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In the column on your right, the link to the BIRDHEALTH project I'll soon be a member -->

Journey in Mussolini country

E.U.R, for Esposizione Universale di Roma, 1942.

The district is not attracting, empty, cold, massive, and something that hovers above the buildings and weights on them. The cars, too, quickly cross the main way, all in perspective. The sky is grey, few people outside.

I arrive in metro in this district built from nothing by the fascist government of Mussolini, in 1942. The district by it-self it's not attracting, it's true: no alleys between two orange-painted walls, no tourists neither. We are so far away from Rome, in what was supposed to become the Third Rome, "extending over the others, along the banks of the sacred river until the Tyrrhean beaches".

The Convention Centre facing the Building of the Italian Civilization. 

This building is the one that impresses the most. 216 arcs hold up a propagandist ode to "a people of poets of artists of heros of saints of thinkers of scientists of navigators of immigrants"... I wonder what the people who live around and pass in front of it everyday think about that... The megalomania of a dictator. I think that what disturbs me is more the fact that those buildings are still standing up there and that these pictures are not aging paper archives but digital ones in my camera. 

A bit farther, nature springed back on a hastily built velodrome. I had to jump over two fences to enter in the site and see it growing and spreading. Nature is right, though.

Walking back, starlings were flying like fishes above the Palazzo dello Sport. Two falcons prefered courting instead of playing at sharks.

ciao

yvan

It's late here, I'll translate that later.

PS that has nothing to see: I've just received a Fao e-mail about the World Food Prize. It's a Nobel-like prize for agriculture and agronomy. This year's nominees are Luis Iniácio Lula da Silva, former Brazilian President, for his reforms against hunger and malnutrition, José Esquinas Alcazar, for his work on the conservation of biodiversity of agricultural species (agrodiversity) and to promote the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, Jeffrey Sachs, for his role in the fight against poverty, and Nicolaas A. van der Graaff, for his support of integrated pest management .

The aim of the game: find the mistake, or the subtle delights of globalisation when it comes to fight against hunger, or even, how to take the naughty for the nice.

The World Food Prize (WFP) has been created by 1970's Nobel Peace prized Norman E. Borlaug. It is said that he "has saved more lifes than anybody else" improving plant species and thus sparking what it's now known as the Green Revolution.

Last year, WFP laureates were "Edson Lobato of Brazil, A. Colin McClung of the United States, and H.E. Alysson Paolinelli of Brazil" for having allowed to transform bare and uncultivated lands of the Cerrado, Brazil, into one of the regions leader in terms of agricultural production. Very good. However, it seems that this Cerrado is one of the richest savanna worldwide in terms of biodiversity: out of 200 milions hectares (~400 milions acres), more than 40% of its 10 000 plant species are endemic, and shelter around 1500 vertebrate species. Today, more than 40 milions of hectares (2005) are designed to soybean cultivation (55% of the national production), to corn (28% of the nat. prod.) and to coffee (59% of the nat. prod.), and more than 55% of beef cattle. That agronomists used fertilizers to transform those unfarmable lands too acidic and rich in aluminium to make fields disturbs me a bit. But that WFP's sponsors are, I quote: World Initiative for Soy in Human Health, Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Cargill, US Grains Council and United Soybean Board pose me a problem...source

Vote for José... Esquinas