Food for the World?
There is a secret agenda behind the development of GMOs, claims Tony Wardle. However ‘safe’ they may be, they will still create starvation and environmental destruction on a previously unimaginable scale. But there is an answer…
fears that new life forms created by genetic engineering will wreak irreversible global damage are well justified. But even if genetically modified organisms (GMOs) turn out to be totally benign, they will still create a human, animal and environmental catastrophe.
In yet another devastating report, the United Nations has shouted at the top of its voice that we are heading towards environmental collapse – the latest in a long string of similar warnings. The introduction of GMOs, even if they kill not a single lacewing or ladybird, will push us even faster towards the precipice.
Food for the world’s starving is the promise of the multinational biotech corporations to justify GMOs. It is calculated, emotional blackmail – a cynical public relations deceit. GMOs will have exactly the opposite effect and the companies know it. People starve solely because they’re poor and GMOs will not alter that.
The poor were first used as an excuse 30 years ago for the ‘green revolution’ – new but fewer seed varieties and a massive use of pesticides and fertilisers. It also started the multinationals’ profit curve on its stratospheric climb.
“Within 10 years, no man, woman or child will go to bed hungry,” said Henry Kissinger in 1974 – but the number of people starving has increased to 800 million. Now, the same deceit is repeated – even newer and even fewer seed varieties and still more pesticides and fertilisers. And it still has nothing to do with feeding the starving.
What do you think dominates world trade? Petroleum, perhaps, or motor vehicles? In fact it is animal fodder and meat. Animals are the engine of world commerce. In the UK, over 75 per cent of all agricultural land is used to graze or grow feed for animals. They consume 70 per cent of all plant crops. It is much the same throughout the EU and US but it isn’t enough and vast quantities of fodder are sucked in from the developing world – enough to cover an area of land the size of Britain, France, Italy and New Zealand.
Imports are often from the same countries whose children die from starvation – countries cowed, subdued and made compliant through debt and powerlessness. This is why in 1984, Ethiopia was exporting animal fodder to us when its people were being ravaged by famine.
Why so much animal feed? It varies from animal to animal but for every 10kg of good quality vegetable protein eaten by a cow, roughly 9kg is wasted in simply keeping the animal alive and functioning. Just 1kg is converted into meat. It is an insanely wasteful and patently unsustainable form of agriculture – but is absolutely central to the multi nationals’ profitability. Without it they go down the pan – it’s as fundamental as that.
The pharmaceutical giants who are pushing GMOs now bestride the world like huge colossuses, banking some 161 billion dollars between them every year. They walk hand in hand with agri businesses and the livestock industry – often they are one and the same company. This is the unholy trinity of food production.
Intensive livestock farming accounts for more than 40 per cent of their income. Only by dosing billions of diseased and dejected animals with a cocktail of drugs, growth enhancers and pesticides can the barbaric systems work.
To produce sufficient fodder to feed this mass of animals, yet more intensive agriculture is needed – land pushed beyond its limits with artificial fertilisers, pesticides and 200 highly-priced chemicals, many of them carcinogenic. Profit centre number two!
Profit centre number three is in pretending to cure the human diseases caused by eating animals. Coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, strokes, cancer, diabetes, gall bladder disease and 50 or 60 other nasties that could all be dramatically reduced or eliminated entirely through diet. Instead, the pills keep popping and almost nothing is spent on prevention – less than one per cent of the West’s entire health budget.
It is a blinding marketing success – a wonderful, gigantic, circular scam. Do you honestly believe that they intend to slay this golden goose?
But what would you do if your core market was cracking up through concern over animal abuse, antibiotic resistant bugs, BSE, E.coli and pesticides and customers were moving towards a healthier diet? Statistics would show you the way forward. US citizens eat 110kg of meat, Britons about 60kg but Nigerians only 6kg and Indians a meagre 1.1kg annually. So, just like the tobacco industry, you would expand your deadly trade to the developing world.
But first, one more problem has to be solved. Despite the world-wide destruction of forests and other ecosystems, there is not sufficient land to grow the huge volume of fodder needed. In fact, the amount of productive land is diminishing through desertification and soil degradation, due largely to intensive livestock agriculture. It will diminish even further with flooding from global warming.
The driving need, therefore, is to make maximum use of existing land by destroying all weeds and wild plants which compete for nutrients and to increase crop yields – hence genetic modification. The majority of ‘new’ land available for fodder is that currently used to grow food for people. The companies are swarming through Eastern Europe like a plague of locusts, exploiting its turmoil by acquiring good agricultural land at cheap prices and tying farmers into long-term contracts to grow – guess what?
Terminator technology – which prevents farmers from saving seed for use the following year – binds them into crippling financial arrangements with the lure of future profits. If they go bust, their land will simply be taken over. Promises that this technology will not be used are hollow and deceitful. In some developing countries, the companies already own 40 per cent of all agricultural land. Brazil is riven with landlessness and hunger yet one crop accounts for 25 per cent of its agriculture – soya beans for cattle feed.
The companies have courted dictators and corrupt elites and have received a dowry of land in return. All across the world, peasant farmers are pushed off the best land to eke out an existence on the margins, where their animals destroy the fragile environment. They then move on, rootless and hopeless, spreading the destruction
China offers the most chilling lesson for the future. Encouraged to adopt the factory farming of pigs and chickens, their numbers have exploded. The country has gone from being an exporter of grain to an importer in just one year. Their newly farmed animals have effectively swallowed up Canada’s entire output of grain overnight.
The three most worrying environmental catastrophes identified by the UN are nitrogen pollution, global warming and loss of fresh water. Company documents reveal that Monsanto had plans to take control of fresh water world wide; plans which they now say have been shelved. Why don’t I believe them? Because water, of course, is as essential to meat production as seed, land or chemicals.
Livestock farming wastes more water than almost any other industry. On irrigated land – which is 60 per cent of all land – one pound of beef can use a staggering 5,200 gallons compared to 25 gallons for a pound of vegetables.
Increased meat and fodder production will accelerate nitrogen pollution and global warming, with each cow producing 200 litres of methane every day from its farting and belching. Combined with forest burning to create grazing, this is a major source of greenhouse gasses. In fact, name almost any environmental catastrophe and you’ll find livestock production at the heart of it.
The financial imperative of biotech corporations is to turn the world into a weed-free, wildlife-free, monocultured fodder and grazing lot, interspersed with obscene factory farms – exactly as has already happened across huge tracts of Europe, the UK and the US.
A decade ago, the World Health Organisation made an impassioned call for an end to the dominance of meat. “Policies should be geared to promoting the growing of plant foods and to limiting the promotion of meat and dairy.” It was, it said, cheaper, healthier, more efficient and the only way to feed the world. They were ignored. Now, we will increasingly witness the obscenity of poor people starving while those with purchasing power tie up world supplies of food and water for their caged animals.
It is cynicism polished to an artform for multinationals to claim concern for the wretched of the Earth when they have helped create them and continue to build profits on their emaciated backs.
We are heading rapidly into a form of global fascism and many of the world’s major government’s are colluding for fear of losing their influence – afraid of the power of the biomasters. The world and all its glories are dying for short-term profit. Resistance is left to individuals and we have to organise and act – with passion and determination.
This demand is a call to action to expose the rag bag of lies and deceit that has protected the meat industry for decades, with full Government support. And we have all subsidised this insanity with fists full of dollars, pounds, marks and francs.
There is only one solution to world hunger and it is a plant-based diet.
- It does not require the mass abuse of billions of animals.
- It does not require genetic modification or other expensive, high-tech solutions.
- It requires less than a quarter of available agricultural land and allows farmers to work with nature, not against it.
- It allows for proper rotation, fallow land and an end to artificial fertilisers and pesticides.
- It produces the healthiest diet known.
- It provides the cure to our collapsing environment.
- It means an end to the obscenity of the world’s poor growing feed for the west’s animals while their children starve.
These are the messages intends to take to the public. We will use all our skills and professionalism to communicate them and we will give you full details of the campaign when they are ready.
And the whole argument will all be summed up for the public in one telling slogan: