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.
From Clansgian AT wmconnect.com Wed Jun 15 13:46:05 2005
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From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
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Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 13:46:01 EDT
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:
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