THE RECORD
May 10, 2000

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

In reply to Rose Hickling's query on the subject of genetically altered foods. The simplest answer I can give is that they are legalized obscenities. According to propaganda we need these GM seeds and foods to cut back on herbicide use and to feed the world's teeming billions.

Both are lies. It is being proven by a daily growing number of university studies that these seeds do not cut, but raise costs for the farmers and create more trouble than they're worth. While they may cut certain weed and bug infestations they virtually breed others. We went through this with chemical farming 40-50 years ago. When we killed one species others and the reactions to the chemicals caused more and more problems which are still growing, causing sickness and pollution all over the world.

In my 73 years I have seen a lot of these miracle cures for the world's problems, but rarely one that hadn't backfired in a big way. For example Chemical farming, nuclear power, globalization, overused anti-biotics and now this GM madness.

All of this is not required. The world does have the capacity to feed it's people, even with the 6 billion and growing, but it will take some courage to find ways to distribute the goods. The problem is not growing, but distributing under the present monetary/economic system that dispossesses the vast majority, while giving powers over life and death to a diminishing class of neo-colonizers.

Governments permit the proliferation of GM foods and seeds mainly because the companies that develop and sell them are large contributors to political parties in the developed countries like the USA, Canada, Britain and to a lesser extent those in Europe and Asia. This is also why our governments are fighting against the daily growing public demands and the insistence of the European Community for accurate labelling.

The Europeans also want to ban hormone and steroid grown beef, while the Canadian and US governments are fighting the ban at the WTO. Why? To protect their corporate sponsors.

Beef has been grown without implants for many thousands of years and probably the majority of the cattle here in the Cariboo are still being grown without them. Ours certainly are. However, when we sell our animals at the stockyards the feedlot buyers pump them full of chemicals as they're being loaded on the trucks.

This procedure is repeated every time the animals change hands. Some years ago there was an article in a farming magazine showing cases where the animals received 5-6 times the recommended dosages of anti-biotics and hormones. Nobody asks or knows what this does to humans?

There are no checks, or examinations, or any way to prevent this under the present system. No level of government would dare to look at this mistreatment of animals and of the public who eat the meat. If any government would just dare to ask questions they'd be labeled as being against "science, free enterprise and profits."

The situation is even worse with hogs, which are receiving even more chemicals than beef. Then, their own manure is being fed back to them for the consumption of the undigested foodstuffs it contains.

These things are some of the costs of globalization and the corporatization of agriculture that is destroying family farming.

Some factory farms in the USA are milking 50,000 cows twice a day under brutal conditions and now want to take over our Marketing Boards. This is the so called market system which will result in the expropriation and the colonization of the whole world into the hands of a few oligopolies.

It doesn't have to be this way. Few people know that wholesome, organic foods can be grown even today at lower than supermarket prices, but the system prevents their distribution. We have been doing it for many years on our farm in the Cariboo, but have no means to sell our products.

Some of our political Parties have been clamoring for many years for the introduction of property rights into our Constitution, copying the USA. What they don't say is that the purpose of the property rights clause in the US Constitution was on the insistence of the slave owners, who considered human beings as properties an wanted to keep them that way.

Yes, everybody must have the right to property for security and well being. Unfortunately, in our society the concept of legitimate property rights has been distorted into rights to expropriate the properties of others for the benefit of a ruling minority.

This brings us back to genetically modified seeds and foods and the rights of so called "intellectual property", eagerly demanded by our governments. They want to make it a law that if a company discovers some new money making scheme by filling our bodies with garbage, we should accept it in the name of the right to profits.

They don't seem to realize, or are paid not to, that one of the most fundamental property rights is the right for free decision making and the right to eat wholesome, unpoisoned, unmodified foods, breathe clean air and the freedom from the violence of propaganda brainwash.

Copyright (c) 2000, West's International