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  • From: "Desert Eagle" <jimi@hdc-nm.com>
  • To: "Desert Eagle" <jimi@hdc-nm.com>
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Why Prince Charles is right: we need GM free food
  • Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:54:41 -0000

Why Prince Charles is right: we need GM free food and agriculture for food
security
By Dr Vandana Shiva

We are grateful to Prince Charles for cautioning the world on the
blind and head long rush worldwide to spread GM seeds and crops especially
the Third World.

a.. Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest environment
disaster
a.. Prince Charles accused by scientists of abusing position over GM
comments
a.. Why we need GM trees
His comments had become necessary because the biotechnology industry
is using the food crisis to push GM crops on grounds that they increase
yields.



This is doubly false. Firstly, because the current crisis is a result
of speculation and diversion of food crops to biofuels, it is not a crisis
of production.

Secondly, genetic engineering so far has only achieved transfer of
single gene traits such as herbicide resistance and Bt. toxin production.

Yield and environmental resilience are multigenetic traits, and there
is no GM crop currently engineered for high yields.

Monsanto has claimed that its Bt. Cotton in India yields 1,500
kg/acre. Most independent studies have found 300-400 kg/acre as an average,
with many farmers facing total crop failure due to pest attack and some
getting more than 1,000 kg if the weather was not too dry or two wet.

While Bt. Cotton is supposed to control the bollworm, it is evolving
resistance and new pests which were not significant have exploded, requiring
higher doses of pesticides.

As a pest-control strategy GM crops are a failure. Integrated pest
management and controlling pests through mixtures is much more scientific
and effective.
The more the industry makes unscientific and false claims about GM
crops giving higher yields and using less pesticide the more they refer to
"science" based decision.

The UK's Environment Minister, Phil Woolas said it was the
government's moral responsibility "to investigate whether genetically
modified crops could help provide a solution to hunger in the developing
world. We see this as part of our Africa strategy."

One would imagine an environment minister would want to investigate
whether biodiverse and ecological farming could help provide a solution to
hunger, especially in Africa.

The recently concluded International Assessment on Agriculture Science
and Technology has concluded that GMOs and industrial agriculture is not the
solution. Small scale ecological agriculture is the answer to poverty and
hunger. Mr Woolas should read the report.

He should also read Navdanya's reports on farmers' suicides in India.
The suicides are concentrated in the Bt. Cotton belt.

Monsanto's Bt. Cotton is, in my opinion, costly, non-renewable, and
unreliable. Farmers are getting trapped in unpayable debt and are ending
their lives.

When I visited Krishna Rao Vaidya's widow on 10th Oct, it was evident
he was driven to suicide because of debt.

On average a farmer like Vaidya takes his life every 8 hours in
Vidarbha, over the past decade, 200,000 farmers in India have committed
suicide.


Prince Charles said that GM crops and corporate control of agriculture
"risked creating the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

Two things were clear in the Prince's statement. He was addressing the risk
of creating a disaster, not a disaster that has already occurred. He was
also addressing the issue of disaster in a broad and comprehensive sense not
in a narrow perspective of "safety".

As he stated "Relying on gigantic corporations for mass production of food
would threaten, not boost future food supplies."

He warned that we would end up with "millions of small farmers all over the
world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded
and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness. I think it will
be an absolute disaster."
For Prince Charles, the large scale uprooting of peasants and small farmers
is a social disaster, a human rights disaster and a tragedy.

Corporate monopoly over our food systems is a food security disaster. And
while in some places like India these disasters have already had an impact
at a global level, they are a disaster in the making.

It is therefore unscientific, illogical and irresponsible for the
Environmental Minister Mr Woolas to say that Prince Charles must provide
"proof" that a disaster has happened.

I would imagine that he is aware of the environmental principle on which the
UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change rest.

The principle is called the Precautionary Principle. It is based on the
recognition that when an activity or technology has the potential to cause
harm, and there is no conclusive evidence to establish the harm that can be
caused, then policy and decision making must err on the side of caution.

The Environment Minister also said "Government ministers have a
responsibility to base policy on science and I do strongly believe that we
have a moral responsibility to the developing world to ask the question:
'Can GM crops help'?

Minister, if you could travel with me through Vidarbha and see the tears in
the eyes of farmers' widows, you would be compelled to ask the question:'Can
GM crops harm'? That is your moral responsibility.

It is also your responsibility to sincerely base your decisions on real
science, not pseudo science. Science based policy would recognise that an
agriculture that conserves biodiversity also produces more food and
nutrition per unit acre.

Science based policy would recognise that if farmers fall into debt, it is
not an instrument for ending poverty, but a recipe for ending the lives of
small farmers.

A science based policy would not blindly spread GM crops to Africa without
assessing their role in India's agrarian crisis. A science based policy
would not be based on unscientific principle of "substantial equivalence"
which has prevented independent and serious testing of GM foods and crops.

That is why the Supreme Court of India has served notice on the Government
of India to ask why a GMO moratorium should not be imposed till proper
testing protocols and tests and facilities for biosafety are in place.

We are proud that Prince Charles will be delivering the Ninth Howard
Memorial lecture for Navdanya this year. We organise the lecture to honour
Sir Albert Howard, the imperial agriculturist sent to India in 1905 whose
"Agricultural Testament" is based on the knowledge on sustainable farming he
learnt from India's peasants.

We organise the lecture on Gandhi's birth anniversary to celebrate
non-violent farming which protects all species, the farmers, the soil and
our health.

GMOs are the latest step in a violent tradition of industrial agriculture
which has its roots in war and has become a war against the farmers, the
land, and our bodies. Prince Charles, like many of us, wants this war to
end.

And all that the biotech industry and its allies in governments can talk
about is the smartness of their weapons.
It is time they realised the debate is much wider and deeper. It is about
the planet we live on, the societies we are shaping, the exclusions billions
are condemned to, the super profits the gene giants and grain giants
harvest, while the real harvest in the fields of real farmers shrink.

The industrial/mechanistic mindset has destroyed our farmers and food
security. It cannot offer solutions to the agrarian crisis and food crisis
it has created. We need to move to an ecological perspective based on
diversity.

Unfortunately, GMOs fail the test of both ecological sustainability and
socio-economic viability. They have accelerated non-sustainability, and
deepened injustice and inequality.

It is time the world listened to the important message from Prince Charles.

a.. Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, author of
numerous books and environmental campaigner. She is the founder of Navdanya,
a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers' rights.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/21/eashiva121.xml





  • [Livingontheland] Why Prince Charles is right: we need GM free food, Desert Eagle, 08/21/2008

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