Saturday, August 16, 2014

Comment on a news article that's blatantly lying about GM


My comment on it:

This article has put in blatant opinions and lies disguised as facts. Please sack this writer.. he has completely lied in this article (if not, please publish the sources and their employers) Since the introduction of BT cotton, over 2 lakh farmers have committed suicide directly because the BT cotton has disastrously failed to stay pest-resistant beyond the intial few years.. which was the one thing it was supposed to do. Now they have to pay for high-royalty seeds from Monsanto as well as increasing pesticide costs. The growing pile of dead bodies isn't lying.
The statement "GM technologies can control pests and reduce insecticide usage, help farmers in managing weeds and also save crops from drought, flood, heat, cold, disease or viruses." --- where's the evidence? Last I checked, all those CLAIMS by the GM companies have been proven wrong by long term studies (the companies only conducted 90 day trials whereas Seralini etc were 2 year trials). A UN report recently has categorically refuted this claim and instead asserted that it is small scale multi-cropping organic farming that is drought-resistant, pest-resistant, higher yielding etc. Honest studies where these are compared side by side under identical conditions are all showing these same conclusions. 
The author glaringly also skips mentioning all the countries and states around the globe that have BANNED these same field trials because of the evidence of harmfulness on the one hand and the absence of any real evidence of advantages on the other.
Even the global decline in bee populations has been attributed to the pesticides, herbicides like Roundup being sold by these same GM companies that have to be bought together with their GM seeds. That's causing another wave of bans on the pesticides / herbicides being sold by these companies.
It is the profiteering GM companies like Monsanto that are being anti-science.. peddling their failed technology to third world countries because they're being systematically kicked out of developed nations. Their scientists which the author is quoting here without bothering to mention name or organisation, will of course peddle their case since they are paid to do so. Can the author find any serious scientific backing for GM that has NOT been funded by the GM companies?
My apologies for not being able to put in any links to all these studies right now. But just do a google search on any of them and you'll find them immediately. Thanks. And please fire this author... this article is full of fraudulent claims disguised as sun-rises-in-the-east kind of facts.

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Another comment there:

And just another little piece of info : it is important to explain to the reader what "Field trial" in farming really means. It is not the same as field trials in medicine. A field trial in GM farming means that you're growing GM plants out in the open, from where their pollen is going to fly freely into other fields near and far. There is absolutely no way of stopping this. A medical analogy of such a field trial would be to spray an experimental virus or bacteria into the air over a populated area. After this trial, several other fields near and far will also produce seeds having the GM strain. If it is UNSAFE (which is what we're testing in the first place), we will have INFECTED all the surrounding regions during the field trial. So, a field trial for GM food is simply anti-logical : there's no "trial" here. You're permanently introducing untested, unreliable DNA into the population. Also not mentioned here is that this is how Monstanto's GM cotton species TOOK OVER India's traditional cotton... it was grown without permission in "field trials" when there wasn't much awareness about it among citizens or govt, and in some years the DNA spread to several other cotton fields and its spread became unstoppable.
So permitting a "Field Trial" of GM wheat, rice, brinjal etc will effectively bring the untested GM strains to wheat, rice, brinjal etc all over the country, and there is no way of checking this spread. THAT's why there was a moratorium put on this. Field trial = forced introduction of GM into the food chain.

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