EN Afternoon Stories 8.10.13 Monsanto Getting Nobel Prize for Agriculture Next Week WFT? The prestigious World Food Prize is due to be handed out on World Food Day next week – October 16th – and though the 27 year old award was supposed to be given to groups or individuals whose innovations or actions led to a reduction in world hunger, for instance, one of the three laureates receiving the award this year is none other than Robert Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. This is disgusting considering the fact that Monsanto’s transgenic seeds produce very little in the way of actual food. Most of its GM corn is grown for animal feed, ethanol, and food additives such as high-fructose corn syrup. Yes, Monsanto has increased the amount of raw agricultural material, but it has done little to decrease hunger or improve the world’s food supply. Even with more than 420 million acres of GM crops planted to date, the number of those going hungry worldwide has increased – to the unconscionable total of one billion today. In 2007, an international study of agriculture and food production by 900 scientists in 110 countries found that “business as usual is not an option” for the future and that in order to feed the world we must move away from industrial agriculture and biotechnology, and instead invest in small-scale farming, access to markets and localized solutions. This is the opposite to what Monsanto does – its agricultural model is based on corporate control, making farmers so dependent on its technology that they are virtually unable to grow any actual food. Once a farmer buys Monsanto’s GM seed, he or she must also buy the necessary herbicides and other inputs to go with it—and is forbidden from saving any of the seed to plant the following year. Additionally, an increasing body of research is demonstrating that constant planting of Roundup-Ready corn is leading to significant growth of “superweeds”—weeds resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, one of the most common agricultural herbicides. Monsanto, like the World Food Prize, is purposely out of touch with what needs to be done to help restore some balance to our global food situation, and, if you’re looking for the real food heroes, the people who ARE making a positive impact, then, look instead to the Food Sovereignty Prize that was handed out last week. (An alliance of Haitian and Latin American peasant organisations - Group of 4 and the Dessalines Brigade/La Via Campesina - and agro-ecology experts won). It champions solutions coming from those most impacted by the injustices of the global food system: small-scale family farmers, fishers, workers, urban growers, and many others around the world. blog.whyhunger.org/2013/06/monsanto-wins-the-world-food-prize/
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 08:19:14 +0000
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