People get excited about genetic modification although we have been genetically modifying animals for thousands of years (calling it breeding) and genetically modifying some crops, like apples, by selective fertilisation of them. A pig used to look like a greyhound. Cows that need to be milked every day are not natural animals.
The Gates Foundation is making a grant of $10 million to a company in England which will be used to attempt to develop a strain of genetically modified cereal crops which need no or little fertiliser. Such grains will be useful not just for Africa where farmers cannot afford cereal crops but also for the United States and many other nations where the use of fertiliser is causing environmental havoc by run off into water courses and ultimately the sea.
Doing the modification in a laboratory instead of a farm creates potential problems because of the short time scales involved. Crops cannot easily be contained in the same way as animals and commercial pressure means that at moment crops that are genetically modified cannot be tested in control environments for a hundred years, so there is always potentil risk.
As in all things we weight the risks and take them in order to feed our over populated world. There is a choice for many people. We can and should chose locally produced food by local small farmers, rather than food produced by the multinationals. I am much more comfortable putting into my body what is grown and produced by a family farm, than what is produced by a multinational corporation because one thing is certain; the ethics of a family farmer are always far better than those of a corporation.
Filed under: climate change Tagged: | cereal crops, cows, effect of over using fertilisers on biodiversity, environment, environmental havoc, Gates Foundation, GM Food, greyhound, milk, nature, pig
We are from similar backgrounds Robert and students of life nonetheless but climate change is happening and will happen wheather we like it or tax it or not.
The planet is currently moving outside its normal eclyptic and does so every few thousand years, TBTP already know this and have taken a large efforts to blank off the media mention of this, the few tiny degrees out of alignment is all that is needed to change things as we are now seeing them.
Our position in orbit around our sun is the thing which is finely balanced.
The last time this happened was the medieval warming period where hundreds of years of normality with the days patterns came to an end without greenhouse gasses being involved as the cause.
Mini ice ages, true ice ages, huge floods, all have happened on much bigger and larger scales to what we are witnessing today and will once again.
What we should be concentrating upon is surviving such scenarios instead of giving our control to the few at the top who now have bankers as leaders over the people trying to survive something completely man made for and by design a few lazy men without hats.
Doing their own safety dance at.the cost of the many.
@ Robert.
Not snake oil Robert, try Agent Orange and its modern derivative called glysophate.
I call the Mono santo the Highlander syndrome where there can only be one outcome for the result.
Maybe they could breed the ultimate drough resistant corn for the weather in the states right now, nature certainly can do this over thousands of years.
Look no further than fossile remains of plantsthat are no longer around that never changed fast enough for the climates of their day and then wake up from the dream that is our honest as Eddie MSM.
The obvious problems in any monopoly or in many cases duopolies is about to get much worse, Monsanto is trying very hard to gain total anonymity for their modified seed, we always see the results of such policies afterwards.
Natural sellection or modification is one thing but splicing in genes in the flavour savour tomotoe for instance, where a gene from the flounder has been added to give it longevity on the shelf simply does’nt happen in nature and never could, so we should’nt be doing it either.
There should also be no corporation period, these and their percentage on their percentage set by law of around 8% is the standard daylight robbery the public is footing the bill for every second.
Here is a simple explanation of how basically all forporations work, I use the F word ligjtly because they are all for themselves regardless of the destruction of the enviornment for growth and profit from the workers with the spanners in their hands held to ramsome by the corporations.
Why do I get the feeling that Monsanto are sell9ing snake oil?
Whilst many ( I think needlessly) fear “Frankenstein food” there is a serious issue with genetically modified seeds from which plants grow but which do not reproduce the same modified seed.
Equally, plants which self protect against pests will ensure that only they can be used in areas where pest control is no longer allowed or affordable.
This type of seed production is just a money spinner for large companies. The seeds will not be cheap and every single plant will be bought via seed. So, in the future, poor farmers will not be able to enlarge their seed bank for free whilst growing crops.
There is also a question over natural bio diversity. It will be lost.
If growing genetically modified plants does not need fertilisers the second year crop will be inherently weak because the soil nutrients will have been taken by the first year’s crop.
Farmers have always enriched their soils to produce healthy succulent plants. Fertiliser is not inherently bad, what is undesirable is large scale use of chemical phosphate and nitrogen fertilisers.
Using gm seeds that do not need pest control is a bit like sowing your field right up to the very edge or taking every apple on the tree. We must always leave something for the other guy, or the other species.
As farmers in our family back to 1580 I can say the way the animals are being fed is not natural at all. The beef cattle are being fed huge amounts of corn to get the carcasses to market sooner, cows are herbivores or as my grandfather called the modern animals anythores, fed anything hut pure grass and high protien devoid of propper herbage like wild flower meadows and pasture naturally contains, the cows alpen oralpine breakfast has long gone and along comes the troubles in dairy cattles feet due to standing and eating all day, sheer cruelty and getting much worse.
The PTB are however preparing for an unatural dissater possibly in the future and have secured all the wild genus in an ice cave just in case, not a conspiracy but fact.
What is clear is that it is the very corporations who rule this planet right now, who have the poloticians where they need them to be, they got them to set the precentage”for life of the forporation, the results now coming home to roost.
The Greek side f my family were farmers (also known as peasants) in Cyprus, until they became asbestos miners. Cattle did not thrive in that part of Cyprus, but sheep and goats did. The lambs there had better leaner taste than lambs have now, which have too much fat. We change the worldinevitably, and other things change the world too.,Slow change is reversible and can be managed sustainably. Rapid change, like rapid climate change can end in the diaster of unforeseen consequences.