Can genetically engineered foods help feed the hungry? Are anti-GMO activists and over-zealous environmentalists standing in the way of the hungry being fed?
The hope that GMO foods might bring solutions to malnutrition and world hunger was never more dramatically illustrated than when Time magazine ran a cover story titled "Grains of Hope." The article joyfully announced the development of a genetically engineered "golden rice." This new strain of GM rice has genes from viruses and daffodils spliced into its genetic instructions. The result is a form of rice that is a golden-yellow color (much like daffodil flowers), and that produces beta-carotene, which the human body normally converts into Vitamin A.
Nearly a million children die every year because they are weakened by Vitamin A deficiencies and an additional 350,000 go blind. Golden rice, said Time, will be a godsend for the half of humanity that depends on rice for its major staple. Merely eating this rice could prevent blindness and death.
The development of golden rice was, it seemed, compelling and inspiring evidence that GM crops are the answer to malnutrition and hunger. Time quoted former U.S. President Jimmy Carter: "Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy, starvation is."
Shortly after the Time cover story, Monsanto and other biotechnology companies launched a $50 million marketing campaign, including $32 million in TV and print advertising. The ads, complete with soft focus fields and smiling children, said that "biotech foods could help end world hunger."
Other ad campaigns have followed. One Monsanto ad tells the public: "Biotechnology is one of tomorrow's tools in our hands today. Slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world cannot afford."
Within a few months, the biotech industry had spent far more on these ads than it had on developing golden rice. Their purpose? "Unless I'm missing something," wrote Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine, "the aim of this audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me -- well-off first-worlders dubious about genetically engineered food -- on the horns of a moral dilemma ... If we don't get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind."
The implication of the ads is that lifesaving food is being held hostage by anti-science activists.
In the years since Time proclaimed the promises of golden rice, however, we've learned a few things.
For one thing, we've learned that golden rice will not grow in the kinds of soil that it must to be of value to the world's hungry. To grow properly, it requires heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides -- expensive inputs unaffordable to the very people that the variety is supposed to help. And we've also learned that golden rice requires large amounts of water -- water that might not be available in precisely those areas where Vitamin A deficiency is a problem, and where farmers cannot afford costly irrigation projects.
And one more thing -- it turns out that golden rice doesn't work, even in theory. Malnourished people are not able to absorb Vitamin A in this form. And even if they could, they'd have to eat an awful lot of the stuff. An 11-year-old boy would have to eat 27 bowls of golden rice a day in order to satisfy his minimum requirement for the vitamin.
I'm sure that given enough time and enough money, some viable genetically modified (GM) crops could be developed that contain more nutrients or have higher yields. But I'm not sure that even if that were to happen, it would actually benefit the world's poor. Monsanto and the other biotech companies aren't developing these seeds with the intention of giving them away. If people can't afford to buy GM seeds, or if they can't afford the fertilizers, pesticides and water the seeds require, they'll be left out.
Poverty is at the root of the problem of hunger. As Peter Rosset, director of Food First, reminds us, "People do not have Vitamin A deficiency because rice contains too little Vitamin A, but because their diet has been reduced to rice and almost nothing else."
And what, pray tell, has reduced these people to such poverty and their diets to such meager fare? In the words of the British writer George Monbiot:
The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolized by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech industry is to capture and monopolize the sources of wealth and the means of production ...GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes which give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can't be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all.
No one in her right mind would welcome this, so the corporations must persuade us to focus on something else ... We are told that ... by refusing to eat GM products, we are threatening the developing world with starvation, an argument that is, shall we say, imaginative ...
With rare exceptions, genetically engineered crops are being created not because they're productive or because they address real human needs, but because they're patentable.
The biotech companies have invested billions of dollars because they sense in this technology the potential for enormous profit and the means to gain control over the world's food supply. Their goal is not to help subsistence farmers feed themselves. Their goal is maximum profit.
While Monsanto would like us to believe they are seeking to alleviate world hunger, there is actually a very dark side to the company's efforts. For countless centuries farmers have fed humanity by saving the seed from one years crop to plant the following year. But Monsanto, the company that claims its motives are to help feed the hungry, has developed what it calls a "Technology Protection System" that renders seeds sterile. Commonly known as "terminator technology" and developed with taxpayer funding by the USDA and Delta & Pine Land Company (an affiliate of Monsanto), the process genetically alters seeds so that their offspring will be sterile for all time. If employed, this technology would ensure that farmers cannot save their own seeds, but would have to come back to Monsanto year after year to purchase new ones.
Critics refer to these genetically engineered seeds as suicide seeds. "By peddling suicide seeds, the biotechnology multinationals will lock the world's poorest farmers into a new form of genetic serfdom," says Emma Must of the World Development Movement. "Currently 80 percent of crops in developing countries are grown using farm-saved seed. Being unable to save seeds from sterile crops could mean the difference between surviving and going under."
To Monsanto and other GMO companies, the terminator and other seed sterilizing technologies are simply business ventures that are designed to enhance profits. In this case, there is not even the implication of benefit to consumers.
I wish I could speak more highly of GM foods and their potential. But the technology is now held tightly in the hands of corporations whose motives are, I'm afraid, very different from what they would have us believe.
Despite the PR, Monsanto's goal is not to make hunger history. It's to control the staple crops that feed the world.
Will GMOs help end world hunger? I don't think so.
John Robbins is the author of many bestsellers including "The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World," the classic "Diet For A New America" and "The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less." He is the recipient of the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award and Green America's Lifetime Achievement Award. To learn more about his work, visit www.johnrobbins.info
Follow John Robbins on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnrobbinsnow
Katherine Marshall: Pilgrimage to Albert Schweitzer's Lambarene
http://newhope360.com/blog/china-mandates-gm-labeling-why-won-t-us
Next is a country who has trouble producing it's own food due to a lack of irrigation, fertilizer, etc. The US could help by funding irrigation projects or farming education initiatives, etc. Instead, we send them food and help jump start their economy using contracts with American companies. Now, instead of even trying to farm, they simply work for the US, and then buy enough food to feed enough of their population so that the rest of the world doesn't feel so bad and writes this off as a success.
So what poor countries need are farmers, and maybe help to get them started, but what we give is the opposite. Imagine what America would be like if Native Americans hadn't shown pilgrims how to farm in Plymouth. There's a good chance that they would have all died. Instead, one in ten Americans can trace their roots to the mayflower. Maybe it's time that we passed that favor on.
http://www.naturalnews.com/GoogleSearchResults.html?q=rawsome+foods&cx=010579349100583850635%3Aw_kzwe9_yca&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&sa.x=0&sa.y=0&siteurl=www.naturalnews.com%2FIndex.html#1455
http://www.utne.com/Environment/Agriculture-Organic-Farmers-Lawsuit-Monsanto.aspx
We'd have plenty of "regular" food supply if big argi stopped trying to micro manage the home farmer and the government stopped trying to rule who gets what for profit.
Lazy people make lazy dietary choices.
Stop trying to get around doing honest work. Grown from organic seeds and demand that your grocers do too. Do the work and be healthier. If people ate lass chemicals, physically exercised more, and ate non-tampered crops women would stop "dieting" forever.
It appears that the tables are now turning. Instead of Monsanto winning against organic farmers, organic farmers can now achieve victory against Monsanto. In other words, farmers being infringed upon by the drifting of GM material into their fields now have a legal leg to stand on in the pursuit of justice against Monsanto and the other biotechnology giants whose "frankencrops" are responsible for causing widespread contamination of the American food supply.
Oluf and Debra Johnson's 1,500-acre organic farm in Stearns County, Minn., has repeatedly been contaminated by nearby conventional and GMO farms since the couple started it in the 1990s
But PFU's inconsiderate spraying habits continued, with numerous additional incidents occurring in 2005, 2007, and 2008, according to the Star Tribune.
After enduring much hardship, the Johnson's finally ended up suing PFU in 2009 for negligence and trespass, only to receive denial from the district court that received the case. But after appealing, the Johnson's received favor from the Appeals Court, which ruled that particulate matter, including pesticides, herbicides, and even GM particulates, that contaminates nearby fields is, in fact, considered illegal trespass, and is subject to the same laws concerning other forms of trespass.
In a similar case, a California-based organic farm recently won a $1 million lawsuit filed against a conventional farm whose pesticides spread through fog from several miles away, and contaminated its fields. Jacobs Farm / Del Cobo's entire season's herb crop.
hempaustralia.net.au/Hemp_History.html - Cached
In the 19th Century in Australia starvation due to famine was stopped by the use of Hemp as food. In 1937 Dupont Industries and newspaper magnate William ..
HEMP SEED: The Most Nutritionally Complete Food Source In The World
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COMPLETE FOOD SOURCE IN THE WORLD Part One. by Lynn Osburn. Seeds of the plant cannabis sativa, hemp seed, contain all the essential amino acids and ...
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Amaranth: New Crop Opportunity
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And here's an interesting read. With the exception of bt-cotton, GMO crops in the US have lead to a net INCREASE in pesticide use.
http://www.combat-monsanto.co.uk/IMG/pdf/Rapport_Benbrooke.pdf
And this, too, on the productivity of organic farming. Turns out you can feed the world on organic farming!
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~christos/articles/cv_organic_farming.html
And there are other, selectively bred non-GMO plant breeds that can do the job in a more natural way. Here's a good index of them. Crops that increase yields, are resistant to insects, weeds, drought, and flooding, and are more nutritious (including beta-carotene), all without genetic modification.
http://www.gmwatch.org/component/content/article/31-need-gm/12305-non-gm-index
I agree that eating too much meat presents a problem for the world. Americans eat way too much protein.
But even if nobody stopped eating meat, there is plenty of food that is destroyed ON PURPOSE that could feed the hungry. The machine is based on artificially created scarcity and is a total scam.
1. There is no system of agriculture, natural or chemical, using machinery or not, that can infintely increase the production of the earth.
2. Humans have the ability to reproduce up to and past the ability of the earth to produce sustenance.
3. The way to handle that problem is either to "let nature take its course" starvation, disease and war, or the gentel course of population control.