Fears continue to grow over genetic engineering

Pretty strange news these days on the Franken-crop front, also known as the genetically engineered/ genetically modified food battlefield. A top-secret visit by Bill and Melinda Gates to Australia in December to check on their $10 million test crop of genetically modified bananas “capable of resisting disease.” Field trials at South Johnstone, Queensland, Australia, point to a GE banana with more pro-vitamin A than regular bananas. The stuff of movies like Soylent Green or a James Bond plot. Poor African nations are in the sights of big agri-business, and biotechnology outfits like Monsanto, Bayer, Chimera, BASF, Syngenta. The Gates Foundation’s AGRA – Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – is all about top-down mandates, hyper-technology, corporate-driven solutions, and sometimes bizarre genetically modified organism in a hocus pocus that puts profits ahead of precautionary principle. Full steam ahead for outside-the-local-region solutions, and damn the local knowledge, those land races of food and crop varieties that have stood the test of time … and culture. George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farming cooperative, which had more than $600 million in sales last year, puts it plainly: “There is a growing awareness that our [food supply] system makes us all guinea pigs of sorts.” Story after story prove to more people than the organic foodies that genetic engineering isn’t the answer to famine, climate change and strengthening food security for poor and rich countries. The seed company Pioneer (owned by Dow Chemical) was developing a GE corn strain, Herculex, that had wrapped up in its DNA a toxin that would help it resist corn rootworm. The problem was, as a group of scientists working at Pioneer’s request found out, that GE corn killed ladybugs. Here’s where the GE-Biotech story gets ugly: according to the journal Nature Biotechnology, Dow prohibited the scientists from publicizing the research and kept it from the EPA. That corn bio-tech “creation” was approved in 2003. Now the narrative really gets close to H.G. Wells’ story “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Nature News reported that a research team discovered two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild, plus a third variety that is a cross of the two GM breeds. One of the transgenic varieties was Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola, engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. The other one, from Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty Link canola, is resistant to gluphosinate. That third cross-contaminated variety contained transgenes from each of these, and, through its own evolutionary track, resists both types of herbicide. It doesn’t take graduate degrees in agronomy, chemistry and botany to figure out that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta have set loose unnatural and untested plants that proliferate, cross-breed, and create new plants. We have no idea what these GMOs are doing to us as biological entities eating so many foods containing GE canola, soy, corn and beet sugar in a so many processed foods consumed by tens of millions. For more than two decades, and especially this past year, alarms have been going off concerning climate change making an already difficult situation of global food security worse, especially in Africa. The climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, had all sorts of panels on food insecurity complicated by climate change. Which countries have the least capacity to adapt? Developing countries – i.e. the majority of countries. The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that body disregarded by Republicans and lambasted and vilified by Tea Party members and presidential aspirant Ron Paul – recently made it clear with a convergence of dozens of scientific studies and organizations that there will be deleterious impacts of climate change on agriculture, livestock and fishing. Here’s how screwed up GE-GMO purveyors are – genetically altered pen-raised salmon, have been DNA-bombarded with genes of a freshwater bass species so they get five times the size of “normal” farmed salmon in the same 18-month period. Feeding those Franken-salmon corn meal, soy by-products and chicken and beef renderings adds to the gross experiment. Here’s an even more strange fact: a single bluefin tuna makes international headlines when it sells for more than $100,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. They are so rare now – overfished to near extinction – we have to marvel at the rapidity of the globe’s drive for wild food. Fish are probably the last wild food Americans eat. Sushi joints from Seattle to Missoula and Las Vegas are as popular as Carl’s Jr. When I talk with sushi-eating friends about this, they shrug it off, saying they might as well eat the last of the wild marine protein before the world contaminates everything and shifts to GE-Everything. Floods and inconsistent weather patterns affecting rainfall have impacted most of the world, worsened by fuel prices. Oxfam correlates this impact into hardship — climate change will help double food prices by the year 2030. These factors, seen before and after the Durban conference, are churning up the debate on genetically modified food. The Gates Foundation, Monsanto and some agricultural experts are convinced that GMOs will provide part of the answer to the long-standing hunger and food insecurity challenges that have plagued Africa for half a century. But civil society, social justice advocates and others from non-governmental organizations urged world leaders to focus on food security, particularly in Africa. Wilfred Miga of PELUM sees food in Africa tied directly to individual countries’ identity and sovereignty – its culture and the right to grow. PELUM is an association in Zambia giving political and technical voice to small-scale farmers in rural areas. It’s simple for people like Miga – improving livelihoods and increasing the sustainability of farming communities by empowering ecological best practices. Miga said PELUM understands that despite the challenges the African continent faces, GMOs are not a universal answer to food insecurity. He like others in the food sovereignty movement know GMOs gut food sovereignty because those crops are patented, they are bio-manipulated to have killer or assassin genes that prevent germination without the pesticides and other artificial inputs created and marketed by the same seed companies or subsidiaries, and the crops in mass plantings will contaminate all other wild or non-GMO crops, in a worst-case scenario. Hawaii had widespread contamination of papaya crops from GM varieties, even in the seed stocks that were sold as conventional.