GMOs, Indian Suicides, and Bob Casey
I’ve been light on the blogging this weekend, spending most of my time in the garden, amending soil with compost, manure, and peat moss. We do everything the old-fashioned way: no chemical fertilizers, just plain old dirt and water.
Christina gets all her seeds from Seed Savers Exchange, which I highly recommend. We’re not too excited about the brave new world of genetically modified organisms (GMOs): the way I see it, plain old normal food has sustained humanity for millions of years, and I’m just not into injecting jellyfish genes or what-have-you into my tomatoes for a redder, shionier, more disease resistant crop. Yes, yes, I’m sure it’s safe: after all, that’s what they said about DDT and Thalidomide (“If all the details of this are true, then it is a most remarkable drug. In short, it is impossible to give a toxic dose.”>, and tetraethyl lead (”better living through chemistry”), and look how well that’s all turned out!
One of my major problems with GMOs (and with their primary distributor/inventor Monsanto) is that growers can’t harvest the seeds from the plants they produce: the seeds have to be bought every year, and at a greater cost than ordinary seeds. In order to produce high yields, the seeds need intensive fertilizers and pesticides, which also cost A LOT of money. Finally, without the added investment in chemicals, these big yields don’t appear, and in Inda, this has led to hundreds of thousands of suicides among poor farmers over the past decade:
Shiva: Indian farmers have never committed suicide on a mass scale – it’s totally new, limited to the last decade. The seed sector was liberalized to allow Cargill and Monsanto to sell unregulated untested seeds. They began with hybrids and moved on to genetically modified Bt cotton, which cannot be saved. The cotton belt of India has now become the suicide belt. The high cost of seeds is linked to the high cost of chemicals because they are designed to be used with chemicals, and they must be bought every year.
There’s a case going on in India’s supreme court right now on the monopoly practices of Monsanto. Anti-trust courts ruled against Monsanto because the costs are so high that farmers necessarily get into a debt trap….
Unfortunately, says Shiva, when the prime minister visited the region where the suicides occurred, he offered more of the same as a solution. A seed replacement package – which means what seeds farmers have get further destroyed.
A few weeks ago I was in Punjab with 2800 widows of farmers suicides who’ve lost their land and have to bring up children. They want to get Monsanto out of the seed sector and make trade honest. This has become a war against farmers, it’s become a genocide.
Between US cotton dumping and GMOs, Indian farmers are literalyl driven to sucide. Instead of a public resource, seeds are treated as a profit center (warning, PDF):
The shift from indigenous varieties of seeds to the Green Revolution (high yielding and hybrid) varieties also involved a shift from a farming system controlled by peasants to one controlled by agri-chemical and seed corporations, and international agricultural research centers. The shift also implied that from being a free resource reproduced on the farm, seeds were transformed into a costly input to be purchased. Countries had to take international loans to diffuse the new seeds, and farmers had to take credit from banks to use them. International agricultural centers supplied seeds, which were then reproduced, crossed and multiplied at the national level.
And now MY senator, the so-called “pro-life” Bob Casey, wants to visit this economic and ecological disaster on poor farmers in Africa and Asia. Haven’t these people suffered enough?
Speaking to Senator Casey’s staff on the issue is like talking to a ventriloquist dummy. “The Senator will continue to support these successful projects,” his aide told me, before warning me not to believe everything I read on blogs (oh thank you for your concern I am obviously as innocent and naive as a small child who is perhaps retarded and doesn’t possess the critical thinking skills of someone like Senator Casey who owes his career to his last name)
Look, I’m not telling you what to eat. You want to put food that’s already been pre-impregnated with pesticides in your tummy, that’s fine by me. But from what I’m reading, the costs of growing GMO crops is incredibly expensive, forcing already-poor farmers in the developing world into further debt, threatening biodiversity, and yes impacting the food chain. Personally, I stand against GMO foods: it’s one of the reasons we go to farmer’s markets, grow our own food, and joined a CSA this year.
Call me a Luddite all you want, call me inconsistent and remind me of all the ways that chemistry has improved my life. When it comes to food, ecology, and any number of topics, i remain a proud conservative and traditionalist. I think food tastes best when it’s grown organically and sustainably, and I think it’s best for the environment too.
So Bobbles, if you or your staff is reading this, if you want to shovel GMOs down your kids’ throats, be my guest. But stop pretending that this has ANYTHING to do with hunger: this is about profits, plain and simple, and using the developed world as a laboratory for Monsanto. The results, sir, will be on YOUR shoulders.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
[...] Original post by Brendan Calling [...]