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Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle
Ben Shahn Daughter of Virgil Thaxton, farmer, near Mechanicsburg, Ohio 1938
But first I would like to touch on a closely connected issue, which is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘war’ on GMOs. Taleb, of Black Swans fame, has been at it for a while, but he’s stepped up his efforts off late.
In 2014, with co-authors Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, he published The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms), an attempt to look at GMOs through a ‘solidly scientific’ prism of probability and complex systems. From the abstract:
The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of “black swans”, unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence.
[..] We believe that the PP should be evoked only in extreme situations: when the potential harm is systemic (rather than localized) and the consequences can involve total irreversible ruin, such as the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Corporations are Being Removed From the Food Supply
HOW THE CORPORATIONS ARE BEING REMOVED FROM THE FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN
The Poverty of Capitalism
The above quote is made by John Hilary, director of the NGO War on Want sums it all in his recent book The Poverty of Capitalism. The industrial food system is characterized by economic focus through an outgrowth of a long and on-going process that has allowed major agribusinesses—companies that supply the chemicals, seeds, equipment and services that are critical to industrial farms—to greatly determine and influence the modern food system. It’s estimated that in 2004 only 8% of farms in the US accounted for 72% of sales.
Further, the top ten seed firms were estimated to control the entire world seed market and the top ten agrochemical corporations controlled 84% of the $30 billion agrochemical market. Further, only six corporations – Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta, Bayer and BASF – control 75% of the world pesticides market, Factory farms now account for 72 percent of poultry production, 43 percent of egg production, and 55 percent of pork production worldwide and only four corporations – ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus – control more than 75% of the global grain trade who overwhelmingly push commodity crops like corn and soy on local farmers at the expense of native crops.
The major aim of most of these agri-corporations the world over is to earn profit through their operations. They are more concerned with their own interests and not those of the public. The policies of these organizations are usually profit oriented. The underlying policy is profit making leaving other superficial benefits constant. With the hegemony of transnational food corporations, food production has been reduced to becoming a model of profit generation instead of producing quality food production. Food is considered to be one of the basic requirements for humans to survive, and agriculture is one of the largest employers/ occupations in the world.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
