Sunday, November 29, 2015

THE GMO SCRAPBOOK: CHINA TO ATTEMPT TO BUY BIG GMO ...

OK. You can chalk this one up in my "miss" column. In fact, you can chalk it up in my big miss column. What do I mean? Well, for a few years, as we've been tracking the GMO/anti-GMO issue here on this website, we have noted the growing opposition to GMOs, and more importantly, to the often under-handed policies, politics, and methods employed by GMO companies like IG Farbensanto, Syncrudda, and other purveyors of GMOs. THese policies began, more or less, under the administration of GHW Bush(who else?), with the findings of "substantial equivalence" for GMOs, a policy that, as F. William Engdahl has pointed out, allowed the big GMO companies like Mon(ster)santo to have their GMO cake and poison us too, for on the one hand, it allowed them to claim that GMO corn was "substantially equivalent" to non-GMO corn, while at the same time, allowing them to patent their creations. This "substantial equivalence" double standard effectively allowed a minimum of scientific testing to be done.
But opposition, both on a public and, more importantly, on a growing governmental level was met, particularly in countries like India where the big GMO companies ran roughshod over farmers. Russia, as regular readers here know, also joined the growing concerns and actually enacted bans on GMOs, and has undertaken a commitment to a long-term intergenerational scientific study of their human and environmental effects. There were indicators that China was having second thoughts about some aspects of GMOs, as llimited bans on certain products were enacted by that country as well.
This led me to hypothesize that if the BRICSA bloc played their cards right, they could transform the GMO issue into a geopolitical one, by pointing out the GMO issue as another example of rampant corruption in the corporate world of the west, and if they really played their cards right, they could move, in a major way, into the agribusiness markets by offering themselves as the sources for natural seeds, playing to the growing world movement against GMOs.
I called it GMO geopolitics, and I based my reasoning, in part, on the idea that there was opposition to GMOs in at least some of the BRICSA bloc countries.
Well, you can chalk it all up in the "big miss" column, for Chiina, it seems, has now decided GMOs are ok, and now wants to buy big western GMO companies, according to this article shared by Ms. M.W.:
China banning anti-GMO websites as communist nation attempts to buy GM seed companies for domination of world food supply
The crux of the article appears to be this:
In recent days, the GMO information site Sustainable Pulse, one of the globe's largest and most respected sustainable agriculture information sites, was blocked by China's communist government censors "in all of mainland China, shortly after ChemChina launched a failed $ 42 billion bid to buy the largest Global pesticide company – Syngenta," the website reported.
"This is yet another example of the Chinese government trying to stop its citizens from informing themselves about topics that could possibly damage Chinese business," said Sustainable Pulse Director Henry Rowlands, in criticizing the ban.
"China has gone from sitting on the fence regarding the use of GM crops, to being one of the main Global 'pushers' of GMOs over the last 12 months. This will lead to a disaster for both the environment and human health in China over the coming years," he said, as quoted by the site.
There is even a faint hint, or suggestion, in the article itself that one may  be looking at some sort of mild internal struggle within the Chinese government regarding the issue:
The website found out about the blocking in recent days, following news that the China National Chemical Corporation, known as ChemChina, was in negotiations to purchase Syngenta, based in Switzerland. Had it gone down, it would have been the largest acquisition to date by a Chinese company. And though the initial $42 billion bid for the Swiss pesticide manufacturer was initially rejected, officials familiar with the negotiations told Bloomberg Business that there remains a strong interest in making the deal.
If it does indeed go through, then ChemChina would become one of the world's biggest GMO developers, putting it in direct competition with the globe's GMO leader, St. Louis-based Monsanto.
The government's ban of Sustainable Pulse is odd when you consider that, in the past, Beijing has banned importation of GMO foods from the U.S., with the specific aim of preventing GMO contamination among Chinese agriculture. Ironically, a recent ban pertained to a Syngenta product.
So if anything, it looks as if China has just concluded the very opposite from the "GMO geopolitics" hypothesis I was advocating in the past few years, as we've been watching the GMO story on this website. If anything, China's version of GMO geopolitics is that it now wants to dominate the field, and the target of entry was apparently Syngenta, the target of recent merger attempts by Mon(ster)santo.
But if anything, we can thank the Chinese Communist government for their ban within their country of websites criitical of GMOs, for it exposes the whole issue and the hypocrisy surrounding it once again, for would you trust a government that has to shut down opposing commentary and criticism to tell the truth about the science, and safety, studies surroundiing GMOs?  Well, you didn't trust the US government when it effectively shut down criticism, why trust China?
So we can chalk my "GMO geopoliitics" idea  up in the big miss column, because China doesn't want to play. It wants to be Mon(ster)santo. On steroids.

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