As the USDA moves dangerously close to deregulating GMOs, the companies behind GMO soy and corn—80 percent of which is used for ethanol fuel or to feed animals on factory farms—continue to feed the media their favorite line: The global population is soaring! We need GMOs to feed the world!
“Feeding the world” was never Monsanto’s motivation for developing Roundup-Ready crops. Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) was always motivated by money, which the company makes hand-over-fist by selling billions of dollars’ worth of chemicals.
An article by Timothy Wise published this week in Medium takes aim at the feeding the world myth:
U.N. agencies have documented rising levels of severe hunger in the world, affecting 820 million people. More than 2 billion suffer “moderate or severe” food insecurity. During the same period, the world is experiencing what Reuters called a “global grains glut,” with surplus agricultural commodities piled up outside grain silos rotting for want of buyers.
Obviously, growing more grain is not reducing global hunger.
Obviously.
As Wise points out, the world already grows more than enough food to feed 10 billion people, which is nearly 3 billion more than currently live on Earth.
People are hungry because they don’t have money to buy food. Or because war, or climate change, have ravaged their land and in many cases, forced them to migrate.
People are hungry because they have no power—over land, water and other food-producing resources.
Paving the way for corporations to rush more GMOs to market isn’t about feeding the world. It’s about feeding the bank accounts of those corporations—and making sure they can never be held accountable for any of the “unintended consequences” of the industrial commodity crops and junk food they unleash on the world.
Our job is to spread the word far and wide—that the path to food security runs not through genetic engineering labs, but through better land stewardship, better food policies and better support for the small-scale farmers who are really feeding the world. You can help.
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