The Real Villain in the World Food Crisis

original-huffingtonpost



The Real Villain in the World Food Crisis

Carl Pope

What's behind the world food crisis? Yes, the growing world population is a huge contributor to the need for more food. Yes, reckless food- and oil-seed-based biofuel subsidies have added to the problem. Yes, the climate crisis will contribute enormously. Yes, greater prosperity by previously vegetarian consumers in India and China will increase demand for feed grains.

But the media only occasionally touch on why we are having this particular food crisis: market fundamentalism and the privatization of world food security. Sunday's New York Times has a devastating article on the dismantling over the past 20 years of the network of publicly funded and accountable agricultural research centers.

What was supposed to take the place of public research? Privatized, market-driven, corporate research. How were they going to ensure food security? By developing genetically modified foods. What would motivate them? Profit -- geared to patented GMO (genetically modified organism) seed varieties. These patented seeds would cost more, but farmers' yields would go up so much that the world would be better off. Unfortunately, the hard truth is that GMOs have actually made the world's food supply smaller -- because the varieties developed for crops like soy beans and cotton, thus far at least, have yields that are lower than the conventional strains they replace.

This might mean that GMO crops simply can't produce the continually increasing crop yields that their advocates have promised. But it is also fair to say that we have no real idea whether they can or can't, because the privatized market for developing GMOs has almost no interest in crop yield per se -- it has been developed for purposes such as making crops that are more tolerant of the herbicide Roundup.

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complete artcle here

Thanks for the article. bookmarked for reading when I get home.

Remember when apples tasted like apples instead of cardboard?

It is really hard to find good tasting vegetables anymore unless you grow your own or go to a farmers market.

The sense of smell told you a lot about produce but today you can't smell ripeness or anything. Now all is based on site, the produce looks yummy but really isn't.

alluded to in the movie Omen II, as 'famine' being the 'emerging industry' into the 21st C.

We will pay very dearly for GM genes infecting our real food.

the food quality of supermarket food changing around 1999.
Things in the fruit and veggie isles seemed to rot faster,taste crappier and it never seemed to satisfy.

I think this food crisis is gonna make a few assholes who don't deserve to live, become very much richer.Soon will be water,for a price.Always for a price.,Since when was existence determined to be a pay as you go situation?

It wasn't always this way.Food once came from the Earth for free.
Now we pay for what was once, free..because of a belief.
A fucking belief!!!

(I hate it when I mess up and get the your post wasn't successful page and end up posting my post twice.grrr)

And RoundUp contains formaldehyde - though Monsanto lied through its teeth leaving that compound off the list of ingredients it handed EPA in order to get the license.