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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Market-farming Digest, Vol 77, Issue 9

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  • From: juliew026 AT netscape.net
  • To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Market-farming Digest, Vol 77, Issue 9
  • Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:47:54 -0400

the following article  from NY Times (asia pacific section) Sept. 19, 2006
and seeing the movie  "Future of Food" has had a big impact on me
  I'd be hard pressed to support GMOs


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Fawzan Husain for The New York Times
Villagers in Bhadumari gathered in the house of Anil Kondba Shende and looked at his body as the local police investigated his suicide.
The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his only source of income.
Whether it was debt, shame or some other privation that drove Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was by no means an isolated one, and in it lay an alarming reminder of the crisis facing the Indian farmer.
Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing.
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Pete Vukovich <pvukovic1 AT yahoo.com>
To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 3:23 pm
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Market-farming Digest, Vol 77, Issue 9

On Jun 8, 2009, at 8:45 AM, Franklin W. Davis wrote:

To expand on rivka's explanation regarding GMO vegetables. There are several problems with them, but basically it comes down to how a plant works.

 A plants DNA is used by its RNA to construct proteins and amino acids we expect to benefit from. The biggest danger here (IMHO) is that some proteins are deadly (to us and/or other plant consumers). Over thousands if not millions of years RNA has evolved along with DNA to produce proteins which are useful in plants we eat (or rather we eat plants with useful proteins). If you expose RNA to unknown genetic sequences RNA will generally ignore them, so GMO companies add an inhibitor which makes RNA copy information from the new genes it has no experience with. Since  RNA does not typically have enough information to properly construct a target protein or amine compound for the new genes it produces unknown and in some cases toxic proteins.

The other major problem stems from the use of virus's to keep the new genetic sequences turned on in all the plants cells all the time. Typically there are genes which activate and deactivate each other depending on chemical and environmental stimuli, and some of these are cyclic - a gene for say brown eyes is usually not active in your feet although its present. GMO companies dope their plants with things like CAmv genes (cauliflower mosaic virus), to turn on genes that would be otherwise dormant. This means for example the BT gene intended to be turned on in meristem tissue is also turned on in root meristem tissue, which not only kills the pests, it also kills the soil (this is apparently the case in BT cotton which requires 2-3 times the fertilizer of non BT cotton). Since additional fertilizer is then required and micronutrients are not usually a big part of commercial fertilizers , yields are reduced at the same time as the farmers expenses are dramatically increased. According to a recent british study this may be the case in much of northern india (as an example).


--- On Mon, 6/8/09, market-farming-request AT lists.ibiblio.org <market-farming-request AT lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:

From: market-farming-request AT lists.ibiblio.org <market-farming-request AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Market-farming Digest, Vol 77, Issue 9
To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Monday, June 8, 2009, 10:17 AM

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