One of the main concerns for advocates against Genetically Modified (GM) crops is the growing number of pesticide tolerant or resistant weeds and their affect on crop yield. According to an article published in Geoforum by Binimelis et al, in 2009 a glyphosate-resistant biotype of johnsongrass (Sorghum halepense (L.)) appeared in Argentina and now covers at least 10,000 ha. They explain that no preventive strategies are deployed against the invasion. The reactive measures are based on "gene-stacking" that allows the use of still more glyphosate or new combinations of herbicides. A new phenomenon called the "transgenic treadmill" is identified. A colleague of mine pointed out that since the EU is the largest importer of soybeans, European awareness of the local impacts of imported soybeans (as feedstuffs and/or agro-fuels) should not focus only on deforestation, but also consider the socio-environmental consequences apart from the loss of productivity.
Bonnie Azab Powell at the Ethicurean recently posted “The Failure of Science”: New paper makes a damning case against genetically modified food crops" where she mentions the new book “Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet" by technology reporter Denise Caruso and recent articles published in the International Journal of Society of Agriculture and Food. The two part series Part 1: The Development of a Flawed Enterprise and Part 2: Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity highlight the conflict between science and society through a historical perspective, tactics used, and regulatory flaws and failures.
This year's Global Food Security Act of 2009 introduced by Senator Richard Lugar, "would authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2010 through 2014 to provide assistance to foreign countries to promote food security, to stimulate rural economies, and to improve emergency response to food crises, to amend the Foreign Assistance Act(FAA) of 1961." Sounds like a great bill for the US to help alleviate world hunger except that it creatively amends the FAA of 1961 by makinging the first sentence include "research on biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including genetically modified technology." Consequently, the bill specifies that the U.S. MUST fund GMOs and biotechnology, a change in policy up to this point.
The bill was nicknamed "the REAL Monsanto bill" by the Organic Consumers Association. According to Monsanto's first quarter lobbying reports, the company spent $2,094,000 in the first quarter 2009. Their specific lobbying issues were Biotechnology acceptance, S. 384- Global Food Security Act of 2009, Sustainable Yield Initiative, Crop insurance/Biotech yield endorsement and USDA Rulemaking - 7CFR Part 340. (thanks to La Vida Locavore who was contacted by Monsanto who denied involvement in the bill).
In the waning months of the Bush Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a proposal to completely overhaul its regulation of genetically engineered crops, significantly weakening its oversight. USDA also published the rules before publishing the full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), as required by law, and in the absence of public review of the data needed to make regulatory recommendations. A comment period for USDA's Docket No. APHIS-2008-0023, Importation, Interstate Movement, and Release into the Environment of Certain Genetically Engineered Organisms has been extended until June 29th.
If you wish to submit a comment using the Internet, go to the Federal eRulemaking portal. Then click on “Add Comments.” This will also allow you to view public comments and related materials available electronically. Using the Federal eRulemaking portal is the best way to ensure that your comments will be associated with the right docket and reviewed by the right people. Consideration will be given to all comments received on or before June 29th.
Showing posts with label GMO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GMO. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Friday, December 5, 2008
Flood Tolerant Rice Breakthrough
An article in the Sacramento Bee reveals that a geneticist at UC-Davis is receiving an award for her work developing a flood-tolerant rice. What is most exciting, is that the research, which was funded partly by USDA, did not use genetic engineering. Scientists identified a gene, called Sub1A, that is responsible for flooding tolerance in rice. "Identifying the gene allowed plant breeders to use "precision breeding" to create new rice varieties that could recover after severe flooding and "produce abundant yields of high-quality grain," the release says.
Study Background
Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant pathology, Julia Bailey-Serres, a UC Riverside genetics professor and David Mackill, of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, will be given the 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture National Research Initiative Discovery Award Friday at UC Riverside.Implications
Other than their flood tolerance, the new plants are virtually identical to popular high-yielding varieties.
Flooding in Bangladesh and India reduces rice yields by up to 4 million tons each year, enough to feed 30 million people.
Researchers anticipate the flood-tolerant rice plants will be available to farmers within the next two years.
The plants are not subject to the regulatory testing that can delay release of genetically modified crops because they are the product of precision breeding, not genetic modification, the release states.
Study Background
Ronald led the effort to isolate the gene, and her lab showed that the gene is switched on when rice plants are submerged in water. The project took 13 years to complete.
"To be part of this project as it has moved from my lab in California to rice fields in Asia has been inspiring, and the project underscores the power of science to improve people's lives," Ronald said in a written statement.
The research that led to the gene's isolation was funded by USDA grants to Ronald, Mackill and Bailey-Serres. The breeding work was funded by the USDA and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
All told the USDA allotted nearly $1.45 million to the research project, a UC Riverside news release states.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Biofuels, World Food Crisis, & Biotech...
This article was posted on Comfood. It is probably some of the scariest information I have read in a long time.
World Bank Secret Report confirms Biofuel Cause of World Food Crisis
By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, July 10, 2008
A secret study by the World Bank, which reportedly has not been made public on pressure from the Bush Administration, concludes that bio-fuel cultivation in especially the USA and EU are directly responsible for the current explosion in grain and food prices worldwide. The US Government at the recent Rome UN Food Summit claimed that "only 3% of food prices" were due to bio-fuels. The World Bank secret report says that at least 75% of the recent price rises are due to land being removed from agriculture—mainly maize in North America and rapeseed and corn in the EU—in order to grow crops to be burned for vehicle fuel. The World Bank study confirms what we wrote more than a year ago about the madness of bio-fuels. It fits the agenda described in the 1970’s by Henry Kissinger, namely, ‘If you control the food you control the people.’
According to the London Guardian newspaper which has been given a copy of the suppressed report, the World Bank study was completed in April, well before the June Rome Food Summit, but was deliberately suppressed as "embarrassing to the position of the Bush Administration." The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is a former top Bush Administration official. Washington is trying to use a crisis which its bio-fuel subsidies created, since a new Farm bill passed in 2005, to advance the spread of Genetically Manipulated Organisms such as GMO maize, soybeans, rice and other crops patented by Monsanto and other "gene giants."
Their strategy is to use the explosive rise in grain prices worldwide, a rise fuelled by hedge funds and troubled US and European banks and investment funds pouring billions of dollars into speculation that grain prices will continue to soar. In other words, the food "crisis" is a crisis of speculation in food futures. The planned EU and USA bio-fuel acreage quotas and the periodic droughts and floods in key growing regions such as the USA Midwest then provide backdrop for speculative price run-ups. But the main driver is that tens of millions of hectares of prime agriculture land in the world’s two largest food export regions—the USA and the EU-- are being permanently removed from food production in order to grow raw material to be burned for vehicle fuel.
The suppressed study
The World Bank study, the most detailed analysis of the global food crisis so far, concludes that bio-fuels have forced "food prices up by 75%." That is far more than previous estimates. That is a damning refutation of the politically-motivated US Department of Agriculture estimate that plant-derived fuels add only 3% to food prices. The report is expected to increase pressure on the European Union governments as well as Washington to change their present bio-fuel subsidy and support policies.
The report has been leaked just days before the important annual Group of 8 industrial nation leaders’ summit held in Hokkaido Japan. The food crisis will be a major topic there as pressure on governments grows to do something.
The World Bank report estimates that doubling and tripling of world food prices in the past three years have forced an added 100 million people below the poverty line. That has triggered food riots from Bangladesh to Egypt.
The report as well calculates that even the successive droughts in Australia and other major food regions have had only a "marginal" impact on food prices.
Within the EU, for example, as of April all vehicles in the UK must contain fuel with at least 2.5% bio-fuel. The EU has in place a target of mandatory 20% by 2020, a staggering amount.
George W. Bush has cynically claimed higher food prices are merely due to higher demand from India and China. The leaked World Bank study refutes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."
"Without the increase in bio-fuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," the World Bank report states. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and February 2008. Higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%. Bio-fuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.
The study demonstrates that production of bio-fuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going to production of bio-diesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for bio-fuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.
The real agenda behind the food crisis
The World Bank study is the first to include all three factors. What is missing from the World Bank study however is the longer-term geopolitical agenda behind the present global food and energy crises. As I document in great detail in my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, the long term agenda of powerful leading circles in the West, particularly represented in tax exempt private foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford and Gates foundations and the private wealth behind them, is a long term agenda of population reduction, in the interests of the global economic and financial elites.
Food scarcity, higher prices for basic foods in developing countries as well as control of food seeds through patent and Terminator suicide seed sales by Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, BASF, Bayer and a few select agriculture chemical seed giants—the "horsemen of the GMO Apokalypse," have been developed to advance the agenda of massive depopulation of the developing world.
The policy goes back, as the book documents in detail, to the early years of the 20th Century when Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Gamble, H.G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, and other wealthy circles backed the development of eugenics research. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the eugenics and forced sterilization research at the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (today's Max Planck Institute) until it became too politically hot in 1939.
. After the end of the war, Rockefeller and others in the eugenics movement decided for political reasons to change the name of eugenics. The new name they chose was "genetics." GMO is a project, based on wrong science, financed with over $100 million of private money from the Rockefeller Foundation. The ultimate aim is for the first time in history to control life on the planet. As Henry Kissinger put in during the 1970’s food crisis, "control the food and you control the people."
In this light it is worth noting that as a solution to a crisis which it deliberately created by its massive government subsidies to farmers to grow bio-fuels instead of food, the Bush Administration made and continues to make a major pressure at the Rome Food Summit in early June and after, to open the doors to GMO as the alleged "solution" to world hunger.
On June 13, just after the Rome UN Food Summit, John Negroponte, US Deputy Secretary of State, stated, ""We therefore are strongly encouraging countries to remove barriers to the use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology," adding, "Biotechnology tools can help speed the development of crops with higher yields, higher nutrition value, better resistance to pests and diseases, and stronger food system resilience in the face of climate change." Washington and the GMO companies now use the more deceptive term, "biotechnology" instead of the controversial GMO term, in a linguistic ploy to overcome opposition.
Independent scientific studies and countless farmer reports have shown that long-term planting of GMO or bio-tech crops as the gene giants prefer to call it, far from giving higher crop yields, lowers the yields and development of resistant "super-weeds" usually mean more, not less Roundup or other GMO-paired chemical herbicides and pesticides are needed. In short the glorious claims for GMO are marketing fraud.
According to highly informed reports, Washington had been told that Pope Benedict XVI would endorse the spread of GMO, something the Vatican until now has been strongly opposed to on moral and other grounds, as a solution to world hunger. At the last minute that endorsement did not happen for reasons only the Pope perhaps knows. Groups like Greenpeace and the London Independent newspaper in the days before the Rome UN summit reported interviews with senior Church figures stating that the policy reverse was expected.
There is strong circumstantial evidence that the entire Rome UN Summit was orchestrated by Washington, London’s Gordon Brown and other Malthusian governments in part to try to convince the Pope to reverse its policy on GMO. The Roman Catholic Church today stands as one of the most important moral barriers to widespread acceptance of GMO in many developing countries such as the Philippines and Latin America.
The leak of the World Bank report adds a dramatic new element into what is becoming one of the major political issues along with oil price manipulation.
F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of Seeds of Destruction, Global Research,2007 [see below], and the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,’ His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
He may be contacted via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
and here is a blog on the subject from the Guardian: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/07/exclusive_the_biofuels_report.html
and here is the World Bank Report pdf: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2008/07/10/Biofuels.PDF
World Bank Secret Report confirms Biofuel Cause of World Food Crisis
By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, July 10, 2008
A secret study by the World Bank, which reportedly has not been made public on pressure from the Bush Administration, concludes that bio-fuel cultivation in especially the USA and EU are directly responsible for the current explosion in grain and food prices worldwide. The US Government at the recent Rome UN Food Summit claimed that "only 3% of food prices" were due to bio-fuels. The World Bank secret report says that at least 75% of the recent price rises are due to land being removed from agriculture—mainly maize in North America and rapeseed and corn in the EU—in order to grow crops to be burned for vehicle fuel. The World Bank study confirms what we wrote more than a year ago about the madness of bio-fuels. It fits the agenda described in the 1970’s by Henry Kissinger, namely, ‘If you control the food you control the people.’
According to the London Guardian newspaper which has been given a copy of the suppressed report, the World Bank study was completed in April, well before the June Rome Food Summit, but was deliberately suppressed as "embarrassing to the position of the Bush Administration." The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is a former top Bush Administration official. Washington is trying to use a crisis which its bio-fuel subsidies created, since a new Farm bill passed in 2005, to advance the spread of Genetically Manipulated Organisms such as GMO maize, soybeans, rice and other crops patented by Monsanto and other "gene giants."
Their strategy is to use the explosive rise in grain prices worldwide, a rise fuelled by hedge funds and troubled US and European banks and investment funds pouring billions of dollars into speculation that grain prices will continue to soar. In other words, the food "crisis" is a crisis of speculation in food futures. The planned EU and USA bio-fuel acreage quotas and the periodic droughts and floods in key growing regions such as the USA Midwest then provide backdrop for speculative price run-ups. But the main driver is that tens of millions of hectares of prime agriculture land in the world’s two largest food export regions—the USA and the EU-- are being permanently removed from food production in order to grow raw material to be burned for vehicle fuel.
The suppressed study
The World Bank study, the most detailed analysis of the global food crisis so far, concludes that bio-fuels have forced "food prices up by 75%." That is far more than previous estimates. That is a damning refutation of the politically-motivated US Department of Agriculture estimate that plant-derived fuels add only 3% to food prices. The report is expected to increase pressure on the European Union governments as well as Washington to change their present bio-fuel subsidy and support policies.
The report has been leaked just days before the important annual Group of 8 industrial nation leaders’ summit held in Hokkaido Japan. The food crisis will be a major topic there as pressure on governments grows to do something.
The World Bank report estimates that doubling and tripling of world food prices in the past three years have forced an added 100 million people below the poverty line. That has triggered food riots from Bangladesh to Egypt.
The report as well calculates that even the successive droughts in Australia and other major food regions have had only a "marginal" impact on food prices.
Within the EU, for example, as of April all vehicles in the UK must contain fuel with at least 2.5% bio-fuel. The EU has in place a target of mandatory 20% by 2020, a staggering amount.
George W. Bush has cynically claimed higher food prices are merely due to higher demand from India and China. The leaked World Bank study refutes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."
"Without the increase in bio-fuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," the World Bank report states. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and February 2008. Higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%. Bio-fuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.
The study demonstrates that production of bio-fuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going to production of bio-diesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for bio-fuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.
The real agenda behind the food crisis
The World Bank study is the first to include all three factors. What is missing from the World Bank study however is the longer-term geopolitical agenda behind the present global food and energy crises. As I document in great detail in my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, the long term agenda of powerful leading circles in the West, particularly represented in tax exempt private foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford and Gates foundations and the private wealth behind them, is a long term agenda of population reduction, in the interests of the global economic and financial elites.
Food scarcity, higher prices for basic foods in developing countries as well as control of food seeds through patent and Terminator suicide seed sales by Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, BASF, Bayer and a few select agriculture chemical seed giants—the "horsemen of the GMO Apokalypse," have been developed to advance the agenda of massive depopulation of the developing world.
The policy goes back, as the book documents in detail, to the early years of the 20th Century when Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Gamble, H.G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, and other wealthy circles backed the development of eugenics research. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the eugenics and forced sterilization research at the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (today's Max Planck Institute) until it became too politically hot in 1939.
. After the end of the war, Rockefeller and others in the eugenics movement decided for political reasons to change the name of eugenics. The new name they chose was "genetics." GMO is a project, based on wrong science, financed with over $100 million of private money from the Rockefeller Foundation. The ultimate aim is for the first time in history to control life on the planet. As Henry Kissinger put in during the 1970’s food crisis, "control the food and you control the people."
In this light it is worth noting that as a solution to a crisis which it deliberately created by its massive government subsidies to farmers to grow bio-fuels instead of food, the Bush Administration made and continues to make a major pressure at the Rome Food Summit in early June and after, to open the doors to GMO as the alleged "solution" to world hunger.
On June 13, just after the Rome UN Food Summit, John Negroponte, US Deputy Secretary of State, stated, ""We therefore are strongly encouraging countries to remove barriers to the use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology," adding, "Biotechnology tools can help speed the development of crops with higher yields, higher nutrition value, better resistance to pests and diseases, and stronger food system resilience in the face of climate change." Washington and the GMO companies now use the more deceptive term, "biotechnology" instead of the controversial GMO term, in a linguistic ploy to overcome opposition.
Independent scientific studies and countless farmer reports have shown that long-term planting of GMO or bio-tech crops as the gene giants prefer to call it, far from giving higher crop yields, lowers the yields and development of resistant "super-weeds" usually mean more, not less Roundup or other GMO-paired chemical herbicides and pesticides are needed. In short the glorious claims for GMO are marketing fraud.
According to highly informed reports, Washington had been told that Pope Benedict XVI would endorse the spread of GMO, something the Vatican until now has been strongly opposed to on moral and other grounds, as a solution to world hunger. At the last minute that endorsement did not happen for reasons only the Pope perhaps knows. Groups like Greenpeace and the London Independent newspaper in the days before the Rome UN summit reported interviews with senior Church figures stating that the policy reverse was expected.
There is strong circumstantial evidence that the entire Rome UN Summit was orchestrated by Washington, London’s Gordon Brown and other Malthusian governments in part to try to convince the Pope to reverse its policy on GMO. The Roman Catholic Church today stands as one of the most important moral barriers to widespread acceptance of GMO in many developing countries such as the Philippines and Latin America.
The leak of the World Bank report adds a dramatic new element into what is becoming one of the major political issues along with oil price manipulation.
F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of Seeds of Destruction, Global Research,2007 [see below], and the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,’ His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
He may be contacted via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
and here is a blog on the subject from the Guardian: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/07/exclusive_the_biofuels_report.html
and here is the World Bank Report pdf: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2008/07/10/Biofuels.PDF
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Arkansas Rice Farmers sue Riceland Foods
The states rice farmers are claiming that Riceland Foods Inc. experiemented with GMO rice that susquently contaminated the commercial supply. The 4,000 rice farmers, who typically export their rice to the EU, are being denied access to the market.
From Arkansas news article:
Riceland collaborated with Aventis Crop Science, which later became Bayer Crop Science, on the rice, engineered to resist Liberty herbicide.
"Riceland Foods knew that that (European) market would not accept it, and they knew that there was a risk of contamination, but they still engaged in the collaboration," Byrd said, "obviously hoping that there would be customer acceptance by the time it ultimately was found that it was going to be contaminated."
The genetically modified rice somehow got into research plots or foundation seed production fields and increased across the state's rice production belt, said Terry Walker, director of the plant industry division of the state Plant Board.
Riceland Vice President Bill Reed declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying the company had not yet been served papers.
From Arkansas news article:
Riceland collaborated with Aventis Crop Science, which later became Bayer Crop Science, on the rice, engineered to resist Liberty herbicide.
"Riceland Foods knew that that (European) market would not accept it, and they knew that there was a risk of contamination, but they still engaged in the collaboration," Byrd said, "obviously hoping that there would be customer acceptance by the time it ultimately was found that it was going to be contaminated."
The genetically modified rice somehow got into research plots or foundation seed production fields and increased across the state's rice production belt, said Terry Walker, director of the plant industry division of the state Plant Board.
Riceland Vice President Bill Reed declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying the company had not yet been served papers.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Biotech's Assault on Mexico
My friend Chris sent me this. The biotech industry is a dark and gloomy place. This stuff gives me the hee-bee-gee-bees. This whole globalization this is about power, money and control. The question is, will be wake up in time?
'Control the oil, you control nations, control the food and you control the people.' Henry Kissinger 1970
Killing Farmers with Killer Seed
By JOHN ROSS
As the global food crisis escalates, Big Biotech (Monsanto, Novartis, Syngenta, Dupont-Pioneer, Dow et al) are capitalizing on the desperation of the hungry at runaway prices and rapidly diminishing reserves as a wedge to foist genetically modified (GMO) seeds on a reluctant Third World.
Latin America is a prime marketing target for Big Biotech's little darlings, often tagged "semillas asasinas" or "killer seeds" for their devastating impacts on local food stocks. Now the killer GMOs are suspected of literally provoking murder most foul.
Last October, Armando Villareal, a farm leader in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, was gunned down after a farmers' meeting in Nuevo Casas Grandes. Villareal had been denouncing the illegal planting of GMO corn in the Mennonite-dominated municipalities of Cuauhtemoc and Naniquipa.
Chihuahua Mennonite communities originally migrated from Canada after a dispute with the Canadian government over education in the 1920s and were granted land by post-revolutionary president Alvaro Obregon. Over the decades, the Mennonites have successfully cultivated up to 60,000 hectares in the northeast of the state. Acutely insular with their signature dress (denim overalls for the men, prairie dresses and calico bonnets for the women) and speaking low-German as befits their European roots, the Mennonites have never integrated into the Mexican mainstream and their success as farmers - they have benefited from Mexican government irrigation projects - has created tensions in a region where aridity limits agricultural production for most farmers.
Hundreds of tractors lined up in a cortege at Villareal's October 15th funeral during which he was compared to another Chihuahua hero, Francisco Villa. Ironically, the slain farmers' leader who claimed to have evidence that the Mennonites' killer seeds had been smuggled in from Kansas, was not opposed to planting GMO corn which his "Aerodynamica" group hoped would save strapped farmers money on pesticides and power costs. His followers had even burnt tractors to demand that the Mexican government grant them permits to plant the transgenic corn.
Eight months later, Armando Villareal's murder remains unresolved.
The Chihuahua farm leader's assassination is not the only death of a militant Latin American campesino being linked to Big Biotech's encroachments. In Parana Brazil about the same time Villareal was gunned down in Chihuahua, Keno Mota, an activist of the Movement of Landless Farmers ("Movimento de Sem Terras" or MST), affiliated with the international poor farmers coalition Via Campesina, was drilled by security guards during an action on an illegal experimental station under cultivation by the Biotech giant Syngenta - the Syngenta plot, adjacent to Iguazu National Park, a protected nature reserve, violated Brazilian strictures as to where such "semillas asasinas" can be planted.
see the rest of the article here
Here is a great interview with Claire Hope Cummings, author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
'Control the oil, you control nations, control the food and you control the people.' Henry Kissinger 1970
Killing Farmers with Killer Seed
By JOHN ROSS
As the global food crisis escalates, Big Biotech (Monsanto, Novartis, Syngenta, Dupont-Pioneer, Dow et al) are capitalizing on the desperation of the hungry at runaway prices and rapidly diminishing reserves as a wedge to foist genetically modified (GMO) seeds on a reluctant Third World.
Latin America is a prime marketing target for Big Biotech's little darlings, often tagged "semillas asasinas" or "killer seeds" for their devastating impacts on local food stocks. Now the killer GMOs are suspected of literally provoking murder most foul.
Last October, Armando Villareal, a farm leader in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, was gunned down after a farmers' meeting in Nuevo Casas Grandes. Villareal had been denouncing the illegal planting of GMO corn in the Mennonite-dominated municipalities of Cuauhtemoc and Naniquipa.
Chihuahua Mennonite communities originally migrated from Canada after a dispute with the Canadian government over education in the 1920s and were granted land by post-revolutionary president Alvaro Obregon. Over the decades, the Mennonites have successfully cultivated up to 60,000 hectares in the northeast of the state. Acutely insular with their signature dress (denim overalls for the men, prairie dresses and calico bonnets for the women) and speaking low-German as befits their European roots, the Mennonites have never integrated into the Mexican mainstream and their success as farmers - they have benefited from Mexican government irrigation projects - has created tensions in a region where aridity limits agricultural production for most farmers.
Hundreds of tractors lined up in a cortege at Villareal's October 15th funeral during which he was compared to another Chihuahua hero, Francisco Villa. Ironically, the slain farmers' leader who claimed to have evidence that the Mennonites' killer seeds had been smuggled in from Kansas, was not opposed to planting GMO corn which his "Aerodynamica" group hoped would save strapped farmers money on pesticides and power costs. His followers had even burnt tractors to demand that the Mexican government grant them permits to plant the transgenic corn.
Eight months later, Armando Villareal's murder remains unresolved.
The Chihuahua farm leader's assassination is not the only death of a militant Latin American campesino being linked to Big Biotech's encroachments. In Parana Brazil about the same time Villareal was gunned down in Chihuahua, Keno Mota, an activist of the Movement of Landless Farmers ("Movimento de Sem Terras" or MST), affiliated with the international poor farmers coalition Via Campesina, was drilled by security guards during an action on an illegal experimental station under cultivation by the Biotech giant Syngenta - the Syngenta plot, adjacent to Iguazu National Park, a protected nature reserve, violated Brazilian strictures as to where such "semillas asasinas" can be planted.
see the rest of the article here
Here is a great interview with Claire Hope Cummings, author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Praise the Lord!
Thanks to my good friend Chris McCullem for sending me this. Now that's the Christian way!
Pope urges countries to combat causes of hunger, malnutrition
More than 250 faith-based organizations called on summit leaders to eliminate the root causes of hunger such as poverty and unjust social structures. In a statement released to journalists, the faith-based coalition, which includes dozens of Catholic religious orders and nonprofit organizations, echoed the concern the pope expressed in his message for the protection of small farmers. Family farms play a key role in building food self-sufficiency for local communities, the statement said. It also called for more simple, sustainable lifestyles in wealthy countries, cautioned against genetically modified foods and urged further review of biofuel production. [...]
Catholic News Service, by Carol Glatz, 06.03.2008
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0802959.htm
Pope urges countries to combat causes of hunger, malnutrition
More than 250 faith-based organizations called on summit leaders to eliminate the root causes of hunger such as poverty and unjust social structures. In a statement released to journalists, the faith-based coalition, which includes dozens of Catholic religious orders and nonprofit organizations, echoed the concern the pope expressed in his message for the protection of small farmers. Family farms play a key role in building food self-sufficiency for local communities, the statement said. It also called for more simple, sustainable lifestyles in wealthy countries, cautioned against genetically modified foods and urged further review of biofuel production. [...]
Catholic News Service, by Carol Glatz, 06.03.2008
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0802959.htm
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