ecoyear

Yesterday I went to a lecture by Vandana Shiva. The talk will be on KGNU at some point. The audience gave Dr. Shiva three standing ovations - I have rarely seen this! She was very inspiring and gave some good tips on addressing Boulder's own genetically engineered seed issue (the GMO beets).

It turns out you can watch The World According to Monsanto on youtube. The film raised several issues I had not previously considered. I used to think that the problem with genes escaping from GMO plants to traditional plants was the the whole world would be growing GMO crops inadvertently. But actually, it's much worse than that.

It turns out that GMO plants contaminate other crops in a way that is random. If you save your own seeds, you will end up with seeds where the engineered foreign bit of DNA inserted itself wherever it could. Those plants are likely to be weird mutants indeed, and may never grow properly. If you thought you could rely on the seeds you save, you would starve.

This raises the possibility that these companies are not simply downplaying the risks of their genes escaping simply out of carelessness or incompetence. One has to consider the possibility that they are aiming to destroy traditional local crops, because then farmers will have no choice but to buy their seeds and herbicides/pesticides/fertilizers.

It is instructive to understand that they started out as chemical companies, not seed companies. Their initial products were Agent Orange and DDT. The seeds could be just a way to sell more chemicals (a win-win situation for the companies, if you will). The story played out over and over is that GMO seeds are promoted in a community, but they are expensive, so they are bought on credit. They also require lots of pesticides (even when they say they don't), and don't yield very well (even when they say they do). The result is often a five-fold decrease in farmer income. Dr. Shiva said that the geographical distribution of Indian farmer suicides (they actually drink pesticide) is parallel to that of GMO crop introduction. I haven't heard what happens then to these farms. Would I be surprised if large agricultural corporations moved in? There is no doubt that this situation fuels the migration from rural areas to urban slums.

Dr. Shiva also made the point that in order to track the successful introduction of a foreign gene into a GMO plant, an antibiotic resistance gene is inserted as well. There is real fear that such a gene could then be transfered to bacteria the person comes in contact with. Again, one can be of the opinion that these companies are just being ignorant and careless, or consider the possibility that this is calculated.

Am I being paranoid? Who benefits from antibiotic resistance, if not the large pharmaceutical companies that market new generations of (still under patent, and horrendously expensive) antibiotics? Could it be all about chemicals?

Certainly, when it comes to seeds, monopoly on the market is the clearly stated aim. The US grows 90% GMO soybeans (which feed cows and chickens). India grows 95% GMO cotton. Monopoly on the food supply would result in control of the entire world.

Am I exaggerating?

I think we need Superman to the rescue.

I think it is no longer an exaggeration to say that if you want to be healthy, it is no longer reasonable to eat food grown or prepared by people you don't know.