Re: [pf] Risks, imposed or chosen

by Betsy Barnum

18 December 2000 02:51 UTC

David A wrote:

> Betsy Barnum wrote:
> > And 10 years ago, maybe even more recently, there was no
> > such problem, back when there was only "conventionally grown"
> > and "organically grown," and there was no trouble keeping the
> > two separate!
>
> By this argument, then ~30-50 years ago we should not have allowed
> grains grown with pesticides to be intermingled with grains grown
> without pesticides.

Organically grown food has been pretty much kept separate, no problem.
People who didn't mind (or didn't realize the extent of) pesticides on their
food would not be bothered by having some organically grown in the mix;
people who wanted to avoid pesticide-laden food chose organic because it was
kept separate and labeled. No problem.

The trouble now is that a lot of people don't want GMOs in their food, and
have only tolerated it because they were uninformed. Why shouldn't they be
allowed to choose GMO-free food, and to expect the purveyprs of same to bear
the costs of separation, since the intermingling was done without offering
them the choice (unlike the organic separation and labeling)?

> And before that, I don't know, crops picked by
> nonunion workers separate from union workers, crops produced with
> machines separate from crops harvested by hand, etc.

If people wanted to eat only crops picked by union workers, and were able to
demand it, this kind of separation wouldn't be impossible to do. The table
grapes boycott that went on for years was precisely about this--people
choosing not to buy grapes unless they had been picked by union workers.

> There's no end to
> the separations...and doing so over time would mean that we would have
> production levels akin to 1900 instead of the enhanced levels we have
> today. Which means we couldn't feed the population levels we have today.

Maybe this wouldn't have been such a bad idea! As Daniel Quinn says, the
more food we produce, the more the population grows. Slowing down food
production (not now, so people starve, but earlier) might have staved off
the overpopulation we now have on Earth.

> > The extra cost of separating non-GMO food from that
> > which has been genetically tampered is a condition
> > that *only* exists because the companies that make GMOs have
> > convinced our regulatory agencies that there's no difference and so >
> > they have not required labeling.
>
> But Betsy, regulators are idiots who bow to the beck and call of
> whatever industry bribes them. (And if you do believe that, I could be
> an equal cynic and say that Greenpeace has been hurting for members and
> is looking only to foment controversy to bring in the dollars.)

Do you think people who are leery of GMOs are dupes being manipulated by
Greenpeace? Give us some credit, David! And anyway, we *know* corporations
are dictating public policy. It's not cynicism to say so. What an
environmental group may or may not do to try to increase its membership is
not even in the same ballpark.

> Again,
> what studies have shown these foods to be dangerous, or what studies
> show deleterious effects from the hundreds of Americans who have been
> consuming the 60% of grocery store food that is GM over the last 15
> years?

15 years! I don't think we've been eating GMOs that long, 10 years max and
only significantly in the past 4 to 5. Not nearly long enough to have any
idea about dangers from the uncontrolled and nonconsensual mass public
experiment that we've been forced to participate in. There has not been any
testing done on these products before they are put into human food, or into
animal feed either. You may not think highly of John Hagelin, I'm not
particularly fond of him myself due to his antics in the Natural Law Party
last spring, but I think his cautionary statements are very wise. I think a
lot of scientists, and certainly many non-scientists, are aware of the
unpredictability of living systems and the foolishness of thinking that
shooting genes into living cells with viruses as carriers, and creating new
life forms, will not have surprising results which could well be *very*
unpleasant.

I also think Jill is right about how the scientific and academic
establishment treat people who go against the accepted dogma, as Hagelin
does, and I think it's pretty clear that the accepted dogma right now in
universities and research institutions is rah-rah biotech. Corporations are
setting the research agenda with funding, and this is not a cynical
statement but a true one. I could tell you what's happening at the
University of Minnesota with the agriculture department and its new dean,
who is a biotech darling, and his attemps to disable the sustainable
agriculture program, and to support of the consortium of biotech companies
in Minnesota, not just with university research, but with marketing of these
products as well! This is not unique. It's happening all over.

> Are there countries where labeling has been mandatory from the start?
> I'm not up to speed in this area so I'd be interested to know. I thought
> the EU was still grappling with this issue, though perhaps some EU
> countries have already acted.

EU requires labeling, or many if not most of the countries do. Brazil will
not accept GMO foods. Japan will not. I don't see how they can refuse unless
they have separation and can be certain which are GMO and which are not.

> I too believe that corporations have too much influence in
> our government. But I'm much less willing to believe that scientists as
> individuals or as a whole, or well-respected bodies such as the National
> Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society, are in the same category. And
> I do trust them much more than Greenpeace or RAFI. I've just known too
> many scientists who are honest, investigative skeptics.

Many individual scientists may be honest, David, but the institutions they
work for are almost certainly having their agenda set by corporations,
whether they like it or not. Maybe they go along to get along. It's a job,
and maybe they get to do a lot of stuff they like. I think we have to
realize that it's all about money. The prestigious societies you cite may be
still somewhat free of this taint, but I wouldn't rely on their objectivity.
I think it is much more sensible these days to be suspicious, since
corporations have reached into almost every economic, political and social
institution, than to assume that any institution is really free of their
influence. The corporations rely on our acceptance of seemingly impartial
societies and associations and agencies, which often, when you look at where
their money comes from, are corporate-directed from beginning to end.

Betsy

--
Betsy Barnum
bbarnum@wavetech.net
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1624

**************************************
And I am asking you how many more plucked eyes and wrenched throats
must we pay for in the villages of the poor before we figure out
that Congress does the dirty work of corporations and that respectfully
petitioning those men and women can only be the work of imperial citizens
who are slowly dying.

--Jerry Fresia, Toward An American Revolution