GMOs

Genetically Modified Organisms

My main quarrel with GMO’s is in fact not directly against GMOs (obviously I have lots of littler but equally important quarrels with GMO's). I believe that humans should always be trying to advance science and develop science that is useful to us. My problem mainly with GMOs is rooted in a nasty habit that has seemed to of developed into a human trait: the need to control nature. The majority of humans and normally the ruling elite have always tried to control nature. It seems to be rooted in capitalisms thought process, that we as humans should get what we want when we want. We have invented fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and the lot to try and control nature. Get it to do what we want it to do, but the one fatal flaw in this methodology/religion is that nature is and always will be the bigger player. We don’t control it; we are part of it and therefore responsible for keeping our part of the ecology cycle going round and round.

There has emerged an argument in recent times that GM has the potential to save millions of lives, but so does permaculture, organic living and clean fresh water, and they are a lot less bureaucratic, a lot cheaper and we have been sitting on these “technologies” for thousands of years. I usually describe myself as a reformist revolutionary but in this case I will settle for nothing less than a full revolution and that is an organic permacultural revolution. 

The way that GM is being forced on us at the moment is the most damaging to our lives. It is being pushed through by corporations as opposed to freelance scientists and independent institutions, as any good technology should be. Giving corporations the driving power of a new technology is dangerous because they are just looking to make as much profit from it as they can. Therefore they are not doing nearly enough research into long term effects of GM on humans or nature because research would take “valuable” time and money.

The reason I point out that permaculture is a lot less bureaucratic than GM (as if it isn't obvious) is because recently – and a trend I think we shall start to see a bit more of – a lot of companies, Monsanto namely, have taken to making the seeds on their “product” plants infertile so that farmers will have to buy more seeds the next year. This is not only unfair to farmers but this is also incredibly short sited and quite immature. Imagine for a second if you will that it is 50 years into the future. All the farmers in the world have switched on to producing GM foods, all the seeds are infertile but because everybody is being told we would all be dead of starvation if it weren’t for this new GM technology the farmers don’t put up much of a fuss and so go on happily buying their new seeds every year. Then one day a disaster strikes, say a nuclear reactor blows up and kills all of the scientists who make these seeds. Suddenly there is no one left to make all of these new seeds. The reason, Monsanto say, they are making their seeds infertile is that the plants that they have genetically designed are their property and they are just loaning it to farmers. So to plant seeds from the next generation would be like stealing. Therefore logically a safeguard should of course be put in place to stop this heinous crime and make it so that farmers can’t use the seeds. Oh so logical don’t you think?

Ever since the industrial revolution, we have been mucking about with nature in a big way. We have been polluting the earth in nearly every way we can. Shooting pollutants up into the air and into the floor which causes an endless amount of trouble, we have been putting billions of tons of plastic into the ocean for about 50 years and we have been draining the water tables as fast as possible. All of this has created many problems; arguably the biggest is man-fed global warming. Now global warming has been sped up by humans because we have physically being messing nature up. Imagine what could happen if we genetically start fiddling about with nature? I shudder to think.

I am not saying humans shouldn’t experiment with GM foods, because some of the best creations come out of experimenting with something entirely different. I am saying that these experiments should be conducted deep down underground where not a single grain of pollen should be allowed to see the natural light of day. Because if a GM farm starts up in a certain area, organic farms are legally not allowed to call themselves organic farms because the bees that pollinate both farms will undoubtedly mix the GM with the non GM pollen.

The upcoming onslaught of GM foods that we face will slowly force everyone to GM. As GM masterminds inject the latest chemical into their crops to repel bugs we shall also slowly see the emergence of resistant bugs to certain chemicals. Rendering organic pesticides (most which have been in use for thousands of years, and work just fine) and non organic pesticides worse than useless. As a result of this the amount of pesticides used will have to be upped, damaging not only our health and the environment even more but also the financial situation of non GM using farmers. These farmers will eventually either switch to GM, or just crash and burn since they will be spending so much money on pesticides. We then very quickly find ourselves in a situation where we do not have so much as a say in whether we eat GM or not, and this voice that we could have is slipping away all the time, Monsanto are lobbying for further deregulation of untested GM products and as I am writing this (01/03/2011) grains and seeds being imported into Europe to feed livestock do not need to be labelled.

How many of you have heard of Bacillus Thuringien? It is a chemical that is found in soil and has now been transplanted into NewLeaf potatoes which are a new Monsanto creation. The Bt chemical can produce a toxin that is lethal to the deadly Colorado potato beetle. The Colorado beetle once it infects a farm will wipe out an entire crop of Russets (which the NewLead potato is based on). The funny thing is that we humans have had the knowledge for thousands of years of how to combat this Colorado beetle. Simply grow plants around the field that the beetle doesn’t like. Therefore there will be no reason for the beetle to then enter the field. Or, an even better idea: since the beetle only goes for russets, don’t plant them in such a concentrated way, this way the Colorado beetle will not be able to find them as easily. Bt has never been in the human diet before, apart from when you dine on the occasional soil as a baby or the little bit of soil that, no matter how hard you wash and spin you’re handpicked salad that dirt will always find its way back into the salad bowl. Now because of NewLeaf potatoes Bt will be for the first time in our diets in a significant way (or at least the diets of those who eat NewLeafs’) and typically Monsanto have not done any research into what the long term effects will be of having a completely new chemical in our diet.

 

Organic farming has had the knowledge of how to feed people successfully for tens of thousands of years. So why instead of listening to organic ideas do humans insist on starting from scratch and trying to work out and build new non organic infrastructure? Because a) the whole idea behind organic farming is working with nature so therefore the need for humans to control everything is made redundant and b) there is not as much profit to be made for the high ups of pesticide companies and now more recently Monsanto. But hey all in the name of profit right? I have heard the recent population boom given as a reason of why we need to turn to GM, but that is simply not the case. If there were an organic food revolution then everyone can live easily on organic food. Obviously our essential outlook needs to shift dramatically in the way we do farming today for this to happen. There needs to be a radical and fast decentralization of farming. I am not saying everyone needs to become a farmer, but there should be at least one if not five farms for every 1,000 people. OCA and aboutmyplanet, as well as others have estimated organic food can easily support 10 billion people, and using permaculture techniques can easily support 20 billion.

Finally to all you GM advocators who are still not convinced that GM is a bad thing, what do you say to the string of studies that show that GM crops produce no higher yields than their counterparts*? Are you really saying that GM can give us more nutritional value than organic foods? Are you really saying that GM is a better – or has the potential to be a better – system of farming than permaculture, a tried, tested and proven method that has been in use for the past thousands of years?

GM is nothing more than an attempt by big corporations to centralize our farming even more, which is damaging to the human race, not only through the creation of disease that big centralized farms bring, but also weakens food security and increases needless bureaucracy. It is moving us away every day from the organic farming we should be practising, and if global warming and out of control capitalism is not the end of us first then I assure you GM foods will be.

*The adoption of bioengineered crops. Jorge FernandezCornejo and William D. McBride, US Department of Agriculture Report, May 2002, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer810/aer810.pdf

*Glyphosate-resistant soyabean cultivar yields compared with sister lines. Elmore, R.W. et al. Agronomy Journal, Vol.  93, No. 2, 2001, pp. 408–41

*Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops. Doug Gurian-Sherman, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009, http://tiny.cc/eqZST