The World’s Silent Battle Without Guns
Since the very beginning of all agriculture on earth, man has been plagued with insects which have cut short our bountiful harvests. True, droughts have also been the cause of a much lowered harvest, but the farmer found they were able to control pests from devouring a large quantity of what had been planted using pesticides…And now comes Genetic Modification(GM) of our seed.
Crop Savior, Or Destroyer, GM Now Being Exposed
True, here in the U.S., the goal to finally release us from the bonds of the use of fossil fuels by our virtually fruitless attempt in producing Ethanol in our hopes to replacing gasoline as a fuel is having a devastating effect on corn production for food in this country. Given that the U.S. is a major exporter of this food crop is having a major effect on world pricing, which includes a wide range of corn derived products for both human and animal feed consumption. GM claims to increase yield of crops has been found to be only a marketing ploy and instead, farms in India and many other nations using GM are finding much less crop yield from its use, even to a point of bankruptcy. It is being used by some farmers here in the U.S. and thus a double whammy for all involved.
A Major new study shows that modified soya, using GM seed produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent. We certainly do not need to lower production yield of any food crop. The answer is simple. The battle to ban it is not.
Some Recent Findings And Opinions On GM
Last week the biggest study of its kind ever conducted – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger
More and more studies are being conducted through many universities and their findings are very close in their results, namely that GM seed produce less, yes from 6 to 11 percent less and these tests were conducted using normal untreated seed grown side by side in the same fields. It was found that only when extra manganese, which increased cost was the GM seed crop able to increase its yield near the level of the normal crop seed.
Professor Barney Gordon, of the university’s department of agronomy grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one. Simple common sense tells us that if this were adopted worldwide, the odds are very great that global agriculture would be greatly limited in feeding our expanding global population and probably bankrupt some developing country farmers.
Professor Bob Watson, the director of the study and chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when asked if GM could solve world hunger, said: “The simple answer is no.”
