Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest-ever environmental disaster

reply to post by schrodingers dog


Well, I agree that before any concise measures are taken education is the main priority. History has always been a race between education and tragedy, as some great mind once said.

But assuming the active part of society realises that we need to get our ability to produce natural healthy food restored in full, then yes, we need to bring back local agriculture based economies, with things like the local markets and biological agriculture. Seeds must be kept local and patent laws on anything related to agriculture must be ignored. And possibly there would be enough arable land and/or sea area to get energy independence.

I live on an island, we could be energy independent if we used kelp to make ethanol, which would also result in cleaner longer lasting engines, just as an example. GMO's for energy production might not be a bad idea, so I'm open to some Genetics work being done, but you're right, the key is people being educated, either by the system or by themselves. We are in the information age, I believe we can say today that people don't know if they don't want to know, the truth is really out there and if you read enough and wade through the disinfo after a couple of years it becomes obvious that we live in an elite controlled world that works against the common human being.

Knowing that makes the solutions clearer.

Thanks, I hope people read it, page five deals with seed and crops.

My opinion on GMO crops

From what I read Monsanto paid off the FDA. The FDA then said there was no difference between GMO crops and natural varieties, therefore no testing was required. WTO used the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) to force countries to allow GMO crops into their lands.





The big problem is GMO crops are not the great solution the advertizements make them out to be.

1. Often natural saved seed is better adapted to the location it is grown, requires less water, grows with natural fertilizer and is more pest resistant.

2. No testing was ever done to determine the enviornmental impact of GMO crops. This is especially true of the "terminator" gene. A gene that needs to be banned in all countries.

3. No testing was done to determine if there were any health hazards connected to GMO crops.

4. No tests were done to determine if the technique ( a virus I think) will allow the gene to jump species.


I do think it is foolish to not preserve old fashioned varieties of seed and livestock. I am not against GMO crops, but I think they need to be well tested before they are turned loose. I am appalled at Monsanto's AGRESSIVE enforcement of their patent rights on farmers who have not bought their seed. The real horror however are the new European Union Regs. on seed and Bush's agreement to "harmonize" US regs with the EU.




Remember the great Irish potatoe famine was caused by a dependence on monoculture

Originally posted by Zepherian
I don't really know what "we" are doing here, but yes, I did make a royal inbreeding reference

I'm serious, we are still living in the British empire, except it's being ruled by Germans.

European royalty never made sense, trust me.

I would just like to point out to those that trumpet the "Queen is a german" bollocks, that she is a direct descendant of King Harold, you know, the Anglo-Saxon King who died at Hastings in 1066 fighting the Scandanavian Norman's?

Most of the UK population is germanic in origin anyway, so what's your point?

Originally posted by Zepherian
Prince Charles talking about this makes me think of Bart Simpson saying "I didn't do it!" I think he's just glueing himself to what he knows will be the popular opinion, hoping nobody realises his bloodline is one of the most responsible for the status quo in the world today.

Not to pick on you specifically, Zepherian, but Charles is an avid farmer and environmentalist. Heknows that of which he speaks, rather than the politicans who know fudge all apart from what corporate sponsored scientists tell them.

reply to post by stumason


I'll give you a little star cause you're funny, but surely this could have been handled via U2U.
Anything to say bout the OP pretty please?

Already done. Nice!

[edit on 8/28/2008 by schrodingers dog]

Originally posted by schrodingers dog
I'll give you a little star cause you're funny, but surely this could have been handled via U2U.

He speaks the truth.

reply to post by stumason


I knew PC was an environmentalist, but a farmer? Surely not hands on.

I'm just glad he spoke up. The Telegraph seems to have a hold on this story. Is it been taken seriously in the UK or is flying under the radar?

Originally posted by schrodingers dog
I knew PC was an environmentalist, but a farmer? Surely not hands on.

He does, by all accounts, get hands on. But I suppose the lions share is done by employees, especially considering the considerable time he is expected to devote to Duties of State.

Organic and sustainable agriculture

The Prince grows and promotes organic food, although he drew some ridicule when he joked about sometimes talking to his house plants.[49]

In the early 1980s, the Prince moved to the Highgrove country estate in Gloucestershire, and became increasingly interested in organic farming. This culminated in 1990 with the launch of his own organic brand, Duchy Originals, the name of which reflects his title as the Duke of Cornwall.[50] The company sells a range of more than 200 organic and sustainably produced products, from garden furniture to food. All the profits go to The Prince's Charities Foundation, raising £6 million so far.[51] He is also patron of Garden Organic (formerly the Henry Doubleday Research Association), a campaigning UK charity dedicated to promoting organic growing and living.

The Prince regularly meets with farmers to discuss their trade. In Saskatchewan in 2001 the foot-and-mouth epidemic in the UK prevented Charles from visiting farms, however organic farmers came specifically to meet him at the Assiniboia town hall.[44]

He is co-author, with Charles Clover, environment editor of the Daily Telegraph (London), of Highgrove: An Experiment in Organic Gardening and Farming, published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. In 2004, the Prince founded the Mutton Renaissance Campaign, which aims to make mutton more attractive to Britons and hence support British sheep farmers.[52] He also called mutton his favorite dish.[53]

Wiki Linky

I'm just glad he spoke up. The Telegraph seems to have a hold on this story. Is it been taken seriously in the UK or is flying under the radar?

It was covered by the BBC as a main headline on news 24 for a couple of days after his announcement. Especially so when the Government got uppity about what he said.

reply to post by stumason


Ha, the good old Mutton Renaissance Campaign. Not so much for the muttons though.

One more question if I may as you seem well informed. Are GM products such as packaged foods/milk/meat indicated on the products that hit the supermarkets?

reply to post by schrodingers dog


I believe they should be labelled as containing GM ingredients, although I may be wrong on that. I am pretty sure that used to be the case but something is ringing in the back of my head about some EU legislation from earlier this year.....

EDIT:

he Agency supports consumer choice. We recognise that some people will want to choose not to buy or eat GM foods, however carefully they have been assessed for safety.

In the EU, if a food contains or consists of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), or contains ingredients produced from GMOs, this must be indicated on the label. For GM products sold 'loose', information must be displayed immediately next to the food to indicate that it is GM.

On 18 April 2004, new rules for GM labelling came into force in all EU Member States. These cover all GM food and animal feed, regardless of the presence of any GM material in the final product.

This means products such as flour, oils and glucose syrups have to be labelled as GM if they are from a GM source. Products produced with GM technology (cheese produced with GM enzymes, for example) do not have to be labelled.

Products such as meat, milk and eggs from animals fed on GM animal feed also don't need labelling.

Any intentional use of GM ingredients at any level must be labelled. But there is no need to label small amounts of approved GM ingredients (below 0.9% for approved GM varieties) that are accidentally present in a food.

Taken from the FSA website

[edit on 28/8/08 by stumason]

It's insane.
The first things that should send out alarm bells are dairy and meat products.
Nobody should really drink milk anyway past 16/17 anyway, but then again I shouldn't smoke either.
I'm just glad we can afford organic food. I'm sorry if that sounds snooty.

I am pretty sure the vast majority of elitist people eat organic healthy food. They just don't want anyone else to...

As for their bloodline, it's all mixed to be honest and I mentioned the German thing as more of a joke than something I actually believe in or hold against them. I am sure they have germans in the family, but like most elitists their families are pretty international. These days a lot of families are internationals, mine for example has Venezuelan, English, Portuguese and French, so it makes little sense to classify a bloodline by nationality. Or even genetics for that matter.

reply to post by Zepherian


Wait, are you saying I'm elitist because we buy organic food?

reply to post by schrodingers dog


Here in the US of A Monsanto took farmers to court for labeling their "organic milk" as being "artifical hormone free"

Milk is certainly better for you than soda. I figure my bones are good because of all the milk products I have consumed. I did not start gaining weight until after I quit drinking milk in quanity .(allergies brought on by food poison)

reply to post by schrodingers dog


No, I am saying some elitists know better than the average person the real nutritional and energetic value of foods and what really makes a good diet, and they try and manipulate popular culture to get people off healthy diets, so they can control malnourished, depressed and weak populations, as they have always done.

It takes an educated person to realise that industrial food, most of which is pretty tasty if we're honest, is actually mildly toxic, low on energy and causes a variety of health issues as well as probably a reduction of the average lifespan of a human being, which would probably be around or over a century with a low calory healthy diet.

reply to post by Zepherian


Could not agree with you more.
It's interesting though that this dynamic is manifested more in the most developed countries where laziness/convenience reigns. In a lot of less developed nations, especially in rural areas there are no supermarkets so people eat what they grow.
For me things have evolved in sudden leaps. I saw a video of how chickens were treated and that was it for me. Same thing when I saw the seal hunt in Canada to put me off most seafood. Little semi-relevant triggers for me to use as an excuse to switch eating patters. But these GMOs are just off the charts as far as poor agricultural management and population poisoning.

I just wanted to add this article for our UK friends:

How can I stay GM free?

With GM crops used in products from plastic to pants, buying organic is the best way to avoid them, says Lucy Siegle.

There is a decidedly retro feel to the sheepish return of GM to the UK. Like the transgenic crop version of a back-to-the-Nineties album, we find ourselves transported to the high emotions of a decade ago; Prince Charles kicking off on the radio and people in jumpsuits tearing up GM test sites (this time around a Leeds University potato trial).

Pulling up GM crops is one very literal way of attempting to stay GM free, but it is ill advised. Apart from the criminal-damage issue, this type of direct action plays into the hands of the GM cheerleaders, who like to label any opposition Luddite or unscientific, which it is not. It is impossible to set out all the scientific arguments against GM here (for a summary see Forum for the Future's Five Capitals model, www.forumforthefuture.org/node/4625). Suffice to say, a decade on from the outcry that effectively placed a moratorium on GM in the UK, many reservations remain, including the thorny issue of cross-contamination of non-GM crops.

The most effective way to fight GM as an individual is via your shopping list, as it was last time, when the wholesale rejection of the Flavr Savr tomato (in which the rotting gene had been removed) meant that retailers soon lost their appetite for transgenic wares.

Admittedly, this time it's more difficult. Last year a record 282.3m acres of the world's croplands were planted with GM soya beans, corn, cotton and other core GM crops, and some 90 per cent of conventional animal feed is thought to contain GM maize. This means it's easy to unwittingly support GM, especially through cotton, bioplastics (derived from GM corn) and processed food, meat and dairy. The best defence remains organic (GM ingredients are not permitted under organic standards), and meat and dairy from retailers - notably M&S - that specify GM free.

There is one departure from the Nineties debate: GM advocates are now citing the global food crisis as motivation. Strikingly, the biotech industry seems keen to play this down. As the chairman of Syngenta admitted to the Guardian recently, 'GM won't solve the food crisis, at least not in the short term.'

But then it's not the job of transnational biotech giants to feed the world. Their job is to make money for shareholders - the combined market value of the two big rivals Monsanto and Syngenta now exceeds $100bn. A decade on, the point remains that just as Flavr Savr are not the only tomatoes, GM is not the only system for growing food in the future. In many ways it could be the worst, not least because it thrives on monocultures and threatens the very basis of our ecology.

As physicist and campaigner against the privitisation of the world's croplands Vandana Shiva (www.navdanya.org) puts it: 'In any crisis, uniformity is the worst way to respond; diversity is resilience.' You won't get diversity with GM.
Guardian

The New Statesman has a fairly interesting take on how both Prince Charles and the UK ministers who disagree with him are wrong on some issues.

Companies regularly overstate the potential gains of GM by under-reporting average yields in conventional production; activists seize on individual crop failures to propose that the whole technology is corrupt. Meanwhile, academics are partial to the big bucks that industry offers for GM research and development, and governments fear to upset their legions of small farmers.

One side paints a picture of the world's poor being denied a technology that could hugely improve lives; the other side claims industrial agriculture's heavy gun is aimed directly at it. Both are probably wrong.
Source

Just updating the thread as it refers to the OP.

Here are the ten important unanswered questions posed by the Prince:

1. Do we need GM food in this country?
The Prince: The benefits, such as there are seem to be limited to the people who own the technology and the people who farm on an industrialised scale.

2. Is GM food safe for us to eat?

The Prince: Only independent scientific research, over a long period, can provide the final answer.

3. Why are the final rules for approving GM foods so much less stringent than those for new medicines produced using the same technology?

The Prince: Before drugs are released on to the market they have to undergo the most rigorous testing...Surely it is equally important that [GM foods] will do us no harm.

4. How much do we really know about the environmental consequences of GM crops?

The Prince: Lab tests showing that pollen from GM maize in the United States caused damage to the caterpillars of Monarch butterflies provide the latest cause for concern. More alarmingly, this GM maize is not under test.

5. Is it sensible to plant test crops without strict regulations in place?

The Prince: Such crops are being planted in this country now - under a voluntary code of practice. But English Nature has argued that enforceable regulations should be in place first.

6. How will consumers be able to exercise genuine choice?

The Prince: Labelling schemes clearly have a role to play, but if conventional and organic crops are contaminated by GM crops, people who wish to avoid GM food products will be denied choice.

7. If something goes wrong with a GM crop, who will be held responsible?

The Prince: It is important that we know precisely who is going to be legally liable to pay for any damage - whether it be to human health, the environment or both.

8. Are GM crops really the only way to feed the world's growing population?

The Prince: This arguments sounds suspiciously like emotional blackmail to me.

9. What effect will GM crops have on the people of world's poorest countries?

The Prince: Where people are starving, lack of food is rarely the underlying cause. The need is to create sustainable livelihoods for everyone. Will GM crops really help or will they make the problems worse?

10. What sort of world do we want to live in?

The Prince: Are we going to allow the industrialisation of Life itself, redesigning the natural world for the sake of convenience? Or should we be adopting a gentler, more considered approach, seeking always to work with the grain of nature?

progress.org