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 ques-tions 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 pro-jects 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 promul-gate itself, but still expelling old and highly resistant traditional seeds from the indian market. This drives Indian farmers into debt and dependency with multinatio-nal companies such as Mon-santo and AgreVo. Such developments are contra-dictory 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.