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Occam Bandage Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu May-28-09 11:43 PM
Original message
GMO foods banned as Zimbabwe starves
The Zimbabwean
GMO foods banned...as nation starves

Zimbabwe’s main consumer rights group, the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ), has started raiding shops and supermarkets found selling Genetically Modified Foods (GMO) on grounds that it is unhealthy.

Most supermarkets and shops in the country’s biggest cities are flooded with GMO foods imported from South Africa and Brazil as local industries are still struggling to find their feet after a decade-long economic crisis. President Robert Mugabe is blamed for pursuing ill-advised economic policies that impacted on all sectors of the economy. Most industries were forced to close shop or relocate to neighbouring countries. As a result of the failure of local businesses, companies from neighbouring countries have flooded the local market, stockpiling shops and supermarkets with imported foods.

According to the CCZ, this has allowed GMO foods into the shops and supermarkets. CCZ which fights for the rights of consumers last week started to inspect and recommend that shops selling GMO foods should be closed. CCZ said the GMO foods which have flooded Zimbabwewere mostly powered milk, meal- mealie, rice and chicken. “We have received a lot of reports of people, mainly children, getting sick after consuming the foods which in most cases will be expired,” said Comfort Muchekeza, the CCZ spokesperson. “We have raided and closed several shops and supermarkets in Bulawayo for selling expired GMO foods. We are working with the health ministry to bar GMO foods from entering the country. The health ministry has mounted check-up points at the country’s borders to inspect foodstuffs coming to into the country.”

(more)

http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/2009052621425/news/gmo-foods-bannedas-nation-starves.html


Problem the first: There isn't enough food in Zimbabwe, so people are starving.
Problem the second: Because people are starving, they're eating food that's past its expiration date, and getting sick as a result.
Solution: Ban the importation of food!
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vadawg Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu May-28-09 11:50 PM
Response to Original message
1. dumbass just does not describe the government her, wish the brits would just invade
remove the government and at least feed the people and get the agriculture going again.
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Name removed Donating Member (0 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:24 AM
Response to Reply #1
5. Deleted message
Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.
 
vadawg Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:50 AM
Response to Reply #5
8. lol, yeah i guess starving to death is better, im pretty sure the people dieing dont care if they
are fed by white british soldiers, black african soldiers or bloody green soldiers, they need food, britain has a responsibility to that part of africa and who said anything about control, as i said when you are starving you take the help you can get, mayby you need to go see some famine then you will understand.
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HarukaTheTrophyWife Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:52 AM
Response to Reply #8
9. The UN should help them
We don't need to turn them into a fucking colony. Of course, British colonies NEVER experience famine.

:eyes:
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vadawg Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:55 AM
Response to Reply #9
10. yeah like the UN has done such a great stellar job up until now
personally i would let the commonwealth do it, plenty of troops, get in there replace the government feed the people. lol you seem to have this bigotry against anything British so it shouldnt surprise me.
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Name removed Donating Member (0 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:58 AM
Response to Reply #10
11. Deleted sub-thread
Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.
 
HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 08:47 AM
Response to Reply #1
13. You do realize that the government has already changed, right?
Morgan Tsvangirai is now Prime Minister in a power sharing arrangement.
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HarukaTheTrophyWife Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 11:53 AM
Response to Reply #13
15. There's a lot of things that poster hasn't realized
Like, the north won.
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Lethe Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu May-28-09 11:54 PM
Response to Original message
2. wow, it would be great to know which foods in US are GMO
but we don't because it's against the law to label a food as GMO in america

1. starvation is not an agricultural problem, it's an economic problem
2. conventional plant breeding can and will and has provided more nutrition to more people than GMO foods ever will

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RaleighNCDUer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:08 AM
Response to Reply #2
3. Yep. It has been discovered that a single gene can have up to four
different purposes, when 'switched on' in different combinations with other genes, so start gene splicing food crops and you never know what you are going to get. That 'fix' to make it more resistant to pests, may also make it carcinogenic.

Monoculture GMO crops will be the death of millions.
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MrScorpio Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:16 AM
Response to Original message
4. The World Bank and the IMF are hard at work
Ain't globalism fun?
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Occam Bandage Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:32 AM
Response to Reply #4
6. Zimbabwe demonstrates that rejecting the international community can be even more destructive
than embracing it.
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Lethe Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 12:49 AM
Response to Reply #6
7. the EU has banned GMO crops
not exactly the "international community" as you put it

more like rejecting the multinational chemical corporations.


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HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 08:49 AM
Response to Reply #6
14. More like the international community rejecting Zimabwe
You might want to check the chronology. It's an interesting story, and not the one typically told in the mainstream media.
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HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 08:45 AM
Response to Original message
12. To think that for over a decade, Zimbabwe had one of the world's most successful land reform program
Edited on Fri May-29-09 09:07 AM by HamdenRice
From roughly 1980 through the mid 1990s, Zimbabwe had one of the world's most successful land reform programs. Commentators from across the spectrum analyzed it and held it up as a model for other countries -- from the South African Department of Land Affairs on the left, to the World Bank on the right, to the British overseas development council, everyone who analyzed it was impressed.

The program involved the compensated expropriation of land from the bloated, inefficient, "white" farm sector. These farmers had farms of anywhere between 2,000 to 15,000 acres. They rarely used most of that land, and often held the rest as game reserves, which they charged wealthy overseas adventurers large fees to shoot exotic animals. They also spent scarce foreign exchange on tractors, parts, fuel and other inputs.

In the tradition of southern African white farmers, they did not actually do physical labor, but hired African farm laborers to do the work -- farm laborers who had the skills to carry out farming on their own, if most of the Africans' best land had not been expropriated and turned over to whites from the early to mid 1900s.

According to the 1980 Lancaster House settlement of the Zimbabwean civil war, these farmers were targeted for expropriation and land reform, with the compensation to be paid in British pounds sterling or American dollars. Because of the scarcity of foreign exchange, the compensation was to be funded by the British and American governments.

The farms were distributed to tens of thousands of skilled African farmers, many of them resettled from Zimbabwe's impoverished, crowded black reservations, or "reserves" or "tribal areas." Each white farm could accommodate dozens or even hundreds of small scale black commercial farmers, who used less capital intensive and more labor intensive and animal intensive methods to grow much more food and goods per acre.

By the early 1990s, small scale black farmers were producing more food and agricultural goods than Zimbabwe's white farmers, on both an aggregate, value added, and per acre basis. Human development index studies of resettled black farmers showed that by almost every measure, resettled farmers had dramatically improved their standard of living, and in particular the well-being of women and children had increased.

It's too bad the British and Americans cut off funding for Zimbabwe's land reform program. In a fit of pique, the British and Americans ended the program over their concerns about corruption, the increasingly anti-Democratic drift of Mugabe's politics and the diversion of some of the expropriated farms to wealthy Mugabe supporters through corruption.

Without dollars and pounds sterling provided by the British and Americans, it became obviously impossible to continue the land reform program as envisioned in the Lancaster House agreement, which is to say, compensated in international currency.

The cut off of British and American funding for Zimbabwe's land reform program is the excuse Mugabe gave for then turning to unorganized, uncompensated and ultimately unsuccessful land reform through land seizure and his increasingly dictatorial and irrational stances.

Yesterday, however, the leading expert on Zimbabwe in the United States, Jeffrey Herbst, wrote an op-ed in the NY Times calling for a resumption of aid to Zimbabwe and the re-integration of Zimbabwe into the community of nations, because Mugabe has finally formed a coalition government with his long term opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change and has appointed Morgan Tsvangirai, Prime Minister.

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Karenina Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 01:14 PM
Response to Original message
16. GMO "foods" are a Trojan Horse.
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HiFructosePronSyrup Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-29-09 01:19 PM
Response to Reply #16
17. Did you read the rest of the site?
It's loony woo woo quackery.
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