PUTTING THIS HERE FOR SAFEKEEPING

Community Voices Speaking Out on the Gill Tract Albany

This Plant Your Dream Blog relates to other issues I am researching.
This is from:

http://occupythefarm.org




This Plant Your Dream Research Blog was posted
11:46 am; November 17, 2014

FROM A COMMENT BY
Update on the ‘Occupy the Farm’ | Gill Tract Struggle
liberatetheland

All graphics and images courtesy of OTF
Comment by Devon G. Peña, Ph.D. | Las Colonias de San Pablo, CO

The movement in Albany counts with the presence and leadership of faculty like Dr. Miguel Altieri, one of the world’s most prominent and respected of all agroecologists. It also counts with the support and participation of Mesoamericans including DREAM Act eligible students. The Gill Tract movement has organic relationships with all autonomous food justice organizations and networks across the Bay Area and well beyond.

The University of California has a moral, political, and educational obligation to invest in helping the students, faculty, and community members transform the Gill Tract into one of the largest urban farms in the US. Converting this rare patch of urban open space to real estate development would be a perverse act and demonstrate the UC system’s insensitive the surrounding disregard for community and its urgent food justice needs and priorities.

It is not like the University is hurting for resources to invest in corn or other crop research. The flow of money (research dollars) from commercial agricultural biotechnology corporations and the federal government and philanthropic endowments is more than very substantial. A $1 million investment to make the Gill Tract into a community- and University-based food justice farm and research center would serve a wider public good and urgent community needs. That would represent less than 1% of the annual expenditures in public-private biotechnology research across the rest of the UC system, if we include Davis.

It is preposterous and immoral for the UC President and system authorities to treat the Gill Tract as just another commercial asset. This land is older than the state. It has deep roots. The Gill Tract is a rare opportunity to work to reconnect people to the land. It is a moral choice and we could make the Gill Tract into a center of service, learning, research, and teaching about how to make our cities more sustainable, resilient, equitable, and self-provisioning. I am re-posting the update by Tiffany Tsing as it appeared in Food First on July 4.

–

Occupy the Farm A STRUGGLE FOR LAND SOVEREIGNTY IN THE EAST BAY

Tiffany Tsang | Berkeley, CA | July 14, 2013

Occupy the Farm (OTF), an assembly of activists from the San Francisco Bay Area, is raising its voice against unsustainable development, reclaiming a piece of land in Albany known as the “Gill Tract” that is slated for commercial development. The Gill Tract, previously dedicated to sustainable agricultural research, has become an important battleground in the struggle for land and food sovereignty in the Bay Area.


6. Lisch came to the UC with a $25 million research grant from the agricultural department of Novartis for this project. The agricultural department of Novartis is now part of Syngenta, a seed and fertilizer company with the third largest market share in the world in 2009. Sarah Hake researches genes in maize to improve switchgrass for efficient biofuel production. The research of these two principal investigators takes up most of the north side of the Gill Tract. (Shand, Hope. “The Big Six: A Profile of Corporate Power in Seeds, Agrochemicals and Biotech.” The Heritage Farm Companion, Summer 2012) Chuck, George S., Christian Tobias, Lan Sun, Florian Kraemer, Chenlin Li, Dean Dibble, Rohit Arora, et al. “Overexpression of the Maize Corngrass1 microRNA Prevents Flowering, Improves Digestibility, and Increases Starch Content of Switchgrass.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 42 (October 18, 2011): 17550-17555. doi:10.1073/pnas.1113971108.




LINKS RELATED

Leslie Goldman https://ignitechannel.com/occupy-farm-organizers-effie.../

This interviews Effie Rawlings and Krystof Lopaur. Published November 13, 2014

https://ignitechannel.com/occupy-farm-organizers-effie-rawlings-krystof-lopaur-talk-profound-benefits-food-justice-movement/





http://www.dailycal.org/2014/11/12/occupy-farm/



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