Vandana Shiva may have found a home amongst anti-GMO and anti-globalization protesters like Occupy Honolulu, but sadly, her Hawai‘i speaking tour glosses over the real problem of poverty and hunger throughout the world — especially famine and malnutrition in her
Vandana Shiva may have found a home amongst anti-GMO and anti-globalization protesters like Occupy Honolulu, but sadly, her Hawai‘i speaking tour glosses over the real problem of poverty and hunger throughout the world — especially famine and malnutrition in her own country of India.
Today, India produces 204 million tons of grain a year.
To produce that quantity using the 1960s techniques (non-GMO) advocated by Shiva would require three times as much land under cultivation.
If India had stuck to traditional methods instead of embracing biotechnology, it would be seeing millions of deaths every year – and it would have plowed under all the wild land.
GMO isn’t killing people in India. Starvation is.
While we can accept Shiva’s religious and philosophical opposition to genetic modification, we do not respect her very extreme condemnation of environmentalist and international journalist, Mark Lynas, when he renounced his long-held belief that genetically modified foods were dangerous.
Just last week, Lynas apologized to the world for spending years ripping up GM crops.
He said, “I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid-1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment. As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.”
Unfortunately, Shiva continues to turn her back on the technology — and the more than 1 billion people in her own country facing famine.
For people still on the fence about GM foods, Lynas offers an unbiased perspective that is based simply on scientific fact and one that forced him to take a second look at his previous anti-GMO position currently being perpetuated by Shiva and her Hawai‘i followers.
After reading the overwhelming amount of credible, respected, published, scientific evidence, he discovered that his cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.
• Myth: GM crops increase the use of chemicals.
The Truth: Pest-resistant cotton and maize need less insecticide.
• Myth: GM benefits only the big companies.
The Truth: Billions of dollars of benefits are accruing to farmers because they need fewer inputs.
• Myth: Terminator Technology is robbing farmers of the right to save seed.
The Truth: Hybrids did that long ago and Terminator never happened.
• Myth: No one wants GM.
The Truth: Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soy into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them. Today more than 15 million farmers — 90 percent in developing countries — are growing GM crops.
• Myth: GM is dangerous.
The Truth: GM is safer and more precise than conventional breeding. GM just moves a couple of genes whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.
In his book, “The God Species,” Lynas junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale: “We are going to have to feed 9.5 billion hopefully much less poor people by 2050 on about the same land area as we use today, using limited fertilizer, water and pesticides and in the context of a rapidly-changing climate.”
The recent extreme drought and freezing temperatures across the United States are the latest challenges facing our farmers.
He continues: “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. So my conclusion is very clear: The GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe — over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm. You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have died from choosing organic, but no-one has died from eating GM.”
As he found, scientific consensus was rock-solid about the safety of GMO foods, backed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association, the British Royal Society, health institutes and national science academies around the world.
But as he knows only too well about Shiva and her anti-GMO activists, “This inconvenient truth is ignored because it conflicts with their ideology.”
Lynas challenges all of us, “Question your beliefs in this area to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence … and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs” or non-governmental organizations like Occupy Honolulu.
But to the anti-GM lobby, he says, “You are entitled to your views. But you must know by now that they are not supported by science. We are coming to a crunch point, and for the sake of both people and the planet, now is the time for you to get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with feeding the world sustainably.”
So do your homework. Read his speech and decide for yourself.
