In 2012, Professsor Seralini of the University of Caen in France
led a team that carried out research into the health impacts on rats
fed GMOs (genetically modified organisms) (1). The two-year long study
concluded that rats fed GMOs experienced serious health problems
compared to those fed non GM food. Now comes a new major peer-reviewed
study that has appeared in another respected journal. This study throws
into question the claim often forwarded by the biotech sector that GMO technology increases production and is beneficial to agriculture.
Researchers at the University of Canterbury in the UK
have found that the GM strategy used in North American staple crop
production is limiting yields and increasing pesticide use compared to
non-GM farming in Western Europe.
Led by Professor Jack Heinemann, the study’s findings have been
published in the June edition of the International Journal of
Agricultural Sustainability (2). The research analysed data on
agricultural productivity in North America and Western Europe over the last 50 years.
Heinemann states his team found that the combination of non-GM seed and management practices used by Western
Europe is increasing corn yields faster than the use of the GM-led
package chosen by the US. The research showed rapeseed (canola) yields
increasing faster in Europe without GM than in the GM-led package chosen by Canada.
What is more, the study finds that it is decreasing chemical herbicide
and achieving even larger declines in insecticide use without
sacrificing yield gains, while chemical herbicide use in the US has increased with GM seed.
According to Heinemann, Europe
has learned to grow more food per hectare and use fewer chemicals in the
process. On the other hand, the US choices in biotechnology are causing
it to fall behind Europe in productivity and sustainability.
The Heinemann team’s report notes that incentives in North
America are leading to a reliance on GM seeds and management practices
that are inferior to those being adopted under the incentive systems in
Europe. This is also affecting non GM crops. US yield in non-GM wheat is falling further behind Europe,
“demonstrating that American choices in biotechnology penalise both GM
and non-GM crop types relative to Europe,” according to Professor
Heinemann.
He
goes on to state that the decrease in annual variation in yield
suggests that Europe has a superior combination of seed and crop
management technology and is better suited to withstand weather
variations. This is important because annual variations cause price
speculations that can drive hundreds of millions of people into food
poverty.
The
report also highlights some grave concerns about the impact of modern
agriculture per se in terms of the general move towards depleted genetic
diversity and the consequently potential catastrophic risk to staple
food crops. Of the nearly 10,000 wheat varieties in use in China in 1949, only 1,000 remained in the 1970s. In the US,
95 percent of the cabbage, 91 percent of the field maize, 94 percent of
the pea and 81 percent of the tomato varieties cultivated in the last
century have been lost. GMOs and the control of seeds through patents
have restricted farmer choice and prevented seed saving. This has
exacerbated this problem.
Heinemann
concludes that we need a diversity of practices for growing and making
food that GM does not support. We also need systems that are useful, not
just profit-making biotechnologies, and which provide a resilient
supply to feed the world well.
Despite the evidence, governments capitulate
Given
the mounting evidence that questions the efficacy and safety of GMOs
(3,4,5,6,7), it raises the issue why certain governments are siding with
the biotech sector to allow GMOs to be made available on commercial
markets. It is simply not the case that country after country is
accepting GMOs on the basis of scientific evidence, as
scientists-cum-lobbyists for the GM sector often state (8). If
scientific evidence were to be determining factor, few if any countries
would have sanctioned GMOs.
Part of the answer lies in the
fact that the powerful US biotech sector continues to forward its agenda
that GMOs are a frontier technology that will save humanity from famine
and hunger. This is despite evidence that most of the world’s hunger is
the product of profiteering industrial chemical agriculture and the
global structuring of food production and distribution under the banner
of ‘free trade’ and ‘structural adjustment’ (9,10), or as many of us
know it brow beating and structural dependency.
Yet,
the mantra of GM as the saviour of humanity persists courtesy of the GM
sector’s puppet politicians and regulatory bodies (11). The US is
pushing for lop-sided bilateral trade agreements with other countries
not only to generally tie economies into US economic hegemony in an
attempt to boost its ailing economy and flagging currency, but more
specifically to get nations to ‘accept’ GMOs. Through behind-closed-door
deals (12,13) coercion (14) or the hijack of regulatory bodies (15),
there has been some success, and many think it could be just a matter of
time before other countries, not least India, capitulate to allow GM
food crops onto the commercial market.
In fact, regardless of any legal
statute, it may be and probably is already happening in India, not least
via contamination (16). However, if
contamination by means of illegal planting and open field ‘testing’
fails to get GMOs on to the commercial market via the back door, the GM
sector is attempting to cover all angles. Immediately after a moratorium
on BT Brinjal was announced in 2010, a Biotechnology Regulatory
Authority of India (BRAI) Bill suddenly emerged. The BRAI Bill could not
be passed in 2010 and 2011 because of objections, but it has surfaced
again as a 2013 Bill. Environmentalist Vandana Shiva argues that it not so much constitutes a Biotechnology Regulation Act, but a Biotechnology Deregulation Act,
designed to dismantle the existing bio-safety regulation and give the
green-light to the GM sector to press ahead with its agenda in the
country.
By highlighting the GM sector interests behind the proposed legislation, Shiva says that the goal is to give the sector’s corporations immunity by freeing them of courts and democratic control under India’s federal structure. For those who follow such developments in India,
it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to appreciate that the
future of Indian agriculture is in the wrong hands. Certain key
scientists and top politicians have already been ideologically (or
otherwise) ‘bought and paid for’ by proponents of the ‘Green Revolution’
and more recently the GM sector (7).
On
a global level, with reports of wheat (17), rice (18) and maize (19)
having been widely contaminated with GMOs, there seems to be a conscious
ploy to contaminate so much of the world’s crops so that eventually
GMOs take over regardless and render the pro/anti GM debate almost
academic (20).
It
seems that secretive trade deals, the hijack of official bodies
designed to ensure the ‘public interest’ and bullying or intimidation
are not enough. Contamination strategies are but one more way of
achieving through closed and non-transparent methods what could not be
possible by transparent and democratic means – simply because hundreds
of millions of people do not want GMOs.
A generation down the line (or much sooner), will we looking at the
health and environmental consequences of GMOs in the same way we now
regard the impacts of the original ‘Green Revolution’?
“There
are very good reasons why we have never introduced a Green Revolution
into Africa, namely because there is broad consensus that the Green
Revolution in India has been a failure, with Indian farmers in debt,
bound to paying high costs for seed and pesticides, committing suicide
at much higher rates, and resulting in a depleted water table and a
poisoned environment, and by extension, higher rates of cancer.” Paula
Crossfield, food policy writer/activist (21).
We
don’t have to take Paula Crossfield’s word for it, though. Punjab was
the ‘Green Revolution’s’ original poster boy, but is fast becoming
transformed from a food bowl to a cancer epicenter and now reels under
an agrarian crisis marked by discontent, debt, water shortages,
contaminated water, diseased soils and pest infested cops (22,23,24).
In the meantime, big
‘ag’ in collusion with big pharma will continue to control our food and
define our healthcare by pushing their highly profitable ‘miracle
solutions’ for the health and environmental problems which they
conspired to create in the first place. It is all part of the wider
corporate-elite agenda to colonise and control every facet of human
existence.
Notes
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