Lubricating the Wheels of the GMO Trojan Horse
Monsanto believes it is
having trouble getting its message across to the public. Last year, it
began a makeover. It realised that it and GMOs have an image problem.
According to the Holmes
Report, an information service following the public relations industry,
Monsanto has embarked on an international campaign by upgrading its
association with Fleishman Hillard, one of the biggest public relations
firms in the US.
On the gmoinside.org website,
it states that a series of videos produced for Monsanto promote the
company’s contributions to US farms, agricultural sustainability, the
job market and the wide array of food choices. Monsanto is also
participating in ‘GMO Answers’, a website launched in September 2013 by
the Council for Biotechnology Information. Part of an industry-wide
effort, which involves BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences,
DuPont, Monsanto and Syngenta, the site allows visitors to ask questions
relating to all facets of GMOs, which are then answered by ‘experts’.
The GMO biotech sector is also hoping to team up with NGOs and
government-backed bodies to develop a more strategic approach to
promoting GMOs.
In Britain, the Agricultural
Biotechnology Centre, the Science Media Centre and senior politicians
and officials have been collaborating to change the public’s negative
perceptions of GMOs [1].
With people calling it the most
evil company on the planet, ‘marching against Monsanto’ and Frankenfood
becoming a common term in the mass media to describe GMOs, Monsanto has
also reorganised its senior public relations (PR) staff and is also
linking up with influential bloggers and the media outlet Conde Nast
publishing house in an attempt to sell sustainability and GMOs to a
sceptical public [2,3]. It has reportedly dangled substantial amounts of
cash in front of respected food critics and celebrity chefs in an
attempt to drag them into the rebranding process.
As usual, the message it is
trying to get across is that Monsanto has the global population’s best
interests at heart and GM food is the solution to solving the world’s
food problems. With an increasing world population, the message is that
GMOs will deliver increased yields. More food can be grown on less land.
No problem, just sit back and give the GM biotech sector access to your
agriculture.
To the uninformed, the pro-GM
PR sounds highly appealing. Anti-GMO activists are dismissed as being
Luddites or anti-big business and ideologically driven – because who in
their right mind would oppose such frontier technology? Millions go
hungry and those anti-GMO people are by implication taking the food from
their stomachs. They are disgusting enemies of the poor, ignorant
enemies of technology and science.
At the end of my articles on
GMOs, I usually provide a long list of references/reports/links to back
my claims that science does not support what the GM biotech sector
claims its products deliver in terms of yields, decreased petrochemical
inputs and effects on health, nutrition and the environment. I also tend
to provide a list of references/reports/links that show traditional
agriculture holds the key to feeding the world.
Well here are some facts, courtesy of environmentalist Viva Kermani’s website/blog:
“India has been self-sufficient in food staples for over a decade and more than that for cereals. Today, the country grows about 100 million tons (mt) of rice, 95 mt of wheat, 170 mt of vegetables, 85 mt of fruit, 40 mt of coarse cereals and 18 mt of pulses (refer to the Economic Survey for the data). These totals ensure that our farmers grow enough to feed all Indians well with food staples. We have 66 mt of grain, two-and-a-half times the required buffer stock (onJanuary 1, 2013). The country has reached this stage through, first and foremost, the knowledge and skill of our farmers who have bred and saved seed themselves and exchanged their seed in ways that made our fields so bio-diverse.” [4]
India can feed itself. The
problem is that not enough people get sufficient food because of
storage, corruption and distribution problems as well as the
restructuring of agriculture as a result of economic liberalisation and a
shift to (GM) cash crops for export [5]. Other possible factors
contribute to mass malnutrition in India as well [6].
Arun Shrivastava notes that
India (and thus the world) doesn’t need modern technology of poisonous
pesticides, destructive fertilizers and patented GE seeds that can’t
match 1890 or even 1760 AD yields in India [7]. And poisonous and
destructive they have certainly been if we take the health and
environmental catastrophe affecting Punjab inIndia - the original
‘poster boy’ of the green revolution [8].
Since the ‘green revolution’ there has been an ongoing attempt to strip farmers of their knowledge and expertise:
“… their legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts. Instead, they were reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of the poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry.” (Viva Kermani)
De-skilling ordinary people and
stripping away traditional knowledge were essential for enslaving
factory workers and binding them to a strict division of labour during
the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in England. Within a
generation or so, most people had lost the knowledge and skills of their
parents or grandparents’ generation. In various parts of the globe, a
similar process has happened or is happening to many farmers who remain
on the land. They are becoming corporate-controlled workers whose
traditional knowledge, seeds and skills will be lost to subsequent
generations.
Through deliberate contamination
[9], devious trade deals [10], intimidation [11], co-optation of
scientists and politicians [1] and infiltration of official bodies [12],
GMOs are now present or scheduled to be present in many countries.
GMOs are potentially a weapon of
mass destruction masquerading as a benign and altruistic product of
mass consumption for the hungry millions. Control the seed and you
control the food supply and the people. Control what is in the seed and
you control the nature of that food and the live and death of people
[13]. Rebranding GMOs and nice-sounding words about ‘feeding the world’
are intended to lubricate the wheels of the GMO Trojan horse. Once
inside a nation’s borders, a nation would potentially lose control of
its food to a major UScorporation armed with its patented seeds and
intellectual property rights.
Monsanto has top level links
with the military [14]. It is actively backed by the US State Department
[15]. GMOs are not required to feed the world. GMOs are integral
to US geopolitical dominance.
Notes
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