GENETICALLY MODIFIED SEEDS CAUSE, NOT CURE, WORLD HUNGER

In case you missed this Reuter's article:

France’s lower house of Parliament banned GM corn in a sweeping fashion, Reuters reported. Now, no variety of GM corn can be cultivated because of its toxic threats to the soil, insects and human health.

The senate has to approve the ban. If it rejects it, the  National Assembly still makes the final decision. Europe is going to be the test case in GM seed planting. 

 It occurred to me all this talk about how GM is urgently needed to solve world hunger is hogwash. First of all, nobody has actually done a study to find out how much of GM food is dumped each day by people because its inedible. GM may be selling like crazy--to unsuspecting Third World customers who spend their hard earned money buying these grains and vegetables that are not edible, and end up in the compost pile. I will post a photograph of a uncookable corn that I bought at the market—the corn was so tough it couldn’t be eaten roasted, boiled or fried. It just wouldn’t cook! Clearly it was an excellent GM product—it was so pest resistent it had resisted the greatest pests of all, namely, human beings. 

Secondly, nobody’s looking at whether people want to eat this stuff. I’m talking about taste, folks. Food does have to be tasty, you know. Even poor people won’t eat things that don’t taste good. I bought some aubergine at the market. It was still fresh, though slightly wrinkled, after three weeks. Normally they rot after 3 days. I imagine if they don't break down in the kitchen, then they don't break down in the gut as well. After which I became alarmed at these vampire vegetables and threw them out. Clearly GM is out and about, stalking the land. And people are resisting it in whatever way they can—including changing their food consumption patterns. Read my previous blog post in which I write about how people in Nepal have stopped eating maize, although it was a significant part of their diet in the past, because the new hybrid/GM corn is so inedible they’d rather eat something else.  

They do feed these seeds to the chicken though. Apparently the chicken have no way to complain that it's inedible.

Has Mr Gates’ much vaunted Foundation done a study of how much malnutrition people now face in Third World countries because these two factors—inedible food products, and waste, threaten their fragile food budgets? And how wiping out corn from the diet significantly causes malnutrition in those communities where this was the primary grain? I bet they haven’t  done that. They are too busy engineering seeds that can “cure” hunger in Africa.

Then there’s the pesticide issue. Giant residues of creepy pesticides are in the food, making people ill. Which makes for an excellent upswing in the pharmaceutical and medical market, but if things weren’t so twisted people who produce food should’t actually be making people sick. They should be creating healthful products that keep people away from illness. Of course try telling that to DuPont and all these other companies that simultaneously shove pesticides and medications into people’s mouths.      

Genetically modified seeds have so far resisted scrutiny-we take it for granted, without any scientific study, that they are good to solve world hunger. These seeds have a halo around them that the so-called scientific community has allowed for too long to last. Namely, the mythology that somehow they are “needed” to cure world hunger. Nobody’s actually looked at how they may be precipitating the hunger crisis, first by providing inedible, “human resistant” food, and second by adding to the burden of fragile food budgets by adding, each day and each week, an item that is trashed into the compost pile. I think some prestigious university needs to look into this issue, because something tells me the statistics are going to shock the world with how different reality is from perception.