With the Hallowe’en Season upon us, I thought this might send a few shivers down a few spines. Enjoy. Bwahahaha……
“Genetically Modified Organisms will save the world!” If that’s true, one has to wonder why many of the companies that pioneer GMO seeds and crops spend so much time and money fighting against all efforts to label their products as either containing GMOs or are GMOs in their entirety.
(see: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/29/us-usa-gmo-labeling-idUSKBN0FY08W20140729 )
Like many consumers, I like to know what is in the products that I buy; I want to know what it is that I’m putting on my body, or in this case, in my body with the food I’m consuming. I’m not too keen on eating a tomato that has had some genetic material from a fish that doesn’t freeze in the arctic inserted to enable said tomato withstand periods of cold temperatures, or eating an apple that has been modified to never go brown when cut open.
I also take issue with the idea of “Terminator Genes” engineered right into the seeds to make the plants sterile, so poor farmers are not able to save the seed and replant for the next year’s crop; necessitating expensive outlays of money every year to purchase new seed.
In many parts of the world, suffering from extreme poverty, the idea of keeping the most vulnerable in crushing debt to satisfy the greed of a few biotechnology companies is offensive.
GMO technologies do offer some benefits. In many cases, yields are higher in a smaller area; plants are engineered to be more drought tolerant (which will be more important as the world undergoes widespread water stresses); and quite often are able to give the farmer a higher income selling the increased yields of product.
I recall sitting at the dining table with my folks on Salt Spring along with a visitor named Fred who had a wealth of experience in the commercial plant-breeding field. Fred recounted to us the experience he had had with the MH-1 tomato, MH standing for machine-harvestable, and how they thought they had it beat, but it turned out that the tomatoes didn’t really ripen subsequent to harvest and were more appropriately used as off-centered baseballs than as salad ingredients. Times move on and we do have tomatoes in winter that ripen to a perfect degree of redness while totally lacking in that taste that makes a sun-ripened tomato such a joy. I think for years thereafter, gene-splicing was a bit of a space-age game for nerds in labs, a well-paid sinecure until the bean counters finally twigged that there was this big cash drain with no tangible results and insisted that the whole lot of them either produce a marketable and profitable product or decamp forthwith. Given that Monsanto (and others) were already heavily invested in agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, they came up with the idea of building resistance to glyphosate into plants whose genetic material had been modified. This way Monsanto, et al, could not only justify the drenching of whole counties with Round-Up, but could also sell the stuff as a package with the resistant seeds, covered, of course, by patent protection, restrictive end-user agreements and backed up by a really ugly legal machine. User results may vary has to be a most important part of the syllabus for selling this stuff: broad reading suggest mitigated results at best, and all the clap-trap about feeding humanity is a crock. This is about generating profits as expeditiously as possible, about assuring the well-being of the executive suite, and, to reinforce the first two goals, about exercising total control over seeds, hence over a great part of the food supply. The whole GMO seed/fertilizer/pesticide/herbicide program is predicated on the widespread use of petro products and mega farms that employ large investments in machinery. These are parameters that likely deplete the soil and ensure run-off of all manner of obnoxious chemicals. Genetic tinkering, as it has been practised, is a huge step forward. To oblivion.