mikevan

Americans are dying like flies. And so are the pets and animals Americans are keeping. Cancers, diseases, whathaveyou. No one is fingering GMO, but no one has discounted it's possible cause. You tell me - why do they put hazardous labels on bT toxin, but then turn around and modify plants to produce that toxin in all its tissues - some of which will be consumed? The industry is in control of this and since they're offshoots of existing chemical industries, they're already well practiced in hiding the drawbacks and barking about the benefits, not to mention their power in government. After all, they are using the USA to force GMO on countries that don't want it! What the hell? That's like Chevy forcing me to buy a Kia trade-in using the strong-arm capabilities of government officials! We'll even use the WTO to force GMO on people. I'm sorry - but I don't see anyone forcing, say, Organic produce on people who don't want it. Or even conventional produce! What makes GMO so special that our very government gets involved in peddling it to countries that'd rather not have it?

A lot of people swallow the "developing nation benefits" myth hook line and sinker, but the fact of the matter, every GMO seed is intellectual property - no one owns that seed or the plant it produces or the seeds that plant produces but the people who developed that seed. You're paying for the right to grow that seed and consume it's produce and that's where it stops. Monsanto "giving" seeds to some poor nation is like Drug Dealer Bob "giving" cocaine to 5th grader kids. Before long, those kids are going to be enslaved to Drug Dealer Bob, and the same goes to those nations. They will be forced to stop saving their own seed (something that's actually in the new Iraq Constitution [edited - oops - actually it's the Iraq Legislation, not Constitution]!!!!) and use exclusively the GMO, deleting centuries of established strains of veggies and grain into extinction under the mythological promise of the "superior" GMO product.

If nothing else - the cloak-n-dagger approach to forcing GMO on other nations should raise your suspicions. Why are they going thru the trouble on trying to force people to have something that they don't want? Why are they using political pressure to try to force themselves into markets that simply are not interested?

Control food, control the world.

There is nothing that GMO can do that conventional breeding cannot accomplish. And there's nothing that GMO can do in productivity than good agricultural practices cannot accomplish. Organic methods concentrating on the most important part of any crop - the soil ecosystem - are just the tip of the iceberg here. Terra preta's secrets are also showing great potential. And, none of these methods strip farmers of their rights, and they don't make farmers criminals as GMO has already done. And they don't make all farmers potential criminals as GMO will.

Let's also not forget the Pharm GMO experimentation and our bumbling that with the result of pharm-produce getting into the human food chain. To err is human - which basically means that there's no way we can be certain that what we are eating isn't chock full of hormones, drugs and whatnot if we allow that to continue unabated. Hey guys, feel your figure slimming down and your voice rising and for some reason your chest seems... bigger? Could be the corn-flakes you're eating. Nothing like a bowl of estrogen every morning.

And GMO isn't going to solve banana's problems. The problem isn't the cavendish. It's the method of agriculture. Every cavendish out there is a clone. If one is susceptible to a disease, every other one in cultivation is too - all over the world. Why is that the fault of the plant? In nature, plants overcome disease by breeding resistance. When you bypass that by cloning, you've effectively eliminated the natural method of overcoming disease. Only breeding can solve this problem and seeking a more diverse gene-pool, and perhaps weening the public off their uniform 9" yellow nanner and introducing them to some variety. GMO nanners will have the same problem - they may be engineered to resist fusarium wilt - but as they become ubiquitous in agriculture, it's inevitable that another disease will find them vulnerable and we're in the same boat - after spending a mint in licensing fees for the intellectual property we're still no better off. It's an arms race out in nature and our agricultural methods are giving disease the upper hand.

Mke