Do we really need GMOs or Hybrids?
“The thing about progress is that it looks much bigger than it truly is”
Letters from Vienna #96
Do we really need GMOs or Hybrids?
In his “Philosophical Investigations” Wittgenstein employed a quote from Johann Nestroy’s “Der Schützling”: “The thing about progress is that it looks much bigger than it truly is”. The Austrian dramatist also once lamented: “Progress is just like a newly discovered country with a thriving colonial system on the coast while the interior remains wilderness, steppe, prairie.”
Some might argue that mankind has made considerable technological and material progress over the last couple of centuries yet there have always been naysayers who’ve called the reality of “progress” into question (most notably Nietzsche and Heidegger) while even at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the scandal of Burke and Hare showed the tainted, dubious “morality” of “science”.
Currently it’s vital for us to understand the origins of the “Great Reset” as well as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”; otherwise we’ll never even begin to surmise the trajectory we’re actually travelling in[1]. People like new gadgets, easy convenience and cozy comfort yet rarely ask: at what price, whose lives and what rights are being sacrificed and what is the ultimate goal?
The Field of Agriculture
Agriculture is a field in which the questionable value of “progress” has long been self-evident.
“What was the result of the First World War?” Dominique Guillet once asked, “if not the eradication of German and French farmers, millions of whom were slaughtered on the battlefield. One can say that the Second World War finished this process off. At the same time ammoniac was produced to create bombs, which was later used in the production of fertilizer. And finally came the creation of mustard gas, which was used to kill insects. And with the Marshal Plan came tractors, the logical heirs of tanks. In reality western agriculture is a war economy.”[2]
“The entire conventional agriculture is based on a secret agreement between agriculture and industry, which, after the Second World War, had enormous reserves of poisons,” Ana Primavesi once opined. “Professor Borlaug (“the father of the Green Revolution”) had a remarkable idea: he’d noticed that agriculture bought little from industry, other than the occasional tractor. He suggested making a secret deal whereby agriculture would buy heavy machinery, fertilizer and pesticides from the industrial sector. Agriculture would make a loss but the government would step in to subsidize it.” The result was that wealth flowed from the so-called “Third World”, which lacked industry and needed to import everything, to the industrialized “First World”.[3]
Before the “Green Revolution” Dominique Guillet tells us, there were 200,000 different kinds of rice in India; after forty years only fifty remained.[4]
According to Vandana Shiva 200,000 Indian farmers perished in the first decade of the new millennium and two farmers commit suicide every hour. Shiva calls this a “suicide economy” and “the biggest genocide in the world”. If they don’t commit suicide then they’re forced to work as hired help on what once belonged to them or simply gravitate to the slums. Altogether c.600 million Indians have been “pushed out” of farming.[5]
This problem, Devinder Sharma comments, isn’t limited to India: every minute a farmer in Europe abandons his farm.[6]
At the start of the century France lost 30,000-35,000 farms a year, a total of 4m farmers. The country, however, will need them desperately when it’s no longer possible to import fertilizer.[7]
Of course, there are answers to the ongoing crisis such as the AMAP in France:
“The AMAP – Associations for the maintenance of peasant agriculture – are intended to promote peasant and organic agriculture which is struggling to survive in the face of the agro-industry. The principle is to create a direct link between farmers and consumers, who undertake to buy the production of the latter at a fair price and paying in advance.”[8]
As Laurent Marbot, founder of an AMAP in Vanves points out: the Île-de-France, the most populous of the eighteen regions of France (with c.12m inhabitants) could only survive for a few days if its source of imported food were to be cut off.[9]
Notional Tomatoes
“The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than the last ten thousand” we are told at the beginning of “Food Inc.” “…the average American supermarket has on average, 47,000 products…There are no seasons in the American supermarket. Now there are tomatoes all year round, grown half way around the world, picked when it was still green, and ripened with Ethylene gas. Although it looks like a tomato it’s kind of a notional tomato, more the idea of a tomato.”[10]
Instead of farms there are factories and instead of farmers there are huge multinational corporations that determine everything.
In his book “Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” F. William Engdahl shows how the scientific evidence about the dangers posed by GMOs has been systematically repressed, scientists who point this out have been persecuted, and human lives and entire countries have been sacrificed to profit.
“The doctrine of “substantial equivalence”” Engdahl tells us “was the lynchpin of the whole GMO revolution. It meant that a GMO crop could be considered to be the same as a conventional crop, merely because GMO corn looked like ordinary corn or GM rice or soybean, and even tasted more or less like conventional corn, and because in its chemical composition and nutritional value, it was “substantially” the same as the natural plant.”
“That determination that GMO plants were to be treated as “substantially equivalent” ignored the qualitative internal alteration required to genetically engineer the particular crop. As serious scientists pointed out, the very concept of “substantial equivalence” was itself pseudo-scientific. The doctrine of “substantial equivalence” had been created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxological tests.”
“Because of the Bush Administration’s “substantial equivalence” ruling, no special regulatory measures would be required for genetically engineered varieties.”
“Substantial equivalence was a phrase which delighted the agribusiness companies. That wasn’t surprising, for Monsanto and the others had created it. Its premise was deceitful, as Bush’s science advisers well knew.”
“Genetic modification of a plant or organism involved taking foreign genes and adding them to a plant such as cotton or soybeans to alter their genetic makeup in ways not possible through ordinary plant reproduction. Often the introduction was made by a gene “cannon” literally blasting a plant with a foreign bacteria or DNA segment to alter its genetic character. In agricultural varieties, hybridization and selective breeding had resulted in crops adapted to specific production conditions and regional demands.”
“Genetic engineering differed from traditional methods of plant and animal breeding in very important respects. Genes from one organism could be extracted and recombined with those of another (using recombinant DNA, or rDNA, technology) without either organism having to be of the same species. Second, removing the requirement for species reproductive compatibility, new genetic combinations could be produced in a highly accelerated way. The fateful Pandora's Box had indeed been opened. The fictional horrors of the “Andromeda Strain”: the unleashing of a biological catastrophe, was no longer the stuff of science fiction. The danger was real, and no one seemed to be overly concerned.”
“Genetic engineering introduced a foreign organism into a plant in a process that was imprecise and unpredictable. The engineered products were no more “substantially equivalent” to the original than a tiny car hiding a Ferrari engine would be to a Fiat. Ironically, while companies such as Monsanto argued for “substantial equivalence”: they also claimed patent rights for their genetically modified plants on the argument that their genetic engineering had created substantially new plants whose uniqueness had to be protected by exclusive patent protection. They saw no problem in having their cake and eating it too.”[11]
In addition to GMOs there are also, equally nefarious, “hybrids”:
“The main difference between a GMO and a hybrid is that a GMO is produced by genetic engineering, altering the genetic material of an organism, whereas a hybrid is produced by cross-breeding of two varieties through artificial mating. Furthermore, a GMO has a foreign DNA piece introduced into the genome under laboratory conditions while a hybrid can be produced by mating two distinct breeds.”
“GMO (genetically-modified organism) and hybrid are two types of organisms produced through distinct genetic manipulation techniques.”[12]
Sigrid Drage tells us: “The production of hybrid varieties is very complex but brings a lot – for individual corporations. However, the benefits for farmers and consumers are deceptive.”
“Hybrid breeding is a special form of cross breeding that was developed at the beginning of the 20th century. Inbred lines of a father and a mother plant are crossed with each other. The inbred lines themselves are produced by forced “selfing” (= self-pollination) of plants over several generations. They become homozygous (having inherited the same versions (alleles) of a genomic marker from each biological parent) and show signs of weakness caused by inbreeding. If the two father and mother inbred lines are now crossed, something amazing happens that is called the heterosis effect: the daughter generation (so-called F1 generation) is particularly productive and tolerable. But only for this one year. If seeds of these F1 hybrids are taken, they won’t be able to keep these properties, but on the contrary, most of the time, they’ll even develop less than welcome properties. In the case of so-called CMS hybrids, where male sterility has been crossed in, the seeds of the F1 generation aren’t even capable of germination.”[13]
If “progress” means greater dependency on the whims of corporations and less independence of the individual then we at least need to be clear in our minds about what is entailed. Otherwise we’ll be making decisions based on ignorance, foolishness and blindness.
Many are of the opinion that it’s time to return to the “old ways” (in the field of agriculture at least) but what this actually involves, in practice, will be left to a later letter.
[1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/dark-origins-davos-great-reset/5797113?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
[2] Solutions locales pour un désordre global (2010)
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
http://www.reseau-amap.org/
[9] Solutions locales pour un désordre global (2010)
[10] Food Inc. (2008)
https://watchdocumentaries.com/food-inc/
[11] pp.7-8, Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, F. William Engdahl
[12] https://pediaa.com/what-is-the-difference-between-gmo-and-hybrid/
[13] p.32 Wie du dein eigenes Saatgut gewinnst und so ein kleines Stück Welt rettest, Sigrid Drage