Stop Blogging and Cook

People in the US need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds.
They’re ruining our chance to support ourselves.  ~Jonas Deronzil

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY:  A CONCEPT WE ALL NEED TO SUPPORT
Beverly Bell, in an article in the Huffington Post reports that Haitian farmers have vowed to burn  to burn 475 tons of hybrid corn and vegetable seeds donated by Monsanto.  She quotes:

“We’re for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals.  In our advocacy, we say that seeds are the patrimony of humanity.  No one can control them,” said Doudou Pierre, national coordinating committee member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA), in a recent interview.  “We reject Monsanto and their GMOs. GMOs would be the extermination of our people.”

American organizations have held demonstrations to show their support.  The Haitian government has already refused a shipment of  genetically modified organisms (GMO) earlier this year as the the American corporate seed giant sought to ingratiate itself in the earthquake-ravaged country.  Apparently, the Haitians see the gifts – given like so many lawyers chasing ambulances – as dangerous to their way of life.  They are smart in wanting to preserve their food sovereignty.  They will accept aid, but only aid that actually helps them in the long run.  We can learn a lot from them.

The right to grow  food is an important concept to civilization, and the Haitians aptly see through the Trojan horsiness of the Monsanto’s seeking to grow their corporate profits through ways that are unsustainable to people all over the world. Through exclusive patenting of GM seeds and the contractual stipulations contrary to farming methods and freedoms that have been standard for thousands of years Monsanto is having it’s way with people who simply want to grow food.

Using seeds from one season to grow food in the next is one of the beauties of farming, common in every culture except the corporate culture of GMOs, where seeds do not regenerate.  One has to imagine that this is intentional, manipulating the very nature of the seed so that the corporation does, in fact, own them. Farmers who want to plant in subsequent seasons are required to purchase them every year.  In fact, saving seeds – in the hopes that they might regenerate – is a strictly forbidden term of their contract when buying seeds in the first place.

Fields of non-GMO crops are being contaminated by the wind that inevitably blows the seeds, and by the birds that feed on them.  Monsanto has had a frightening history or not only suing farmers who find GM seeds in their fields through no fault of their own, but of also prevailing in the American justice system of engaging in protracted litigation forcing farmers to their knees who settle before trial because they cannot compete with the billions of dollars in corporate profits that allow Monsanto to beat them at a bankruptcy-inducing game.

Where is the American Civil Liberties Union in all of this?  If anyone needs defending the right to grow food, it is those who are at the mercy of a behemoth with infinite amounts money.  And money is power.   Most Americans have yet to wake up to Monsanto’s desire to control the world’s food supply.

The American Indian laughed at European explorers who came to this country, offering them money to buy land.  The indigenous people believed  that no one could own land except the One who created it.  Land was the domain of all the earth’s creatures, the human and animal populations living off the land.  The explorers taught mankind a valuable lesson:  that ownership is possible if people agree that it is possible.  Many believe that no one can own seeds, that food – like the air we breathe and the water we drink – is everyone’s God-given right.  Real seeds propagate freely.  Through this fruitful consortium between man and nature, human beings have lived and multiplied happily for the entire span of their existence.  Monsanto is here to change all that, and preliminary results are in.  It isn’t working well at all.

Marion Nestle’s updated book, Safe Food:  The Politics of Food Safety, discusses GMOs. While I have not yet read it, Ms Nestle is a respected authority on the politics of food and the operations of the food industry.  Her first book,  Food Politics:  How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition & Heath, is excellent in explaining how politics surrounds all aspects of the American food industry.  Her daily blog, Food Politics, is a microcosm of what is going on in the brave new world of our food supply.  And as goes the American food supply, tragically, so goes the world’s.

There are many internet sites that detail the harmful cultural effects of sowing genetically-modified (GM) seeds.  The health effects of consuming plants engineered by scientists are not fully known.  Livestock grazing on GM cotton plants have dropped dead in the fields after three days, and third generation offspring of mice force-fed a diet of GM corn have failed to reproduce.  Europe has banned all but one type of GM corn, and Germany – along with five others – has said “No” to allowing even that variety into the country.

Farmers in India are literally killing themselves after suffering the devastation of crop failure due to pest’s resistance to the very pesticide inherent in GM corn.  Increasingly powerful weed-killing chemicals are needed to keep super weeds from swallowing up the crops that were designed to work in concert with fewer applications of milder herbicides.  And now Haitians are joining the fight against the global monstrosity fed by it’s huge size, reach, money and power.

SAY NO TO GMO
Monsanto, and other chemical and food companies eager to get on this gravy train to hell, are developing wheat and other artificially engineered species of food.  They have already captured a corner of the corn, soybean, sugar beet and cotton market.  They must be stopped before the natural food supply is contaminated, ensuring not only the proliferation of GM crops but also of the domination of companies who want to earn all of the profits from selling all of the food to all of the people on earth, unconcerned with the cost to humanity.  And that is a harrowing thought.  Don’t buy GMO crops, or food products make with GMOs.  A previous post  from June 1st lists foods and food products to avoid, and how to distinguish GMOs from real food.  Vote with your food dollars.  The health of the planet – and the health of all living things upon it – depends upon it.