One of the biggest seed banks in the world could soon be replaced by a housing development. (Al Jazeera)

One of the world’s largest and most important seeds banks, in Pavlovsk near St Petersburg, Russia, has come under threat of obliteration to make way for new private housing development. The historic Pavlovsk Experimental Station, started in 1926 by Russian botanist and agricultural scientist Nikolai Vavilov, is an agricultural experiment station and gene bank containing some 5,000 different varieties of fruits and berries. An estimated 90% of the collection is found in no other seed bank or research collection in the world, meaning that if development moves forward, these varieties are most likely to be lost forever. To highlight the gravity of this, that includes more than 1,000 varieties of strawberries alone!

If the site is closed down it will be a massive blow to Europe’s biodiversity and our already fragile ecology. Perhaps all is not yet lost though; President Medvedev tweeted two weeks ago that the issue of the closure will be, in his own words, “scrutinised”. Well, he has been talking about food security and agriculture for a while, most recently stating that “There will be no food shortages.” Now all there is left is to start connecting the dots..

More here, here and, if you’re a twitterer, here: @kremlinrussia_e.

Some late night thoughts to new friends in Almería. Thanks.

San Isidro de Níjar, April 2010.

Andalusia, April 2010.

Sebastian Scheiner / Associated Press

From the New York Times’ Lens blog on June 2, 2010, this image by Sebastian Scheiner. Caption reads:

“Israeli youths released doves and balloons during a rally in support of the military after a deadly raid by Israel’s navy on an aid flotilla bound for the blockaded Gaza Strip.”

On June 4, 2010, an article in The Guardian has the following image by by Vadim Ghirda:

Vadim Ghirda/AP

followed by the news that independent autopsy reports many of the dead aboard the aid flotilla were shot in the head at close range.

“Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.

Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.

The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.

The findings emerged as more survivors gave their accounts of the raids. Ismail Patel, the chairman of Leicester-based pro-Palestinian group Friends of al-Aqsa, who returned to Britain today, told how he witnessed some of the fatal shootings and claimed that Israel had operated a “shoot to kill policy”.

He calculated that during the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.

The new information about the manner and intensity of the killings undermines Israel’s insistence that its soldiers opened fire only in self defence and in response to attacks by the activists.

“Given the very disturbing evidence which contradicts the line from the Israeli media and suggests that Israelis have been very selective in the way they have addressed this, there is now an overwhelming need for an international inquiry,” said Andrew Slaughter MP, a member of the all party group on Britain and Palestine.

Israel said tonight the number of bullets found in the bodies did not alter the fact that the soldiers were acting in self defence. “The only situation when a soldier shot was when it was a clearly a life-threatening situation,” said a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London. “Pulling the trigger quickly can result in a few bullets being in the same body, but does not change the fact they were in a life-threatening situation.”

Protesters from across the country will tomorrow march from Downing Street to the Israeli embassy to call for Israel to be held to account for its actions.

Earlier this week, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said the government would call for an inquiry under international auspices if Israel refuses to establish an independent inquiry, including an international presence.”

Amen.

Photo by dad.

Just to keep things flowing a bit, a small announcement: I graduated from art school a couple days ago with the opening of the exhibition Afgang 10 at the Aarhus Art Building, shown above. The work on show consists of the last two months’ material from Spain and around. It’s not much, at most a preliminary storyboard intending to connect themes and stories, but if you’re in town (or country), feel free to drop by for some cultural enrichment before June 13. There are five other graduating artists on the show, and it’s very odd altogether, but I think in a good way.

Thanks to family and friends who came for the opening from near and far away – it meant a lot to me. That’s my dear brother right there in the front. Can you tell?

No, it didn’t snow.

José Manuel, a greenhouse farmer in San Agustín, Almería.

Warehouse workers in the alhóndigas, greenhouse farmers’ marketplace.

Time for an update on where this is all coming from; El Ejido. This is where I am, a town in the southern Spanish province of Almería, the center of intensive agriculture known as the ‘sea of plastic’ – named after the thousands of hectares of plastic covered greenhouses that produce very much of the vegetables found in Europe’s supermarkets. It is also a hub for cheap immigrant labour and, it would appear, racial segregation – whether intended or unintended. Figures vary from source to source, but we have been told that there are as many as 140.000 immigrant workers here, which as far as I can tell outnumbers the Spanish population.

Oh, and I’m here with Lucas, didn’t I tell? Lucas has based himself in Spain for the time being, working out of Galicia up in the leafy north, on issues of farming and food production, among other things. When he started talking about El Ejido months back, around the same time I decided to try and do some work about immigration along Europe’s southern border, our ways seemed destined to meet here. So for the past five days we’ve been bumming around the region, among greenhouse after greenhouse, meeting people involved in various steps in either production or immigration, or both. Though we’re realizing there is very much work to be done here, and that it would take much more time than we have right now, we surely haven’t been lazy. Lots and lots of good walking, and more ahead in the next few days. It’s a very strange landscape.

More soon…

Market price chart in the alhóndigas, greenhouse farmers’ marketplace. Price of end-season cucumber: €0.18 per kilo.

The Medina in Tetouan, Morocco.

There’s been many, many reports and testimonies coming out of Iraq of totally disproportionate use of aggression by coalition soldiers, be they the contracted mercenaries of Xe/Blackwater (read here, here and most particularly here for some of the most gruesome accounts), US Army soldiers (or robots). Very sadly they are most likely but the tip of the iceberg. The above video, posted on wikileaks.org yesterday, probably spells much about today’s video game generation of soldiers that we send into combat completely detached from reality, and about the training they receive. The video shows how a US helicopter crew engages and kills a group of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, based on grainy video images showing ‘insurgents’. In fact the people on the street were unarmed civilians and a Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver, Saeed Chmagh, whose cameras were mistaken for weapons and quickly translated into ‘AK47′s and ‘RPGs’. The video pretty much speaks for itself, but the N.Y.Times also wrote about it here. Just horrible, horrible.

Drawings by immigrants in the Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes (CETI). Ceuta, 2010.

Yussuf, 2010.

A picture of Yussuf, right on the border literally between Ceuta and Morocco. I had been keeping an eye on him for a couple minutes, shuffling slowly across the border, when he grabbed and greeted me in Danish. So, we fell into chatting in a jumble of four languages (including Swedish), and it turned out that he lived in Copenhagen for a period in the sixties. Sadly I lost him when I was turned back at the border control to go back for a stamp, but I hope I can find Yussuf again in Tetouan.

Update April 10: I couldn’t.

Hi there, back again. I will now make a turn in my blog posting and make it much more focused, regular and in-depth as I am beginning my new long-term project on migration in Europe. In about a week’s time I will be making a first research trip southern Spain, where I will visit the provinces of Cadíz –on the Strait of Gibraltar– and Almería where I will be briefly reuniting with Simca, who is doing some undoubtably great work on an organic farm there, and Lucas with whom I am making plans for collaborations in Spain and beyond. I am also looking forward to cook up a storm with Simca from her organic produce. But first of all the excursion is for seeking out places and people and getting some more direction on this project. This also means I will be writing a lot more in the near future, but also will be shifting focus to developing a project site, which currently sits at thomaselsted.net. Alongside an exhibition I am having in May-June, this site will be the site of investigation of migration across and around the external border of the European Union, with a geographic focus on migrants from North Africa into Spain via the Mediterranean. More on that soon.

Still from We Feed The World (2005)

On the subject, I just watched the really terrific documentary We Feed The World on global vs. local food production and the internal logics of global foodstuffs corporations. The movie can be watched online for free here. It features a vital interview with Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and some frank statements by the CEO of Nestlé. Here’s Ziegler:

“The absurdity of the situation in the agricultural markets today is the following: The rich countries, that is, the EU and the United States, give subsidies to their farmers for the production and export of their produce, last year to the tune of 349 billion dollars, [almost] a billion dollars a day. And the consequences of that is dumping, the destruction of agriculture in the southern hemisphere where there’s almost nothing else apart from peasant agriculture. To take an example, the capital of the republic of Senegal in West Africa, is Dakar. This city has the largest agricultural market in West Africa, the Sandagar Market. If you go to Sandagar Market, you can buy European vegetables, European fruit, European potatoes and so on, for a third of the local prices. So to the Senegalese peasant, even if he works himself into the ground for 18 hours a day under the burning sun, he hasn’t got a chance of being able to survive by working his own land.
So what can he do? If he’s still got the energy he risks his life as an illegal immigrant via the Strait of Gibraltar and has to hire himself out somewhere or other in Southern Spain or work as a street sweeper in Paris in inhumane conditions.”

“Free trade has nothing at all to do with freedom, that’s an enormous lie. It’s the freedom of the predatory animal in the jungle when Nestlé, for example, takes on an African farmers’ syndicate. That’s like Mike Tyson going into the ring against an unemployed and undernourished Bengali.
And the corporations, the power of the corporations in today’s world is expressed in a figure published last year by the World Bank: Last year, 52% of the gross world product, that means all the wealth produced in the world in a year, was controlled by 500 global corporations. And these global corporations are run purely with the aim of maximizing profits. The largest food product corporation in the world, with almost 300.000 employees, operating on five continents, and controlling over 8.000 brands, is Nestlé.
Nestlé is currently headed by a likable, suntanned Austrian. But he obeys the internal logic of the corporation, that is, value-free profit maximization. And if he doesn’t every year produce new, astronomical profits for his shareholders, then he’ll be out on his ear. The huge power he has today, over hundreds of millions of people in the world, won’t help him one bit. Profit maximization is the murderous strategy of global corporation hierarchies.”

– Jean Ziegler, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

The suntanned Austrian CEO of Nestlé is named Peter Brabeck. From his office in Switzerland, he says:

“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a matter of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter.
The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that you as a human being should have a right to water. That is the one, extreme solution.
And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other it should have a market value. Personally I think it’s better to give foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.
I’m still of the opinion that the biggest social responsibility of any CEO is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued long-term existence will we be able to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world.”

“We’ve got to create a positive image of the world for people, and I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be positive about the future. We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want and still we go around as if we were mourning for something.”

Chair of the world’s largest producer–exporter of bottled drinking water, perhaps that’s a hint to what solutions he in having in mind, and his salary of $11 million annually, may help to explain why he’s never had it so good. The reality for the small farmers and hungry people around the globe, those millions of people which he goes on to say depend on his company, is a bit different, and less favourable: As Karl Otrok, the production director in Romania for Pioneer, one of the world’s largest producers of hybrid (GM) seeds for agriculture, says to a traditional Romanian farmer:

“I hope that the people here, the small farmers, will not have enough money to buy our seeds, that you will stay with your good seeds (…) We came here long time ago and we fucked all the West. And now we came to Romania, and we will fuck all the agriculture here.”