GM will save the world (and Tesco's bank balance)
Meagan Freeman | 24.02.2009 16:30 | Bio-technology | Ecology | Health | World
Tescos have really outdone themselves this time. At the London 'City Food Lecture', Chief Executive Terry Leary has announced that Tescos will be willing to 'back' GM foods, due to changing consumer attitudes and some sort of misguided belief that people starving in Africa are only doing so due to the UK's and Europe's lack of acceptance of GM foods.
In a bizarre, poorly informed statement, which leaves out all the right words to make GM sound like the victim, Tesco's Chief Exec has thrown the weight of one of the most ruthlessly expansionist food retailers of all time behind the promotion of genetically modified crops.
"You get a sense that whilst always the scientific evidence was clear, governments let alone retailers stopped short of wholehearted endorsing it and I think that that certainly didn’t help in the case of GM…"
Maybe someone should have told his speech writer that the word 'whilst' should be replaced with 'because', and then we might be a little closer to the truth.
GM crops have not flooded agriculture in this country precisely because there has been so much resistance to their introduction.
Leahy's statement that 'there also seemed to be a growing appreciation by people that GM was likely to play "a vital role in feeding the world, in adapting to climate change and indeed in producing some of these more nutritional products – foods - that people will need"' sounds like pure fallacy in the light of a little independent research.
A late 2007 Independent article states clearly that 'no experiments are currently underway in Britain after 400 potato plants were destroyed on a farm run by the University of Leeds in June. Almost all of the 54 GM crop trials which have been conducted since 2000 have been targeted by opponents and vandalised'. The whole premise of this article is that, at the time, the government was to start GM crop trials in secret in the UK, because of all the opposition to them.
So not only are the government not against GM, but the people certainly aren't for it. Perhaps the people Leahy is referring to are the very few people who sit at the top of the corporate ladders. People who presumably get nothing but the finest organic produce from their chefs and housekeepers, but who stand to make a massive profit if they get to replace vast areas of agricultural land with GM crops and technology (which, in true corporate style, they will surely sell to the farmers and indebted governments).
So we move to the science. The evidence against the propagated view of GM as some sort of safe, superior and saving angel that will miraculously solve world hunger and make all the nasty effects of climate change just go away, is all too clear. Here are just two examples [your own research is infinitely more valuable than anything I can tell you].
A 2008 Austrian study by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna found that genetically modified corn greatly reduced fertility.
Also in 2008 a disease linked to GM oysters in France wiped out between 40 and 100% of the regular oysters. How can GM be so beneficial if it not only destroys human health, but also ravages the natural agricultural and eco systems?
The institutionalised guilt tripping over GM is really quite impressive. Not only are those who speak against it responsible for not releasing things like 'cancer fighting tomatoes' onto the market [hey, there's a whole load of cancer fighting B17 in apple kernels and lots of other seeds and bits you're taught to throw away, to name but one example], but we're also stopping the kind, compassionate governments from feeding the world.
Now, there was world hunger before anyone had even heard of GM. There were common sense ways to solve it, too. There was huge criticism leveled against the Thatcher government for refusing to send massive UK stockpiles of unwanted food to parts of Africa. How GM is going to solve a food distribution 'problem', almost entirely created by the corporations and governments who want to push GM, is anyone's guess.
Professor Lord Krebs, former chairman of the UK Food Standards Agency, said at the same event;
'To me the real moral tragedy of the whole GM debacle was not so much the impact on our food here in the UK, but the fact that the European prissiness about GM has affected its adoption in Africa. The tragedy in terms of human loss and starvation has been in Africa. I hope as we move forward, somehow European attitudes can change and so African attitudes will also change'.
Almost all the countries starving, especially in Africa, have been somehow ravaged by Western influenced wars, landgrabbing, economic raping, and climate change wreaked by industrialising 'civilisation'. Another load of messing with nature by the self same institutions is not going to change anything. It's illogical and not in their interest.
To endorse GM is to pander blindly to the corporations that produce and market these mutated crops. Corporations like the concentrated evil that is Monsanto, a company with such a long list of food and animal tinkering, law suits, corporate and journalistic hush ups and farmer exploitation that it deserves a good looking through. Here's a good selection from CorpWatch:
http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/corpwatch?
q=monsanto&is=corpwatch.org&x=20&y=2
Of course there's an interest for Tescos to do this. And it's money money money. Although the quoted passages of Leahy's speech leave it oddly unclear as to whether this official 'backing' will mean that Tesco's will sell this produce, this surely must the case. And how do all supermarkets 'back' things that they sell? They make them cheap, cheap, cheap. In a global recession that has in the past few weeks seen fast food outlets in the UK, like KFC and even McDonalds, create thousand of new jobs and hundreds of new outlets; where a quick perusal of supermarket shelves will see much of the 'crunch busting' own brand products stuffed with poisonous sweeteners like aspartame; the last thing we need is people in the grip of economic crisis filling their stomachs with poorly researched, probably dangerous 'food'.
It's in a whole lot of big shots' financial interest. And we all know good health is much less profitable than disease,
Original article on Leahy statement: http://www.farminguk.com/news/United-Kingdom-Tesco-in-keeping-with-the-times.11436.asp
Article on French 'oyster plague': http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/2656892/Genetically-improved-oysters-behind-Frances-shellfish-plague.html
Institute for Responsible Technology publication of Austrian report: http://www.responsibletechnology.org/GMFree/MediaCenter/ReleaseAustrianGovernmentStudy/index.cfm
2007 Independent article on resistance to GM: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/government-to-defy-critics-with-secret-gm-crop-trials-1021675.html
"You get a sense that whilst always the scientific evidence was clear, governments let alone retailers stopped short of wholehearted endorsing it and I think that that certainly didn’t help in the case of GM…"
Maybe someone should have told his speech writer that the word 'whilst' should be replaced with 'because', and then we might be a little closer to the truth.
GM crops have not flooded agriculture in this country precisely because there has been so much resistance to their introduction.
Leahy's statement that 'there also seemed to be a growing appreciation by people that GM was likely to play "a vital role in feeding the world, in adapting to climate change and indeed in producing some of these more nutritional products – foods - that people will need"' sounds like pure fallacy in the light of a little independent research.
A late 2007 Independent article states clearly that 'no experiments are currently underway in Britain after 400 potato plants were destroyed on a farm run by the University of Leeds in June. Almost all of the 54 GM crop trials which have been conducted since 2000 have been targeted by opponents and vandalised'. The whole premise of this article is that, at the time, the government was to start GM crop trials in secret in the UK, because of all the opposition to them.
So not only are the government not against GM, but the people certainly aren't for it. Perhaps the people Leahy is referring to are the very few people who sit at the top of the corporate ladders. People who presumably get nothing but the finest organic produce from their chefs and housekeepers, but who stand to make a massive profit if they get to replace vast areas of agricultural land with GM crops and technology (which, in true corporate style, they will surely sell to the farmers and indebted governments).
So we move to the science. The evidence against the propagated view of GM as some sort of safe, superior and saving angel that will miraculously solve world hunger and make all the nasty effects of climate change just go away, is all too clear. Here are just two examples [your own research is infinitely more valuable than anything I can tell you].
A 2008 Austrian study by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna found that genetically modified corn greatly reduced fertility.
Also in 2008 a disease linked to GM oysters in France wiped out between 40 and 100% of the regular oysters. How can GM be so beneficial if it not only destroys human health, but also ravages the natural agricultural and eco systems?
The institutionalised guilt tripping over GM is really quite impressive. Not only are those who speak against it responsible for not releasing things like 'cancer fighting tomatoes' onto the market [hey, there's a whole load of cancer fighting B17 in apple kernels and lots of other seeds and bits you're taught to throw away, to name but one example], but we're also stopping the kind, compassionate governments from feeding the world.
Now, there was world hunger before anyone had even heard of GM. There were common sense ways to solve it, too. There was huge criticism leveled against the Thatcher government for refusing to send massive UK stockpiles of unwanted food to parts of Africa. How GM is going to solve a food distribution 'problem', almost entirely created by the corporations and governments who want to push GM, is anyone's guess.
Professor Lord Krebs, former chairman of the UK Food Standards Agency, said at the same event;
'To me the real moral tragedy of the whole GM debacle was not so much the impact on our food here in the UK, but the fact that the European prissiness about GM has affected its adoption in Africa. The tragedy in terms of human loss and starvation has been in Africa. I hope as we move forward, somehow European attitudes can change and so African attitudes will also change'.
Almost all the countries starving, especially in Africa, have been somehow ravaged by Western influenced wars, landgrabbing, economic raping, and climate change wreaked by industrialising 'civilisation'. Another load of messing with nature by the self same institutions is not going to change anything. It's illogical and not in their interest.
To endorse GM is to pander blindly to the corporations that produce and market these mutated crops. Corporations like the concentrated evil that is Monsanto, a company with such a long list of food and animal tinkering, law suits, corporate and journalistic hush ups and farmer exploitation that it deserves a good looking through. Here's a good selection from CorpWatch:
http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/corpwatch? q=monsanto&is=corpwatch.org&x=20&y=2
Of course there's an interest for Tescos to do this. And it's money money money. Although the quoted passages of Leahy's speech leave it oddly unclear as to whether this official 'backing' will mean that Tesco's will sell this produce, this surely must the case. And how do all supermarkets 'back' things that they sell? They make them cheap, cheap, cheap. In a global recession that has in the past few weeks seen fast food outlets in the UK, like KFC and even McDonalds, create thousand of new jobs and hundreds of new outlets; where a quick perusal of supermarket shelves will see much of the 'crunch busting' own brand products stuffed with poisonous sweeteners like aspartame; the last thing we need is people in the grip of economic crisis filling their stomachs with poorly researched, probably dangerous 'food'.
It's in a whole lot of big shots' financial interest. And we all know good health is much less profitable than disease,
Original article on Leahy statement:
http://www.farminguk.com/news/United-Kingdom-Tesco-in-keeping-with-the-times.11436.asp Article on French 'oyster plague':
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/2656892/Genetically-improved-oysters-behind-Frances-shellfish-plague.html Institute for Responsible Technology publication of Austrian report:
http://www.responsibletechnology.org/GMFree/MediaCenter/ReleaseAustrianGovernmentStudy/index.cfm 2007 Independent article on resistance to GM:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/government-to-defy-critics-with-secret-gm-crop-trials-1021675.html
Meagan Freeman
