Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Propaganda and more bad news.

Vandana Shiva: “…Patents are granted for inventions. Seed is not invented. But the only reason why you take a patent is to collect royalties. Royalites meaning cost for your seed. Royalties meaning seed that is renewable by its very nature is made non-renewable.”
Vandana Shiva has long been a heroine of mine, she has fought long and hard against the corporate take over of her country by Monsanto, in a recent BBC Hardtalk interview with Sarah Montague she put forward the reasons why so many Indian farmers have committed suicide and once again, thousands of people are dying in India and throughout the world through starvation.
 When India gained it's independence from it's masters, Britain, in 1948 , under the land reform act the people were given 2 ha of land so they could grow their own food and support themselves, this is called subsistence farming, farmers grew a variety of crops, no mono culture, so more bio diversity. If one crop failed they had others to fall back on, and it was sustainable, but once again they find themselves enslaved  to the agro chemical giant  Monsanto.
Montague tried to argue that the production of cotton has increased by 100% since the introduction of GM cotton and that the farmers have never had it so good and now can export their product. It was very clear from the interview that she was nothing more than a mouth piece for the propaganda machine which is the BBC. At one time the BBC was looked up to for fair reporting, how things have changed.
It might be true to say that the overall production of cotton is up by 100% but that is very different from saying that yields have increased. If you have 2ha of land growing eight crops, and then change that to 50% of the land growing just one crop you have an immediate increase of  400%, and in the case of cotton you reduce your food crops by 37.5%. This clearly is unsustainable.
One way or another GM crops are being forced onto people, even when they say repeatedly they do no wish to eat them.
As you may have heard, in the past two weeks many UK supermarkets abandoned long-standing policies on GM animal feed. The move, said to be based on the difficulty in sourcing non-GM feed, flies in the face of the UK Government's own data showing consumers want GM out of the food chain entirely, as well as our GfK/NOP poll results showing shoppers are willing to pay more to avoid GM.
GM Freeze is surprised that Marks & Spencer is among the companies making this change, as it has long had a strong and admirable stand on this issue. The Co-op has also changed its policy.
Please see our action here and tell supermarkets you are very unhappy with this move away from non-GM fed products.

Please also remember that if you use FaceBook or Twitter it is extremely helpful for you to use these to direct people to this action to help build our strength. The url to use for this is http://www.gmfreeze.org/actions/1/

We are fortunate in being able to grow most of what we eat, and what we can't grow we are fortunate enough to be able to afford Organic, but many people are not, but they should have a choice of what they wish to eat.
 With the Supermarkets saying it's too hard to source GM free feed for their meats and eggs they are giving in to the GM companies, if this happens they will have won.
People must fight back, this is the road to total disaster , and world domination by the agro chemical companies.



3 comments:

  1. Hopefully more and more people will listen and start to fight back against this disastrous situation.

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  2. Anne,
    Many thanks for sharing this great information. It certainly hard to shop GMO smart as here in the US there is not labeling.
    Glad your weather has calmed down some so that you could plant. The celery plants look great.
    My best to you
    Carole

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  3. In theory things are supposed to be labelled here but I have my doubts. We recently inspected a packet of corn, the type used to make popcorn from, the countries of origin were the USA and Spain, both countries crow more GM corn than non GM, I suspect this corn was GM, just not labelled.
    Meat, eggs, milk, butter, cream and cheese all come from animals which have almost certainly been fed GM, but they do not have to be labelled.

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