, she came to understand—and if they also wanted to support local family farms and preserve heirloom varieties that were in danger of disappearing—they might have to live with apples that contained some pesticide residues.
Miller’s mission, working with local farmers, is to make sure the residue levels are as low as possible. The approach, called integrated pest management, or IPM, tries to take full advantage of the effective methods of organic farming but also allows farmers the option of using some pesticides when necessary. “Farmers don’t want to use toxic chemicals,” Miller told me. “Everyone hears stories about farmers with cancer or Parkinson’s disease, and even if you can’t say synthetic pesticides are to blame, you worry. And synthetic pesticides are expensive. If farmers can cut down the number of sprays, they’ll actually save money.”
Over the past two years, farmers in Miller’s program have been able to reduce what she calls “pesticide risk”—a measure that takes into account both the amount of pesticides used and their particular toxicity—by 58 percent. Some farmers have cut their operating costs too. All of them can assure customers that their fruit is being grown locally with a minimal use of pesticides.
Similar groups are promoting sustainable agriculture and pesticide reduction around the country. A group called Red Tomato is gaining ground in the Northeast. Another, Protected Harvest, focuses on reducing pesticide use on farms that grow peaches, potatoes, carrots, green beans, wine grapes and other crops. Some of these groups have created their own eco-labels, offering consumers choices that go beyond organic versus conventional. (For more information, check out eco-labels.org.)
“Organic farming is a great thing,” explained Scott Exo, who heads up Food Alliance, an Oregon-based group that has created its own alternative certification program for farmers committed to sustainable agricultural practices. “Organic farmers are making a huge contribution. But organic isn’t everything. Organic certification is a series of prohibitions—a long list of chemicals that can’t be used. Certified-organic farmers often use organically derived pesticides like sulfur. But in some regions, it’s almost impossible to grow certain crops without synthetic pesticides.” What’s more, he pointed out, an organic label doesn’t tell you whether the food was grown locally or flown halfway around the world. It doesn’t tell you if workers on a farm are paid fairly or given decent living conditions. It doesn’t tell you whether animals are treated humanely, or whether a farm or ranch is doing anything to protect wildlife habitat or conserve soil and water.
To be sure, many small organic farmers do all those things. They’ve led the revolution in sustainable agriculture, after all. But even organic farmers worry that big players moving into the organic market may be living up to the letter of the regulations but betraying the spirit—thus diluting a more essential meaning of organic. As an example, a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group called the Cornucopia Institute reported in April that at least some organic milk sold by a major nationwide brand comes from industrial-style dairy farms with thousands of cows who are kept confined rather than being allowed to graze. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, recently announced that it will double its organic produce offerings—sparking new worries that the original notion of organic farming as small and local has been lost to big business.
Most Food Alliance-certified farms, in contrast, aren’t organic. The group bans 13 of the most toxic chemicals but allows the use of others if organic approaches aren’t working. Certified farms also commit themselves to fair treatment of farmworkers, humane treatment of animals and stewardship of the land. More and more farms and ranches on the West Coast and in the Midwest are signing on, Exo told me.
To find out why, I spoke to Connie and Doc Hatfield, founding members of the Food Alliance, who live outside of Bend, Oregon. The Hatfields are ranchers, not farmers. Their “Country Natural Beef” is sold in many markets that feature organic produce. The cattle are raised without growth hormones or antibiotics. They’re free to roam the range. But they’re not strictly organic.
When I asked Doc Hatfield, a veterinarian by training, why not, he said, “We’ve got 14,000 acres of our own, but our cattle also range over land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, and the BLM sometimes uses pesticides to clear weeds away from the roadside.” For that reason, his cattle can’t qualify as organic. But the Hatfields have come to believe that letting the animals roam over as much land as possible is more important to their health—and contentment—than restricting them to organic acreage.
Connie Hatfield put it this way: “I could park a cow here in our living room and feed it only organic feed. That cow would be organic. But it wouldn’t be very happy.”
What really matters?
After talking with Exo and the Hatfields, I began to realize that the choice isn’t nearly as simple as conventional versus organic. There are issues that go beyond those handy categories. And there are far more questions to weigh. Is it local? How far has it come to reach my table? Who grew it? How was it grown? In the case of milk or meat, were the animals treated humanely?
I know, I know. Not many of us have the time or inclination to interrogate grocery managers about every basket of blueberries or brisket of beef. But in my conversations with farmers and ranchers and scientists, I began to understand that by learning just a little more about the food I’m putting on the table, I could use my food dollars to cast a small but meaningful vote not only for the health of my family but for the kind of world I want to preserve.
I’m lucky to live in Sonoma County, California, where I can jump on my bike and, in five minutes, be riding through some of the most beautiful countryside in the world, a patchwork of dairylands, vineyards and small vegetable farms. Because I want to protect that open space and the economic vitality of local farming, I’ve begun to see that it’s important to support locally produced foods—sometimes more important than being a stickler for organic. Agricultural diversity also matters. I discovered that firsthand when I saw and tasted heirloom tomatoes at the local farmers’ market—Cherokee Purples, Green Zebras and Nebraska Weddings. Now I go out of my way to support small farmers who grow these heirloom varieties, even if they aren’t certified organic.
I’ve also come to understand that organic isn’t always hands-down the best choice for the planet—a fact brought home to me the last time I went shopping for dinner. Our local market was featuring gorgeous organic red peppers. A quick glance at the label revealed that they’d been shipped halfway around the world—from greenhouses in Holland to California. Fresh from the garden they weren’t. And whatever pesticides were spared in growing them were more than made up for by the petrochemicals used to get them here.
I settled for some fresh locally grown green bells.
Of course abundant local produce isn’t available all-year-round in most places, as my sister in Minnesota is quick to remind me (“You Californians,” she says, and I can almost see her rolling her eyes). Not everyone can choose between organic and conventional. But many places in the country do have bustling farmers’ markets in the summer—and there’s no better place to meet the people who are growing your food and preserving local agriculture. Some grow organically. Others may integrate organic and conventional techniques. Ask them and they’ll tell you exactly how they farm—and why.
Among the farmers I talked to was Kristie Knoll, whose small farm east of San Francisco supplies greens and other produce to Chez Panisse, the world-famous restaurant in Berkeley. Knoll also sells her produce at San Francisco’s farmers’ market on Saturdays, where I caught up with her on a drizzly morning. She offered me a sample of arugula and a bitter green I’d never tasted before, called puntarella. She also insisted that I try an arugula blossom—the small cream-colored flower that appears long after most arugula has been harvested. It was superb—sweet and peppery and beautiful to behold.
Knoll’s produce isn’t certified organic. “When the feds got into organic, we got out,” she told me, explaining that she didn’t want some bureaucrat telling her how to farm. Even so, everything she and her husband produce is grown entirely without chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Their farm goes beyond organic in its commitment to sustainable agriculture. “Sometimes that means losing something to bugs,” she said with a shrug, “but it’s the risk you take.”
Risky or not, she loves her work. All morning she dashed around answering customers’ questions, identifying unusual vegetables—puntarella, cardoons, broccoli rabe—and suggesting ways to prepare them, even passing out printed recipes. Before I said goodbye, I bought a generous bag full of arugula and a bunch of puntarella.
Back in my own kitchen, I chopped the puntarella into thin ribbons and mixed it with olive oil, finely chopped green garlic and anchovies to create a savory spread—a traditional Italian recipe that Knoll had given me. Maybe it was knowing how the greens were raised. Maybe it was the fact that they’d been picked fresh that morning. Maybe it was simply the memory of Kristie Knoll’s almost manic passion for everything she grows. Whatever the reason, it was absolutely delicious.
Where to put your money
Organic produce often costs 50 percent more than conventional produce and that can add up on your grocery bill. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, pored over the results of more than 100,000 USDA and FDA tests for pesticides on 46 popular produce items. The list below is ranked from most to least commonly contaminated produce to help you decide which fruits and vegetables to buy or not buy organic.
The myth of Talibanistan
By M H Ahssan & Syed Saleem Shehzad
Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.
But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.
Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.
The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.
To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.
Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.
Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.
Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.
So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington - now under Obama's "Af-Pak" strategy - simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to "US interests" than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.
What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup - and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.
It's crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour - and the next few hours, days and months - is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir's former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.
Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.
What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA's population is around 3.5 million - overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.
The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel - which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.
During a first stage - let's call it the branding of evil - Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the "threat of al-Qaeda" to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central - the most dangerous place in the world where "the terrorists" and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the "liberators" of US/NATO.
In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator "hell from above" drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the "evil" Taliban) - an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama's Af-Pak surge.
For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "The Shadow" himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.
Now there's a US$5 million price on Baitullah's head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family's South Waziristan bases. But - curioser and curioser - not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah's location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.
And maybe there won't be - especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery - Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar - star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror"), of course deserve star treatment.
Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.
But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.
Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.
The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.
To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.
Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.
Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.
Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.
So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington - now under Obama's "Af-Pak" strategy - simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to "US interests" than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.
What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup - and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.
It's crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour - and the next few hours, days and months - is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir's former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.
Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.
What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA's population is around 3.5 million - overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.
The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel - which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.
During a first stage - let's call it the branding of evil - Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the "threat of al-Qaeda" to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central - the most dangerous place in the world where "the terrorists" and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the "liberators" of US/NATO.
In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator "hell from above" drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the "evil" Taliban) - an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama's Af-Pak surge.
For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "The Shadow" himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.
Now there's a US$5 million price on Baitullah's head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family's South Waziristan bases. But - curioser and curioser - not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah's location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.
And maybe there won't be - especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery - Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar - star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror"), of course deserve star treatment.
So far so good in Indian Elections 2009
By M H Ahssan
As India enters the crucial round three of its month-long, five-phase parliamentary elections on Thursday, the electoral fate of the ruling Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the opposition and the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) prime ministerial candidate Lal Krishna Advani and 1,565 other candidates will be sealed by over 140 million voters.
While Gandhi looks comfortably positioned in her Rae Bareli constituency in Uttar Pradesh, a traditional Nehru-Gandhi dynasty stronghold for over five decades, the Hindu nationalist BJP premier hopeful Advani isn't badly off either in Gandhinagar (Gujarat) where he has trounced his opponents in each election since 1991.
Other prominent political leaders in the fray in this phase include erstwhile prime minister H D Deve Gowda, Sharad Yadav (Madhepura), Shahnawaz Hussein (Bhagalpur), Jyotiraditya Scindia (Guna) and Yashodhara Raje Scindia (Gwalior).
The third round of the polling will cover a swathe of 107 constituencies across 11 states and two union territories. Ballots will be cast for 26 seats in Gujarat, 16 in Madhya Pradesh, 15 in Uttar Pradesh, 14 in West Bengal, 11 each in Bihar and Karnataka, 10 in Maharashtra and one each in Jammu and Kashmir, Sikkim, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. This important polling phase will also witness the election of a new 32-member legislature in India's northeastern border state of Sikkim.
In the wake of this phase, polling will be wrapped up for 372 of the total 543 Lok Sabha (Lower House) seats. Observers point out that by this stage in the 2004 general elections, the National Democratic Alliance combine had bagged 45 seats while the now ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had scooped 30 and the left parties 19.
However, despite the evidence of past arithmetic, poll analysts assert that voter turnout could still swing things either way.
It's quite another matter though that India's egregious heat (43 degrees Celsius plus) and an overall disenchantment with the political class have acted as a dampener for much of the electorate this year. As a result, voter turnout has been a modest 55% across the 12 states in the first two phases of the elections. However, there have been a few surprises, like Andhra Pradesh, which has recorded a turnout of over 68%. Analysts feel that Andhra Pradesh, with a population of more than 70 million, may well turn out to be a key determinant in deciding who India's next ruler could be.
Orissa comes in a notch lower with a 62% turnout. However, the biggest surprise was Amethi (Uttar Pradesh), Gandhi scion Rahul Gandhi's constituency. Despite the Congress machinery being pressed into full service to garner support for him, including his sister Priyanka Vadra's vigorous canvassing, the area recorded a tepid 40% turnout.
Interestingly, according to poll pundits, the lowest turnout for any Lok Sabha election in India was in 1952 (45.7%), while the highest - 64.1% - was witnessed in 1985. The last elections in 2004 saw 58.1% of the electorate turn up to cast their ballots.
Another unusual trend witnessed in this election has been the relatively better (58%) voter turnout of middle and upper class voters in urban areas. This is in direct contrast to past electoral traditions in India where it is usually the economically weaker sections which come out in droves to vote while the rich register abysmal turnouts of 40% or less.
Over the past four general elections since 1977, the trend has been that the poor have invariably voted in greater numbers than the country's upper classes with rural areas recording greater turnout than the urban pockets. This trend, concede poll analysts, contrasts starkly with Western nations where political participation - especially one's franchise - is taken very seriously by the educated and the empowered sections of society.
High turnout or not, election 2009 has also been significant for another reason: an unprecedented level of security with the deployment of over 3 million personnel to keep a strict eye on electoral proceedings. As a result, elections have more or less been peaceful, with only a few sporadic cases of violence. The only major trouble spots have been the Naxalite-affected areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, which witnessed the killing of 19 people across 86 polling stations. Here, Maoists had called for a boycott of the elections and carried out a series of attacks in mid-May.
Be that as it may, all eyes are now focused on May 16, when the poll results will start trickling in after two more rounds of polling. As a single-party government in India looks unlikely in the current scenario - with both the BJP and the Congress likely to fall short of the requisite magic numbers to form a government at the center - at least half a dozen smaller political parties, representing India's multifarious regions, castes and sub-castes, are set to lobby hard for key government positions. There is even a chance that one of their leaders may become next prime minister. And as is entirely expected, vigorous horse-trading will then commence for candidates who carry maximum political weight.
But significantly, unlike past coalitions, this time political alliances will be cobbled together only after all results have been announced. This will further heighten the uncertainty about what kind of political permutation will rule in Delhi. New alliances will need to be forged, and what cannot be entirely ruled out is a third front - a conglomerate of non-BJP and non-Congress parties - forming the government, leaving the two major national parties wringing their hands.
But more than the power-broking, what will be of most concern to the Indian electorate ultimately is the type of coalition government that will emerge out of the current chaos and alphabetical soup of regional parties. The more delicately poised the coalition, analysts say, the more cumbersome it will be for it to make politically contentious choices.
As India enters the crucial round three of its month-long, five-phase parliamentary elections on Thursday, the electoral fate of the ruling Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the opposition and the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) prime ministerial candidate Lal Krishna Advani and 1,565 other candidates will be sealed by over 140 million voters.
While Gandhi looks comfortably positioned in her Rae Bareli constituency in Uttar Pradesh, a traditional Nehru-Gandhi dynasty stronghold for over five decades, the Hindu nationalist BJP premier hopeful Advani isn't badly off either in Gandhinagar (Gujarat) where he has trounced his opponents in each election since 1991.
Other prominent political leaders in the fray in this phase include erstwhile prime minister H D Deve Gowda, Sharad Yadav (Madhepura), Shahnawaz Hussein (Bhagalpur), Jyotiraditya Scindia (Guna) and Yashodhara Raje Scindia (Gwalior).
The third round of the polling will cover a swathe of 107 constituencies across 11 states and two union territories. Ballots will be cast for 26 seats in Gujarat, 16 in Madhya Pradesh, 15 in Uttar Pradesh, 14 in West Bengal, 11 each in Bihar and Karnataka, 10 in Maharashtra and one each in Jammu and Kashmir, Sikkim, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. This important polling phase will also witness the election of a new 32-member legislature in India's northeastern border state of Sikkim.
In the wake of this phase, polling will be wrapped up for 372 of the total 543 Lok Sabha (Lower House) seats. Observers point out that by this stage in the 2004 general elections, the National Democratic Alliance combine had bagged 45 seats while the now ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had scooped 30 and the left parties 19.
However, despite the evidence of past arithmetic, poll analysts assert that voter turnout could still swing things either way.
It's quite another matter though that India's egregious heat (43 degrees Celsius plus) and an overall disenchantment with the political class have acted as a dampener for much of the electorate this year. As a result, voter turnout has been a modest 55% across the 12 states in the first two phases of the elections. However, there have been a few surprises, like Andhra Pradesh, which has recorded a turnout of over 68%. Analysts feel that Andhra Pradesh, with a population of more than 70 million, may well turn out to be a key determinant in deciding who India's next ruler could be.
Orissa comes in a notch lower with a 62% turnout. However, the biggest surprise was Amethi (Uttar Pradesh), Gandhi scion Rahul Gandhi's constituency. Despite the Congress machinery being pressed into full service to garner support for him, including his sister Priyanka Vadra's vigorous canvassing, the area recorded a tepid 40% turnout.
Interestingly, according to poll pundits, the lowest turnout for any Lok Sabha election in India was in 1952 (45.7%), while the highest - 64.1% - was witnessed in 1985. The last elections in 2004 saw 58.1% of the electorate turn up to cast their ballots.
Another unusual trend witnessed in this election has been the relatively better (58%) voter turnout of middle and upper class voters in urban areas. This is in direct contrast to past electoral traditions in India where it is usually the economically weaker sections which come out in droves to vote while the rich register abysmal turnouts of 40% or less.
Over the past four general elections since 1977, the trend has been that the poor have invariably voted in greater numbers than the country's upper classes with rural areas recording greater turnout than the urban pockets. This trend, concede poll analysts, contrasts starkly with Western nations where political participation - especially one's franchise - is taken very seriously by the educated and the empowered sections of society.
High turnout or not, election 2009 has also been significant for another reason: an unprecedented level of security with the deployment of over 3 million personnel to keep a strict eye on electoral proceedings. As a result, elections have more or less been peaceful, with only a few sporadic cases of violence. The only major trouble spots have been the Naxalite-affected areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, which witnessed the killing of 19 people across 86 polling stations. Here, Maoists had called for a boycott of the elections and carried out a series of attacks in mid-May.
Be that as it may, all eyes are now focused on May 16, when the poll results will start trickling in after two more rounds of polling. As a single-party government in India looks unlikely in the current scenario - with both the BJP and the Congress likely to fall short of the requisite magic numbers to form a government at the center - at least half a dozen smaller political parties, representing India's multifarious regions, castes and sub-castes, are set to lobby hard for key government positions. There is even a chance that one of their leaders may become next prime minister. And as is entirely expected, vigorous horse-trading will then commence for candidates who carry maximum political weight.
But significantly, unlike past coalitions, this time political alliances will be cobbled together only after all results have been announced. This will further heighten the uncertainty about what kind of political permutation will rule in Delhi. New alliances will need to be forged, and what cannot be entirely ruled out is a third front - a conglomerate of non-BJP and non-Congress parties - forming the government, leaving the two major national parties wringing their hands.
But more than the power-broking, what will be of most concern to the Indian electorate ultimately is the type of coalition government that will emerge out of the current chaos and alphabetical soup of regional parties. The more delicately poised the coalition, analysts say, the more cumbersome it will be for it to make politically contentious choices.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Crucial Lok Sabha battle - A Hung House looms large
By M H Ahssan
By all accounts, Lok Sabha polls 2009 guarantee a totally fractured verdict that would make government-formation a most daunting task. The task will be daunting because the divisive process will then turn into a ruthless, remorseless numbers game.
The 15th Lok Sabha poll will go down in our parliamentary democracy's annals for the churning - that mythological amrit manthan - by the most divided polity since independence. What kind of visha the churning will produce is difficult to say. There is no Lord Shiva to consume it and save the nation. But this poll guarantees a totally fractured verdict that would make government-formation a most daunting task. The task will be daunting because the divisive process will then turn into a ruthless, remorseless numbers game.
What the country is witnessing in the run-up to the poll, which is most likely to continue post-poll, is amoral politics at its best. The Aya Ram Gaya Ram process that made the late 1960s notorious may well seems like juvenile pranks, what with money power now in full play.
Why is one compelled to draw such a gloomy picture? Not because of the emergence of the regional parties. Also, not because of the rise of the Dalits and those who have been denied their share of power. This twin process has to be accepted and respected.
What is difficult to digest is the approach to politics - of just about everyone demanding a pound of flesh of just every other satrap brazenly trying to be the king or the queen or kingmaker or queenmaker. All norms, all rules are being flouted. All values and virtues are being thrown to the winds as the country prepares to go to the polls.
This has fractured the polity. From a group of national parties, we have moved to two alliances led by national parties with regional allies. There is not even pretence of confidence in reaching out to the entire nation for votes. A party or alliance with nationwide reach and leaders with nationwide appeal is simply missing.
From single parties going to the polls, we are having alliances going to the polls. From two alliances we have witnessed a graduation of sorts to three alliances. And none of the three alliances has the nationwide sweep.
A vast country that once looked a single political entity seems like a conglomerate of states and regions with conflicting interests. People are sought to be divided as per their caste, religion and region. And none is sorry about it - not the players at least.
As the poll process began after the Budget Session of Parliament was completed, the first signs came from three states - Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal. In Orissa, Biju Janata Dal (BJD) ditched its senior partner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), giving a setback not only to the BJP but also to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
In Bihar, two of the staunchest constituents of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad and Lok Janashakti Party (LJP) of Ram Vilas Paswan, cocked a snook at senior partner Congress. What happened to BJP and NDA in Orissa, happened to the Congress and the UPA in the more populous Bihar.
In West Bengal, the Congress finally decided to confront the Left Front. It struck an alliance with Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress, giving her double the number of seats and accepting her as the senior partner. The Congress move has two-fold consequence: it has reduced its own prospects of winning more seats in West Bengal and more important, it has made things more difficult for the Left Front. A Congress-Mamata alliance is a formidable one in terms of political support base and could hurt the Left. With only the tiny Tripura as a safe base, the Left cannot hope to repeat its performance of 2004 poll, since it has ruined its own chances in Kerala where in-fighting within the CPM is rampant and suicidal. This reduces chances of a post-poll alliance of the UPA (or whatever that will be left of it) with the Left parties. The Left support to any move to keep the NDA out of power shall remain crucial.
The NDA too loses out on many fronts - the loss of the Orissa bastion, the parting of ways with Mamata Banerjee and with Telugu Desam Party that supported it from outside.
The NDA, reduced from the mighty 24 constituents in 2004 to just ten, can have the consolation prizes like Ajit Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Asom Gana Parishad in Assam. But they could be crucial, provided they win, when each vote will matter after the poll.
As for the Third Front, the ragtag combine midwifed by the Left has been shunned by the likes of Mayawati and Jayalalithaa. For the rest, it remains a loose conglomerate of parties rejected by the electorates in their states and leaders with overarching ambitions.
Whoever said that it is never-saydie in politics must have meant the likes of Om Prakash Chautala and Bhajan Lal and above all, H D Deve Gowda, whose greed for power and love for his sons paved the way for the BJP rule in Karnataka.
The Left is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It must oppose BJP/NDA ideologically, but must also oppose the Congress/UPA politically. The CPM manifesto promises to undo the defence relations with the US and review the civil nuclear treaty - further reducing its own acceptance at home and in the fast-moving globalised world community. The political travesty, if one may call it, is the statement of CPM leader Prakash Karat that post poll, the Congress can seek support from, or lend support to, the Third Front. This, when even Marxist patriarch Jyoti Basu is not sure of its success.
Only the results will show who the dog is and who will wag its tail. If the CPM has to contend with serious infighting between Kerala Chief Minister Achuthanandan and Peenarayi Vijayan, the BJP had anxious moments when Arun Jaitley, assigned to coordinate the entire campaign, sulked and stayed away from meetings to display his unhappiness at the appointment of Sudhanshu Mittal, essentially a moneybag and a fixer, as coconvener for Northeast states. ThatJaitley had to climb down and Mittal did get the charge of the North-east assigned to him indicates that BJP has to contend with its dirty linen being washed in public.
BJP's woe became acute when Varun Gandhi who it hopes would some day take on cousin Rahul, botched up his electoral chances by making inflammatory speeches. The party had for long contended with the estranged 'bahu' of the Gandhi family, Maneka, but had to distance itself from Varun when the Election Commission took a serious view of his utterances.
Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav also had to contend with a recalcitrant Mohammed Azam Khan. So much so that Yadav had to publicly say that he would go and meet Khan to assuage his hurt feelings.
People switching sides when denied party nomination is the done thing in Indian politics.
Two of the more glaring examples were Nationalist Congress Party's Jaisingrao Gaekwad Patil, who joined Shiv Sena and Congress' Bhavsinh Rathod who joined BJP and got the ticket to contest the Patan seat.
There is a plethora of prime ministerial candidates. Sonia Gandhi has said that Dr Manmohan Singh would be the prime minister after the election. The BJP anointed L K Advani for the post many months ago.
An indication of Lalu Prasad- Paswan alliance was available when Paswan jauntily threw his hat in the prime ministerial ring and Lalu enthusiastically welcomed it. But the Congress, as Paswan later said, never took him seriously. That the two were moving to stall the rise of Mayawati was an open secret. This explains why Mayawati has stuck to her no-pre-poll alliance stand. She rejected overtures from the Third Front leaders like Chandrababu Naidu. This leaves a flicker of hope for Deve Gowda.
Sharad Pawar, the prime ministerial candidate since 1991 (he lost to P V Narasimha Rao) first got his party, NCP, to 'authorise' him to work for the top job. This got support from Shiv Sena that demanded a Maharashtrian prime minister. Both were playing up to their rivals: Pawar to the Congress and Bal Thackeray to the BJP. They succeeded in causing turmoil within both UPA and NDA. It was only after BJP stitched up its alliance with the Sena that Pawar changed the tune to say that he was aware of his 'limitations' and that anyone with a dozen MPs could not just catapult himself/herself to the prime minister's gaddi.
Another person with burning ambitions, but aware of her 'limitations' without admitting so, is Jayalalithaa. She does not have a single member in the 14th Lok Sabha and did not want to queer the pitch with her allies in her do-or-die fight with rival M. Karunanidhi. After the Third Front decided that it would go to the poll without a prime ministerial candidate, apparently a Left stipulation, Jayalalithaa said that she was not in the race "as of now."
The only person who has no qualms about being "in the race" is Mayawati who thinks she can do it single-handedly. A good omen for her was the break-down of the Congress-Samajwadi alliance in Uttar Pradesh. Much would depend on how many seats she gets in UP and how many more in other states where she is putting up a large number of candidates. For the moment, Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party seems to be the only 'national' party ready to take on one and all. There is no sign of dissension and money is not a problem. How the one-woman army handles this battle in a vast terrain remains to be seen. The general perception is that, if not the queen herself, she may end up being the king/queen maker. Even that would give her a position of pre eminence.
By all accounts, Lok Sabha polls 2009 guarantee a totally fractured verdict that would make government-formation a most daunting task. The task will be daunting because the divisive process will then turn into a ruthless, remorseless numbers game.
The 15th Lok Sabha poll will go down in our parliamentary democracy's annals for the churning - that mythological amrit manthan - by the most divided polity since independence. What kind of visha the churning will produce is difficult to say. There is no Lord Shiva to consume it and save the nation. But this poll guarantees a totally fractured verdict that would make government-formation a most daunting task. The task will be daunting because the divisive process will then turn into a ruthless, remorseless numbers game.
What the country is witnessing in the run-up to the poll, which is most likely to continue post-poll, is amoral politics at its best. The Aya Ram Gaya Ram process that made the late 1960s notorious may well seems like juvenile pranks, what with money power now in full play.
Why is one compelled to draw such a gloomy picture? Not because of the emergence of the regional parties. Also, not because of the rise of the Dalits and those who have been denied their share of power. This twin process has to be accepted and respected.
What is difficult to digest is the approach to politics - of just about everyone demanding a pound of flesh of just every other satrap brazenly trying to be the king or the queen or kingmaker or queenmaker. All norms, all rules are being flouted. All values and virtues are being thrown to the winds as the country prepares to go to the polls.
This has fractured the polity. From a group of national parties, we have moved to two alliances led by national parties with regional allies. There is not even pretence of confidence in reaching out to the entire nation for votes. A party or alliance with nationwide reach and leaders with nationwide appeal is simply missing.
From single parties going to the polls, we are having alliances going to the polls. From two alliances we have witnessed a graduation of sorts to three alliances. And none of the three alliances has the nationwide sweep.
A vast country that once looked a single political entity seems like a conglomerate of states and regions with conflicting interests. People are sought to be divided as per their caste, religion and region. And none is sorry about it - not the players at least.
As the poll process began after the Budget Session of Parliament was completed, the first signs came from three states - Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal. In Orissa, Biju Janata Dal (BJD) ditched its senior partner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), giving a setback not only to the BJP but also to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
In Bihar, two of the staunchest constituents of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad and Lok Janashakti Party (LJP) of Ram Vilas Paswan, cocked a snook at senior partner Congress. What happened to BJP and NDA in Orissa, happened to the Congress and the UPA in the more populous Bihar.
In West Bengal, the Congress finally decided to confront the Left Front. It struck an alliance with Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress, giving her double the number of seats and accepting her as the senior partner. The Congress move has two-fold consequence: it has reduced its own prospects of winning more seats in West Bengal and more important, it has made things more difficult for the Left Front. A Congress-Mamata alliance is a formidable one in terms of political support base and could hurt the Left. With only the tiny Tripura as a safe base, the Left cannot hope to repeat its performance of 2004 poll, since it has ruined its own chances in Kerala where in-fighting within the CPM is rampant and suicidal. This reduces chances of a post-poll alliance of the UPA (or whatever that will be left of it) with the Left parties. The Left support to any move to keep the NDA out of power shall remain crucial.
The NDA too loses out on many fronts - the loss of the Orissa bastion, the parting of ways with Mamata Banerjee and with Telugu Desam Party that supported it from outside.
The NDA, reduced from the mighty 24 constituents in 2004 to just ten, can have the consolation prizes like Ajit Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Asom Gana Parishad in Assam. But they could be crucial, provided they win, when each vote will matter after the poll.
As for the Third Front, the ragtag combine midwifed by the Left has been shunned by the likes of Mayawati and Jayalalithaa. For the rest, it remains a loose conglomerate of parties rejected by the electorates in their states and leaders with overarching ambitions.
Whoever said that it is never-saydie in politics must have meant the likes of Om Prakash Chautala and Bhajan Lal and above all, H D Deve Gowda, whose greed for power and love for his sons paved the way for the BJP rule in Karnataka.
The Left is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It must oppose BJP/NDA ideologically, but must also oppose the Congress/UPA politically. The CPM manifesto promises to undo the defence relations with the US and review the civil nuclear treaty - further reducing its own acceptance at home and in the fast-moving globalised world community. The political travesty, if one may call it, is the statement of CPM leader Prakash Karat that post poll, the Congress can seek support from, or lend support to, the Third Front. This, when even Marxist patriarch Jyoti Basu is not sure of its success.
Only the results will show who the dog is and who will wag its tail. If the CPM has to contend with serious infighting between Kerala Chief Minister Achuthanandan and Peenarayi Vijayan, the BJP had anxious moments when Arun Jaitley, assigned to coordinate the entire campaign, sulked and stayed away from meetings to display his unhappiness at the appointment of Sudhanshu Mittal, essentially a moneybag and a fixer, as coconvener for Northeast states. ThatJaitley had to climb down and Mittal did get the charge of the North-east assigned to him indicates that BJP has to contend with its dirty linen being washed in public.
BJP's woe became acute when Varun Gandhi who it hopes would some day take on cousin Rahul, botched up his electoral chances by making inflammatory speeches. The party had for long contended with the estranged 'bahu' of the Gandhi family, Maneka, but had to distance itself from Varun when the Election Commission took a serious view of his utterances.
Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav also had to contend with a recalcitrant Mohammed Azam Khan. So much so that Yadav had to publicly say that he would go and meet Khan to assuage his hurt feelings.
People switching sides when denied party nomination is the done thing in Indian politics.
Two of the more glaring examples were Nationalist Congress Party's Jaisingrao Gaekwad Patil, who joined Shiv Sena and Congress' Bhavsinh Rathod who joined BJP and got the ticket to contest the Patan seat.
There is a plethora of prime ministerial candidates. Sonia Gandhi has said that Dr Manmohan Singh would be the prime minister after the election. The BJP anointed L K Advani for the post many months ago.
An indication of Lalu Prasad- Paswan alliance was available when Paswan jauntily threw his hat in the prime ministerial ring and Lalu enthusiastically welcomed it. But the Congress, as Paswan later said, never took him seriously. That the two were moving to stall the rise of Mayawati was an open secret. This explains why Mayawati has stuck to her no-pre-poll alliance stand. She rejected overtures from the Third Front leaders like Chandrababu Naidu. This leaves a flicker of hope for Deve Gowda.
Sharad Pawar, the prime ministerial candidate since 1991 (he lost to P V Narasimha Rao) first got his party, NCP, to 'authorise' him to work for the top job. This got support from Shiv Sena that demanded a Maharashtrian prime minister. Both were playing up to their rivals: Pawar to the Congress and Bal Thackeray to the BJP. They succeeded in causing turmoil within both UPA and NDA. It was only after BJP stitched up its alliance with the Sena that Pawar changed the tune to say that he was aware of his 'limitations' and that anyone with a dozen MPs could not just catapult himself/herself to the prime minister's gaddi.
Another person with burning ambitions, but aware of her 'limitations' without admitting so, is Jayalalithaa. She does not have a single member in the 14th Lok Sabha and did not want to queer the pitch with her allies in her do-or-die fight with rival M. Karunanidhi. After the Third Front decided that it would go to the poll without a prime ministerial candidate, apparently a Left stipulation, Jayalalithaa said that she was not in the race "as of now."
The only person who has no qualms about being "in the race" is Mayawati who thinks she can do it single-handedly. A good omen for her was the break-down of the Congress-Samajwadi alliance in Uttar Pradesh. Much would depend on how many seats she gets in UP and how many more in other states where she is putting up a large number of candidates. For the moment, Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party seems to be the only 'national' party ready to take on one and all. There is no sign of dissension and money is not a problem. How the one-woman army handles this battle in a vast terrain remains to be seen. The general perception is that, if not the queen herself, she may end up being the king/queen maker. Even that would give her a position of pre eminence.
Who will be PM, will the government be stable?
By M H Ahssan
Predicting electoral outcomes is a dicey business. Many well known astrologers had ended up with egg on their faces in the past. But that has not deterred them from predicting this time round too. HNN met some well known star-gazers to find out what they say about Lok Sabha 2009 polls.
Politics is as uncertain as the weather is. The political scene in the country is warming up as the campaign for the Lok Sabha elections picks up. Politicians are visiting astrologers to know their electoral future. While four astrologers predicted that the BJP would come to power, three favoured the Congress. If astrology is a science, why is there a divided prediction? We will have to wait till the results are out and the new government is formed to know who is right.
The NDA will form the government with L K Advani the most likely Prime Minister. Using its "Hindutva card", the BJP would emerge as the largest party followed by the Congress with others trailing behind. This is the prediction by some seasoned astrologers who have made a name in the field. N P Thareja, Dr S S Gola and Shailender Chamoli, all known for their political forecasts. say that Advani would be the Prime Minister. However, Dr Gola says that the new government would be a precariously fledgling which may face "the 100 per cent chances" of mid-term elections. But this may happen after 2010. But Thareja says that after November 2 this year, the new dispensation will enjoy stability.
Chamoli says that Advani would definitely be the Prime Minister, but there would be chances of horse trading on large scale to reach the magic figure of 272 in the government formation. Money is going to play a big role.
Lachchman Das Madan, known for his predictions on incidents the world over, including the 9/11, says the Congress will not come to power on its own and Sonia Gandhi will not become the Prime Minister. He predicts that a dark horse but a younger person could be the Prime Minister. The chuppa rustam could be either Arun Jaitley or Narendra Modi.
Sonia may be "forced" to become PM Panchkula-based astrologer P Khurrana, however, says that the UPA would come back to power, Congress would be the largest party and Sonia would be "forced"
to become the Prime Minister. Agreeing with Khurrana, Delhibased lady astrologer, Ms Bhavna Bhatia, emphatically says that UPA government will come back to power and Manmohan Singh would again be the Prime Minister.
"In Sonia Gandhi's horoscope Saturn's mutual aspect with Jupiter indicates a big strength of individuality and recognition. Under the circumstances she may not like her candidature for Primeministership but she will be forced to become the Prime Minister. This will be a period of acid test for Sonia and she may again resist this. However; "Shasht Chandi Yajna" is suggested for Sonia. Manmohan Singh will be the candidate for Prime Minister but his tenure will be short lived. The name of the next PM would start with alphabet 'S' or 'A'," Khurrana says.
Indian calendar, the New Year Vikrami Samvat 2066 which began on March 27 (Friday), represents Venus, also known as the "king of the year". Manmohan Singh will again be the Prime Minister with the support of coalition partners, particularly women MPs, says Bhavna Bhatia. Her husband Ashok Bhatia, a researcher in Numerology, says that since No. 6 (Venus) is present in Manmohan Singh's numeroscope, he will become the PM again with the support of women. Jayalalitha, Mamata and even Mayawati are likely to rally around him, apart from Sonia Gandhi.
However, both Manmohan Singh and Advani share No.8 in their numeroscope. While Manmohan has 2+6=8, Advani has straight 8. No.6 represents Venus, which is missing in Advani's numeroscope. Manmohan Singh has 2,6,9,3,2 as numbers in his numeroscope, while Advani has 2,7,8 with no presence of No.6. Hence, Advani has no chance of becoming PM, contends Ashok Bhatia.
Stability or Instability
The malefic effect on India's horoscope shows that the political situation in India will further deteriorate due to some power hungry leaders. A prominent leader whose name starts with alphabet A, M, or S will try to destabilise the government, says Khurrana. This time more women would get elected and they would remain loyal to their parties. Cutting cross the party lines only youth MPs would help make a new government, says Madan.
After October 13, Mr Madan says, things would look better for the new government. The country would take a new turn if a youthful person like Narendra Modi or Arun Jaitley becomes the Prime Minister.
Other contenders like Rahul Gandhi, Deve Gowda, Sharad Pawar, Mayawati or Prakash Karat stand no chance of getting closer to the seat of the Prime Minister, says Madan.
Bhavna says that the new government under the Prime Ministership of Manmohan Singh would face ups and down but would somehow sail through for the next five years, providing stability to the government.
On economic front
On the economic slowdown, Khurrana says since Jupiter is in 8th position but deceptively placed, the economic position may not improve on large scale but the country will see major changes on financial front in 2010. Over all it will be a period of growth on international map. India will become 'super power' in the next decade.
Thareja says that the economic melt-down has been caused due to configuration of Rahu and Jupiter. The Jupiter's debilitated position since December 2008 would end on account of its moving onward to Kumbh Rashi on December 19 this year. Rahu is also getting apart from it on November 2, 2009. After which there will be an ease in the present state of economy. Further, from May 2010 with the Jupiter entering its own sign Meen Rashi, the world will see an end to the depressive economy and money situation. There will be boost in economy and an era of prosperity will set in.
Predicting electoral outcomes is a dicey business. Many well known astrologers had ended up with egg on their faces in the past. But that has not deterred them from predicting this time round too. HNN met some well known star-gazers to find out what they say about Lok Sabha 2009 polls.
Politics is as uncertain as the weather is. The political scene in the country is warming up as the campaign for the Lok Sabha elections picks up. Politicians are visiting astrologers to know their electoral future. While four astrologers predicted that the BJP would come to power, three favoured the Congress. If astrology is a science, why is there a divided prediction? We will have to wait till the results are out and the new government is formed to know who is right.
The NDA will form the government with L K Advani the most likely Prime Minister. Using its "Hindutva card", the BJP would emerge as the largest party followed by the Congress with others trailing behind. This is the prediction by some seasoned astrologers who have made a name in the field. N P Thareja, Dr S S Gola and Shailender Chamoli, all known for their political forecasts. say that Advani would be the Prime Minister. However, Dr Gola says that the new government would be a precariously fledgling which may face "the 100 per cent chances" of mid-term elections. But this may happen after 2010. But Thareja says that after November 2 this year, the new dispensation will enjoy stability.
Chamoli says that Advani would definitely be the Prime Minister, but there would be chances of horse trading on large scale to reach the magic figure of 272 in the government formation. Money is going to play a big role.
Lachchman Das Madan, known for his predictions on incidents the world over, including the 9/11, says the Congress will not come to power on its own and Sonia Gandhi will not become the Prime Minister. He predicts that a dark horse but a younger person could be the Prime Minister. The chuppa rustam could be either Arun Jaitley or Narendra Modi.
Sonia may be "forced" to become PM Panchkula-based astrologer P Khurrana, however, says that the UPA would come back to power, Congress would be the largest party and Sonia would be "forced"
to become the Prime Minister. Agreeing with Khurrana, Delhibased lady astrologer, Ms Bhavna Bhatia, emphatically says that UPA government will come back to power and Manmohan Singh would again be the Prime Minister.
"In Sonia Gandhi's horoscope Saturn's mutual aspect with Jupiter indicates a big strength of individuality and recognition. Under the circumstances she may not like her candidature for Primeministership but she will be forced to become the Prime Minister. This will be a period of acid test for Sonia and she may again resist this. However; "Shasht Chandi Yajna" is suggested for Sonia. Manmohan Singh will be the candidate for Prime Minister but his tenure will be short lived. The name of the next PM would start with alphabet 'S' or 'A'," Khurrana says.
Indian calendar, the New Year Vikrami Samvat 2066 which began on March 27 (Friday), represents Venus, also known as the "king of the year". Manmohan Singh will again be the Prime Minister with the support of coalition partners, particularly women MPs, says Bhavna Bhatia. Her husband Ashok Bhatia, a researcher in Numerology, says that since No. 6 (Venus) is present in Manmohan Singh's numeroscope, he will become the PM again with the support of women. Jayalalitha, Mamata and even Mayawati are likely to rally around him, apart from Sonia Gandhi.
However, both Manmohan Singh and Advani share No.8 in their numeroscope. While Manmohan has 2+6=8, Advani has straight 8. No.6 represents Venus, which is missing in Advani's numeroscope. Manmohan Singh has 2,6,9,3,2 as numbers in his numeroscope, while Advani has 2,7,8 with no presence of No.6. Hence, Advani has no chance of becoming PM, contends Ashok Bhatia.
Stability or Instability
The malefic effect on India's horoscope shows that the political situation in India will further deteriorate due to some power hungry leaders. A prominent leader whose name starts with alphabet A, M, or S will try to destabilise the government, says Khurrana. This time more women would get elected and they would remain loyal to their parties. Cutting cross the party lines only youth MPs would help make a new government, says Madan.
After October 13, Mr Madan says, things would look better for the new government. The country would take a new turn if a youthful person like Narendra Modi or Arun Jaitley becomes the Prime Minister.
Other contenders like Rahul Gandhi, Deve Gowda, Sharad Pawar, Mayawati or Prakash Karat stand no chance of getting closer to the seat of the Prime Minister, says Madan.
Bhavna says that the new government under the Prime Ministership of Manmohan Singh would face ups and down but would somehow sail through for the next five years, providing stability to the government.
On economic front
On the economic slowdown, Khurrana says since Jupiter is in 8th position but deceptively placed, the economic position may not improve on large scale but the country will see major changes on financial front in 2010. Over all it will be a period of growth on international map. India will become 'super power' in the next decade.
Thareja says that the economic melt-down has been caused due to configuration of Rahu and Jupiter. The Jupiter's debilitated position since December 2008 would end on account of its moving onward to Kumbh Rashi on December 19 this year. Rahu is also getting apart from it on November 2, 2009. After which there will be an ease in the present state of economy. Further, from May 2010 with the Jupiter entering its own sign Meen Rashi, the world will see an end to the depressive economy and money situation. There will be boost in economy and an era of prosperity will set in.
Who will be PM, will the government be stable?
By M H Ahssan
Predicting electoral outcomes is a dicey business. Many well known astrologers had ended up with egg on their faces in the past. But that has not deterred them from predicting this time round too. HNN met some well known star-gazers to find out what they say about Lok Sabha 2009 polls.
Politics is as uncertain as the weather is. The political scene in the country is warming up as the campaign for the Lok Sabha elections picks up. Politicians are visiting astrologers to know their electoral future. While four astrologers predicted that the BJP would come to power, three favoured the Congress. If astrology is a science, why is there a divided prediction? We will have to wait till the results are out and the new government is formed to know who is right.
The NDA will form the government with L K Advani the most likely Prime Minister. Using its "Hindutva card", the BJP would emerge as the largest party followed by the Congress with others trailing behind. This is the prediction by some seasoned astrologers who have made a name in the field. N P Thareja, Dr S S Gola and Shailender Chamoli, all known for their political forecasts. say that Advani would be the Prime Minister. However, Dr Gola says that the new government would be a precariously fledgling which may face "the 100 per cent chances" of mid-term elections. But this may happen after 2010. But Thareja says that after November 2 this year, the new dispensation will enjoy stability.
Chamoli says that Advani would definitely be the Prime Minister, but there would be chances of horse trading on large scale to reach the magic figure of 272 in the government formation. Money is going to play a big role.
Lachchman Das Madan, known for his predictions on incidents the world over, including the 9/11, says the Congress will not come to power on its own and Sonia Gandhi will not become the Prime Minister. He predicts that a dark horse but a younger person could be the Prime Minister. The chuppa rustam could be either Arun Jaitley or Narendra Modi.
Sonia may be "forced" to become PM Panchkula-based astrologer P Khurrana, however, says that the UPA would come back to power, Congress would be the largest party and Sonia would be "forced"
to become the Prime Minister. Agreeing with Khurrana, Delhibased lady astrologer, Ms Bhavna Bhatia, emphatically says that UPA government will come back to power and Manmohan Singh would again be the Prime Minister.
"In Sonia Gandhi's horoscope Saturn's mutual aspect with Jupiter indicates a big strength of individuality and recognition. Under the circumstances she may not like her candidature for Primeministership but she will be forced to become the Prime Minister. This will be a period of acid test for Sonia and she may again resist this. However; "Shasht Chandi Yajna" is suggested for Sonia. Manmohan Singh will be the candidate for Prime Minister but his tenure will be short lived. The name of the next PM would start with alphabet 'S' or 'A'," Khurrana says.
Indian calendar, the New Year Vikrami Samvat 2066 which began on March 27 (Friday), represents Venus, also known as the "king of the year". Manmohan Singh will again be the Prime Minister with the support of coalition partners, particularly women MPs, says Bhavna Bhatia. Her husband Ashok Bhatia, a researcher in Numerology, says that since No. 6 (Venus) is present in Manmohan Singh's numeroscope, he will become the PM again with the support of women. Jayalalitha, Mamata and even Mayawati are likely to rally around him, apart from Sonia Gandhi.
However, both Manmohan Singh and Advani share No.8 in their numeroscope. While Manmohan has 2+6=8, Advani has straight 8. No.6 represents Venus, which is missing in Advani's numeroscope. Manmohan Singh has 2,6,9,3,2 as numbers in his numeroscope, while Advani has 2,7,8 with no presence of No.6. Hence, Advani has no chance of becoming PM, contends Ashok Bhatia.
Stability or Instability
The malefic effect on India's horoscope shows that the political situation in India will further deteriorate due to some power hungry leaders. A prominent leader whose name starts with alphabet A, M, or S will try to destabilise the government, says Khurrana. This time more women would get elected and they would remain loyal to their parties. Cutting cross the party lines only youth MPs would help make a new government, says Madan.
After October 13, Mr Madan says, things would look better for the new government. The country would take a new turn if a youthful person like Narendra Modi or Arun Jaitley becomes the Prime Minister.
Other contenders like Rahul Gandhi, Deve Gowda, Sharad Pawar, Mayawati or Prakash Karat stand no chance of getting closer to the seat of the Prime Minister, says Madan.
Bhavna says that the new government under the Prime Ministership of Manmohan Singh would face ups and down but would somehow sail through for the next five years, providing stability to the government.
On economic front
On the economic slowdown, Khurrana says since Jupiter is in 8th position but deceptively placed, the economic position may not improve on large scale but the country will see major changes on financial front in 2010. Over all it will be a period of growth on international map. India will become 'super power' in the next decade.
Thareja says that the economic melt-down has been caused due to configuration of Rahu and Jupiter. The Jupiter's debilitated position since December 2008 would end on account of its moving onward to Kumbh Rashi on December 19 this year. Rahu is also getting apart from it on November 2, 2009. After which there will be an ease in the present state of economy. Further, from May 2010 with the Jupiter entering its own sign Meen Rashi, the world will see an end to the depressive economy and money situation. There will be boost in economy and an era of prosperity will set in.
Predicting electoral outcomes is a dicey business. Many well known astrologers had ended up with egg on their faces in the past. But that has not deterred them from predicting this time round too. HNN met some well known star-gazers to find out what they say about Lok Sabha 2009 polls.
Politics is as uncertain as the weather is. The political scene in the country is warming up as the campaign for the Lok Sabha elections picks up. Politicians are visiting astrologers to know their electoral future. While four astrologers predicted that the BJP would come to power, three favoured the Congress. If astrology is a science, why is there a divided prediction? We will have to wait till the results are out and the new government is formed to know who is right.
The NDA will form the government with L K Advani the most likely Prime Minister. Using its "Hindutva card", the BJP would emerge as the largest party followed by the Congress with others trailing behind. This is the prediction by some seasoned astrologers who have made a name in the field. N P Thareja, Dr S S Gola and Shailender Chamoli, all known for their political forecasts. say that Advani would be the Prime Minister. However, Dr Gola says that the new government would be a precariously fledgling which may face "the 100 per cent chances" of mid-term elections. But this may happen after 2010. But Thareja says that after November 2 this year, the new dispensation will enjoy stability.
Chamoli says that Advani would definitely be the Prime Minister, but there would be chances of horse trading on large scale to reach the magic figure of 272 in the government formation. Money is going to play a big role.
Lachchman Das Madan, known for his predictions on incidents the world over, including the 9/11, says the Congress will not come to power on its own and Sonia Gandhi will not become the Prime Minister. He predicts that a dark horse but a younger person could be the Prime Minister. The chuppa rustam could be either Arun Jaitley or Narendra Modi.
Sonia may be "forced" to become PM Panchkula-based astrologer P Khurrana, however, says that the UPA would come back to power, Congress would be the largest party and Sonia would be "forced"
to become the Prime Minister. Agreeing with Khurrana, Delhibased lady astrologer, Ms Bhavna Bhatia, emphatically says that UPA government will come back to power and Manmohan Singh would again be the Prime Minister.
"In Sonia Gandhi's horoscope Saturn's mutual aspect with Jupiter indicates a big strength of individuality and recognition. Under the circumstances she may not like her candidature for Primeministership but she will be forced to become the Prime Minister. This will be a period of acid test for Sonia and she may again resist this. However; "Shasht Chandi Yajna" is suggested for Sonia. Manmohan Singh will be the candidate for Prime Minister but his tenure will be short lived. The name of the next PM would start with alphabet 'S' or 'A'," Khurrana says.
Indian calendar, the New Year Vikrami Samvat 2066 which began on March 27 (Friday), represents Venus, also known as the "king of the year". Manmohan Singh will again be the Prime Minister with the support of coalition partners, particularly women MPs, says Bhavna Bhatia. Her husband Ashok Bhatia, a researcher in Numerology, says that since No. 6 (Venus) is present in Manmohan Singh's numeroscope, he will become the PM again with the support of women. Jayalalitha, Mamata and even Mayawati are likely to rally around him, apart from Sonia Gandhi.
However, both Manmohan Singh and Advani share No.8 in their numeroscope. While Manmohan has 2+6=8, Advani has straight 8. No.6 represents Venus, which is missing in Advani's numeroscope. Manmohan Singh has 2,6,9,3,2 as numbers in his numeroscope, while Advani has 2,7,8 with no presence of No.6. Hence, Advani has no chance of becoming PM, contends Ashok Bhatia.
Stability or Instability
The malefic effect on India's horoscope shows that the political situation in India will further deteriorate due to some power hungry leaders. A prominent leader whose name starts with alphabet A, M, or S will try to destabilise the government, says Khurrana. This time more women would get elected and they would remain loyal to their parties. Cutting cross the party lines only youth MPs would help make a new government, says Madan.
After October 13, Mr Madan says, things would look better for the new government. The country would take a new turn if a youthful person like Narendra Modi or Arun Jaitley becomes the Prime Minister.
Other contenders like Rahul Gandhi, Deve Gowda, Sharad Pawar, Mayawati or Prakash Karat stand no chance of getting closer to the seat of the Prime Minister, says Madan.
Bhavna says that the new government under the Prime Ministership of Manmohan Singh would face ups and down but would somehow sail through for the next five years, providing stability to the government.
On economic front
On the economic slowdown, Khurrana says since Jupiter is in 8th position but deceptively placed, the economic position may not improve on large scale but the country will see major changes on financial front in 2010. Over all it will be a period of growth on international map. India will become 'super power' in the next decade.
Thareja says that the economic melt-down has been caused due to configuration of Rahu and Jupiter. The Jupiter's debilitated position since December 2008 would end on account of its moving onward to Kumbh Rashi on December 19 this year. Rahu is also getting apart from it on November 2, 2009. After which there will be an ease in the present state of economy. Further, from May 2010 with the Jupiter entering its own sign Meen Rashi, the world will see an end to the depressive economy and money situation. There will be boost in economy and an era of prosperity will set in.
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