“Food dictatorship”—GMOs’ eco-disaster

Compiled and edited by Carolyn Bennett

A handful of gene giants (Monsanto, Syngenta, Aventis, Dow, DuPont) control agricultural biotechnology.
They control intellectual property and entrench patent monopolies over GM seeds and plants.
They stifle freedom of information and choice.

Genetically modified crops have spread where “farmers are denied freedom of information and freedom of choice because of corporate control and dependency,” writes scientist Vandana Shiva. “GM foods are entering the food chain where consumers are denied the right to know and the right to choose. U.S. farmers are the most trapped under corporate control of inputs and marketing.”

Corporations preventing the labeling of GM foods have denied U.S. citizens food freedom and food democracy.

In Europe and Japan, consumers have freedom of choice, freedom that prevented GM foods from flooding the market.

Famine caused by western powers is being used to market GMOs [genetically modified organisms] through food aid. The WHO [World Health Organization] was mobilized to force African countries to accept GM food. The U.S. government made the force-feeding of Africans with GMOs a major issue. In the closing plenary of the 2002 Earth Summit when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell representing the George W. Bush administration kept insisting that African countries import GM food from the U.S, both NGOs and governments heckled him.

Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique [Africa] refused to accept GMOs in food aid. African farmers had come to the summit in Johannesburg with alternatives—small scale, indigenous-based farmers rights to land, water, and seed.

A democratic process led to Zambia’s refusal to accept GM food and the Zambian president condemned the FAO, WHO, and World Food Program for being irresponsible in supporting the U.S. ‘We may be poor and experiencing food shortages,’ the Zambian president said, ‘but we are not ready to expose people to ill-defined risks.’ He pleaded that Zambians not be used as guinea pigs.

African Civil Society groups of more than 45 African countries participating at the World Summit on Sustainable Development joined Zambian and Zimbabwean governments and peoples in “rejecting GE contaminated food [saying] ‘We refuse to be used as the dumping ground for contaminated food rejected by the Northern countries and we are enraged by [this] emotional blackmail of vulnerable people.’”

The introduction of genetically engineered (GE) organisms into the complex ecosystems of our environment, Greenpeace writes, is a dangerous global experiment with nature and evolution. GE organisms (or GMOs: genetically modified organisms) pose unacceptable risks to ecosystems, and threaten biodiversity, wild life and sustainable forms of agriculture.

Genetically engineered organisms are a threat to crop diversity, which is critical to the continuing development of varieties resistant to new pests, diseases, and changing climatic and environmental conditions. The lack of genetic diversity has documented links to many major crop epidemics in human history. Diversity is essential for global food security.

Genetic diversity is all that ‘stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine’ ─ Botanist Jack Harlan

Sources and notes
Dr. Vandana Shiva, director of Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology was speaking in 2003 and parts of her February 2003 speech presented at the Future of Life Summit were posted at Z Magazine: The spirit of resistance lives, April 2003,
http://www.zcommunications.org/food-democracy-v-food-dictatorship-by-vandana2-shiva
Greenpeace, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/agriculture/problem/genetic-engineering/ge-agriculture-and-genetic-pol/

We women, in all our vibrant and fabulous diversity, have witnessed the increasing aggression against the human spirit, human mind and human body and the continued invasion of and assault upon the Earth and all her diverse species ─ and we are enraged, write Women for Diversity.

We demand that governments, international organizations, transnational corporations and individual men who share our rage address the crisis caused by the creation of monocultures and the reduction, enclosure, and extinction of biological and cultural diversity.

We insist that those who address the crisis listen to and take leadership from women, indigenous peoples, farmers, and all who have raised these concerns at the local level. We ask their heed of the wisdom, stewardship, knowledge and commitment that has preserved the diversity we celebrate today. Navdanya Women for Diversity’s Statement of Concern, http://www.navdanya.org/diverse-women-for-diversity/60