gmo foods = food fascism

Another great interview with Vandana Shiva.  I love her equating gmo foods with fascism. 


VS:   First, the disappearance of diversity under an agriculture designed for war chemicals rather than designed for the soil, the earth, human nutrition and human health. The first thing that disappears with agriculture that iss like war is our biodiversity because chemicals are intolerant to diversity. They need monocultures. Monocultures have made our rice varieties disappear. According to Dr. Reshari, the leading scientist in rice, there use to be 200,000 varieties. He is the one who taught me about seed saving, and because of that [our organization] Navdanya has been able save 3,000 varieties of rice. We had 1,500 varieties of wheat, many of which rescued farming in Europe and Canada because they were frost tolerant. Research was conducted by Sir Albert Howard who is known as the father of modern organic farming. Dr. Howard was sent to India to introduce chemicals and when he came here he found the fields were fertile, there were no pests in the field. And he said I threw away my spray gun and decided to turn the peasant and pest into my teacher. He then wrote the Agricultural Testament which is called the bible of organic farming.





Now our governments are told by the Del Montes of the world, that our mangoes – 1500 varieties of delicious mangoes—the beshari, the kalmi –are not good enough. Why are they not good enough? Because they don't travel well.  Food was not meant to be put on ships, freezers and sit for six months in containers and on supermarket shelves. Food is meant to be harvested and eaten. So when a chemical model of agriculture takes over it goes hand in hand with not just uniformity but with the standardization that is anti-health, anti-nutrition and anti-taste. 



One of the important parts of the industrial food system is that it creates hunger. My new book which should be out in the US in Spring is called Making Peace with the Earth and a large part of the book is an analysis of what I call “hunger by design”. The very design of industrial farming, the very design of industrial breeding of seeds, is to create hunger. First it creates hunger by destroying the resources that give us food: the soil, the biodiversity, the water. Second, it creates hunger by locking farmers into debt. So farmers grow food but then they don't eat because it is  now a commodity. They are indebted. They sell what they've grown to pay back the debt for the chemicals and then go hungry themselves. That is why among the one billion people in the world who are hungry, half of them are food producers. 

 Two-hundred seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide since the GMO cotton seeds were introduced in India. Monsanto started to take over the seed supply to use hybrid seeds, not renewable seeds. I call this a genocide

But there is another level at which the violence takes place in this food system. What is being produced are commodities not food. 

 If GMOs spread, they must destroy democracy. They must destroy independent science. They must destroy the environment and must destroy our health. This is why we can't afford GMOs besides the issues of the health risks and the particular issues of biosafety. The largest systemic damage is from a pathetic, petty industry producing something nobody wants and something that would never spread if democracy were an independent science. So we are either going to have food fascism with GMOs, or democracy with organic.

http://www.countercurrents.org/null151212.htm

If these riders had been in place during the review of GE alfalfa, Monsanto could have requested – no they could have compelled – the Secretary of Agriculture to allow continued planting of GE alfalfa even though a federal court had ruled commercialization was illegal pending completion of an environmental impact study.

Essentially, the riders would prevent the federal courts from restricting, in any way, the planting of a GE crop, regardless of environmental, health or economic concerns. USDA's mandated review process would be, like court-ordered restrictions, meaningless. A request to USDA to allow planting of a GE crop awaiting approval would have to be granted.

No, the Farmer Assurance Provision and the Farm Bill riders – are not about farmers, nor are they about speeding needed crops to the waiting public. They’re about getting fast rubber stamp approval for new, profitable GE crops.

These riders are an effort to end run Congress, the Courts and the Constitution.

Corporate collusion with government is not new, but this takes it to a new level. By allowing corporations to subvert the Constitution, Congress is saying that corporate influence and profits are more important than the best interests of the people.

http://www.progressive.org/monsanto-gets-its-way-in-ag-bill