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market-farming - Re: GMO Education?

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  • From: Joan Vibert <joan AT windwalker-farm.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: GMO Education?
  • Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 21:48:40 -0600


I wonder if this is an national effort by extension (and Farm Bureau, who
co-sponsored ours) in all the states to do a dog and pony show on gmo? Our
local one was a panel discussion - sort of. There was the ag guy from
Kansas State "explaining gmos", a professor from Kansas University who is an
expert on bees and has gotten into the monarch butterfly scene, our friend
Dan, who is locally a well-known organic grower, and a woman who could have
been cloned from the person you described. This woman was holding up food
items we should be grateful for due to "science" - such as nutrasweet and
basically saying that gmos were no different. She could have been selling
refrigerators.

This meeting was better attended that what you describe with a decent
cross-section of organic growers and consumers and conventional farmers.
The unfortunate thing in my opinion was the the true discussion only took
place right at the end of the q&a period. One young woman, a conventional
farm wife, got up and was very upset because they are expected to "feed the
world" and do it cheaply and she said "we can't feed the world and grow
organic, too".

Another woman spoke about her 16 year old daughter who has Krohn's disease
and told how the doctor at the children's hospital told her that he is
seeing more and more of this disease at these young ages. She went on to
mention several other diseases that appear to be of epidemic proportions
including cancers. The ag guy from K-State immediately bellowed "there is
no cancer epidemic!"

I think agri-business thought this was going to be an easy sell and it
probably could have been to most of the American population who considers a
big mac a meal - but the uproar in Europe helped gain attention and now the
star link corn that worked its way into everyone's tortilla chips - people
are paying notice. So agri-business is having to send out their land grant
school patsies to sell their product through "good science".

Week before last 60 minutes was airing a segment on gmo food and I managed
to miss it but heard yesterday that the show was moved to 2:30 A.M. that
night instead of being shown at prime time. I wondered if that meant it
came down on the "against" side. Did anyone see it. There's way too much
money to be made by the big corporations - if they can only get us to
realize what favors they are doing for us!

joan
windwalker farm
ottawa, kansas






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