WE HAVE NO BANANAS

New Yorker; 1/10/2011, Vol. 86 Issue 43, p28-34

Abstract:The article discusses the effect of the Tropical Race Four plant disease on Cavendish banana crops in Australia and Asia. Emphasis is given to the disease's progress in destroying banana crops in Darwin, Northern Territory and the development of genetically modified disease-resistant fruit. Other topics include biotechnology research on antifungal genes, the threat to Latin and South American crops, and the United Fruit Company..

A REPORTER AT LARGE

Can scientists defeat a devastating blight?

Darwin, the capital of Australia's Northern Territory, is more than a thousand miles northwest of the country's largest banana plantations, which are centered around Innisfail, on the eastern seaboard. A ramshackle place, Darwin is known for its many impoverished indigenous residents, entertainment attractions like Crocosaurus Cove (where visitors are lowered, via "the Cage of Death," into a crocodile-filled tank), and, as one local puts it, "not partying, exactly, but certainly drinking." To Robert Borsato, a fruit farmer, the area looked like an ideal place to grow bananas. In 1996, he began farming a thousand acres in Humpty Doo, which is on the road between Darwin and Kakadu National Park.

To bear fruit, banana plants need at least fourteen consecutive months of frost-free weather, which is why they are not grown commercially in the continental United States. Darwin offered this, and more. As one of Borsato's workers told me recently, "You came up here and saw the consistency that you've got between the blue sky, the sunshine, the water, the fucking soil. You knew you were going to beat everybody else, hands down." There were a few nuisances: crocodiles wandered onto the property, Asian buffalo trampled young plants, and dingoes chewed the sprinklers. Before long, though, the Darwin Banana Farming Company was growing lush ten-foot plants with as many as a hundred and seventy bananas on each stalk. In 2006, Cyclone Larry decimated ninety per cent of the Innisfail plantations; banana prices soared from ten dollars a carton to a hundred and thirty, and Borsato became a multimillionaire.

More than a thousand kinds of banana can be found worldwide, but Borsato specialized in a variety called Cavendish, which a nineteenth-century British explorer happened upon in a household garden in southern China. Today, the Cavendish represents ninety-nine per cent of the banana export market. The vast majority of banana varieties are not viable for international trade: their bunches are too small, or their skin is too thin, or their pulp is too bland. Although Cavendishes need pampering, they are the only variety that provides farmers with a high yield of palatable fruit that can endure overseas trips without ripening too quickly or bruising too easily. The Cavendish, which is rich in Vitamins B6 and C, has high levels of potassium, magnesium, and fibre; it is also cheap--about sixty cents a pound. In 2008, Americans ate 7.6 billion pounds of Cavendish bananas, virtually all of them imported from Latin America. Each year, we eat as many Cavendish bananas as we do apples and oranges combined. Your supermarket likely sells many varieties of apples, but when you shop for bananas you usually have one option. The world's banana plantations are a monoculture of Cavendishes.

Several years ago, Borsato noticed a couple of sick-looking plants on a neighbor's property. The leaves turned a soiled yellow, starting at the edges and rapidly moving inward; necrotic patches appeared and, a few weeks later, the leaves buckled. What had once formed a canopy now dangled around the base of the plant, like a cast-off grass skirt. Inside the plant, the effects were even worse. Something was blocking the plants' vascular system, causing rot, and tissue that should have been as ivory as the inside of a celery stalk was a putrefying mixture of brown, black, and blood-red. When the plants were cut open, they smelled like garbage, and their roots were so anemic that the plants could barely stay upright.

Borsato feared that he was seeing the symptoms of a pestilence that had wiped out the Cavendish across Asia: Tropical Race Four. A soil-borne fungus that is known to be harmful only to bananas, it can survive for decades in the dirt, spreading through the transportation of tainted plants, or in infected mud stuck to a tractor's tire or a rancher's boot. It cannot be controlled with chemicals. Tropical Race Four appeared in Taiwan in the late eighties, and destroyed roughly seventy per cent of the island's Cavendish plantations. In Indonesia, more than twelve thousand acres of export bananas were abandoned; in Malaysia, a local newspaper branded the disease "the H.I.V. of banana plantations." When the fungus reached China and the Philippines, the effect was equally ruinous.

Australia was next. Over the following three years, Borsato watched as the other banana farmers in Darwin succumbed to the disease. "A lot of people were in denial," he recalled. "Most growers tried to hide the fact that they had it. It would've devalued their property immensely. But today nearly everybody is out. The guy across the street now grows melons." He went on, "The government tried to put in a quarantine. You couldn't move equipment around. There were footbaths to wash your shoes in. Stuff like that. We put a new car park in, paved it all up for the sake of the quarantine, went to that level of expense, and you know what happened? The first idiot to drive up went screaming past all our new signs. Drove right up on the muddy road, up to the shed! It was a bloody idiot government official."

Scientists believe that Tropical Race Four, which has caused tens of millions of dollars' worth of damage, will ultimately find its way to Latin America--and to the fruit that Americans buy. "I don't have a crystal ball," Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida, who was the first researcher to identify Tropical Race Four, said. "People are bringing stuff in their luggage, moving stuff around the world that they shouldn't be. I hope it doesn't happen, but history has shown that this kind of stuff does happen." Borsato was more blunt: "Shit's gonna move. Americans are snookered. They'd better wake up and realize it, or they're not going to have any bananas to eat."

"We were prepared to give up," Borsato told me one afternoon, as he and his farm manager, Mark Smith, showed me around their plantation. "But you just can't get excited about melons." Borsato, who is fifty, has a fringe of white hair and the shoulders of a rugby fullback. (He used to play in high school.) He told me that he had taken much of the money he had earned from the Cyclone Larry shortage and invested it back into his farm. For a while, he and Smith tried to grow bananas only in soil that Tropical Race Four had apparently not yet reached. They soon ran out of virgin land. Then they planted cassava and pinto peanuts, hoping to rejuvenate the soil, and applied quicklime to lower the soil's acidity; these efforts failed to counteract the blight. A few years ago, Borsato leased ninety acres of a seemingly unsullied property twenty miles away. To insure that infected machinery wasn't used, Smith and a small crew planted forty-three thousand banana stalks by hand. Within eight months, Tropical Race Four had appeared. Today, Borsato farms only a quarter of his land, and every week he and Smith chop down two hundred infected plants. "In another month, that'll be three hundred," Smith said.

As we walked through the fields, Tropical Race Four seemed as abundant as the mosquitoes circling our heads. "There's one," Smith said, pointing. "That's two. You can see that one there? He's coming out. There's another one." Some plants were just turning yellow; others were a desiccated mass of raw umber. At one point, Smith unsheathed a cane knife, which is similar to a machete, but with a shorter, wider blade. An axe is not needed to cut down a banana plant, which is not a tree but, rather, the world's largest herb. The part that is usually called the trunk is the pseudostem--a barkless staff composed only of leaves waiting to unfurl. In one stroke, Smith sliced through a diseased plant. The inside resembled a crushed-out cigar, and the fetid odor was overwhelming. Smith said, "You smell that, and you think, Ah, fuck."

Borsato shook his head. "Cruel," he said. "Just cruel." Lately, he had been obtaining fresh plants from a laboratory that cultivated the seeds in antiseptic petri dishes. But, because the fungus is in his soil, he could get only one or two bunches before the plants died.

Smith was wearing a blue baseball cap that depicted a banana above the slogan "Get Bent Into Shape." He removed it and wiped his brow. "You see one plant, and you know pretty soon you'll be up shit creek," he said. "All this work we're doing--it's not viable. The only way to keep going is to breed a disease-resistant variety, one with commercial potential. That's the only way."

Borsato knew that attempts to replace the Cavendish through traditional breeding--crossing two bananas to create a third, disease-resistant fruit--had failed. After a series of phone calls, Internet searches, and chance encounters, he found James Dale, a professor at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, who experiments with genetically modified crops. In 1994, Dale produced one of the first genetically transformed Cavendishes. He and his team members inserted what is known as a marker gene; the resulting banana, when placed under ultraviolet light, glowed fluorescent green. More recently, in research supported by the Gates Foundation, Dale has been trying to increase the provitamin-A content of locally grown bananas in Uganda, where villagers eat several bananas daily.

This spring, Dale expects to plant on Borsato's land four acres of banana plants that have been genetically modified to resist the blight. The Australian Research Council will pay for much of the field trial, but Borsato is also investing a quarter of a million dollars. "And we'll go to the millions," he told me. "Someone has to do this work. Otherwise, there'll be grief."

The Queensland University of Technology borders Brisbane's City Botanic Gardens, where students read under weeping figs and cabbage-tree palms. Dale's office, at the university's Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities, is less picturesque. "Our lab was once voted the ugliest building in Brisbane," Dale told me. "It was painted pink and gray--appalling, just dreadful. The university's solution was to give each floor a different color scheme. Now we've got a lime-green-and-red interior."

Dale leads a team of a dozen scientists, and on the day I visited he informed them of the Australian Research Council's decision to fund the Darwin field trial. "It's all go!" he said. The news aroused only muffled enthusiasm. "They know that the plants have to perform," Dale explained later. "Otherwise, we don't keep getting money." Dale, an affable, diminutive man with a wispy white beard, noted another challenge that banana scientists faced: bad jokes. He said, "I hate when people ask, 'Hey, James. How are you going to straighten the banana?' Yeah, we get it: bananas are phallic. I always say, 'Well, you dickhead . . . ' "

Despite the fruit's priapic associations--the refrain from an old blues song contains the line "Let me put my banana in your fruit basket"--the bananas we eat are sterile. Unlike wild bananas, the Cavendish doesn't have seeds, because it has three sets of chromosomes; it's what biologists call a triploid--in this case, the haphazard product of two wild, seeded diploids that mated thousands of years ago. (Wild bananas, which have flinty seeds the size of peppercorns, can be found across Asia.) Cavendish and other domesticated banana plants produce fruit without fertilization. In a healthy nine-month-old Cavendish plant, a secondary stalk rises from the center of the pseudostem and, a few months later, droops with a single eighty-pound bunch. A bunch consists of a dozen "hands," and each hand has some twenty "fingers," or individual bananas. (Fingers do not hang down but, instead, curl toward the sky.) Meanwhile, small suckers poke out from the plant's roots. When growers harvest the bunch, they cut down the "mother" plant and all but the heartiest sucker. In another year, that sucker sprouts a new bunch. In this way, commercial banana plants can produce genetically identical fruit for decades. Tropical Race Four has upended this efficient method of cultivation; one of the main ways that farmers spread the disease is by uprooting contaminated suckers that appear to be clean and replanting them elsewhere.

On a wall in Dale's office, there was a painting of a gyrating Josephine Baker, naked except for a pendulous skirt of bananas. "It's a real leap of faith," he said of the Cavendish project. "We trust the gene's in there, but until the plant grows up we don't know if it will be blight-resistant. That's the mystery and the magic."

Despite the danger posed by Tropical Race Four, only a handful of scientists are working to modify bananas. Whereas other biotechnology researchers have focussed on trying to insert an antifungal gene into the Cavendish, Dale wants to insert a gene that will starve the fungus to death. For years, scientists believed that the fungus injected toxins into the plant, killing cells and gorging on the waste. "Now there's good evidence that these toxins don't actually kill," Dale told me. "Instead, they switch on a certain mechanism in the plant and the plant actually kills itself." That mechanism is known as programmed cell death. In stressful situations, plants fortify themselves by, say, dropping leaves; they kill weaker cells so that stronger ones may live to fight. "Our thinking," Dale said, "is that we can insert a gene that inhibits this process, that tells the plant not to kill its own cells."

Once a year, Dale explained, his lab assistants extract cells from sterilized banana plants and attempt to multiply them in liquid media. Their success rate is five per cent. The cells that survive are selected for gene transformation, which Dale accomplishes by making clever use of a common soil bacterium, Agrobacterium tumefaciens. When the pathogen invades the nucleus of a cell, it installs a few of its own genes, hoodwinking the cell into making food for it. To sneak his desired genes into a banana plant, Dale swaps a few of the bacterium's genes for the ones he wants. The bacterium then installs those genes into the cells. Later, the bacterium is killed off with an antibiotic. "It's a natural genetic engineer," Dale said. "It still amazes me that we can do it."

Two years ago, Dale and his team inserted into banana cells one of nine genes, which were taken from life-forms as diverse as rice, thale cress, and an armyworm. Each gene was known to impede programmed cell death. "The toxin will still get in, but the cells don't die," Dale theorized. "And if the cells don't die the fungus hasn't got anything to live on."

That afternoon, Dale and I drove east of Brisbane to a state-owned greenhouse. A yellow biohazard sign was posted on the front door. Inside, on waist-high tables, young banana plants grew in six-inch plastic pots. Several staff members, wearing white lab coats and white surgical gloves, were slicing open two hundred and fifty genetically altered banana plants and checking for disease resistance. After digging a plant out of its pot, they used a chef's knife to split the plant's stem lengthwise. The two halves were photographed, side by side, on a plastic tarp.

"The sap from the stems gets everywhere, and it never comes out," a research fellow said. "We didn't use to have the tarp. Management got a bit pissed off."

Four months earlier, the plants in the greenhouse had been infected with two hundred times as much fungus as they would face in the field. The fungus, however, was not Tropical Race Four but an earlier, more widespread strain of the disease called Race One. "We're not allowed to bring the Race Four fungus down here," Dale said. "That's how paranoid people are." This problem had led to another: Cavendish is resistant to Race One. So the banana plants here were actually a variety known as Lady Finger, which is susceptible to Race One. When I asked Dale how his science could be sound when he was experimenting with a different fungus on a different banana, he replied, "Race One and Race Four are very, very closely related, and we believe that they use the same mechanism of killing. If they both use programmed cell death, then the same mechanism should stop both. That's our hypothesis, anyway."

We were talking in a side room of the greenhouse when a young researcher suddenly called to us. "Oh, they've got something!" Dale said. In the main room, the group members were bent over the tarp, examining a pair of bifurcated plants; with their coats and gloves and camera, they looked like forensics experts at a crime scene. The two leading gene candidates, I was told, were taken from the armyworm and the thale cress. A plant harboring the armyworm gene was soot-colored, its roots a mush of corrosion. "Ewww," Dale said. A plant with the thale-cress gene was as spotlessly white as a wedding gown. "Well done, guys!" Dale said. "We'll definitely be taking this one up to Darwin."

As we drove back to Brisbane, he said, "No one's ever taken any of these genes and put them in and seen that they've given resistance. What you saw today was a world first." He went on, "It looks like we've got the potential to produce a product that uses a plant gene rather than an animal gene. That makes me happy. The general public will be much more willing to accept a plant gene."

Bananas, which Alexander the Great introduced to the West in 327 B.C., initially came from jungles in India, China, and Southeast Asia. There are fuzzy bananas whose skins are bubble-gum pink; green-and-white striped bananas with pulp the color of orange sherbet; bananas that, when cooked, taste like strawberries. The Double Mahoi plant can produce two bunches at once. The Chinese name of the aromatic Go San Heong banana means "You can smell it from the next mountain." The fingers on one banana plant grow fused; another produces bunches of a thousand fingers, each only an inch long.

Many of these varieties are known as plantains; they are starchy and inedible until cooked. In 1870, when a Cape Cod fishing-boat captain named Lorenzo Dow Baker imported a hundred and sixty bunches of bananas into Jersey City--the first bananas in the U.S.--he chose a kind of banana that is sugary and eaten raw, and that he'd seen growing in Jamaica. Baker's variety, called the Gros Michel, offered a sweet and complex flavor, and its skin was resilient. Baker could throw the bunches directly into the hold of his ship without worrying that he'd bruise the fruit or hasten its ripening. When the bunches arrived in stores, shopkeepers hung them up and, at a customer's request, cut off the desired number of bananas. As Dan Koeppel notes in "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World," by 1900 Americans were eating fifteen million bunches of Gros Michels every year; by 1910, the number was forty million. Two decades later, Baker's company, renamed United Fruit--and today called Chiquita--was worth more than two hundred million dollars.

In converting a tropical fruit into a global commodity, United Fruit amassed land across Latin America, from Guatemala to Colombia, replacing virgin jungle with vast tracts of Gros Michels. Poorly compensated workers, battling malaria, dengue fever, tarantulas, pythons, and jaguars, constructed miles of railroad track, telecommunications lines, and irrigation canals. By the nineteen-sixties, United Fruit controlled nearly seven hundred million acres of land. "Tropical nature left to herself creates foodless jungles and miasmic swamps," a historian wrote at the time. "The banana of commerce is one of Man's proud triumphs over Nature."

United Fruit eventually commanded ninety per cent of the American banana market, and in Latin America it became known as El Pulpo--the Octopus. When a head of state tried to thwart its progress, the company often responded with militaristic force. It clandestinely aided the 1911 coup in Honduras and the 1954 coup in Guatemala. At the company's urging, Colombia's Army launched a campaign against striking workers, which culminated in a massacre. In 1975, the company's chairman, Eli Black, jumped to his death from the forty-fourth floor of the Pan Am Building, in New York; the Securities and Exchange Commission soon discovered that he had given a high-ranking Honduran official a one-and-a-quarter-million-dollar bribe.

Early in its ascendancy, United Fruit began contending with crop disease. " FRUIT BLIGHT COSTS MILLIONS IN COSTA RICA AND PART OF PANAMA: NO REMEDY IS AVAILABLE, " the Times reported in 1927. "As much mystery surrounds the banana disease as the plague in medieval times and so far it has not been possible for modern science to cope with it." This was Race One. Over the next thirty years, a hundred thousand acres of Gros Michels were wiped out across Latin America, and the industry lost $2.3 billion. As the historian John Soluri has pointed out, before United Fruit arrived Latin Americans farmed small, diffuse tracts of land. But as jungle diversity was replaced with monolithic fields of Gros Michels, funguses like Race One were provided with many more hosts. In the words of one reporter, "Acts of God have not been wholly unsolicited."

In the nineteen-forties, a distant rival, Standard Fruit, reacted to the blight by shifting to Cavendish bananas, the Chinese variety, which were growing in the private greenhouse of the Duke of Devonshire, in Chatsworth, England. The bananas proved naturally resistant to Race One. In every other way, however, the Cavendish was less desirable than the Gros Michel. The Cavendish was susceptible to other diseases, which were controllable only with costly pesticides. It had a tendency to bruise, which meant that, rather than shipping bananas directly on the stalk, Standard Fruit had to box them in elaborate new packing houses. The Cavendish also needed special ripening rooms, where the green bananas, after arriving in the U.S., were helped along with doses of ethylene gas. When the bananas made it to stores, they lasted only a week before spoiling. And to those who knew the Gros Michel the flavor of the Cavendish was lamentably bland.

United Fruit, fearing that consumers would reject the taste of the Cavendish, was slow to switch, and saw its profits drop from $66 million in 1950 to $2.1 million in 1960. Standard Fruit (now known as Dole) became the country's largest seller of bananas, and remains so today. In 1960, United Fruit opened a research center in La Lima, Honduras, and hired Phil Rowe, a former rice breeder from Arkansas, to breed the perfect export banana: flavorful, hardy, and disease-resistant. The company also wanted the new plant to sprout big bunches, and to be sturdy enough to withstand the high winds that occasionally blew through Latin America. Because domesticated bananas are sterile, Rowe was forced to cross wild diploids that offered a grab bag of good and bad traits. In four decades of work, he grew twenty thousand hybrids, but he never found a replacement for the Cavendish. His leading candidate, called Goldfinger, withstood Race One, but consumers rejected it as acidic and starchy. In the end, the unrelenting capriciousness of his work proved too much. One morning in 2001, Rowe walked into his experimental-banana fields and hanged himself from a tree. United Fruit was stuck growing the Cavendish.

"Cavendish is fairly bland," James Dale told me. "But, if you have no option but one, then that option looks pretty good." Today, there are millions more acres planted with the Cavendish than ever were planted with the Gros Michel.

This past fall, I flew to Honduras to visit the La Lima research station, which is now a nonprofit traditional breeding facility known as the Fundación Hondureña de Investigación Agrícola, or FHIA. The head banana breeder is a man named Juan Fernando Aguilar, and outside his office hangs a sun-blanched picture of Phil Rowe. Aguilar, a thickset, gregarious Guatemalan, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and glasses with light-sensitive lenses, picked me up one morning at my hotel--the Banana Inn--and gave me a tour of a gated residential community called the Zona Americana. "This is where all of United Fruit's workers lived," he said. "La Lima is ugly, but the American Zone is beautiful!" Aguilar pointed out the old company swimming pool and two golf courses, which are still in use, and stopped the car in front of a white mansion. "This was the house of the general manager," he said. "Look at the size! And two tennis courts!" When we arrived at FHIA's headquarters, down the road, a dead mule lay near the entrance, its distended belly rising above the weeds. I remembered that a United Fruit executive had once joked, "A mule costs more than a Honduran deputy."

Rowe's death, ten years ago, coincided with advances in biotechnology, and many researchers now dismiss the traditional breeding of bananas as too reliant on happenstance. In 2003, the director of research at Chiquita told a British journalist, "We supported a breeding program for forty years, but it wasn't able to develop an alternative to Cavendish. It was very expensive and we got nothing back." Aguilar, however, has crucial leverage: nearly fifty per cent of Americans, and sixty per cent of Europeans, oppose genetically modified food. For this reason, Chiquita reversed its position in 2004 and signed a confidential agreement with FHIA, hiring the center that it once owned to naturally engineer a better banana. (The contract is said to be worth two million dollars.) Dole and FHIA are negotiating a similar deal. "We never left traditional breeding," a spokesman for Chiquita told me. "In our core markets, in America and Europe, a genetically modified banana would never be marketable. At the end of the day, we're interested in continuing to sell bananas." Jorge Gonzales, Dole's senior vice-president of agricultural research, said, "Traditional breeding is getting closer. This may be a shot in the dark, but if you don't take the shot you've got absolutely zero chance of hitting the target."

Aguilar's operation has the rusticity of a summer camp; the buildings have rough-hewn wooden exteriors, tin roofs, and chicken-wire windows. "I am glad you have come," Aguilar told me. "The hybrid plants are like women. To look at a woman from afar is not to know the woman. To know her, you must be with her. And to know the hybrids you must be with the hybrids." Aguilar begins his work by planting twenty thousand plants of a single variety. Once the plants have flowered, at nine months, workers manually dust them with the pollen of another banana plant that has a desirable trait, such as disease resistance. Three months later, Aguilar harvests the bunches, in the hope that the forced fertilization has impelled the plants to produce seeds. Every Monday, local women peel a hundred thousand bananas. Two days later, after the bananas have fermented and softened, the women smash them on a sieve, let the pulp ooze through, and retrieve any seeds.

On average, Aguilar recovers one seed from every ten thousand bananas--about ten seeds a week. If any of those seeds provide a working embryo--the odds aren't great--Aguilar might be able to grow a new hybrid. But even if that plant acquires the trait of blight resistance, it will likely pick up several other, less desirable attributes, such as a low yield of fruit. One round of this exercise lasts three years. "The people in Australia don't like this--it's too time-consuming for them," Aguilar said. "Many people call me crazy, but I'm very confident that I can develop a Cavendish replacement."

Like Phil Rowe, Aguilar focusses on diploid bananas, which have an unusual capacity to accept pollen and produce seeds. Recently, however, Aguilar forced a seed out of a Cavendish--the first banana breeder in history to do so--after hand-pollinating tens of thousands of plants. He now finds one viable seed out of every million Cavendishes. In November, at an international banana conference in Medellín, Colombia, Aguilar presented a paper arguing that the Cavendish is not actually sterile. Still, because Aguilar finds seeds only through achingly artificial means and, even then, finds so few of them, any fertility seems to be a human-induced aberration.

Aguilar led me to a small trial plot. He was unable to share many details, he explained, because of confidentiality agreements, but he said that these few plants represented his best shot at success. We approached a tall, thick plant, with a dozen suckers growing around it. A robust bunch hung from the mother, but the bananas were only four inches long. "This one is strong, vigorous, full of power," Aguilar said. "It has a high yield, but the texture of the pulp inside is very poor, just mushy." He bounded off. "Look at this one!" he said. "This one has the same mother as that one before, but a different father. You can see it's much thinner. The plant is healthy, but not as vigorous. I don't know why." He walked to a far corner of the field, near a barbed-wire fence, and paused next to the tallest banana plant I'd ever seen. "Nine metres tall!" he called out. "Here you get very good resistance to winds, and a very good taste, but the bunch is small."

Finally, Aguilar inspected a stubby plant in the center of the field. It was sectioned off by a shin-high fence made of broken sticks and lolling twine. A tag read "06-04-333." He crushed under his foot the cigarette he'd been smoking and breathed deeply. Dragonflies buzzed, and a stray cat pawed at the dirt. Aguilar said sombrely, "This is mi esperanza. My hope and my wish. Give me six years. I will have to taste it and test it, but my dream is for this to be my Cavendish replacement." The plant was by far the smallest in the field--six feet tall. Several leaves were dying. But, Aguilar said, "the mother of this plant is Cavendish." Its "blood," as he put it, was promising.

Aguilar tapped a fist against his chest. "The field is spiritual for me," he said. "Plant breeding, it must be a part of you, part of your emotions. Biotechnology came along, and they suddenly labelled us 'traditional breeding.' It's a way to diminish our work. But we are not in competition with anyone. We are doing what we do, and they are doing what they do. The difference is that my tools are in the field, not in the laboratory."

Near the end of my stay in Brisbane, James Dale invited me to his house for dinner. He lives with his wife, Ged, and their son, Jordan, on ten acres west of the city, in a bucolic suburb called Moggill. The Brisbane River meanders past their back yard, and on the property he and Ged grow oranges, avocados, pumpkins, pomelos, blueberries, papayas, and finger limes. "There's not a banana to be seen," Dale said. "It's very embarrassing. But they'd just get blown over if we planted them."

"That's our excuse, anyway," Ged said.

"It's not an excuse," Dale said. "It's a reason."

We were sitting on their front porch, cracking macadamia nuts pulled from the trees that line the driveway, drinking beer, and watching the sun drop. Flying foxes, the largest bats in the world, were swooping, warming up for their nightly hunt. Since obtaining the results from the greenhouse test, Dale and his colleagues had been waiting for the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, which oversees the safety of the country's genetically modified crops, to approve the field trial. A verdict was expected soon. Dale's team had begun preparations to transport the modified plants to Darwin--airplane seats would be bought for them--where they would toughen up for a few months in "humidicribs." In April, the plants would be released into the fungus-infested soil, and Dale hoped to have initial results sometime next fall.

Robert Borsato, meanwhile, had been looking to buy new land, confident that he would soon be able to expand his operation. He had also been travelling to Papua New Guinea, searching for new banana varieties that might thrive in the marketplace. "I found a little banana about three inches long, the color of tomato juice," he told me. "I think I could sell it to hotels, for a breakfast banana. It's acid-sweet, and there are lots of people who only want half a banana for breakfast."

As word spread of the planned field trial in Darwin, local news outlets had begun asking Dale what, exactly, he intended to put in the ground. Critics of genetically modified foods, such as Greenpeace and Earth First!, have claimed that such foods not only violate the sanctity of nature but also could spark antibiotic resistance and allergic reactions. (In 1996, researchers found that soybeans modified with a Brazil-nut gene triggered allergies in test subjects; the product, which had been designed to have a higher amino-acid content, was never commercialized.) Opponents also fear that foreign genes might be transferred into related species, through the uncontrolled exchange of pollen. Ronnie Cummins, the co-author of "Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers," told me, "Scientists often think technologies are safe that turn out not to be. It's not that you're going to keel over and die as soon as you eat genetically modified papaya. It's the unpredictable long-term health and environmental effects that concern us."

As we sat down to dinner, Dale, who helped write the federal guidelines for genetically modified food in Australia, said, "The public isn't necessarily wrong to be wary of them, and everything should be regulated--that's extremely important. But you can't name a single time when G.M.O.s did something really bad, either to humans or to the environment. And don't forget that bananas are sterile. They don't have seeds, and they can't cross-fertilize. So even if we were putting something dangerous into banana plants--which we are not--there's absolutely no way for those genes to exit the banana and enter the wider world." Dale added that he thought it would take more than a hundred years for traditional breeding to solve the Cavendish problem. "Cavendish is a very, very well-accepted cultivar," he said. "The taste of Cavendish, the method of growing Cavendish, the method of harvesting and transporting Cavendish--it's all extremely well worked out. A Cavendish plant with an extra gene for Tropical Race Four--well, I think it's a more elegant method." Dale also seemed pleased that neither Chiquita nor Dole would own his creation. Borsato would no doubt want a return on his investment, but eventually he and Dale would offer a blight-resistant banana to the world.

For now, the limits of science force Dale to express foreign genes throughout the entire banana plant, but he hopes eventually to confine them to the roots, where the fungus attacks, and away from the fruit. Furthermore, a French institute called Genoscope is sequencing the banana genome, and once that is complete Dale might be able to insert a disease-resistance gene from a wild banana. "Then we'll be putting a banana gene into a banana," he said gleefully. "The public will have to love that."

Dignified as Dale made this sound, a new Cavendish banana still didn't seem like a panacea. The cultivar may dominate the world's banana export market, but, it turns out, eighty-seven per cent of bananas are eaten locally. In Africa and Asia, villagers grow such heterogeneous mixes in their back yards that no one disease can imperil them. Tropical Race Four, scientists now theorize, has existed in the soil for thousands of years. Banana companies needed only to enter Asia, as they did twenty years ago, and plant uniform fields of Cavendish in order to unleash the blight. A disease-resistant Cavendish would still mean a commercial monoculture, and who's to say that one day Tropical Race Five won't show up?

Dale once remarked to me that his favorite bananas are "the little sweet ones from Uganda called sukali ndizi, or sugar banana. They're absolutely fabulous." Now he added, "What we really want to do is make the Gros Michel resistant to both Race One and Race Four, and then someday, maybe, we'll put these disease-resistance genes in any variety we want." It was tempting to envision a reëngineered supermarket that afforded Americans a broader replication of tropical bounty: next to the McIntoshes, Granny Smiths, and Honeycrisps would sit the Cavendishes, Gros Michels, and sukali ndizis. Of course, before this could happen the more exotic bananas would also have to be genetically modified for seaworthiness. "Those kinds of genes--we're years away," Dale said.

At Dale's house that evening, we'd seen peacocks strutting about and a hare bouncing through the field. The chickens that Ged raises clucked occasionally, and, even though the sun had set, the richness of the couple's gardens remained visible through a kitchen window. "From a biological perspective, I love genetic diversity," Dale said. "That's what makes the world safe, what makes it thrive. It means that everything is terribly healthy. And when you see the narrowing of genetic culture, that's when you know things are going to die."

PHOTO (COLOR): Plants have been wiped out in Asia and Australia. Latin America may be next.

~~~~~~~~

By Mike Peed

美國小學生作文：一篇讓中國式教育震撼的文章

來源：搜狐新聞社區

10歲的孩子被送進了美國學校，上英文課，老師佈置的作業是寫論文，題目居然大得沖天：《我怎麼看人類文化》；上歷史課，老師讓孩子扮演總統顧問，給國家決策當高參；在中學的物理課上，作業竟然是一個市政研究專案城市照明系統的佈局；而道德教育，居然是從讓孩子們愛護小動物開始。

沒有統一的教科書，沒有統一的考試，沒有對學生的三六九等的分類排位。這就是呈現在一個中國記者眼前的美國教育。面對與中國教育截然不同的西洋景，種種的疑慮、困惑接踵而至，美國教育究竟要培養什麼樣的人才？沒有殘疾的孩子，只有殘疾的教育。這究竟是教育學者的危言聳聽，還是對人與教育之間客觀規律的深刻認識？

我們中國人是否認真反省過我們的教育？我們中國的教育有缺陷嗎？如果有，在哪里？我們這樣一個正在全面謀劃自己未來前程的民族，應該怎樣審視我們為孩子們提供的教育環境？

美國小學給10歲的兒子留的作業是寫一篇論文，題目嚇我一跳：《中國的昨天和今天》。學習二戰史，美國老師竟然讓10歲的孩子回答這樣的問題：如果你是杜魯門總統的高級顧問，你將對美國投放原子彈持什麼意見？種種不可思議的事情，種種躲閃不開的衝突與思考，我由此遭遇美國教育。

當我牽著10歲的兒子登上中國東方航空公司飛往美國洛杉磯的班機時，心中就充滿了疑惑：我不知道在孩子這麼小的年齡就把他帶到美國去，是不是一個失策？一位朋友的勸告還響在耳邊：最少應該讓孩子在中國接受完基礎教育再到美國，因為中國的基礎教育是最完整、最系統的。多少專家也認為，美國的高等教育很出色，而基礎教育絕對不如中國扎實。

直到我把兒子送進了那所離公寓不遠的美國小學的時候，內心的憂慮終於得到證實：這是一種什麼樣的學校啊！學生可以在課堂上放聲大笑，每天在學校最少讓學生玩兩個小時，下午不到3點就放學回家，最讓我開眼的是兒子根本沒有教科書！那個金髮碧眼的女教師弗絲女士看了我兒子帶去的中國小學四年級的數學課本後，溫文爾雅地說：我可以告訴你，6年級以前，他的數學是不用再學了！面對她那雙充滿笑意的藍眼睛，我就像挨了一悶棍。一時間，真是懷疑把兒子帶到美國來是不是幹了一生中最蠢的一件事。

日子一天天過去，看著兒子每天背著空空的書包興高采烈地去上學，我的心就覺得沉甸甸的。在中國，他從一年級開始，書包就滿滿的、沉沉的，從一年級到四年級，他換了三個書包，一個比一個大，讓人感到知識的重量在增加。而在美國，書包裏沒了負擔，孩子精神上就更鬆快了，這能叫上學嗎？一個學期過去了，把兒子叫到面前，問他美國學校給他最深的印象是什麼，他笑著送給了我一個字正腔圓的答案：自由！這兩個字像磚頭一樣拍在我的腦門上。

此時，真是一片深情懷念中國的教育，似乎更加深刻地理解了為什麼中國孩子老是能在國際上拿奧林匹克學習競賽的金牌。不過，事已至此，總不能再把他送回國去呀？也只有聽天由命了。

不知不覺一年過去了，兒子的英語長進不少，放學之後也不直接回家了，而是常去圖書館，不時就背回一大書包的書來。問他一次借這麼多書幹什麼，他一邊看著那些借來的書一邊打著電腦，頭也不抬地說：作業。

作業？我忍不住湊過去看，兒子打在電腦螢幕上的標題是：《中國的昨天和今天》。這是一個小學生的作業？這樣天大的題目，即便是博士，敢去做嗎？於是嚴聲厲色地問兒子這是誰的主意，兒子坦然相告：老師說美國是移民國家，讓每個同學寫一篇介紹自己祖先生活的國度的文章。要求概括這個國家的歷史、地理、文化，分析它與美國的不同，說明自己的看法。

我一時語噎：真不知道讓一個10歲的孩子去運作這樣一個連成年人也未必能幹的工程，會是一種什麼結果？偌大一個中國，它的地理和文化，它的歷史和現狀，一個10歲的孩子能說得清麼？我只覺得一個10歲的孩子如果被教育得不知天高地厚，弄這些大而無當的東西，以後恐怕是連吃飯的本事也沒有了。

過了幾天，兒子完成了這篇作業。沒想到，列印出的是一本20多頁的小冊子。從九曲黃河到象形文字，從絲綢之路到五星紅旗……熱熱鬧鬧。我沒讚揚，也沒評判，因為我自己有點發懵，一是我看到兒子把這篇文章分出了章與節，二是在文章最後列出了參考書目。我想，這是我讀研究生之後才使用的寫作論文的方式，那時，我30歲。

不久，兒子的另一個作業又來了。這次是《我怎麼看人類文化》！如果說上次的作業還有邊際可循，那這次真可謂是不著邊際了。

兒子猛不丁地冒出一句：餃子是文化嗎？

餃子？文化？我一時竟不知該如何回答。為了不誤後代，我只好和兒子一起查閱權威的工具書。真是沒少下功夫，我們總算完成了從抽象到具體又從具體到抽象的反反復複的折騰，兒子又是幾個晚上坐在電腦前煞有介事地做文章。我看他那專心致志的樣子，不禁心中苦笑，一個小學生，怎樣去理解文化這個內涵無限豐富而外延又無法確定的概念呢？但願我這個虎頭虎腦、從來就對吃興趣無窮的兒子，別只是在餃子、包子上大作文章。

在美國教育中已經變得無拘無束的兒子，很快就把文章做出來了，這次列印出來的是10頁，又是自己設計的封面，文章後面又列著那一本一本的參考書。

他洋洋得意地對我說：你說什麼是文化？其實特簡單就是人創造出來讓人享受的一切。那自信的樣子，似乎他發現了別人沒能發現的真理。後來，孩子把老師看過的作業帶回來，上面有老師的批語：我佈置本次作業的初衷是讓孩子們開闊眼界，活躍思維，而讀他們作業的結果，往往是我進入了我希望孩子們進入的境界。

沒有評價，既未說對，也沒說不對。問兒子這批語是什麼意思，兒子說，老師沒為我們驕傲，但是她為我們震驚。

是不是？兒子反問我。

我無言以對。心中始終疑疑惑惑：弗絲老師希望他們進入什麼境界？

兒子6年級快結束的時候，老師留給他們的作業是一串關於二次大戰的問題。你認為誰對這場戰爭負有責任？你認為納粹德國失敗的原因是什麼？如果你是杜魯門總統的高級顧問，你將對美國投放原子彈持什麼意見？你是否認為當時只有投放原子彈一個辦法去結束戰爭？你認為今天避免戰爭的最好辦法是什麼？……

如果是兩年前，見到這種問題，我肯定會抱怨：這哪是作業，這分明是競選參議員的前期訓練！而此時，我開始對美國的小學教育方式有了一些理解。老師正是在是通過這些設問，向孩子們傳輸一種人道主義的價值觀，引導孩子們去關注人類的命運，引導孩子們學習高屋建瓴地思考重大問題的方法。這些問題在課堂上都沒有標準答案，它的答案，有些可能需要孩子們用一生去尋索。

看著12歲的兒子為完成這些作業興致勃勃地看書查資料的樣子，我不禁想起當年我學二戰史的情景：按照年代、事件死記硬背，書中的結論，有些明知迂腐也當成聖經去記，不然，怎麼通過考試去奔光明前程呢？此時我在想，我們在追求知識的過程中，重複前人的結論往往大大多於自己的思考。而沒有自己的思考，就難有新的創造。

兒子小學畢業的時候，已經能夠熟練地在圖書館利用電腦和縮微膠片系統查找他所需要的各種文字和圖像資料了。有一天我們倆為獅子和豹的覓食習性爭論起來，第二天，他就從圖書館借來了美國國家地理學會拍攝的介紹這兩種動物的錄影帶，拉著我一邊看，一邊討論。孩子面對他不懂的東西，已經知道到哪里去尋找答案了。

兒子的變化促使我重新去審視美國的小學教育。我發現，美國的小學雖然沒有在課堂上對孩子們進行大量的知識灌輸，但是，他們想方設法把孩子的眼光引向校園外那個無邊無際的知識的海洋，他們要讓孩子知道，生活的一切時間和空間都是他們學習的課堂；他們沒有讓孩子們去死記硬背大量的公式和定理，但是，他們煞費苦心地告訴孩子們怎樣去思考問題，教給孩子們面對陌生領域尋找答案的方法；他們從不用考試把學生分成三六九等，而是竭盡全力去肯定孩子們的一切努力，去讚揚孩子們自己思考的一切結論，去保護和激勵孩子們所有的創造欲望和嘗試。

提提你!

震撼:武漢首次披露拆遷公司貪污國家拆遷補償款1248萬大案

來源：中國新聞網
　
拆遷蛀蟲5個月“賺”1248萬補償款

漢陽一家拆遷公司數名高管與社會閒雜人員勾結，採取偽造房屋拆遷資料、虛增房屋無證建築面積等手段，在短短5個月內騙取國家拆遷補償款高達1248萬餘元。檢方發現，31家被拆遷戶的無證建築面積均被人做過手腳，每家憑空多出了30萬-50萬元補償款，被上述一夥人瓜分裝進了各自的腰包。昨日，武漢市檢察院對相關涉案人提起公訴。

此案也是武漢首次披露的拆遷公司工作人員貪污國家拆遷補償款大案。

雙方一拍即合
圖謀虛增拆遷建築面積多出的錢私下瓜分

2005年4月，武漢市土地整理儲備中心委託里安拆遷公司(國有性質的有限責任公司)，負責實施漢陽區鸚鵡洲二期改造工程的房屋拆遷安置工作。拆遷補償資金由儲備中心提供，里安拆遷公司代為支付。里安拆遷公司聘請鐘青、高春蘭、郭元喜，分別擔任鸚鵡洲二期改造工程房屋動遷三組組長、一組組長和四組組長。

2006年5月，漢陽居民馮明貴通過里安拆遷公司副經理龔某結識了鐘青，兩人商定先由馮明貴出面和被拆遷戶商定補償金額並先行支付拆遷款，然後由鐘青通過偽造房屋拆遷資料、虛增房屋無證建築面積的方式，在實際付款的基礎上多算拆遷補償款。馮明貴再組織人員找鐘青辦理拆遷補償款的領取手續，所套取的多餘的拆遷補償款由馮明貴、鐘青等人私分。

第一筆造假
虛報拆遷面積188平方米輕鬆騙取差價35萬元

主意打定後，馮明貴把第一個目標鎖定在楊泗街165號戶主黃某身上。2006年7月，黃某委託他人找到馮明貴，表示希望62萬元包乾走人(意為搬家)。

隨後，馮明貴給鐘青打電話稱，黃某一家已談好，讓她按照97萬元左右計算拆遷補償金額。鐘青當即表示同意。

馮明貴從自己的銀行卡上轉了62萬元到黃某的帳戶，然後派人找鐘青辦理了該房屋的拆遷補償手續，後到銀行領取了存有97萬餘元拆遷補償款的銀行卡。馮明貴輕鬆吃進“差價”35萬餘元。

經查，楊泗街165號房屋有證建築面積是91平方米，無證建築面積約160平方米。而在拆遷補償協定中計算的房屋無證建築面積則為348平方米，足足大出實際面積188平方米。

領卡當天，馮明貴約鐘青見面，分給她5萬元。餘下的錢除了打點拆除驗收組組長孫先迪等人之外，馮明貴個人實得19萬餘元。

最大一筆造假
虛增拆遷面積646平方米79萬元差價多人瓜分

初次嘗到造假的甜頭後，馮明貴等人一發不可收拾。

2006年9月的一天，楊泗街137號的拆遷戶周某找到馮明貴，希望180萬元包乾走人。馮明貴估價後說最多給150萬元，周某表示同意。 事後查明，楊泗街137號房屋申報的有證建築面積是106.9平方米，無證建築面積約250平方米。拆遷補償協定中計算的房屋無證建築面積，大於實際無證建築面積646平方米。

手續辦完後，馮明貴和周某等人一起到銀行領取了存有229萬餘元拆遷補償款的銀行卡。這意味著，除去150萬元補償給拆遷戶外，還有79萬餘元“差價”被馮明貴等人瓜分。

領卡當天，馮明貴用報紙包著10萬元現金“奉送”給鐘青，說是楊泗街137號多算的錢。餘下的錢除打點其他人之外，馮明貴分得16.2萬元。

最大一次私吞
請清潔工假冒委託人簽字馮明貴吞下了37.9萬元

馮明貴等人的膽子變得越來越大。

楊泗街140號和141號拆遷戶周某、李某是母子關係。鐘青曾多次上門做工作未果。2006年9月，鐘青請馮明貴出面“談判”。很快，馮明貴談好139萬元兩戶包乾走人，並致電鐘青按192萬余元補償金計算相關面積。

楊泗街140號和141號房屋有證建築面積共154.51平方米，無證建築面積共220平方米。鐘青經測算，只有無證建築面積大於實際無證建築面積約235平方米，才能算出192萬餘元的高價。但她還是點頭答應了馮明貴。

荒唐的是，馮明貴所在公司的兩名清潔工，作為委託人在委託書上簽了字。此後，馮明貴和他們一起到銀行領取了存有192萬餘元拆遷補償款的銀行卡。

就這樣，馮明貴騙取了國家拆遷補償款53萬餘元差價。當天，馮明貴開車在里安拆遷公司附近與鐘青見面，在其轎車內當面奉送用報紙包裹著的5萬元現金，還送給了孫先迪1萬元。餘下的錢中，馮明貴“賺”了37.9萬餘元。這也是他私吞的最大一筆款項。

最小一筆差價
虛報120平方米賺了11萬元馮明貴感歎“搞少了”

拆遷工作還在繼續。

楊泗街131號拆遷戶方某，一直沒有和動遷組談好價格。2006年10月，方某找到馮明貴幫忙，價格定在了53萬元。“照葫蘆畫瓢”，按照以前的做法，馮明貴做手腳虛報了120平方米無證建築面積房屋，這筆單做下來，他“賺了”11萬餘元。事後，馮獨自吞了此款，還發出感歎：“這次賺得不多，搞少了……” 事後，鐘青找到馮明貴領“賞銀”，馮明貴答應給錢，但一直未兌現，這事讓鐘青感到很不痛快。

伎倆愈發嫺熟
巷子“變身”無證建築面積輕鬆多出47萬元差價

馮明貴等人的伎倆越來越嫺熟，距離東窗事發也越來越近。

楊泗街65號是一棟三層樓的私房，高春蘭去做戶主王某的動遷工作時，王某說和馮明貴是親戚，要高春蘭直接跟馮明貴談。經商議，兩人決定給予77萬餘元拆遷補償款。後來，馮明貴想撈些“油水”，再次找到高春蘭，讓其將王家一條150多平方米巷子算成無證建築面積加進去。

高春蘭覺得有些離譜，沒輕易答應。馮明貴遂做高春蘭工作，聲稱會給她一筆好處費。高春蘭當即應允，後據此虛增該戶房屋無證建築面積210多平方米，製作了一份125萬餘元的拆遷補償協定。

馮明貴再次吃進“差價”47萬餘元，給了高春蘭5000元，他則拿了37萬餘元。

檢方查明，2006年6月至11月間，在總共31起拆遷中，拆遷公司高管夥同馮明貴等人，5個月內共騙取拆遷款1248萬餘元，其中馮明貴涉嫌個人實得425萬餘元。

查處結果
多名涉案人已判刑

法院認定，拆遷公司高管高春蘭夥同馮明貴等人先後六次共同貪污國家拆遷補償款296萬餘元，一審以犯貪污罪判刑12年，並處沒收財產1萬元；

鐘青、郭元喜均已判刑或追究刑事責任； 拆遷公司拆除驗收組組長孫先迪21次收受馮明貴賄賂21萬元，一審以犯貪污罪、受賄罪判刑17年，並處沒收財產2萬元。

嫌犯其人
馮明貴曾多次入獄

漢陽區檢察院在查辦鐘青等人案件中，發現馮明貴涉案。去年3月22日，漢陽檢方對馮明貴實施刑拘，後移送至武漢市檢察院審查。昨日，市檢察院對馮明貴提起公訴。

馮明貴綽號“大耀”，男，1964年出生，初中文化程度，湖南省新化縣人。1980年5月，他因搶劫被送少管2年；1982年9月，因流氓、盜竊被送勞動教養2年；1986年11月，因盜竊被送勞動教養1年6個月；1989年11月，因犯流氓罪被判刑3年。2002年至今，他任武漢市隨緣物業管理有限公司法定代表人。

案發後，馮明貴家屬協助退出贓款，檢察機關還依法扣押了馮明貴用贓款購買的思威牌轎車和紅旗轎車各一台，評估價值合計34萬餘元，合計追繳贓款贓物277萬餘元。

同時，檢察機關已查實馮明貴夥同鐘青、高春蘭、郭元喜等共同貪污國家拆遷補償款1248萬餘元，截至到去年11月，已追回贓款558萬餘元。

檢察機關認為，馮明貴應以貪污罪追究刑事責任。

律師觀點
加強監管保護國有資產

湖北九通盛律師事務所主任律師劉貽蓀指出，拆遷公司工作人員與社會人員勾結“黑錢”的行為，嚴重違背了拆遷應公開、公平、公正原則。令人關注的是，相關拆遷戶在自身利益下，也極為配合，以致國有資產流失。

律師呼籲，相關部門應加大對拆遷公司的監管，絕不給犯罪分子可乘之機，以保障拆遷人的合法權益和社會穩定。

(楚天都市報)
本報記者余皓
實習生鄧思慧 李君
通訊員吳紅
(來源:荊楚網)
(博訊自由發稿區發稿)

孩子們，你們掃了爺爺的興

韓寒
泰興幼兒園中的小孩也被人砍了，32人受傷，死亡情況不明。這個新聞因為離開上一次南平幼兒園襲擊的新聞太近，我甚至一度誤以為是同一個幼兒園。

在最近的變態凶手殺人事件中，他們都選擇了幼兒園和小學，相信在很多想報復社會的人心中，去幼兒園小學殺人成為了一種時尚，因為在殺人過程中，你將遇到最少的抵抗，殺掉最多的人，造成民間最大的痛苦的恐慌，是最有效的報復社會手段。除了楊佳以外，幾乎所有殺手都挑選了向弱者下手。這個社會沒有出口，殺害更弱者成了他們唯一的出口。我建議把全國地方政府門衛間裡的保安們抽調去保護幼兒園，孩子都保護不了的政府不需要那麼多人保護。

這些殺人事件的產生很大原因是這個社會不公正，不公平。是的，讓公平正義比太陽還要有光輝。但太陽不是每天都出。我們的陰天和黑夜是否稍微太多了一些？所以，提出讓公平正義比太陽還要有光輝並不偉大，做到讓太陽分分鐘都掛在你頭頂上才偉大。

在泰州幼兒園殺人事件中，新聞被控制了，這些孩子們生不逢時，死更不逢時。在相關部門的認識裡，在這喜慶的氣氛裡，這事當屬雜音。我們只知道，泰州幼兒園殺人事件中，受傷32人，政府和醫院一再強調，無一死亡，但是坊間又傳說，死了多個孩子。你說我應該相信誰呢？相信政府吧，那為什麼他們禁止家長見到孩子呢？至今還封鎖著醫院和新聞，沒有孩子的照片和視頻，況且一個殺人用刀劈了32個人，結果一個沒死，那他到底是在殺人還是在做手術呢，也太小心了。相信傳聞吧，畢竟傳聞都是喜歡往誇張了傳的，我們無圖無真相，也不能相信。於是我一搜索泰州，出現的新聞居然是——《泰州近日三喜臨門》，日期是4月30日。

我只是非常的詫異，泰州政府通過了封鎖消息，封鎖醫院，控制媒體，禁止探望，轉移視線，等手段，居然成功的將人們對於殺手的憤怒轉移到了自己身上，這是何苦。你以為他有什麼目的，其實不是的，除了要配合世博會《和諧歡歌》以外，這只是慣性，是政府處理類似事件的習慣，是七步曲：吃飯喝酒到一半，出事了—— 隱瞞，隔離，撤媒體，發禁令，發通稿，賠錢，火化——繼續吃飯喝酒。他們處理問題的手段不比凶手高尚多少，也難怪在網上看到有幼兒園掛出橫幅——冤有頭債有主，出門左轉是政府。

短短的一個多月內，五起校園凶殺案件，短短的一周以內，就發生了兩起，4月29日，泰州，4月30日，濰坊。我不想去探討其中的社會原因，只想告訴大家，也就在這裡，一個人衝進幼兒園砍了32個小孩是不能上社會新聞的，32個加起來才超過一百歲的孩子，你們被砍了，連個報紙都不給你上，因為在幾百公裡以外，召開了一個盛會，那裡光煙花就放了上億，同時在你們的家鄉泰州，要召開國際旅游節，經貿洽談會和華僑城開業典禮，正三喜臨門。

也許在那些爺爺們眼裡，你們，是掃興的。

但是，我們可憐的孩子們，奶粉毒害的是你們，疫苗傷害的是你們，地震壓死的是你們，被火燒死的是你們。就算是成人們的規則出了問題，被成人用刀報復的也是你們。我願望真的像泰州政府說的一樣，你們全部都只是受傷，無一死亡。年長者失職了，願你們長大以後，不光要庇護你們自己的孩子，還要讓這個社會庇護所有人的孩子。

The US: Friend No More

Mark Simon
Second Opinion
Next Magazine
08 April 2010

With our currency pegged to the US dollar, rule of law, long standing cooperation in international financial affairs and staunch support of free trade, no other trading partner offers more of what the United States claims it needs for the success of its people and companies in international commerce than Hong Kong does. At least that was the story until President Obama and his left leaning union-backed coalition came to power.

A US president who supports higher taxes, greater regulation,"fair" over free trade, and a belief that nations with"costs" below those of the US have an unfair trading advantage, means Hong Kong is about to taste the economic and trade agenda of the American left.

The shift in the US Democratic Party on trade has been taking place for some time, as unions, environmentalists and the usual collection of anti-capitalist elements have climbed to power within the party. Unions never forgave Bill Clinton for his pro-trade accomplishments which they saw as hurting US workers. President Obama secured union support in 2008 with a pledge to be more skeptical towards free trade. A pledge that he has undeniably lived up too as he has stopped signature-ready trade agreements with South Korea and Columbia, and made trade talks more about climate change than the exchange of goods.

The Democrat's anti-trade stance has consequences for Hong Kong. We are a city that lives on trade. If the dominant political power in our second largest market is turning protectionist, then Hong Kong will be harmed. Worse yet is when that trading partner is the US, and Hong Kong is seen as an economic threat based on the very system that has made Hong Kong prosperous.

Newsweek recently wrote that the only thing China accomplished at last April's G20 meeting was to block a US effort to name Hong Kong a tax haven. China may soon have another item to block. It is no coincidence that the Petersen Institute, a left leaning pro-Obama economic think tank recently called Hong Kong's currency undervalued. Is the US about to add currency manipulation to its charge of Hong Kong being a tax haven and opaque offshore banking center? And since Hong Kong hasn't made many changes to our banking system in the last twenty years, when exactly did we become the rouge system the US now wants to clamp down?

Hong Kong is not a money laundering center nor a city founded on tax evasion. We are a low tax trading hub. The fact that Hong Kong banking laws are under assault by the US Treasury and IRS has more to do with closing up a financial system which is far more competitive than the high-cost US rather than the IRS chasing deadbeat Americans. It did not go un-noticed in the US that Hong Kong eclipsed New York in IPO offerings as companies fled US over-regulation and high taxes. It is possible to become competitive by either cutting your own costs or by raising your competitor's costs.

The shift in the US position on Hong Kong is clear. Is there one item on the US-Hong Kong agenda that opens more trade or removes regulation between the two partners? The entire economic focus of the US on Hong Kong is negative and accusatory.

Hong Kong's response to this new hostility has been feeble. The US is calling Hong Kong a money laundering tax haven with poor banking laws. Hong Kong's response? A kowtow. While it is understandable that the government does not wish a fight with the US, one might ask what the alternative is if Hong Kong does not resist the US? Make no mistake the problem the American left has with Hong Kong goes much deeper than a few banking law changes. A protectionist agenda is forming in the United States and Europe, and part of that agenda is an attack on low-tax light-regulation nations. This means Hong Kong.

Donald Tsang and his government owe the Hong Kong people a defense of the Hong Kong system, not complicit adherence in helping the US raise the cost of Hong Kong by increasing regulation and reducing competitiveness. Some fights are worth having.

Mark Simon first lived in Hong Kong from 1992 to 1995. Since 2000 he has been an executive with the Next Media group in Hong Kong. He has written on free trade in the Asian Wall Street Journal, IHT, SCMP, and various international policy journals.

內地半數飯盒含致癌物

明報
2010年3月25日

【明報專訊】內地不法商家以有毒化學物質生產塑膠飯盒的情况嚴重。有檢測結果顯示，這些飯盒含有工業碳酸鈣和工業石蠟等有毒化學物，當飯盒盛載有油或醋的食物時，化學物就會溶解入食物之中被人體吸收，輕則影響新陳代謝 系統，形成膽石、腎石，攝入過量更可能致癌。

《中國青年報》引述中國國際食品包裝協會的統計，中國每年消耗150億個飯盒，但大部分飯盒在生產過程存在問題，質量不合格，協會秘書長董金獅說，這些飯盒「合格率還不到一半」。

董金獅指出，曾將北京 兩間著名飯店「老邊餃子」和「東來順涮羊肉」所用的飯盒拿去檢驗，結果發現，飯盒所用物質溶解到食物中的比例超過國家標準20倍至150倍。董金獅稱，生產商為省成本，生產飯盒時混入工業碳酸鈣和工業石蠟等有毒化學物，令民眾用飯盒吃飯等於「服毒」。