We are destroying our environment at an incredible pace. If that is not enough, we are also putting poisons in our drinking water (fluoride, chlorine) and even fill our teeth with a highly toxic mix of metals including mercury. Industrial agriculture has all but eliminated wholesome food and multinational companies want us to eat genetically modified foods. The "experts" advise us that a varied diet is all we need to stay healthy, but short of those who grow organic food in their own garden, who really eats all that well?
I say it's environmental clean-up time!
The European Union on Tuesday took the debate about genetically modified crops to the public with a survey asking citizens to share their thoughts on organic farming, reports Phys.org in a recent article titled EU asks citizens to join debate on GM food
The article continues ... The bloc's 500 million consumers are invited to complete an anonymous online questionnaire on the European Commission's Agriculture and Rural Development website (ec.europa.eu/agriculture/consultations/organic/2013_en.htm). The consultation, which ends on April 10, is part of a review of European policy on organic agriculture.
The survey is available in all official EU languages. English is the one linked here, but other languages are available from a drop-down menu at the top of the page.
The Phys.org article, putting emphasis on the GM angle, goes on to say...
Alex Ikonomidis is a Greek film maker who lived, studied and worked in Lebanon. After returning to his native Greece and serving his time in the military, he took up his profession there and was happily going along, producing in the world of media and advertising when, suddenly, the economic crisis hit. Through the crisis, Ikonomidis recognized that when money becomes more and more scarce, it is important to be where food is grown.
This brought him to embark on a documentary project. A Seed for Change is his soon-to-be-released feature length film documenting why agriculture must start with seed freedom. Chemical inputs are often toxic and are disruptive to human health and the environment. "Standardized" seeds, as imposed by the agro-chemical conglomerates through legislation pushed through in much of the civilized world, are destroying our heritage of biological diversity, created by nature and harnessed by farmers for producing our food over thousands of years.
The chemical companies will tell us that to kill pests we must poison them. The drawback is that after some time, the poison instals itself in the environment and even if we do not directly come in contact with it while trying to wipe out insects, we find traces of it in our food and drinking water, or drifting over from that neighboring field planted with soy beans that has just been sprayed to eliminate the bugs attacking the crop.
There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on Earth - mankind has named only about 1 million and of those, only about 1 thousand are considered "pest" species, and of these, already over 50% of these insects have become resistant to synthetic chemical pesticide poisons. Each year mankind loses about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals due to man's "ecological footprint. But, after poisoning the planet and contaminating every living thing for the last 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide poisons, man still has not successfully eliminated, or much less controlled, even one species of insect considered to be pests! And still, mankind continues to use more and more pesticides to try to "keep up"! Even with all of this expensive pollution - we continue to lose more and more crops and human lives each year to the use of pesticides.
Steve Tvedten (The Ideal Pesticide) is a former pesticide applicator - I think that is what you call the people that come to exterminate the ants or cockroaches in your back yard. He is a reformed pesticide applicator, since he got sick from being in contact with the chemical poisons. But he hasn't just stopped working with pesticides - he invented and patented a non-toxic form of pest control - using enzymes.
William Engdahl's book Seeds of Destruction takes on the hot theme of what is behind the development of genetically altered plants and their imposition by what seems sheer force, on the earth's population. The motives he finds are not something everyone will be comfortable with, but since we are the guinea pigs and the eventual target of the foods so produced, we better start looking.
You may have heard of Arpad Pusztai, a scientist of Hungarian origin who, working in the UK, discovered that genetically modified potatoes, when fed to laboratory animals, caused pathological changes of their organs. The head of the Rowett Institute, which had employed Pusztai, terminated his contract and ruined his career, one indication that there are dark forces at work that will attempt to prevent any damaging information about GMOs to reach the wider public.
Rats fed GM soy developed sick offspring, and the Russian researcher blowing the whistle on that has been similarly vilified and her career ended.
In India, sheep grazing on cotton plants modified to manufacture BT toxin, died in large numbers indicating that the toxin is not, as we are told, harmless to vertebrates.
William Engdahl has put these and other instances of damage and suppression of science together with historical information on the promoters of 'scientific agriculture' and his conclusions are disquieting.
