When Veggies ‘Committed Suicide’ to Spread a Message
Greenpeace activists protest against genetic modification of food crops
BANGALORE, India - “Genetic modification of food crops can be disastrous.”
To spread this message of impending danger, Greenpeace chose the “suicide” route.
The victims, for a change, were not farmers, but vegetables, hordes of tomatoes, corn, potatoes, brinjals and lady’s fingers. Committing “mass suicide”, the vegetables had left a “suicide note” against the Government’s imminent decision to approve large-scale open air field trials for genetically modified (GM) food crops.
The symbolic suicide was followed by a “funeral”. Greenpeace activists carried the “dead body” of a “martyr corn” in a hearse from the Mahatma Gandhi statue to a supermarket on M.G. Road. The activists then gathered to distribute the “Sabji Times,” the vegetable bulletin that chronicled the disaster. “The approval of the field trials would mean that our food is one step closer to being dangerously unsafe. The health of citizens and the environment of this country are at risk,” said Divya Raghunandan, GE campaigner from Greenpeace.
She says: “We have recorded cross pollination, genetic contamination and even mixing up of GM test crops over the past few years and demanded that regulatory procedures be overhauled. We have weak and poor laws and even worse implementation, and the open air field trials, if permitted, is likely to end up in the plates of unsuspecting consumers.” Last year, Indian agricultural exporters had opposed the field trials of GM rice because consumers in Europe and the West Asia rejected GM food for safety reasons. The rationale behind the symbolic vegetable suicide was clear.
As Ms. Raghunandan put it: “Consumers in India do not have to be passive guinea pigs in this large-scale experimentation taking place at their expense. We have a right to choose what we eat and must demand from our Government and food corporations an emphatic statement that our favorite brands are free of GM contamination.”
© Copyright 2007 The Hindu
“You are what you eat.”
GM’d foods are modified to do what…? Make’em all the same a resilliant to onslaught of whatever bugaboo…
Gosh, …what an emperor could do with of a population of “group-minded” followers… Hmmmm…
This is so sad to see. I am strongly against genetically modified organisms and to see that now India must battle against giant bio-pharmaceutical companies and agro-business. May they continue to fight.
For more of my Modern Musings www.taureandevi.blogspot.com
This is amazing. Maybe we should outsource our activism as well, since we do such a pathetic job of it. There is still hope and maybe it exists in the ‘third world’ after all.
These GM crops are being specifically developed to destroy the food supplies so that big corporate-agra can control the food. Whoever controls the food controls the people and the world. It’s that simple.
Over 1,000 chemicals are already being put into foods or onto foods and almost all of them have never been tested TOGETHER to see what the “side-effects” would be. And testing that many chemicals would take about 100 years to do. I learned that from the following website:
http://www.hundredyearlie.com/home2.html
Since the federal government agencies, like the FDA and USDA (and sold out scientists) actively involved in the regulation of GM plant development have mostly all sold out to the big corporate interests they regulate…well it’s all about the MONEY (as usual), 24/7, and never about SAFETY. We’re talkin’ about our FOOD SUPPLY for heaven’s sake! You, me, the children, everybody!
These are very, very evil mindless, godless people moving forward with this. And they’re stupid enough to think it won’t ever affect THEM.
And money ain’t gonna cut it when the crops die off. (SIGN: The bees are dying off in droves.) You’re gonna go GET food no matter where, and no matter how. Good Lord, I know that sounds terrible but that’s where this could all head.
What to do? Start backyard and community gardens and greenhouses. Talk to your local emergency planners about what to do if the worst case happens. And, like we’re learning from the trans-fat bans, educate your local government officials to create laws BANNING all GM foods from your community. Federal laws are full of loopholes. Think globally, act locally.
This is serious. Get serious.
Think smart. Plan ahead. And pray to God for help.
Lets go beyond protest and “Become the change that we want to see in the world”!
In deference to Mohandas Gandhi, our goal is to manifest positive organic economies among ourselves. Deeper than protest reaction is the recognition that we give to each other. Gandhi wrote, “Regerd human labour as more even than money and you have an untapped and inexhaustible source of income, which ever increases with use” in a letter 1945 to a British governor.
‘Economic’ (derived from the Greek meaning ‘care and nurture of the home and family’)recognition is essential to our unity. Recognition is found in our accounting systems as well as in our ‘caucussing’ (Iroquois meaning ‘grouping of like-interests’) of labour, resources, purchases, goods and services. This kind of accounting is time-based as well as integrating money, shares,social-security and more.
The ‘Haudenosaunee’(Iroquois meaning ‘People of the longhouse’)Great Law of Peace is based in accounting through the string-shell for diverse community Production Societies for all contributions (male and female), the caucussing of like-interests and planning together for the whole community.
We can develop relational economy by recognizing multiple stakeholder contributions to economies and developing progressive ownership and guild integrated apprenticeship (adult-youth mentorship). Through inclusive recognition among ourselves then we can join our forces together and include the whole world.
eco-montreal@mcgill.ca
A five-acre plot of land, with open gardens and 40′x18′ greenhouses, worked by only two people can feed 360 people for one year all year round in just about any climate.
Go here to find out how:
http://www.fourseasonfarm.com/index.html
The people of India don’t have to be the guinea pigs for GM crops because Americans already are, and have been for about ten years now.
These gmo’s might be what is killing the bees.
Oh, for the love of…
Look. The conservatives you’d think Greenpeace would be trying to persuade are about as impressed with suicidal corn as they are with people protesting the war dressed up as wee pixies sprinking glitter on the sidewalks. It does not move them and it certainly doesn’t make them listen.
Plant a garden or buy local produce from a farmers market. Organic if possible. The food system is poisoned by pesticides as well as genetically damaged food.
It is bad enough that you have to breathe the air and drink the water the corporate idiots have polluted.
The less money there is in this crap the less of it we will get.
Monsanto has been pouring money into advertising and lobbying. Greenpeace is trying to counter this with far fewer resources. I think, considering the millions of uneducated farmers they are trying to reach, that this dramatic demonstration will have a great impact.
I have yet to see any real argument that says that GM foods are intrinsically bad. Everything I have seen, including the posts on this board, are variations of “It’s not natural, therefore it must be bad.” It is essentially a religious argument, not a rational one.
Also, most people associate GM with commercial giants without stopping to question whether that is a rational position. There is a book that everyone concerned should read that talks about how plants have been developed through the ages called “Mendel in the Kitchen.” Until you read it, you really have little to say in this discussion. In actuality most of the GM work is done in university research settings and are designed to increase production, increase nutrition (added Vit A), adapt to harsh environments (saline soils), obviate the need for applying pesticides (Bt) or extra fertilizer (nitrogen fixing bacteria), disease resistance (fungus resistant wheat), and so on. If you are so bent out of shape by Monsanto being more interested in the profit motive than alleviating world hunger, then support the research being done at public supported institutions. Destroying and impeding their work just means that Monsanto does more of the R&D for their advantage, not the consumers’.
We are now at 6,500,000,000 people in the world and becoming more all the time. Arable land is not increasing. Actually, thanks to erosion and development, it is decreasing. How do you propose that we feed those people? Maybe we should cut down more forests? How about plowing up the desert? What do you suggest to increase food production? It is not going to get easier. Babbling about not eating meat and converting animal feed to human feed is not the answer because the amounts involved are not nearly enough. Plowing up grassland that would raise livestock to grow crops just gives you dust bowls and more erosion.
Stupid arguments that eating GM food will somehow make you an easily manipulated pawn of the government have no place in a serious discussion. If you want to influence how people are going to starve, then you have to come up with something authentic, not this fairy tale stuff that is rampant in the internet. Barbara Kingsolver wrote an article in Mother Jones about how so few of our citizens have any concept at all of what it takes to produce food. Fifty years ago when more than 2% of the population was involved in food production, this argument would not be viable because too many people would have realized how ridiculous it is.
Like DKM says, no one has any information on the negative aspects of GM food. Just like industry scientists have stated for 50 years that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer.
Diseases in one species can jump to another species, then they will have to create new poisons to kill the new disease, then they will have to genetically modify the new food product to be able to be resistant to the new poisons, and so on and so on.
Just a quick look on the website brought up the following:
http://www.holisticmed.com/ge/
http://www.organicconsumers.org/gelink.cfm
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/genetic-engineering
And since you can’t see radiation, it can’t kill you. Right?
Eat and support organics, but buy on your local level. Some reports say that much of the ‘organics’ in large grocery chains is in fact not ‘organic.’
so it goes
AG
there is a difference between what mendel did, which was natural pollination and natural selection and genetically modifying a plant. about 2001 lincoln university, new zealand was inserting frog genes into potatoes. that is something i would not be willing to eat.
dkm, i’m not inherently opposed to GM foods. but, as w/anything, you have to ask yourself: is it safe? is it necessary? on both counts, serious questions remain. no one knows the effects of GM, and it seems to me all the supposed benefits of GM can be gained in less drastically interventionist ways whose effects on health/environment we already know.
besides, we are talking about the food supply here. don’t you think the cautionary principle should apply, w/full force?
and if they are so goddam good for you, why doesn’t Monsanto, the FDA, etc., even want you to know you are eating GM?
the food issue reveals the nature of contemporary predatory capitalism: they’ll lie to you and promise you the world while destroying the possibility of life in order to make a buck.
dkm,
If you research GMs, you’ll find lots of reasons to avoid them like a plague. If you read Mendel, you’ll go even further to preserve our human role in productive natural heritage.
If you read on Agro-foresty, Edible Forest-Gardens, http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
Permaculture or Orchard Food Production Efficiencies, you will find out that the multi-layer orchard forests that indigenous peoples around the world have carefully selected, bred and groomed for tens of thousands of years are 100 times more productive than field cropping or agriculture (’agri’-means ‘field’). The deserts you are putting your hopes into are caused by agriculture.
Meagre harvest, plunder and control of food stores is the legacy of agriculture and concentration of power that began the empire or what we refer to as civilisation. Read about Sylvalization, discover your own hidden indigenous roots and the violent invasions that have torn our generations from these stories. Resd 1491 by Charles C. Mann, or Their Number Become Thinned by Henry F. Dobyns or Mutual Aid by Petr Kropotkin.
The advantage that tree cropping has over field cropping is in 1) The solar harvest of 95 - 98 % of solar energy falling on a given piece of land and the convertion through photosynthesis of this energy into the creation of tree and plant matter as well as water cycle. Agriculture after the enormous energy expended to destroy indigenous peoples orchards only absorbs and converts 5% of solar energy.
The roots of a nut, fruit, seed, edible-bark etc. orchard, descend as deep or deeper than the canopy some 50 to 200 feet where they pump water, minerals and nutrients (colonised by the roots)to the surface. Fall leaves and other droppings off the tree provide a permanent source of fertilizar beyond what petro-chemicals can even dream of. Agriculture only send roots down inches or sparse feet.
Continentally when the orchard absorbs 95% of solar energy, a cold spot is created (when we walk in the forest it is cooler in summer and warmer in winter) to which the warm moisture laden airs of the oceans and seas are drawn. When the moist air contacts cold leaf surfaces, the water condenses and often rains underneath the tree. This moisture transfer from ocean to land accounts for 60%. Cloud rain only accounts for 40%.
When the orchards of the middle east, North Africa, western South America etc. were cut by expanding empires, and field cropping, the untapped energy of the sun only absorbed at 5% and reflected at 95% began to turn the winds from the continent to the sea and hence our desert empire legacy of the past 6000 years.
If you are not in touch with the research, North Americans and Europeans are creating deserts around the world as we exploit indigenous lands for coffee, tabacco, sugar and other de-natured foods. Read Economic Democracy by JW Smith.
There a hundreds of reasons including water retention, saving on plowing and other mechanical intervention, humidification of the air, O2 production, toxin absorbtion and storage, nutrient cycle (mushrooms etc), gravity harvest etc. that the orchard is more productive than the monocropping of the lower forest canopy plants.
I learned about orcharding from Mennonite, Dukobour, Quaker, particularly First Nations and as the owner of an orchard over many years. I have also worked in agriculture and studied Mendel among others.
As a vegetarian for 35 years and as a vegan for 20 years, I use one tenth of land needed for my food production than meat-eaters. You mention that vegetarian savings are insignificant. When you are looking for answers consider the Ecological Foodprint now available as free downloadable calculable formats from the web.
We can continually try to reinvent history or we can try to learn from it. Institutional researchers by the $ cost/expense of their infrastructure have often cut themselves off from a universal and appropriate human food production heritage available around the world. Sustainability is written in ‘indigenous’ (derived from the Latin meaning ’self-generating’) history.
If you would like to find our more, contribute to sustainable solutions or engage in an equal time recorded dialogue. Douglas Jack eco-montreal@mcgill.ca
One of the most heart-breaking and apoplexy-inducing articles I read in the last few years was about a farmer (in Canada, I think) who grew and sold organic corn. Some seeds from Monsanto GM corn were blown, carried by birds, or somehow got mixed in with his stuff, and pretty much took over his small crop. Monsanto sued him for illegally growing their patented product (even though he was desperately trying to get rid of it - he couldn’t sell GM corn as “organic”) and WON! Agra-business to the rescue…soon we’ll all be drowning in GM crops (most of which are specifically bred to be resistant, making them them virtually predatory) like the south in Kudzu.
DKM,
In actuality, guess what drives much (USA, since early 1900’s) of university research (Especially food production research)?
Yes, kind of like “our” congress. Mind control has been used on people like DKM, it’s the way Upton Sinclair put it well — to the effect that says, you won’t understand what makes your salary if what you believe isn’t true but instaed is the accepted lie (Especially if you are egocentric, short-sighted, or live off the crumbs of the like).
One example that you don’t even see for what it isn’t, let alone for the continued harm it is. “You see,” same types of people that invested heavily in university building and such “research” were like minded with the people that are pro manifest-destiny and pro colonial type imperialism. Spelled out, go over to foreign countries that need your help being discovered or cultured; centralize power; then, centralize land ownership (Kicking people off their once diversely bountiful producing lands). Understand, you are not educated. Vitamin A production was gene spliced-in by inhumane type people — put there to keep people down (Continue to keep people down). So the Vitamin A rice (“Golden rice”) appeases the “health” community, so the people don’t look as physically nutritionally deficient as they are (Don’t go blind as much), so the GE Patent owners earn profit by keeping a populace at the “mercy” of corporate do-gooders (Do-gooders in the eyes of the truly blind like DKM). The corporate do-gooders pay off a few lobbyists, clergy, or other people seen as influential and or well to do. They go have some champagne, wine, tea what have you (Stole) go act like they hiked Everest, then come back to the hungry next generations in the home country with your pictures of the brave mommy or daddy DKM to show the next generation (That is so sedated on synthetic conceived lives they too often believe in this ignorant way) how its done.
You see DKM, knowing history connecting to current events is for more than just small talk so you sound smart when you are really either ignorant or one that numbs oneself for the quick deadly dollars. DKM, the bulk of cheap rice we have bought (For even longer than colonial oil) has largely been grown (In places such as India) from non-locally owned and managed farms. Instead we buy from generations of corporate families of mostly extra-national agribusiness and or distributors. Now, if they (Extra-national) corporate people cared anything about legitimacy in their dealings, we would never have seen the stealing of soils, the depletion of soils, the pollution of soils; and, as well, the need for vitamin A to be synthetically in a type of rice. You see, these soils were (Largely) stolen by or for people like you DKM, the once diverse managed and wild cultures were depleted then destroyed for ease of making more dollars for fewer people by overuse of mono-cropping on large scales which bred “need” for synthetic nitrogen cycle, overuse of irrigation, abuse of about every resource required for living. You see, the once diverse crops displaced by cheap export rice once already had the Vitamin A that you believe is missing by mysterious unexplainable means. The only mystery to bringing back a diverse and nutritional diet to people is how to get DKM to see thru his own blindness (I’m not talking about Vitamin A deficiency type blindness).
So, us 6 billion say (to the other ½ or so billion that are mindless consumers trying to oppress true education) either get it right or move to your next synthetic planet or something if you don’t believe in hell. (I don’t believe in hell, but that doesn’t negate my ability to recognize a liar or someone who is lying to themselves that they have really considered this more deeply than what has been spoon-fed to many of the 6.5 billion). DKM, turn off the spigots that are drowning your being with biased “research.” I don’t say automatically believe anything else, just turn your thinking (Reading or watching not equal to thinking) ability back on.
ps: thank’s to all else for the links to what looks like some good information.
Genetically modified foods are there, not for the benefit of humanity, but to make profits for the billionaires who control the industry and force farmers to buy seeds from them. It also paves the way for bankruptcy and the ability of these capitalists to buy farm land cheaply. Also on their agenda is privatizing the water supply. Only massive demonstrations–street heat as Jesse Jackson called it–will keep us safe
There’s an excellent DVD that lays out the issues regarding GMOs - http://www.thefutureoffood.com
Preston and all thank you again for the good references to the likes of Future of Food.
Also, DKM, thanks for the Kingsolver tip I just read some more, might like also:
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver (Author), Camille Kingsolver (Author), Steven L. Hopp (Author).
Hopp wrote of some history on gold rice in that book.