Biotech snake oil: a quack cure for hunger

Weeds are already becoming resistant to their poison Round Up. Yet they keep raking in the profits.

The best thing they can come up with is insect resistance and herbicide tolerance? Bah. Both of those are pretty much loosing suckermatches.

Insect resistance will fade pretty quickly because insects adapt pretty damn quickly to an environmental change.

Herbicide tolerance? I'm thinking that the cross pollination of species will create herbicide resistant weeds too.

Or worse. This is the stuff that those 1950's 3D movies were all about.

You too can have a voice in this movement. All it takes is a letter to your state representatives to tell them that you want at least labels on food to denote GM ingredients to have a democratic choice. It has worked with milk regarding RGBH, and it can work regarding our food. Safety and disclosure are our rights as consumers.

More from the article:

Biotech mania has also diverted attention from the underlying social causes of the food crisis, which include diversion of food crops to make biofuels, and “trade liberalization” policies that have crippled developing country agriculture and made these nations dependent on subsidized surpluses from rich nations. “The structural causes” of the food crisis, says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, “lie in policies of international financial institutions over the last 20 to 30 years, which have made developing countries so vulnerable in the first place.” International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank policies, she says, “eroded state and international investment in agriculture,” as well as farmer support mechanisms such as state grain marketing agencies and subsidized agricultural services.

The IMF and World Bank also “promoted cash crops instead of domestic production of food for domestic consumption. All of those policies have basically removed the principle of self-sufficiency. At the same time, you have had the lowering of tariffs which has resulted in the dumping of cheap, subsidized commodities from rich countries. With all of those policies, you find an erosion of the agricultural base of developing countries and their ability to feed themselves,” says Mittal.

Eliminating agricultural self-sufficiency was an explicit objective of rich-country policies. As Reagan’s agriculture secretary John Block expressed it with uncharacteristic candor in 1986: “The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost.”

The global food crisis underscores the bankruptcy of such policies. The flood of subsidized U.S. corn into Mexico facilitated by NAFTA has thrown at least 1.3 million Mexican farmers out of work. Haiti and the Philippines, once nearly self-sufficient in rice production, are now among the world’s largest rice importers. Africa, a net food exporter in the 1960s, now imports 25 percent of its food. With the sharp rise in international grain prices, the reduced ability of poor nations to feed themselves presages increased hunger and poverty for many years to come. In fact, the food crisis recently prompted University of Minnesota food experts C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer to double their projection of the number of the world’s hungry by the year 2025, from 625 million to 1.2 billion. The UN-World Bank IAASTD report advocates “food sovereignty,” defined as “the right of peoples and sovereign states to democratically determine their own agriculture and food policies.”

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More and more we are hearing the truth. GM crops cannot feed the hungry as they are being pushed by the PR machine of the multinationals looking to profit from the climate and food crises. More and more countries around the world are seeing this hoax for what it is. Even in America now we are seeing counties in California banning GM crops, and Hawaii banning GM coffee and taro. We are seeing court cases finding in favor of farmers and in keeping GMOs from completely pushing out all other types of farming that provide us with sustainability and quality. There is progress and we have to keep informing people about this in order to be able to do what is moral and right not only to feed people but to meet the challenges of climate change.