Golden Rice: GM Silver Bullet that Misses the Target
Colin Todhunter
Promoters of genetic modification (GM) in agriculture have long argued that genetically engineered Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets.
Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk for infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.
Some scientists believe that Golden Rice, which has been developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, could help save the lives of around 670,000 children who die each year from Vitamin A deficiency and another 350,000 who go blind.
Meanwhile, critics say there are serious issues with Golden Rice and that alternative approaches to tackling vitamin A deficiency should be implemented. Greenpeace and other environmental groups say the claims being made by the pro-Golden Rice lobby are misleading and are oversimplifying the actual problems in combating vitamin A deficiency.
Many critics regard Golden Rice as an over-hyped Trojan horse that biotechnology corporations and their allies hope will pave the way for the global approval of other more profitable GM crops. The Rockefeller Foundation might be regarded as a ‘philanthropic’ entity but its track record indicates it has been very much part of an agenda which facilitates commercial and geopolitical interests to the detriment of indigenous agriculture and local and national economies.
Smears and baseless attacks
As Britain’s Environment Secretary in 2013, Owen Paterson claimed that opponents of GM were “casting a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world”.
He called for the rapid roll-out of vitamin A-enhanced rice to help prevent the cause of up to a third of the world’s child deaths:
It’s just disgusting that little children are allowed to go blind and die because of a hang-up by a small number of people about this technology. I feel really strongly about it. I think what they do is absolutely wicked.”
Just recently, Robin McKie, science writer for The Observer, wrote a piece on Golden Rice that uncritically presented all the usual industry talking points.
On Twitter, The Observer’s Nick Cohen chimed in with his support by tweeting:
There is no greater example of ignorant Western privilege causing needless misery than the campaign against genetically modified golden rice.”
Yes, that Nick Cohen; the one who cheer-led for the illegal invasion of Iraq and who remains unrepentant.
Whether it comes from the likes of corporate lobbyist Patrick Moore, Owen Paterson, biotech spin-merchant Mark Lynas, well-remunerated journalists or from the lobbyist CS Prakash who engages more in spin that fact, the rhetoric takes the well-worn cynically devised PR line that anti-GM activists and environmentalists are little more than privileged, affluent people residing in rich countries and are denying the poor the supposed benefits of GM crops.
Golden Rice does not work and opponents are not to blame
Despite the smears and emotional blackmail employed by supporters of Golden Rice, in a 2016 article in the journal Agriculture& Human Values Glenn Stone and Dominic Glover found little evidence that anti-GM activists are to blame for Golden Rice’s unfulfilled promises. Golden rice was still years away from field introduction and may fall far short of lofty health benefits claimed by its supporters.
Professor Glenn Stone from Washington University in St. Louis stated that:
Golden Rice is still not ready for the market, but we find little support for the common claim that environmental activists are responsible for stalling its introduction. GMO opponents have not been the problem.”
Stone added that the rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done. While activists did destroy one Golden Rice test plot in a 2013 protest, it is unlikely that this action had any significant impact on the approval of Golden Rice.
Stone said:
Destroying test plots is a dubious way to express opposition, but this was only one small plot out of many plots in multiple locations over many years. Moreover, they have been calling Golden Rice critics ‘murderers’ for over a decade.”
Believing that Golden Rice was originally a promising idea backed by good intentions, Stone argued:
But if we are actually interested in the welfare of poor children – instead of just fighting over GMOs – then we have to make unbiased assessments of possible solutions. The simple fact is that after 24 years of research and breeding, Golden Rice is still years away from being ready for release.”
Researchers continue to have problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GM strains already being grown by farmers. Stone and Glover point out that it is still unknown if the beta carotene in Golden Rice can even be converted to vitamin A in the bodies of badly undernourished children.
There also has been little research on how well the beta carotene in Golden Rice will hold up when stored for long periods between harvest seasons or when cooked using traditional methods common in remote rural locations.
Claire Robinson, an editor at GMWatch, has argued that the rapid degradation of beta-carotene in the rice during storage and cooking means it’s not a solution to vitamin A deficiency in the developing world. There are also various other problems, including absorption in the gut, the low and varying levels of beta-carotene that may be delivered by Golden Rice in the first place and the rapid degradation of beta-carotene when stored.
In the meantime, Glenn Stones says that, as the development of Golden Rice creeps along, the Philippines has managed to slash the incidence of Vitamin A deficiency by non-GM methods.
In whose interest?
The evidence presented here might lead us to question why supporters of Golden Rice continue to smear critics and engage in abuse and emotional blackmail when they are not to blame for the failure of Golden Rice to reach the commercial market. Whose interests are they really serving in pushing so hard for this technology?
In 2011, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with a background in insect ecology and pest management asked a similar question:
Who oversees this ambitious project, which its advocates claim will end the suffering of millions?”
She answered her question by stating:
An elite, so-called “Humanitarian Board” where Syngenta sits – along with the inventors of Golden Rice, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and public relations and marketing experts, among a handful of others. Not a single farmer, indigenous person or even an ecologist, or sociologist to assess the huge political, social, and ecological implications of this massive experiment.
And the leader of IRRI’s Golden Rice project is none other than Gerald Barry, previously Director of Research at Monsanto.”
Sarojeni V. Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific, has called on the donors and scientists involved to wake up and do the right thing:
Golden Rice is really a ‘Trojan horse’; a public relations stunt pulled by the agri-business corporations to garner acceptance of GE crops and food. The whole idea of GE seeds is to make money… we want to send out a strong message to all those supporting the promotion of Golden Rice, especially donor organizations, that their money and efforts would be better spent on restoring natural and agricultural biodiversity rather than destroying it by promoting monoculture plantations and genetically engineered (GE) food crops.”
And she makes a valid point.
To tackle disease, malnutrition and poverty, you have to first understand the underlying causes – or indeed want to understand them.
Walden Bello notes that the complex of policies that pushed the Philippines into an economic quagmire over the past 30 years is due to ‘structural adjustment’, involving prioritizing debt repayment, conservative macroeconomic management, huge cutbacks in government spending, trade and financial liberalization, privatization and deregulation, the restructuring of agriculture and export-oriented production.
And that restructuring of the agrarian economy is something touched on by Claire Robinson who notes that leafy green vegetables used to be grown in backyards as well as in rice (paddy) fields on the banks between the flooded ditches in which the rice grew. She argues that the ditches also contained fish, which ate pests.
People thus had access to rice, green leafy veg, and fish – a balanced diet that gave them a healthy mix of nutrients, including plenty of beta-carotene.
But indigenous crops and farming systems have been replaced by monocultures dependent on chemical inputs. Robinson says that green leafy veg were killed off with pesticides, artificial fertilizers were introduced and the fish could not live in the resulting chemically contaminated water.
Moreover, decreased access to land meant that many people no longer had backyards containing leafy green veg. People only had access to an impoverished diet of rice alone, laying the foundation for the supposed Golden Rice ‘solution’.
Whether it concerns The Philippines, Ethiopia, Somalia or Africa as a whole, the effects of IMF/World Bank ‘structural adjustments’ have devastated agrarian economies and made them dependent on Western agribusiness, manipulated markets and unfair trade rules. And GM is now offered as the ‘solution’ for tackling poverty-related diseases. The very corporations which gained from restructuring agrarian economies now want to profit from the havoc caused.
Genuine solutions
In finishing, let us turn to what the Soil Association argued in 2013: the poor are suffering from broader malnourishment than just vitamin A deficiency; the best solution to vitamin A deficiency is to use supplementation and fortification as emergency sticking-plasters and then for implementing measures which tackle the broader issues of poverty and malnutrition.
Tackling the wider issues includes providing farmers with a range of seeds, tools and skills necessary for growing more diverse crops to target broader issues of malnutrition. Part of this entails breeding crops high in nutrients; for instance, the creation of sweet potatoes that grow in tropical conditions, cross-bred with vitamin A-rich orange sweet potatoes, which grow in the USA.
There are successful campaigns providing these potatoes, a staggering five times higher in vitamin A than Golden Rice, to farmers in Uganda and Mozambique.
The Soil Association says, despite the fanfare, Golden Rice has not yet actually helped a single person and if commercialised it will not be helping to reduce people’s reliance on a rice based diet. It believes that we could have gone further in curing blindness in developing countries years ago if only the money, research, and publicity that have gone into Golden Rice over the last 15 years had gone into proven ways of curing the Vitamin A deficiency that causes blindness.
However, instead of pursuing genuine solutions, we continue to get smears and pro-GM spin in an attempt to close down debate.
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Thank you for this article, I was stunned that the Guardian decided to publish such propaganda!! Blaming NGOs for “millions of lives lost” just because some experimental rice was not yet allowed. How a rice going to solve structural problems of poverty, access to diversified food and pollution that these countries suffer from? I am still shocked…
Very glad I found your article, thanks!
Not at all surprised to hear that the Rockefeller Foundation is involved. Agribusiness, the corporate takeover of Agriculture and the death of independent family farms, was developed by Rockefeller Foundation and Harvard Business School.
Probably an easier way to get vitamin A into a diet, other than a patented corporate GMO product. Financing will be available with the farmer’s assets as collateral. The rice farmer will end up as an employee, or as a independent contractor, with nothing to pass on to his family.
The extension of John D Rockefeller’s coal company towns into the 21st century. Barely a step above slavery.
What do we need golden rice for?
We’re soon going to have Kraft rubber cheese, Hershey plastic chocolate, chlorine flavour chicken and lashings of glyphosate.
Yum, yum!
Can’t wait.
My wife returned from a holiday in the states saying that they all looked like Roseanne Barr and John Goodman. And she brought home the reason why: a selection of American sweet bars that were pure sugar.
As we continue our descent into the Looking Glass fantasisation of an already Disneyfied Hyperreal fantasy – where Tulsi Gabbard is Snow White; and all will return to hypernormality when she is elected Queen …we seem to have forgotten we are autocthonic creatures born of the land on which we stand. Our entire physical integrity is maintained mainly by free energy stored in foodstuffs; our wastes biodegrade back into the soil (or not as the case may be); the lithosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere nexus of life interacts in an intimate balance that maintains all life in its own ‘Goldilocks Zone’.
This is not Gaia – or only a very weak version of it. This is Gaia/Medea: in a perpetual balance of life and death; creation and destruction. Some call it Dao. It is not a person or a Supreme Being. It is a process: a very complex interactive process we largely do not understand. Not enough to replicate. The balance of which we collectively seem to have an unconscious Thanatocidal desire to tip toward Medea – with our ongoing active experimental disruption and geochemical engineering of natural cycles into man made cycles. Some call this the Anthropocene – which started with a wave of radiation now found in the Ice Record …from circa 1945 onward.
So if we owe our life to the soil: why are we poisoning it? This is Wetiko psychosis. Not Colin – he is absolutely sane. The death eaters of the corporate revolution that want to turn life into death for profit. Have they thought their business model through?
The land is the basis of the economy too. We cannot ‘mine the sky’ as the ecomodernists say: we have to capture free energy …which means it is no longer actually ‘free’ – but comes with an increasing marginal cost due to thermodynamics. Or we extract stored solar and stored cosmic energy – in the form of Fossil Fuels (FFs) and Nuclear Energy (NEs). Which means it is no longer actually ‘free’ – but it also comes with an increasing marginal cost due to thermodynamics.
Harnessing pre-existing energy – to add and augment to captured ‘non-free’ energy (agriculture; solar PVs; etc) – is tho ONLY way to create a surplus value in an economy [Keen; Warr; Ayres; etc]. That energy has to be transformed into exergy (the residual portion available to do actual work) …with a conversion ratio that is always much less than one – due to thermodynamics. The amount of exergy is also limited by the rising marginal cost of extraction – the energy cost of energy or EROI. Which means that the available exergy to do economic and non-economic work tends to diminish across time due to thermodynamics. Which constrains economic expansion and limits growth as finite.
That source to sink throughput of energy transformed into exergy – plus mass biophysical flows for conversion to commodities; etc – is augmented by labour (embodied ‘non-free’ energy in humanity and our livestocks) and capital (embodied ‘non-free’ energy in machines) is essentially what an economy is. An economy is what it produces as a surplus from the land. Patzek has shown that those mass flows scale to the factor of one from input to output. There will be no mythical dematerialisation or absolute decoupling – as Hickel et al and Parrique et al have recently shown.
So we are bound to the land. And the output of the land is limited by finite FFs, NEs, the increasing cost of harnessing solar; the poisonings; the strip mining called industrial farming; the geochemical experimental engineering; etc. Colin is absolutely right in some respects: but bio-tech and GMOs are not the biggest problem, per se. It is that capitalism is condemning nearly everyone alive to death: in order to ‘feed the world’. And blaming the likely victims to damnation for breeding.
Why are people starving when we have a $595 trillion [BIS] derivative bubble that is about to burst? Not because of SAPs per se. It is because the structural functional dynamics of the current global order take the food out of the mouths of babies and sends it to us. 15-20% of the worlds affluent – that’s us too; not just the rich – are among the world’s resource bourgeoisie …or petty-bourgeoisie if that offends too much. We starve the world. That is the brutal fact of it. Overpopulation is a problem which needs to be addressed to – but it is overconsumption, overdevelopment, and overfinancialisation by a priviliged portion of the world’s surplus value class and caste system …that includes us, all of us.
If we really want to address these issues: we have to get real. We have to look in the mirror and see what we conceal. We starve the world to maintain our lifestyles at a level we are not happy with. But we cannot ask for more: or we starve the world more. It is a zero-sum game within finite limits.
To be fair: the solutions are now so radical almost no one would contemplate them. Dispossessing the possessing class and reversing centuries of primitive accumulation is a political non-starter. Reverse globalisation and food and energy sovereignty – with minimal logistics and distribution networks relying on naptha/diesel might be achievable. But where is the political will? The very mention of the environment is accompanied by chants of ‘eco-fascists’ and ‘Malthusians’: so what chance do we have? We starve the world increasingly until the productivity of the biosphere collapses – which is impossible in nearly all assertively reified imaginations. Except it is possible and happening. We just do not want to know. So we make up some Spectacular narrative faery tales to keep us permanently distracted and Disneyfied. The price of the movie is at least 100,000 of our relatives a day at current rates: soon to rise. Can we hear them scream yet? Better turn up the volume on the Disneyfied soundtrack?
I want to make one point clear though: capitalism is Malthusianism and condemns nearly every alive today to death. Not the ecologists and thinkers who propose we actually modify our live accordingly. To be entirely clear from copious research: there is simply no way of replicating our death eating economy with renewables. And FFs are depleting much faster than anyone will admit: because that would mean that they would have to change their lives. And no one wants to change their lives by the requisite amount it would really require. So we starve the world until productivity collapses. Then we starve ourselves too. What an absolutely genius script for a Disneyfication snuff movie? I do not suppose enough will actually want to change the script by changing themselves?
We simply cannot live like this any more. If we pretend we can: we condemn everyone to death. No one ever gave a fuck about biodiversity or the biosphere: no need to even pretend. If everyone realised their economy was over: they might think.
It can take up to 500 hundred years to regenerate topsoil. How do we do that when we have poisoned all the earthworms, nematodes, microbes, etc that are required to do it? No one seems to be thinking this through in any clear way. Maybe if we don’t think about it for long enough: the problems will go away?
B, that baleful split that you describe here I’ve been calling for some time the PTP and the ADEP; the Pampered Twenty Percent and the Abused and Deprived Eighty Percent. That’s been going on for longer than my lifetime, and it’s worse now, the gap between the two groups having widened.
Note that, in this reckoning, virtually EVERYONE in an economy like Britain’s is a member of the PTP. There will be a very few who slip through the gaps into genuine destitution, but even the large majority of Brits who are suffering stress, excessive pressure, mild hardship, and a general – perfectly justified – dissatisfaction with life under successive anti-democratic cabinets of neolibcon austerity hucksters are nevertheless still members of the PTP in the absolute basics of life here; the NHS for ALL, for example; malnutrition and the flood of vile junk ‘foods’ sure, but no – or virtually no – actual starvation. You have to visit places like Mumbai or Kolkata, where I’ve been, or the slums of places like Lagos or Dhaka, were I haven’t, to witness the authentic destitution of the poorest of the real ADEP people – who, in varying degrees of deprivation, now number 80% of the world’s human populace; all because of the unthinking greed of we obedient-consumer PTPers, in cahoots with the transnational gangsters-in-charge, who play us like well carrot-and-stick-trained circus animals.
20/80 is about right. Or 16% consuming 86% of resources: but that’s quite an old data-set now. There is quite a lot of ecological footprint data now. The average footprint for the UK is 5.45 gha (global hectares). To be set against a global biocapacity of 1.63 gha – which is not sustainable; it is the maximum capacity. That works out that the average lifestyle in the UK consumes 3.34 planets worth of resources to sustain. Which you can reduce by not having a car; not eating meat; not flying; not having children. After that; it gets a bit silly. Not heating your house and living off moss and rainwater. I’m not eating moss so Lord and Lady Ftang-Biscuit-Barrel can heat their Belvedere penthouse while they are in the Maldives. No one is.
The thing with median averages is that they are averages. We need to reduce consumption drastically AND make sure it is equally distributed with NO privileged entitlement. Which the UK is not quite ready for. Which is a shame: because this Winter could be extremely harsh for most of us. Especially if it is cold: which it quite often is in Winter.
Grid failures; blackouts; potential financial collapses; and diesel rationing aside …I despair that we have let it get so bad by ignoring the problems inherent as contradictions in capitalism. All these problems are predictable outcomes that have been almost universally ignored to make exponential growth real. It never was: but now it is …if that makes sense?
It does not really. The point is no one will go back. We want more. 4 planets equivalence? It is achievable: by war; imperialism; and a return to colonialism. Something has got to give to snap some sense into us. Starting with the National Grid this Winter, very probably.
Starting with the National Grid this Winter, very probably.
That will collapse due to your XR friends in and out of government following pied piper Greta & co. Nothing to do with capitalism, Brexit, resources exhaustion or even Greed. Just irrationality due to vested fearmongering.
“And no one wants to change their lives by the requisite amount it would really require. So we starve the world until productivity collapses. Then we starve ourselves too. What an absolutely genius script for a Disneyfication snuff movie? I do not suppose enough will actually want to change the script by changing themselves?”
You do not suppose incorrectly. Including the 99% #MeToos of the current Xtinctionist Rebellioners when they get over their rebellingness.
Admirably cogent. Thank you Colin Todhunter.
Colin and his selection of supporting voices are without doubt on the right track; but not quite radically far enough along it.
Add to all their sound, actual-facts-in-the-real-world reasoning the further observation that this is also a geopolitical power struggle. One that involves we, the commons, striking back against the perennial push to concentrate de-facto political power in the hands of a small minority of global crooks, together with the grotesque over-wealth and ‘high’ (but ersatz) status which always accompany that power; an inherently, virulently ANTI-democratic, anti-honesty impulse, clearly.
Quite obviously, the whole GMO racket is seen currently by the world’s gic class (gangsters-in-charge; always with us, alas!) as one still-promising path towards feeding their endless psychopathic WealthPowerStatus addiction (and to hell with the mere feeding of poor people).
It’s always acutely necessary, when countering the pro-GMO propaganda, to remember that it’s entirely about WPS, and has – literally – nothing whatever to do with helping poor people, for whom the WPS addicts never give a tuppeny damn. The pro-GMO whores/useful-idiots with their specious ‘helping-the-poorest’ babbling-points need to have this stark reality thrown back in their faces, every time they trot out such utter tosh.
We – the commons – are no more than potentially-profitable cattle, always, in the minds of gics, to be exploited ruthlessly, and – when it’s deemed profitable – to be killed too (or simply left to die), in large numbers, just like cattle. The gics’ motives are never anything more than this pursuit of commercial profit, in the service of WPS building; the psycho’s favourite life-activity.
Sod all the ‘feeding the poor’ rubbish! Feeding the poor will be done much more effectively with what Dmitry Orlov calls the pragmatically most effective form of government ever tried so far by human mass-scale societies, as proven by the objective historical and current record on the ground; and that is: socialism, with some (permitted but strictly-restrained) market characteristics.
In a nutshell: to hell with giant, outtac0ntrol, multinational, strictly fascistic, fanatically anti-democratic corporations; and all who sell-out to them! China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Euskadi, etc. are showing the right way.
PS: Should have included Iran as one of the socialist way-finders. Ramin Mazaheri, who posts frequent multi-part essays on the Saker blog (recommended), whilst also being a chief PressTV correspondent in France, is emphatic that his home country is run along socialism-with-islamic-characteristics lines, ever since the revolution which ousted Pahlavi. I don’t know enough about that to be able to argue with Ramin, but – as a convinced socialist himself – he makes a persuasive case. (How well are the GMO gangsters doing in Iran…?)
PPS: Add NKorea to the list, too. Virtually no market characteristics there. But one of the many versions of socialism-in-practice. Astonishingly successful too, after dragging themselves up by their own bootstraps from the catastrophic quasi-genocide that the US (plus its usual coterie of arse-kissers) inflicted during the Korean War (and the constant bullying and starving of essential trade that they’ve suffered ever since). They’ve even got themselves a credible nuclear weapons system, with delivery vehicles that can reach the US, which has brought the US to start talking seriously about making some sort of peace with them.
As Dmitry O points out: de facto, places like China and NKorea have proven that their versions of socialism are world-beaters when it comes to actual results. Especially when compared with the rotten-ripe gic-oppressed West.
“Colin [Todhunter] and his selection of supporting voices are without doubt on the right track; but not quite radically far enough along it.”
You start where you can start in the way you can start and where and when you can start is where the time and place and circumstance enables you to start. Starting without regard to time, place and circumstance is no time, place or way to start, only time and place from which to go nowhere until time, place and circumstance enable it. If you do not like where Mr Todhunter is moving along your right track, the persons to take it up with are yourself, your contemporaries and your Mummy and Daddy and their Mummy and Daddy and the time to take it with them was back then. Now is too late.
Mr Todhunter is now where they and you have–past tense–enabled him to be now. 70 years ago Rachael Carson had such a hard time pitching her predictions of a Silent Spring to academics and politicians that she turned to pitching it to the popular media. Only in the last few years–five? ten?–have their readers finally enabled her message to start with anything like the impetus it needs to have any perceptible effect. For most politicians and academics and their general publica it’s still a non starter, still just a doom merchan’ts crazy $ilent $pring.
Fot “…the time to take it with them…” read “…the time to take it up with them…”
Well it seems that some misery is more needless than others. Bombing native populations into the stone age is perfectly acceptable – after all, it provides “marketing opportunities” for new technological “aid” revolutions. Only after such bombing do we then have “needless” misery i.e. misery which can be used to generate lovely profits. Cue the corporate fellators like Cohen to provide the requisite moral outrage. “Aid” must be defined as “profitable aid” i.e. profitable to the ones giving the aid – which ultimately means screwing the ones receiving.
Incidentally, I note that the Owen Paterson piece has a number of adverts running below amongst which I read “25 Safe Countries Where $150 K Dollars is Enough To Retire”. No GM rice needed there.
The whole argument about GM is distorted by not focussing solely on the key issue:
A very small number of TNCs wish to control the entire global seeds industry by forcing sterile variants on the whole world, enabling them to starve the world to death at any time through withholding their key requirements for life (food seeds).
The TNCs make these strains sterile for one reason: you have to keep going back to buy them forever if they have wiped out open pollinated competitors. They have you by the proverbial short n curlies.
TNCs are not charities, they focus solely on profits. That is in their articles of association. They do NOT operate for global good, however much spin they put on it. Nowhere in their Articles of Association is it stated that curing malnutrition is the overarching goal. If they have to choose between making money and curing malnutrition, children will continue to be malnourished.
It is perfectly possible to set up organisations whose goal is SOLVENCY, TNCs are never set up that way. They are set up to maximise returns to shareholders. TNCs would be heroin lords if they could get away with it, because ROCE in heroin is off the charts. They are not charities who will invest in R+D until they find a solution that works.
So these are my sticking points:
1. Make open pollination a requirement of all GM crops.
2. Require all field testing to be carried out outside the TNC environment and also require all trials to be designed and evaluated by independent third parties.
3. Ban all political donations by GM companies.
4. Limit any GM crop to 5% of the market.
Not popular in GM land, but I am not a shareholder….
I have no knowledge of this subject but I did read a very frightening book called “The wind-up girl” that envisages a world where sterile GM rice seeds were the only viable crop, an engineered blight had destroyed natural rice leaving people at the mercy of the seed market if they wanted to live….Logic informs me this is the path we will follow.
This gives the lie to the claim that “all the scientists” are Global Warming enthusiasts.
“The scientists”, or a significant proportion of them, are up for sale.
They are paid shills giving spurious legitimacy to whatever line globalist corporate interests want to peddle.
Pay them enough and they will bring out papers proving that smoking 200 fags a day and drinking 5 bottles of whisky a day is good for you.
Such as the scientists, employed by Monsanto, who performed product safety testing on Roundup by testing the main ingredients separately, rather than as delivered in the final product.
As you mentioned, scientists developed the highly addictive tobacco based cigarette by adding dangerous chemicals to the mix.
Scientists developed Agent Orange.
Scientists are human. Capable of good and evil. Not gods, not superhuman.
If they are funded if they provide a result, the desired result will be provided.
In the movie, Damien: Omen II (1978), one of Thorne Industries business lines was agro-chemicals. At one point, the CEO talks about being able to engineer famines (Famine is one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse) globally. Revealing, though wrapped in supernatural fiction and the Antichrist, a key global corporate project that is all too clear today.
Yes – it is all about ‘control’. Anything else is subordinate to serving that purpose.
The mindset of control, or the setting of thought under the intent to control, is a way of ‘seeing’ only in terms of structures of control that represent closed systems operated by an outside controlling intelligence. For that is the fundamental belief in active identification with ‘fear, division, attack and denial’.
The seeking of power as unquestioned reactive defence, orders to change the distribution of power in the system to regain or attain the idea of ‘controlling intelligence’. As the final and uncontested judgement over self – as life on Earth.
This use of mind frames its experience, and environment so as to force outcomes that represent power and protection to private agenda set over and against others – and making alliance in common enemy, threat or fear so as to use others or set them to serve hidden agenda while following self interest in the frame of their own perceived self-interests.
This is negatively defined self-interest, set in defence as fear of pain of loss to a scale of overriding fear set against inescapable pain of total loss. In other terms set as survival necessity and overriding all else when activated.
Negatively polarised identity operates the psycho-pathy of loveless thinking – or thinking from a self-justified withholding and withdrawal of alignment in hate – as if a power of protection, In control as if a substitution for the heart’s acceptance and decision.
It is a negative creation made by fear and denial running in our name.
The nature of self-illusion or deceit is to pass off as true and substitute for or usurp the true.
The nature of such a mindset is to dress up in or mask and hide behind the forms of the true. And so the waking from an unwitting bot-net of support for deceits that are destructive by definition is the un willingness to run on a mind framed in forms and appeals of adulterated ‘truths’ running any kind of guilt and fear based agenda.
Notice that to the mind under such agenda, release of fear and guilt as leverage would leave it powerless and unprotected. Notice that we use fear and guilt in our thinking and our common language as a sense of separate self protection. Notice I am suggesting to notice and not to judge and deny or force anything to be what it is not.
That a loveless and dark creation can be fed and protected to become the destroyer of life on Earth is the measure of our willingness to love to hate. If what I say in stark terms were obviously so, we could not bear our lives. Great ingenuity is called on to mask denial in forms of power or protection.
What could possible go right?
Noticing.
Noticing can right to the heart of a true recognition – instead of feeding the death spiral of blind judgements.
‘My Holiness’ is a translation of ‘monsanto’ – is it not?
As if Our innate and integral wholeness of being is protected by a manipulative proprietary patent.
Such is the nature of the corruption of power.
The nature of wholeness is to recognise our self in another and to give in the measure that we – in truth – would receive.
I add – ‘in truth’ – to the Golden Rule because under self-judging hate we believe we deserve punishment, denial and separating from a love that we can no longer share in – and so a reversal of consciousness sets love as hateful, unreal, and treacherous. And makes symbols and idols of love as weak and victim – by which to raise war in its very name.
Self-hating humans become a zombie-apocalypse. It doesn’t matter if we can target or be framed to target ‘special others’ to mitigate our hate. That is simply how to keep it as an active denial beneath our minds, while believing we escape it onto others.
It’s all based on lies. Deceit is not undone by attempts to eradicate or excommunicate – but by being brought to the light of truth. Meanwhile truth is brought to judgement as a willing sacrifice or as the giving up of a true willing – how else can illusions find ‘sustainability’ but at cost of true?
How insanely painful must life get before we notice that we feed problems by warring on them, as if to make them go away? And have thereby made ourselves victim to a ‘problem- management system’ that generates ‘sustainability’ from as a mandate of compliance?
GM and biotech is nothing to do with with caring for anything but its patents, profits and power to protect and enforce them.
Yes I know that Nobel thought dynamite was so terrible that it would deter going to war.
There are many scientific geniuses who were and are completely naive in regard to the drivers of war.
How to get lots of attention and thus funding: create an irrational fear. Terror was one, climate is another and GMOs might take off too.
All this distracts from rational fears like MAD, Islamism, monopolies, 1984.
Greta should be more concerned with Modern Monetary Theory and infinite debt robbing her future than carbon dioxide.
The world economy will implode, as it has before, and the financiers will profit as before, before climate change will extinguish humanity.
Greta is probably safe from economic downturns as she has the family background that suggests the phoenix, the old bird that creates its own funeral pyre, to arise anew as a new phoenix though still with the accumulated wealth/ashes of the old phoenix. Greta comes from a long line of actors, all playing a role.
For a feel good and paid career with big social status start a NGO against something.
Suggestions in the GMO field:
*viruses inject their DNA into other organisms: AntiVir!
*bacteria use Horizontal gene transfer and thus become GMOs themselves: AntiBact!
*AIDS transfers genes vertically from mother to baby: AntiAIDS!
*the Gemini virus transfers genes to tobacco plants: AntiGemini!
Always funding possible from rich but gullible persons.
Best trick of the anti something NGO brigades: delay big projects so long that they will pay you off to stop. Court procedures are favorite as they can go on forever.
Genuine concerns get trampled by that kind of strategies.
This was tried in India’s Kudankulam nuclear power project by some (foreign Christian paid) NGOs but failed as that project was between two nations, India and Russia, not MNCs.
Luckily India is now enjoying more ‘imported fossil fuel’- free nuclear electricity.