Resisting the ‘Food Transition’: Genetic Engineering and Dependency
Colin Todhunter
This is an abridged version of the second chapter of the author’s short e-book Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order (2022), which can be read for free here.
The ‘food transition’ is integral to the ‘great reset’. This transition is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability and warnings about the imminent need to address the Malthusian threat of too many people and not enough food to feed nine billion by 2050.
This transition envisages a particular future for farming. It is not organic and relatively few farmers have a place in it. It involves drones, driverless machines and largely farmerless farms. Cloud-based ‘precision’ agriculture as the norm – meaning GMOs and new gene-editing techniques and amalgamated farmlands growing monocultures.
GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.
There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his paper “The Myth of a Food Crisis” (2020).
However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.
These new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. Even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.
The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided financially by the Gates Foundation.
Various scientific publications show that new GM techniques allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature. These new GMOs pose similar or greater risks than older-style GMOs.
In addition to these concerns, a paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.
By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and contempt for democratic accountability.
Bt cotton in India
This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India (the only officially approved GM crop in that country) which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.
Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.
On 24 August 2020, a webinar on Bt cotton in India took place involving Andrew Paul Gutierrez, senior professor at the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, Keshav Kranthi, former director of Central Institute for Cotton Research in India, Peter Kenmore, former FAO representative in India, and Hans Herren, World Food Prize Laureate.
Herren said that “the failure of Bt cotton” is a classic representation of what an unsound science of plant protection and faulty direction of agricultural development can lead to.
He argued that a transformation of agriculture and the food system is required; one that entails a shift to agroecology, which includes regenerative, organic, biodynamic, permaculture and natural farming practices.
Kenmore said that Bt cotton is an aging pest control technology:
It follows the same path worn down by generations of insecticide molecules from arsenic to DDT to BHC to endosulfan to monocrotophos to carbaryl to imidacloprid. In-house research aims for each molecule to be packaged biochemically, legally and commercially before it is released and promoted. Corporate and public policy actors then claim yield increases but deliver no more than temporary pest suppression, secondary pest release and pest resistance.”
Recurrent cycles of crises have sparked public action and ecological field research which creates locally adapted agroecological strategies.
He added that this agroecology:
…now gathers global support from citizens’ groups, governments and UN FAO. Their robust local solutions in Indian cotton do not require any new molecules, including endo-toxins like in Bt cotton”
Gutierrez presented the ecological reasons as to why hybrid Bt cotton failed in India: long season Bt cotton introduced in India was incorporated into hybrids that trapped farmers into biotech and insecticide treadmills that benefited GMO seed manufacturers.
He noted:
The cultivation of long-season hybrid Bt cotton in rainfed areas is unique to India. It is a value capture mechanism that does not contribute to yield, is a major contributor to low yield stagnation and contributes to increasing production costs.”
Gutierrez asserted that increases in cotton farmer suicides are related to the resulting economic distress.
Presenting data on yields, insecticide usage, irrigation, fertiliser usage and pest incidence and resistance, Kranthi said an analysis of official statistics (eands.dacnet.nic.in and cotcorp.gov.in) shows that Bt hybrid technology has not been providing any tangible benefits in India either in yield or insecticide usage.
Cotton yields are the lowest in the world in Maharashtra, despite being saturated with Bt hybrids and the highest use of fertilisers. Yields in Maharashtra are less than in rainfed Africa where there is hardly any usage of technologies such as Bt hybrids, fertilisers, pesticides or irrigation.
It is revealing that Indian cotton yields rank 36th in the world and have been stagnant in the past 15 years and insecticide usage has been constantly increasing after 2005, despite an increase in area under Bt cotton.
Kranthi argued that research also shows that the Bt hybrid technology has failed the test of sustainability with resistance in pink bollworm to Bt cotton, increasing sucking pest infestation, increasing trends in insecticide and fertiliser usage, increasing costs and negative net returns in 2014 and 2015.
Herren said that GMOs exemplify the case of a technology searching for an application:
We need to push aside the vested interests blocking the transformation with the baseless arguments of ‘the world needs more food’ and design and implement policies that are forward-looking… We have all the needed scientific and practical evidence that the agroecological approaches to food and nutrition security work successfully.”
Those who continue to spin Bt cotton in India as a resounding success remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India) farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).
In general, across the world the performance of GM crops to date has been questionable, but the pro-GMO lobby has wasted no time in wrenching the issues of hunger and poverty from their political contexts to use notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of its promotional strategy.
The performance of GM crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in a 2018 piece by PC Kesavan and MS Swaminathan in the journal Current Science, there is already sufficient evidence to question their efficacy, especially that of herbicide-tolerant crops (which by 2007 already accounted for approximately 80% of biotech-derived crops grown globally) and the devastating impacts on the environment, human health and food security, not least in places like Latin America.
In their paper, Kesavan and Swaminathan argue that GM technology is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they say that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient. In this respect, conventional options and innovations that outperform GM must not be overlooked or side-lined in a rush by powerful interests like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to facilitate the introduction of GM crops into global agriculture; crops which are highly financially lucrative for the corporations behind them.
In Europe, robust regulatory mechanisms are in place for GMOs because it is recognised that GM food/crops are not substantially equivalent to their non-GM counterparts. Numerous studies have highlighted the flawed premise of ‘substantial equivalence’.
Both the Cartagena Protocol and Codex share a precautionary approach to GM crops and foods, in that they agree that GM differs from conventional breeding and that safety assessments should be required before GMOs are used in food or released into the environment. There is sufficient reason to hold back on commercialising GM crops and to subject each GMO to independent, transparent environmental, social, economic and health impact evaluations.
Regardless, global food insecurity and malnutrition are not the results of a lack of productivity. As long as food injustice remains an inbuilt feature of the global food regime, the rhetoric of GM being necessary for feeding the world will be seen for what it is: bombast.
Take India, for instance. Although it fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food (in terms of calories) available to feed its entire population.
It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton.
But large sections of India’s population do not have enough food available to remain healthy nor do they have sufficiently diverse diets that provide adequate levels of micronutrients.
People are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, including inadequate food distribution, (gender) inequality and poverty; in fact, the country continues to export food while millions remain hungry. It’s a case of ‘scarcity’ amid abundance.
Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GMO lobby says GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income. Again, this is misleading: it ignores crucial political and economic contexts. Even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.
India’s farmers are not experiencing hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling from the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace smallholder agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations. Little wonder then that the calorie and essential nutrient intake of the rural poor has drastically fallen. No number of GMOs will put any of this right.
Nevertheless, the pro-GMO lobby, both outside of India and within, has twisted the situation for its own ends to mount intensive PR campaigns to sway public opinion and policy makers.
Golden Rice
The industry has for many years been promoting Golden Rice. It has long been 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.
As Britain’s Environment Secretary in 2013, the now disgraced 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. He claimed:
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.”
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 even when ready may fall far short of lofty health benefits claimed by its supporters.
Stone 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.”
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, Stone says 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 still had problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GM strains already being grown by farmers. 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 is not a solution to vitamin A deficiency in the developing world. There are also various other problems, including absorption in the gut and the low and varying levels of beta-carotene that may be delivered by Golden Rice in the first place.
In the meantime, as the development of Golden Rice creeps along, the Philippines has managed to slash the incidence of Vitamin A deficiency by non-GM methods.
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 activists 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, 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 agribusiness 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 organisations, 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.
A complex of policies that pushed the Philippines into an economic quagmire over the past 30 years is due to ‘structural adjustment’, involving prioritising debt repayment, conservative macroeconomic management, huge cutbacks in government spending, trade and financial liberalisation, privatisation 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.
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. Green leafy veg were killed off with pesticides, artificial fertilisers 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’.
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’. The very corporations which gained from restructuring agrarian economies now want to profit from the havoc caused.
The poor are suffering from broader malnourishment than just vitamin A deficiency; the best solution is to use supplementation and fortification as emergency sticking-plasters and then for implementing measures which tackle the broader issues of poverty and 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.
Blindness in developing countries could have been eradicated years ago if only the money, research and publicity put into Golden Rice over the last 20 years had gone into proven ways of addressing Vitamin A deficiency.
Value capture
Traditional production systems rely on the knowledge and expertise of farmers in contrast to imported ‘solutions’. Yet, if we take cotton cultivation in India as an example, farmers continue to be nudged away from traditional methods of farming and are being pushed towards (illegal) GM herbicide-tolerant cotton seeds.
Researchers Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs note the results of this shift from traditional practices to date does not appear to have benefited farmers. This is not about giving farmers ‘choice’ where GM seeds and associated chemicals are concerned (another much-promoted industry talking point). It is more about GM seed companies and weedicide manufactures seeking to leverage a highly lucrative market.
The objective involves opening India to GM seeds with herbicide tolerance traits, the biotechnology industry’s biggest money maker by far (86% of the world’s GM crop acres in 2015 contained plants resistant to glyphosate or glufosinate and there is a new generation of crops resistant to 2,4-D coming through).
The aim is to break farmers’ traditional pathways and move them onto corporate biotech/chemical treadmills for the benefit of industry.
Calls for agroecology and highlighting the benefits of traditional, small-scale agriculture are not based on a romantic yearning for the past or ‘the peasantry’. Available evidence suggests that smallholder farming using low-input methods is more productive in overall output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable and resilient to climate change.
Despite the pressures, including the fact that globally industrial agriculture grabs 80% of subsidies and 90% of research funds, smallholder agriculture plays a major role in feeding the world.
At the same time, agri-food oligopolies externalise the massive health, social and environmental costs of their operations.
But policymakers tend to accept that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be owners and custodians of natural assets (the ‘commons’). These corporations, their lobbyists and their political representatives have succeeded in cementing a ‘thick legitimacy’ among policymakers for their vision of agriculture.
Common ownership and management of these assets embodies the notion of people working together for the public good. However, these resources have been appropriated by national states or private entities.
Those who capture essential common resources seek to commodify them – whether trees for timber, land for real estate or agricultural seeds – create artificial scarcity and force everyone else to pay for access. The process involves eradicating self-sufficiency.
International bodies have enshrined the interests of corporations that seek to monopolise seeds, land, water, biodiversity and other natural assets that belong to us all.
Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security.
Under the guise of ‘climate emergency’, we are currently seeing a push for the Global South to embrace the Gates’ vision for a one-world agriculture (’Ag One’) dominated by global agribusiness and the tech giants. But it is the so-called developed nations and the rich elites that have plundered the environment and degraded the natural world.
To say that one model of agriculture must now be accepted by all countries is a continuation of a colonialist mindset.
Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his “mini e-book”, Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Cultivating Resistance, here.
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For the more technically-inclined, here’s a great scientific link on GMOs. Just have a gander:
http://www.econexus.info/
The antibodies generated by consuming GM maize attack sperm [guardian.com 2001-09-09]. Add that to the covid jab and cottonseed oil. GM maize is also hard to digest.
Other issues: destruction of soil due to industrual scale and methods, and loss of crop/animal varieties.
“Cartagena Protocol and Codex share a precautionary approach to GM crops and foods”
If so, why is GM so prevalent everywhere?
Orange sweet potatoes already grow in the tropics.
The giant agricultural industry – research, experts, field advice, proprietary inputs, debt, marketing, etc. – rests on the dogma or pretence that specialists know more than local farmers.
Russia wil take none of this junk. Its health, food security and economy will benefit.
Yes, mgeo, Europe and 40 other countries had banned import or growing of GMO crops as of 2015. I don’t know how many bans have been overcome since by stuffing the committees w GMO-investors.
Even tho Russia has said “no” to GMOs in the food supply, they have said “yes”– like so many others– to injecting us directly w gene-editing “vaccines.”
Thank you OffG for presenting Colin’s work.
Last week I was in a garden centre and noted “Glyphosate Free” “Roundup” for sale. No, I wasn’t asleep.
I find this quite offensive, how dare they?
Anyone ever watched that sci-fi series “Continuum” where the big baddie was a corporation called Sonmanto?
The problem of GMO or GE crops is not the gene splicing, but, the heavy usage of pesticides and herbicides on them, which build up in the human gut and cause disease.
John, the quite imprecise gene splicing is also harmful to the animal or human consuming the GMO plant.
https://www.econexus.info/publication/transformation-induced-mutations-transgenic-plants
And WHY should we assume that the intention is benign? Is it coincidental that consumption of GMO plants increases risk of infertility, birth defects, cancer, etc?
I watched a 1999 TV movie ‘Swing Vote’ last night. The plot starts with… the Supreme Court having overturned Roe by 6-3! WTF!? The Court then rules on the first case of murder. Their solution? The Court takes the responsibility for the welfare of every child in the USA! And this is presented as a compromise! Nowhere does the film consider the true issue of where the matter should be decided. Nobody stops and says maybe this is for state legislatures. They deliberately picked Alabama as the test case and clearly regarded the state as a hellhole that has no democratic self-government because they’re such a bunch of rednecks. There’s also no attempt to justify the Court’s new welfare role from the constitution. The film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, clearly a major elite player. BTW does it need saying that all the SCJs pro-choice are women and ethnic minority… Read more »
The SCOTUS majority are thinly veiled religious extremists.They are owned 100% by a reactionary Catholic hierarchy, a cabal that is out of step with the real world (and even the current Pope who they regard as illegitimate). Its also well out of step with the people.
The result is that the court lacks legitimacy, and by extension so does the government. The only way that the government can implement this is by force — piling on sanctions for people who refuse to bend to its will. This is exactly how the Civil War came about, essentially a minority trying to impress enforcement on an odious institution on those who didn’t want anything to do with it. These SCOTUS diehards may be smart ‘originalists’ but they don’t seem to have much of a grasp of history.
David Dees
What we need are a few David Dees illustrations on this thread. I will try to post a couple if I can. I suspect they bumped Dees and Kari Mullis off before the scamdemic was unleashed.
A few years ago I read Steven M Druker’s book: Altered Genes, Twisted Truth. The book puts the lie to the claim that GM crops require less pesticides, even it anyone believes that GM foods are a good thing.
However, now that the majority of the western world’s population itself has been turned into genetically engineered organisms through those gene shots, there will surely be even less resistance to unregulated and unlabelled GM crops.
All the claims for GM have been proven false:
:- For plants and animals in general, (a) “substantially equivalent” to the natural varieties (b) economic viability.
:- For crops, (a) hardier varieties (b) less need for agro-chemicals (c) greater yields (d) more nutrients (e) safety of the crop, produce and agro-chemicals for people, other farming and biomes.
Once upon a time science was for the many.
No more.
Avarice rules.
Actually, once upon the time, science was for the few. Those were the great days. More became worse.
“Except for the time when a babe was laid in a manger in Beth Lechem, no movement slipped into the world so quietly nor grew up to shake the world so greatly as science has done.”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/polluted-america-gmo-manmade-biological-threats-plant-diseases-germ-warfare/5324336 GMO DIFFERS FROM PLANTS DEVELOPED THRU SELECTIVE BREEDING OR HYBRIDIZATION By genetically engineering plants with the insertion of certain foreign bacterial genes, glyphosate can be applied directly to crop plants without killing them. . . . Both the toxic proteins produced by the foreign bacterial genes and the glyphosate chemical now are present in the feed and food produced for animal and human consumption. Genetic engineering has introduced other genes for insect resistance where additional toxic proteins accumulate in plant tissues consumed by animals and man. These toxins are found in the blood and readily transferred across the placenta to developing babies in the womb. Animal studies have shown that GMO-fed animals become sterile after a few generations. The outcome of many years of Roundup Ready GMO corn and soybeans has been a decline in nutritional value, the outbreak of new plant diseases resulting in widespread crop failures, and… Read more »
make it such an effective broad-spectrum weed killer
As a weed-killer, it is a dud. Plants exchange genetic material (plasmids) among themselves. The weeds soon acquire the precious proprietary resistance from the crop. This has been known for some time.
We know from Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet medical journal, that up to 50% of all medical science is just nonsense. I’m not sure there is a science as rigorous as medical science, but what Horton is saying is, when you read a scientific study, you may as well toss a coin to understand whether it’s meaningful or not. Any other science e.g. climate science you may as well just roll a dice to establish if what you are reading is credible. Silly of course, if you’re a medical bod because you are a scientist and can largely define what is a good or a bad study. However, the BBC, the Times Independent, Guardian and off-guardian do not have a particularly well educated scientific audience nor scientifically educated journalists. They have people educated in journalism, not science. So they just trot out any old science to prove their point.… Read more »
The tone of your comments would suggest that you are fully jabbed and boosted. No need for any worry, they’ve been tested over the weekend…
Neither. Assumptive moron.
Doubtless how your science rolls……
Rep
This fellow Hot Scot is obviously an agent for Monsanto and the rest of the Frankenstein food pushing industry. Surely there ought to be a limit to the number of posts one can make ?
New Name, maybe we should stop feeding the troll, eh?
Great idea. Censorship. How very extreme left. And I imagined off-Guardian was an alternative to the rabidly left wing Guardian.
Apparently not.
Colin Todhunter has done good work on this. The yields are clearly in favor of bio-diverse regenerative/organic farming. Transitioning to this cannot be done instantly but requires in some cases learning new skills, and in other cases relearning what was once inherently in the farmer’s history. Large scale (monoculture) farming has been usurped by the same mind-set and ambitions as the pharmaceutical enterprise – hook you on a patented seed (medication) and you have trapped the customer/patient into the vicious cycle where the only winner are the corporate profiteers. Monsanto, et al are integral to global trade agreements, which not only provide less (preped for long-distance journeys) nutrition, but also fragile system of far-flung exports prone to the kinds of disruptions we see today (real or manufactured). One area I would like to hear more from Colin is not just the efficacy of GMO (or gene editing) but the science… Read more »
There are 10 corporations who control most of the world’s food system. Much like the media, there’s few who own and control our food. And that means factory farming, excessive use of antibiotics, GMO production, distribution, fossil-based fertilizer and monoculture big ag farming. This setup has been the result of policies and consolidation.
Technical Director of CNN explains his next news (ie agenda) focus:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/cnn-director-on-the-pivot-to-climate
His name (Charlie Chester) is almost as bad as his grammar and his ethics (or lack thereof).
Colin says “industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.”
Yeah – what it has uplifted is their stress and suicide levels.
It’s as important to question the narrative you agree with as it is to question the narrative you don’t agree with.
What you have just read is the left emotional agenda encroaching on the right’s scientific narrative by way of emotion.
Emotion is much more powerful than fact.
WTF do these people imagine we have been eating for hundreds, if not thousands of years? All our crops are Genetically Modified. Selective breeding is GM. Matching up desirable qualities of two similar but different crops and breeding them over time, often generations, to achieve an objective is no less GM than doing the same thing in a lab over a weekend. Ever seen a Brindle Greyhound? I’ve owned two of them. I’m happy to tell you the colour was Genetically Modified and developed over generations from its origin, the British Bulldog. They bred a Greyhound with a Bulldog and continued to breed bulldog qualities, but maintain the Greyhound qualities. That’s GM the hard way. I don’t see Greenpeace objecting to Brindle Greyhounds! But it got more sophisticated a few generations ago, when scientists realised they could bombard seeds with Gamma Rays. Yep, large doses of radiation until, randomly, the… Read more »
How silly. “Nature which is determined to kill everything in its path” doesn’t make a lick of sense. first, this idea of “Nature” as monolithic instead of incredibly complex. Second, every living thing in “nature’s” path is, by the way, including humans, part of nature–which is, again, a vast and complicated system. Monsanto/bayer and their gmo seeds also are aimed at control and centralization of food systems, hence they force small farmers into using their seeds and then of course buying their other products. It’s a Ponzi scheme.
Try living without the convenience’s of 21st Century technology and you will find out very quickly that nature will kill you very fast. And by technology, I mean clothes, other than what you can kill to wear, and food that remains from what you kill to wear. Monsanto/Bayer may well desire control and centralisation, that’s not an argument I made. Assuming they do, that does not make their crops any less effective. What you’re confusing is political motivation with scientific progress. …..hence they force small farmers into using their seeds They don’t force anyone to use their seeds, they give them away free. Farmers are perfectly able to refuse them and grow conventional rice if they wish. Frankly, this is the dumbest, most hysterically unscientific argument I have heard for years. Try to think beyond the narrative you are fed in this article. It could have been stripped straight from… Read more »
I’m currently reading I book you might also enjoy called What Your Food Ate by David Montgomery and Anne Bikle, about the failures of the Green Revolution, about soil, and about regenerative agriculture. It’s clear to me that your opinions are, um, misguided.
Instead of conforming to someone else’s ideas, written in their book, published for their profit, you might consider thinking for yourself.
Nor am I clear on what you are saying. Are Montgomery and Bikle claiming that regenerative agriculture (which to my mind is green utopia) is a green failure?
Nor do I understand how the factual progression of events (GM selective breeding, GM irradiation of seeds and GM laboratory practices) can possibly be considered misguided.
They are facts. That’s the way mankind’s development of GM has progressed. There is no argument about that to be misguided about.
A.nal
I.ntrusion
alert
martha
I know. Actually, I posted the info about the book because I’m finding it fascinating, and anyone who disagrees with HotScot might find it fascinating too. Well written and well researched, without being dry. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are diminishing the life in the soil and thus decreasing the nutrient value of food. We all know this, but if you’re interested in seeing that concept fleshed out, read the book.
Yes, but you do not eat genetically modified Greyhounds. At least I do not.
I want to eat dates as they were created. They are perfect for me.
Stay away Monsanto from my Khalas dates.
You could study for example the rampant growth of cancer in the population world over, younger and younger population.
Is this related to Monsanto? Who and what is giving cancer to more and more people, younger and younger?
You eat cattle and sheep do you not? Do you somehow imagine they, and chickens, ducks, geese etc. haven’t been genetically modifies over centuries for human consumption? Do you also somehow delude yourself that dates have not been genetically modified by selective breeding? The “rampant growth in cancer” could be for a million and one reasons, not excluding people ‘artificially’ living extended lives thanks to medical intervention and producing a weaker genetic life line than nature would otherwise allow. Tell you what, let’s leave everything to nature. Ban all medicine and chemical intervention of every type because they carry a risk. Ban all chemicals like Nitrogen fertilisers (Sri Lanka just tried it) and see how modern society copes. Let’s go the whole hog, let’s all go back to leading happy, but very short, unhealthy lives without antibiotics, paracetamol, morphine, anaesthetics, or even homeopathy or herbal medicines. Homeopathy and herbal interventions… Read more »
We have no insight into any process going on in the nature. You only assume it is selective breeding. You obviously do not know what it is, nobody does. We have dates. Neither you nor anyone else here created the palms and the dates. As to your next cluster of arguments, in short: I never met anybody who was healed/cured by doctors. I know a lot of people who go to doctors with various serious diseases, and then they leave their offices with bags of medication, they take numerous pills a day, and they remain as sick as they were, their symptoms only masked to a degree, and as bonus acquiring serious toxicity called gently side effects, very serious toxicity indeed, which is further killing them, side effects as systemic as the diseases they went there with in the first place. If you deny it, we live on different planets… Read more »
We have no insight into any process going on in the nature. You only assume it is selective breeding. Stupid comment of the day award. Thank you. You have just won the internet for a day. I want a brindle greyhound. I breed a white greyhound with a brindle bulldog. There is one pup in the litter which is brindle. I take that pup and breed it with another greyhound. I take the brindle pup from that litter and breed it with another greyhound. And so on. Eventually I wind up with a greyhound with all the attributes of a regular greyhound, only it’s brindle. All but the brindle genetic relationship to a bulldog is eliminated. This is not assumption, this is documented, scientific, generational Genetic Modification. The same is done with crops. Until we found irradiation produced the same random results in crops, only quicker. Not a single objection… Read more »
Bt cotton and Round-up ready soybeans are in no way analogous to dog breeding. They are abominations against Nature.
Luddite. Scared of your own shadow.
BTW, cancer in dogs is also on the rise.
This is the common movement of these vampires. They utterly devastate an environment and wreck the lives of the inhabitants whilst their wretched academic and scientific stooges provide the edifying humanitarian success myth.
The situation with GM food is the same as with the covid vaccines. The potential dangers the novel item presents are secondary to the sheer needlessness of it. And it is this needlessness that signals the warning. Since there is no valid stated reason for these proposals in the first place, then the real reason for them is clearly malevolent.
Our world will end up barren and useless because these clueless parasites will cause so much destruction to our world.
Bollox! don’t remain a luddite all your life through ignorance.
Remain girl, remain!
Simply ignore such men, owners of numerous genetically modified Greyhounds whom they admire.
You are genetically modified.
Do you not understand the concept of human procreation producing a genetically unique individual?
Sadly, in your case, the process regressed.
No, I do not understand it. I am not genetically modified. I simply reject your language and all theory behind it.
I consider naive people who believe in things you are saying.
Please tell me which of your parents you are cloned with. Mum or Dad. Perhaps Dolly the sheep. 😂 😂 😂
That’s hysterical, I can’t stop laughing. You are a dunce.
The world is a worse place when you infect the internet.
Obnoxious
You are both obnoxious and corrupt. What sort of commission do you get from whoever pays you ?
Do Not Feed the Troll. Obnoxious, true, but I don’t think it is being paid.
Hotscot is simply having fun playing Hopscotch by hopping over all your indignant replies.
You are Archie. Ewen Bremner and Mike Leigh created you in 1993.
“What’s it like being you? A bit ‘ectic?”
https://oculumlabs.com/facts-about-each-csrq-sm-class/
The rich elite and the rest of us…
Now you can kill someone with a 2 year sentence suspended?when will it be ok to to slit someone’s throat because they are depressed?.
Its already just fine to incarcerate them and use them as labrats – kill them when they’re physically sick – so probably not that long. There are way more suicides in prisons than are publicised in BS official figures.
You are an intellectual cretin to level that argument when the case you allude to, was tragically personal between a man and his wife.
I sincerely hope that by the time either my wife or I are terminally ill and suffering, we are able to trust one another to lovingly end the anguish.
I refuse to become a burden on my family and society and will seek every means at my disposal to ensure I’m not.
The worst criticism I could level at this man is that he was unnecessarily clumsy and barbaric. A drug overdose would have been sufficient.
The fact that I’m an ex cop and believe his clumsiness and barbarity were in themselves suspicious, is now neither here nor there.
A parallel issue: suicide is being normalised for children. Some children now take their lives for matters such as failure in an exam, or even over something their peer group decides is important, such as not owning a branded bauble.
The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/06/investigative-reports/the-revenge-of-the-malthusians-and-the-science-of-limits/
Matthew is a Believer…
Matthew believes that science will find solutions to all the problems caused by natural Limits to Growth…
Sandwiched between reminding readers that humans have shown inventiveness, ingenuity and creativity, and his final paragraphs about how science will save the day, Matthew gives a detailed detour into the modern history of eugenics and its influential adherents…
Matthew evinces a faith in science that is called Scientism…Scientism is the secular religion of modern man, simply expressed as “Science will save us !”
I’m not certain if it was Einstein who said something along the lines of “you cant solve a problem with the same reasoning that created the problem.”…Yesterday i learned an expression from Mike Stone’s ViroLIEgy site, “elephant hurling”…I’m puzzling if it might apply…
Genetic engineering (of any kind) is an assault against the basic building blocks of life. It is genetic rape. A crime. Nothing more. There are no excuses for tinkering with the Natural and essential balances that begat mankind.
It would be helpful to quit treating the planet as an open-air laboratory for unnecessary genetic experiments.
Though I agree with Mr. Todhunter’s analysis in this article, it does not go far enough. Genetic scientists belong in isolated rubber rooms, wherein they can blithely extinguish themselves by any means they have at their disposal.
I recently watched someone chat with Bill Mollison of Permaculture fame.. Not once did he use the word “science” to describe how he works WITH nature…He
treats nature as an open-air laboratory, but his working WITH nature is a whole lotta different to those who seek to dominate and control nature…
Some of the tinkering may cure diseases. However, there is complere evasion of what caused the diseases. Was it something “civilization” in the form of capital, science and industry brought on?
Hello mgeo: I stand by my opinion and comment. The order of the Natural world should be considered sacred. In other words: Hands off. Man has become a butcher. What we do to Nature, we do to ourselves.
The insane are running the asylum. There’s no food shortage everyone can be fed it’s all a farce because the parasites have a God complex.
TPTB require a food shortage.
There will be a food shortage.
Get ready.
They are doing all they can to starve us.
Who cares that millions, if not more, will die because of this? If we can save our asses, let TPTSB kill all the poor that will die because of this. They are subhumans anyway…
How the fuck can you live with yourself and have the audacity to keep posting this kind of crap? You truly are an evil psychopath no different from the ones running this madness.
Billions are living thank’s to GM crops.
That is not true.
You eat them every single day of your life.
Not one single death has ever come close to being associated with GM food.
It’s the same claim as climate change killing millions of people, yet no one has ever proven climate change caused one single death.
To be more specific, life expectancy has dramatically improved over generations of GM foods.
But because ‘Monsanto’ which Greenpeace has targeted for vilification, is mentioned, everyone throws a hissy fit.
”To be more specific, life expectancy has dramatically improved over generations of GM foods.”
Except for the bare figure, which is now higher, all the rest in this statement should be questioned.
Life expectancy in the past was low mainly because of the large number of infants/children – and their young mothers -who used to die at birth/giving birth. Or people unable to survive a lung/ or any other bacterial infection.
It is mainly antibiotics that extended life expectancy. Nothing to do with Monsanto.
Gosh, I wish that made sense. An opportunity wasted. Other than, who manufactured antibiotics other than Monsanto? Oh! wait, Pfizer does, or some equally evil pharmaceutical company. Hilarious, Monsanto is mentioned and you descend into a delirium of hatred. A rage so entrenched that you can’t possibly imagine there are other chemical manufacturers in the world. It is mainly antibiotics that extended life expectancy Really? I would love to see your evidence for that. I mean, ten’s of thousands of people globally are subject to major surgery they would hitherto have died of shock from, every day. You know, like routine hip and knee replacements. But I guess anaesthetics have nothing to do with saving their lives. Pre Op sterilisation of course has nothing to do with saving lives. Millions of major and minor surgeries conducted globally every day, but – Meh – who gives a monkeys about all that… Read more »
No, not hilarious.
And sorry, but you have missed my point re. life expectancy. Life expectancy is as it was before. Nothing changed.
Tolstoy died aged 82, more or less fit. My father died 85, seriously damaged by doctors, procedures, and medicine in general for the last ten years of his life. Truly horror on earth, what they did to my father in top hospitals and through top-modern procedures [ it was all creme de la creme state of the arts as my father’s son is a PhD in nuclear medicine ].
People who grow old on average do not live longer than before, or the difference is slight, insignificant. You have not been able to extend the length of life of those who live to old age.
Life expectancy has extended statistically only, it comes out of figures, i.e. reduction of the number of those who die young.
Tolstoy died aged 82, more or less fit. He died in 1910 you moron, and he wasn’t ‘more or less fit’ or he wouldn’t have died! 😂 😂 Your father probably wasn’t born when Tolstoy died so there is simply no healthcare comparison. And he lived longer than Tolstoy, which makes my point you idiot. Your father was also the beneficiary of medical science which had progressed for, likely, 80 years since Tolstoys death. And if your fathers son (your brother?) was/is a PhD in nuclear medicine and, by your account, facilitated his “creme de la creme state of the arts” treatment, whilst your father was “seriously damaged by doctors, procedures, and medicine in general for the last ten years of his life. Truly horror on earth” why didn’t he do something about the conditions your father endured? We all have sob stories about our relatives demise.… Read more »
Take two people. One who dies on the day of her birth. The other one who lives till age of 80.
Life expectancy for them is 40.
Now – rhetorical – question: What does this figure tell you?
Or,
Take a small society of 100 people. 99 of them have 10 USD each. One has 100 000 000 USD.
Calculate now the wealth average. What does this figure tell you about the wealth distribution in this society?
Please provide studies showing life expectancy has improved solely due to GM and GM has never caused a single death. And please show a single study that shows ‘billions’ are alive because of GM. Because if you cannot do that, you are making unscientific statements. Furthermore, each genetic modification has a different impact, so, again, it is unscientific to make a blanket statement that all GMOs have the same impact (or are ‘safe’).
No one can prove a double negative you idiot. Human life expectancy has increased whilst GM processes have developed over the life of the planet. It’s called evolution you idiot! That’s just a plain fact. As pointed out earlier, you are the subject of GM, whether you care to believe it or not, unless you are a clone! I assume your name is not Dolly the sheep, who died prematurely following the science of cloning, not the entirely natural process of genetic modification; following which she would likely have lived an entirely normal sheep life. The GM process inherent within nature (which might be described as natural selection) has served to extend life therefore, it is simply not possible to provide evidence that GM has shortened life because that evidence can’t exist. It’s impossible. Why am I explaining this to an intellectual retard? What GM process has shortened even a… Read more »
Thanks. You proved my point. You are indeed unable to cite any study to support your claims and therefore resort to name calling. You should go elsewhere – perhaps to the echo chamber of Kevin Folta, Stuart Smyth, Val Giddings, CS Prakash and that crowd – or to agribusiness promoter Jon Entine’s GLP website. All will happily welcome you to their online fold on Twitter. Based on your comments here, you seem made for each other.
What the fuck have the GMO crops to do with the coming famine and this xavier guy displaying his total lack of empathy all over this board?
we are currently seeing a push for the Global South to embrace the Gates’ vision for a one-world agriculture (’Ag One’) dominated by global agribusiness and the tech giants. But it is the so-called developed nations and the rich elites that have plundered the environment and degraded the natural world.
why don’t we just give the planet to Bill Gates, and move to Mars.
…- I’ll do you one better, eman: – Why don’t we just keep *Our* planet and send Billy (Eu)Genes to Mars?…
…- It *Is* Humankind’s (ie: Our) *Home*, after all, and thus well worth our defending it as such…
…- Billy and the rest of his ilk, on the other hand, *Clearly* have willfully and entirely voluntarily cashed-in their humanity chips, and so should conversely be regarded therefore as simply no more nor less than home invaders, intent on nothing but violence and robbery, perpetrated upon the rightful homeowners…
Move the 0.001% to Mars; it’s easier.
World Economic Forum; Save the planet, starve the people. Watch Nicole Kidman eat ze bugs.
https://youtu.be/zm6vPC4pWfI
Here in Australia, reports are appearing in our mainstream media about Foot & Mouth disease being imported from Indonesia in various products. Could this be yet another con designed to restrict the sale of real meat, and to begin to cull/slaughter animals?
Already the cost of meat at the butchers has risen considerably. Is this part of their insect marketing policy?
Wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Bill says he wants to kill farm animals …… “In one of the interviews promoting the book, he argued for cutting down the levels of methane by getting rid of livestock and replacing it with the science-fiction trope of vat-grown meat.”
https://www.rt.com/news/515765-gates-synthetic-beef-climate/
Soylent Green.
“Farting cows” is a Fake Socialist myth to promote Climate Change Panic. Same as World Socialist Web Site promotes Covid-19 panic). Probably financed by Soros as part of his “attack from the Leff”.
“The time to make [Big] money is when there is panic in the streets” — Rockerfeller.
It is only a matter of time. How else is the government expected to reach the 30% land sequestration by 2030 target? FMD will destroy our livestock agriculture; and break a multitude of family farms. The government will offer a fair rate to acquire the land; many farmers will have no other choice but to accept. The government then ‘re-wilds’ per the UN agenda 21 goals. The re-wilding, while ostensibly sold as a great way to prevent climate change, will line the pockets of the political class with lucrative carbon-offset deals set up with multinational corporations who care not a whit about the Australian people.
My friend, who is a genuine scientist, says thank goodness for the timing of the Grand Solar Minimum. It’s going to keep getting colder until 2030 (when it bottoms out for about 30 years, before it climbs back up again). People won’t need to watch TV to be told they will roast to death, instead, they’ll be freezing cold and begging for coal, oil and gas.
But I bet the tricky globalists will claim that the coolness is a result of their climate change policies.
“But I bet the tricky globalists will claim that the coolness is a result of their climate change policies.”
The way they claim that the ineffectiveness of “The vax” is reason to increase the number of jabs.
This brings to mind an episode of “The Twilight Zone” that I found quite harrowing and creepy when I watched it during my prehistoric youth:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x80ckkl
And the descendants of dispossessed farmers will be arrested for trespassing or poaching on their previously own land. Even if they are starving. As happened in England centuries ago.
“Could this be yet another con designed to restrict the sale of real meat, and to begin to cull/slaughter animals?”
Bingo! It was a Foot&Mouth scam that set Neil Ferguson on his way to fame and fortune. Ferguson’s UPA mathematical proved T.BLiar’s usual policy of mass slaughter was only way to stop F&M. It wasn’t true, there actually was an effective vaccine against F&M that would have prevented the cull, the New Liebor regime “apologized” afterwards that they had “received unsound scientific advice”, but that didn’t stop Westminster from registering Neil as “a safe pair of hands”, and filing him away to be called on by any future regime that might require “a safe pair of hands” that could tap on a PC keyboard and deliver convenient medical advice — as Neill dutifully delivered in Con-19, thirty years later.
“UPA” model: Universal Prove Anything model.
“nine billion by 2050.” This is the UN figure. Firstly, their stats have been demostrable lies during convid so why believe any of them? Secondly, that’s their figures for things that have supposedly happened – their projection models have been way way off. Why believe any of them? Thirdly, even if population does indeed increase up to 2050 there are multiple reasons to think it will then start declining (the UN’s 11b figure for 2100 is a joke – and a freemasonic master number). A few population facts and figures: 1) Two dozen countries are already losing population (eg Japan, Korea, Spain, Italy, most of Eastern Europe – Bulgaria’s population of 9m declined by 2m after the collapse of communism). 2) The stated UN figures aren’t usually mentioned as being medians. The 11b figure for 2100 is the median for projections ranging from 7b to 17b. The population could shrink… Read more »
And remember billions of people have been injected with kill gates devil juice, billions are probably going to die over the next few years.
Of a heart attack brought on by washing their hair.
Frankly, heaven knows what will happen. Nobody seems to know what is in the damn juice. Looks like it’s quite hard to pin down the contents of bat urine…
I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure.
Right. And younger survivors will be infertile. Seems to be the whole point of the agenda.
Exactly!
I think that 9 bn statistic came from Neil Ferguson.
I think Neil’s mathematical model predicted 90 Billion.
That was a great factual post. Thank you. Actually, a lot to be positive about. Humanity was assured 1Bn people on the planet was too many, then 2Bn, and so on. The fatalists seem to forget (or deliberately ignore) humanity’s ability, and desire to survive, progress and prosper. Where was their evidence 7Bn people on the planet were too many? They didn’t have any evidence, because there had never been 7Bn people on the planet before, which consigns their ‘science’ to voodoo time travel. Science is the observation of the here and now. Science has never been endowed with the ability to look into the future. The MSM hijack science to achieve that task, and they are always wrong. Science can have a guess at the immediate future, then seek to confirm that by way of observation, but imagining serious scientists would confidently predict a future beyond the next experiment… Read more »
peak at eight billion in 2040
If the news media is correct, we will hit 8 billion in a few months.
teenage pregnancies.. barely exist
The jab given to teen girls for “cervical cancer” may be related.
Africa: There are only a handful of countries well above 2.5. They happen to be just where a certain Empire is creating war or subversion.