my aim is learning and sharing what I encounter to help inspire and grow myself and others.
Posts tagged: monsanto
Biodiversity means a robust response mechanism against natural and man-made disasters. With our food supply’s genetic diversity dwindling, we risk catastrophic collapse of food systems if we don’t have the variations that can respond to such shocks.
Monsanto and other Big Agriculture players want this reduced scope because it allows them to corner the market, own patents and control what we eat.
Preserve heirloom varieties, cultivate what grows best in your area and share locally to ensure that we don’t subsume our independence and vitality to our corporate masters.
Note: This info graphic only leads up to 1983! I assume that the modern numbers are even less.
Say “No” to Deregulating Monsanto’s “Drought Resistant” Genetically Modified Corn (MON 87460)
Monsanto, the agribusiness behemoth, has a “drought resistant” variety of corn that has not proven to be drought resistant compared to non-GMO varieties of corn and threatens potential cross contamination with real drought resistant species, potentially undermining their traits.
Please sign the petition urging the USDA to reject the deregulation of MON 87460.
More info from the Organic Consumers Association:
Why deregulate and risk contamination of organic and non-GMO crops for an experiment that didn’t work and has no foreseeable benefits?
Monsanto’s years of investment into so-called “drought-resistant” biotech crops has been a nothing more than a risky and very expensive failure. Based on company data submitted to the US Department of Agriculture for deregulation, it is clear that Monsanto’s new genetically-modified corn variety does not perform any better than non-GMO varieties. The findings come from a US Department of Agriculture draft environmental impact assessment, produced as a step towards approval of the new GM crop, MON 87460.
This proves, as Dr Helen Wallace director of GeneWatch UK wrote this week: “[Bio]technology has been spectacularly unsuccessful at delivering complex traits such as drought tolerance, which involve multiple genes and complex interactions with the plant’s environment. Meanwhile, conventional breeding and new techniques such as marker-assisted selection - which uses knowledge of the plant’s genome to inform breeding, without engineering the plant - have produced a long string of successes.”
The danger is, if MON 87460 is deregulated, it will inevitably contaminate truly drought-tolerant varieties of organic and conventional corn, destroying the rich genetic diversity that the world’s farmers have cultivated for millennia for the planet’s infinitely varied micro-climates.
