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.
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.
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