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Visit to Organic Farm near Berlin

Sided by alot of intersted persons and a journalist, participants of the Intercontinental Caravan visited the organic farm "Appledream" near Müncheberg. The farm supplies Berlin households with crates, stuffed with organically grown food on a subscription base.

The Indian visitors asked many questions about costs, techniques and the struggle against diseases in organic agriculture, and about the breeding of livestock under an ecological perspective.

Lunch we had at "Oecolea", a rural commune, only a couple of miles away. After we had been presented some projects running in the commune, the people from the Caravan met with local anti-GMO activists, discussing the problems of genetically manipulated seeds — lasting for only one year, not being able to promulgate itself, but still expelling old and highly resistant traditional seeds from the indian market. This drives Indian farmers into debt and dependency with multinational companies such as Monsanto and AgreVo. Such developments are contradictory to their views of self-determination and self-sufficiency in agriculture, barring their ways to real independence from western european and northern american industrial nations.

In a forum-discussion, organised for the evening as a part of the internationalist days in the Berlin Technical University, such views were restated with even stronger force.


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