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[Homestead] Genes and a Hoe

From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] Genes and a Hoe
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 07:29:01 -0700

This gives pause to the automatic pilot that steers one's personal moral plane into the money maw of monster Monsanto. The only caution I can think of is that the genetic manipulation of Kenyan corn will cause some future harm that is currently unpredictable. How much caution is too much?

Genes and a Hoe

Published: June 15, 2005

Every year Kenya's corn farmers lose about 15 percent of their crop to the stem borer, an insect that drills into the corn stalk. Farmers who can afford it douse their corn repeatedly with pesticides, which poison the environment. The stem borer and its relatives steal the livelihood of millions of small corn farmers. Last year at least 125 Kenyans, most of them children, died from eating corn with toxins created by the stem borer.
Help may be on the way from genetic manipulation. Kenya has just begun trials of a corn identical to the local variety but carrying genes that increase its resistance to the stem borer. The project, carried out by the Kenyan national agricultural research program and the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, is a careful endeavor to test genetically modified crops and make them work for the small farmer.
A billion acres worldwide are planted with genetically modified crops. Yet virtually all the land belongs to agribusiness. That is because biotech companies create genetically modified seeds that can't be replanted; farmers who use them have to buy expensive patented seeds each year. Subsistence farmers need to be able to replant their own crop for seed, but companies like Monsanto and Syngenta find no profit in recyclable seeds. They also have no incentive to create hardier versions of subsistence crops, like cassava and sweet potatoes, that agribusiness doesn't grow.
Kenya's corn project will move slowly. The research will take six more years and will cost $10 million, which will come from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, which is separate from the biotech company. Researchers must also persuade biotech companies, which hold the patents, to free up the technology.
The Kenya project will likely get the needed financing and permissions. But similar studies will be needed elsewhere. Other farmers might, for example, want a drought-resistant corn. Since there is no market incentive, it won't happen without help from governments and foundations and cooperation from biotech concerns. The Kenya study is a model of how to do it and a warning about how difficult adapting this technology for poor farmers will be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/opinion/15wed3.html

From Clansgian AT wmconnect.com Wed Jun 15 13:46:05 2005

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Subject: Re: [Homestead] Genes and a Hoe
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Gene writes:

<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> The only caution I can think of is that the genetic manipulation of Kenyan corn will cause some future harm that is currently unpredictable. How much caution is too much?

</BLOCKQUOTE>
Two things on this:

1) 15% isn't much of a loss. Most of our household bread is from corn and we grow all of it ourselves. A 15% loss of the crop is nothing, expected from some cause or the other (crows, racoons, borers, smut). That's no good cause to use GMO and certainly no cause to dump pesticides on it.

2) As an example of what happens when the GMO is introduced see:

http://www.newfarm.org/international/pan-am_don/aug04/tepotzetlan.shtml

Look at the included slide show and the explaination that the high yield GMO corn is only suitable for about 20% of the ground traditionally used for corn, thus making the corn grown on the other 80% noncompetitive, thus encouraging subsidized corn to be dumped in Mexico from the US, thus putting the 'ejido' farms in jeopardy, thus requiring hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to come to the US to send money back so the family can hold onto the farms.

Agribusiness types are so convinced that peasant farming is a bad thing that the "unintended consequences" of introducing GMO corn would be written off as a worthwhile exchange, no matter how much trouble it causes.

James

[Homestead] Genes and a Hoe, Gene GeRue, 06/15/2005