Emboldened by the U.S. government’s repeated willingness to unleash genetically modified food on its citizens, biotech companies have big plans for our future.
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| Image: Wikimedia commons |
A Canadian biotech company called Okanagan Specialty Fruits developed a GM apple currently under review by the FDA. This would be one of the first genetically modified fruits on store shelves in the U.S. The “Arctic Apple” would not turn brown after being sliced or bitten into.
It seems almost funny, considering that people have never seemed to have a problem with this bit of browning during the apple’s thousands of years in cultivated existence.
Of course, the company touts all sorts of benefits the FrankenApple would provide. It would allow sliced apples to be sold in bags for convenient school lunches (it’s for the kids!), and restaurants could abandon the need to use preservatives to keep their fruit salads fresh (what about all the other fruits in there?).
Apple growers are worried because the introduction of a GMO fruit would force them to implement costly measures to protect against cross-contamination and would decrease sales to foreign markets where GMO labeling and restrictions exist.
Perhaps even scarier than a GM apple is the almost certain prospect of Monsanto’s next herbicide-resistant crop. Monsanto must be very assured of government approval, because they’ve already planted the stuff at
“Ground-Breaker” demonstration plots in North and South Dakota for farm media.
The new GM crop is a soybean resistant to dicamba, a more toxic and more volatile herbicide than RoundUp. This development is causing extreme concern among farmers and concerned citizens due to the high volatility of dicamba during spraying. It is known to drift for miles, even 100 miles in one case where it damaged 15,000 acres of cotton and pomegranate orchard.
Monsanto has said they are working on a new formulation of dicamba that isn’t as volatile. Needless to say, folks aren’t buying the reassurances. Monsanto also issued guidelines for cleaning dicamba sprayer tanks that are so onerous and time-consuming it is hard to believe people will be able to follow them adequately.
Considering the astronomical rise in RoundUp sales after the RoundUp Ready system was introduced during the 1990s, Monsanto can look forward to huge profits as it sells another patented life form to dependent farmers along with patented chemicals.
And we can look forward to millions of acres of farmland being drenched in a more toxic and volatile herbicide, creating runoff into aquatic ecosystems and damaging crops and vegetable gardens of the unfortunate people who live nearby.
Let’s not forget that the industrial agriculture demand for another herbicide-resistant crop is due to the fact that weeds have developed resistance to RoundUp, the key component of Monsanto’s first foray into GMO herbicide resistance.
Monsanto creates the problem, then genetically engineers a solution to it, all the while making farmers dependent on their products. And when weeds develop resistance to dicamba, we can be assured that Monsanto is working on the next “solution.”
by Justin Gardener RealFarmacy.com
Source: RealFarmacy.com
