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Part I 

Farming, Manifold Landscape

And The Socalled "Third Industrial Revolution" Part II


The biologist and FAZ - science journalist Joachim Müller-Jung explains enthused the pretended boom in that "third industrial revolution "; he speaks of „Rekord hunting" and romanticizes: „The seventh year in succession the growing of genetically engineered cash crops has increased, and admittedly more powerful than ever: for at least nine millions hectare, or 15 percent on now 67, 7 Millions hectare worldwide. (.. .) more than seven millions farmers in eighteen countries" shall have referred to genetically engineered kinds in the earlier last year „more than one million more as in the year before. And that is supposed to be only the beginning" (1). In respect to the new law on GMOs in Germany, which forcibly prescribes labelling and thus offers the possibility to the consumer to decide himself between genetically modified food  products and those, containing no GMOs - Mr. Müller-Jung says lapidary: the Minister for Consumers and Agriculture Mrs. Renate Künast has generated therewith a „poisoned political climate and promoted" (2) and „sat down a signal, that must hit those, who work at the 'innovations' of the green genetic engineering, deeply" (3).

The Biotec - industry was after all accustomed from countries like the United States, Argentina, Romania, Bulgaria, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, India, Uruguay and even Spain to pushing it’s products unrecognized underneath the consumer’s food. Here and there a few backhander -- and the drawing up of clearance certificates and the approbations for the cultivation of the GM - kinds functioned - as it turned out recently in some cases.

The new numbers of the international agriculture agency (ISAAA), who evaluates annually the cultivation data from all countries, have prompted Mr. Müller-Jung to give a shout of triumph: „The green genetic engineering is on the advance "( 4). -- but also the refusal of the green genetic modification in the population! - even in the USA.

Scientists being tarred with the same brush as Mr. Müller-Jung estimate the spread of the green genetic modification as a type of natural necessity. They praise this aberration as especially prodigiously innovation within humanly technology and describe themselves and congenial scientist as open-minded and impartial - though it applies the exactly opposit.**

What is a critical consumer thinking about, if he is reading the followings in the FAZ : Bulgarian farmers planted on some thousand hectare transgenic cash crops, or in Romania „the area under cultivation with genetically changed soy plants increased even for 50 percent on now 70.000 hectare "( 5), or „besides the United States count Argentina, Canada, China, South Africa and Brazil to the most important user-states of the green genetic engineering. All  six states together own 99 percent of the global acreage with transgenic plants. With each more than 50.000 hectare follow behind it Australia, India, Romania and Uruguay" (6).

The critical consumer who is not brushing aside his worries, thinks the landscape in those countries get corrupted (how such landscapes look like is described below) and agricultural products, bee products, as well apitherapeutic compounds ( propolis, honey, pollens etc.) from these countries can be no longer unseen purchased. Who tells me, that those products are not contaminated with GMOs? People will runaround to other countries to purchase the product or take care to an exactly identification and labelling. Not unreasonably more farmers go organic,  close themselves ( also conventional farmers) together and found a „GM-free zone ", and more beekeepers are interested in international certification systems like T+T Certification system.*

According the FAZ even „the President of the German Farmer's Union, Mr. Gerd Sonnleitner, who still before a few years was a supporter of each innovation on the field, has himself therefore positioned sceptical "( 7).

Many scientists in institutions as USDA, USAID, (two of the most active pro-GM organisations in the world as reported below), including billionaires, who want to help the poor and suffering people by their high donations amounts ( but cause the opposit, as the case Bill Gates shows)  - comply with dusty materialistic ideologies. A little practised judgement and an unspiritual world view are not sufficient, to look through aberration in science, technology and medicine, as little as a person who is sleeping, can see while he sleeps, that he will be stolen very easily by a robber.

All this is the reason why farmers, who are experienced with GMOs and side effects warn all the others not to listen to GMO promotion agancies and their allies. American consumer associations give us a "who is who" or "WHO DO YOU TRUST?" especially regarding trustworthiness of USDA: The Bush Administration gave the USDA Secretary of Agriculture position to Anne Veneman (who once served on Monsanto's Calgene Board of Directors). She appointed Dale Moore as her Chief of Staff. Prior to playing his new role of "protecting" consumers from food safety threats like Mad Cow Disease, Dale Moore was the chief lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

According to Reuters 2003 Canadian farmers with first hand experience growing genetically modified (GMO) crops say the technology will damage Britain's booming organic food sector and leave fields strewn with "super weeds" grown from stray, leftover seeds. "I took the decision to stop growing GM canola (the Canadian variant of rapeseed) because it was impossible to stop it spreading to other fields -- the seeds cling to the machinery and are easily transferred, even with intensive cleaning," David Bailey, a Saskatchewan-based farmer told Reuters. "My neighbours all had the same problem," he added. But suppliers of GM seeds say the majority of Canadian growers are not complaining. "Conservative estimates indicate that 65 percent of the Canadian canola crop in 2002 was genetically modified. It can only capture this portion of the market if it offers significant advantages to Canadian farmers," a spokesman for the London-based Agriculture Biotechnology Commission (ABC), which represents major biotech firms like Monsanto, said. Jim Robbins, a Canadian grower who is converting from conventional to organic farming and who is also talking with UK farmers this week, said GMO crops would ruin the livelihoods of organic farmers. "You can't grow organic canola in Canada anymore, simply because the GM variety exists," Robbins said. "The potential problems with GM crops have been well documented in the UK -- our experiences bear out these concerns." A group representing 1,000 organic farmers in the Saskatchewan province has already taken out a class-action suit against two major manufacturers of GMO crops for making it impossible for them to grow rapeseed on their land, since they can no longer guarantee that it is GM-free. But David Bailey said Canada's farming sector is now facing an even bigger GM threat, this time from wheat, which U.S. biotech giant Monsanto is keen to introduce. "With GM canola, we lost a C$300-400 million (a year) market share because Europe stopped importing it. If Canada grows GM wheat, we stand to lose much, much more than that. It will shut off even bigger and more important markets for us," Bailey said. Monsanto has been conducting field trials in western Canada to develop GM "Roundup Ready" wheat for around three years. The plants are genetically altered to be unaffected when the herbicide "Roundup" is used on the fields to control weeds. What say the studies? In two separate studies, UK researchers have found that bees carrying GM rapeseed pollen had contaminated conventional plants more than 26 kilometres (16 miles) away and that if farmers grew GM rapeseed for one season, impurities could stay in the soil for up to 16 years if not "rigorously controlled." Britain's public are also highly sceptical of GM crops. There are no GM crops in the ground in the UK at present and no imminent plantings. (8)

Suzanne Goldenberg Carman/Manitoba reports in the Guardian (UK): Under the vast bowl of a clear summer sky, cheery yellow splashes of canola light up the prairies for miles. The sight of it makes Reg Stow's heart sink. When Reg and his wife, Beverley, started farming as a young Canadian couple in the early 1960s, canola, as the local version of oilseed rape is known, was the crop they could count on. If the bottom dropped out of the price on the other crops they were growing on their 2,300 acres in the fertile farmlands of Manitoba, they always knew that canola would come through for them. No more. The Stows resisted the introduction of genetically modified canola seven years ago, unlike their neighbours. But it started growing in their fields anyway, as the pollen was brought in by the wind from surrounding farms. There is no distinguishing their fields from those of their neighbours. Now Canada is awaiting the second wave of biotech with Monsanto, the creator of GM canola, working to put a GM version of wheat on the market. The Stows see it as a disaster in the making. "A company should not be able to come in and wreck a livelihood," said Mr Stow. "If they do here with wheat what they've already down with canola, then we are lost." British farmers have been looking to Canada as the closest parallel to UK conditions with similar crops and markets. As in Britain, GM has been marketed as providing higher production for lower overheads but it is clear that after seven years' experience cross-contamination with other crops has occurred on a large scale. In Canada, reservations about the second generation of GM have spread like brushfire. The new strain manipulates the DNA of the most widely grown variety of bread wheat to make it resistant to Roundup, Monsanto's leading weedkiller, which accounts for 40% of the company's sales. Monsanto argues that GM wheat will cut costs and increase yields by simplifying weed control. It could enter production by 2005, pending government approval. But the major producer associations - the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the smaller, leftwing National Union of Farmers, and the Canadian Wheat Board, which exercises a near-monopoly on sales - are adamantly opposed to the GM wheat, branded Roundup Ready, and have called on the government to block it. The uproar over Roundup Ready is rare for Canada, where consumers have unknowingly eaten food with GM ingredients for years, because there is no labelling requirement. As much as 80% of canola grown in Canada is genetically modified. But far more is at stake now. Wheat is the lifeblood of western Canada, which produces up to 25m tonnes a year - or nearly 20% of the world's supply of bread, pasta and cake flour. The crop brings in 4bn Canadian dollars (£1.8bn) each year, and 85% of those earnings is from exports. If Canada embraces GM wheat, those earnings would collapse because its customers in Europe and Asia have said they will not buy it. "About 82% of our customers say they do not want to receive any GM wheat in our products," said Gord Flaten, a marketing director for the Canadian Wheat Board, which exercises al most sole control over the marketing of Canada's wheat production. "It should not be introduced." Europe's ban on GM products would force Canada to segregate conventional wheat ruthlessly from the Roundup variety. However, many in the industry are sceptical that Canada's aging storage and transport system can offer such guarantees, and fear it would lose its reputation for high quality wheat. "You can find Roundup Ready canola almost anywhere you look," said Rene Van Acker, a plant scientist at the University of Manitoba, and author of a study critical of the GM wheat variety. "Nobody gives it a second look any more." Agronomists expect a similar outcome with GM wheat. (9)

John Vidal, the Guardian's environment editor gives a note on prominent supporters of Biotech: Bill Gates wants to do public good with the immense profits of his IT empire, and over the past few years his foundation has given more than $6.5bn to global causes. The money has been well-received as socially useful and, generally, sensibly directed. But this week the Gates Foundation, the largest philanthropic organisation in the world, was strongly criticised when it gave $25m to GM research to develop vitamin and protein-enriched seeds for the world's poor. In scientific terms, this is not a lot of money, but it is expected to be just a first tranche and to stimulate what the GM companies say is the second generation of GM crops - those that are potentially of some real use to ordinary people. Gates was bitten hard by international charities, farmers' groups and academics in Europe, India and elsewhere, who argued that the money would not go to addressing poverty, the root cause of worldwide hunger, but would promote an agriculture that was of little use to the very poor. He was further accused of being captured by an industry now using the hungry as a "Trojan horse" to get its biotech into poor countries. The foundation, and the research organisations who will spend his money, deny all charges, saying that the poor are in desperate need of vitamins and micro nutrients, and arguing that GM will give the poorest a choice. But there are reasons to believe that the Gates food agenda is now being shaped by US corporate and govern ment interests. The Gates Foundation has recently appointed a Kenyan ex-Monsanto scientist to one of its boards, and last year joined Kraft foods, a subsidiary of Philip Morris, the world's largest and most profitable tobacco corporation, in a programme to add vitamins to conventionally grown foods. Gates, moreover, has chosen for his latest venture to partner the US Department of Agriculture and USAID, Washington's overseas aid organisation  - two of the most active pro-GM organisations in the world. Also helping with money or research, are several US government groups and universities who have benefited from government biotechnology grants. The other major financial partner is the World Bank, which is reviewing the costs and benefits of GM to poor countries. The Gates money, however, is directed at some of the least known but most controversial organisations on the global stage. The research will be done mainly by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture and the International Food Policy Research Institute. Both are part of the little-known Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (Cgiar). This family of 16 global public institutes  forms  the world's largest public plant-breeding effort for poor farmers and has immense say on the direction of world agriculture. But Cgiar is widely accused of being a creature of its two major funders - the US and the World Bank. The bank, dominated by the US, not only houses its secretariat, but provides its current chair. Cgiar is only slightly better than the WTO when it comes to accessibility. It has only once held an annual meeting outside the bank offices and, when it did - last year in Thailand - there were major demonstrations against it by international and local farmers' organisations complaining that it was promoting a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to research that ignored the knowledge and experience of farmers and indigenous people. Cgiar's public research, say NGOs in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, is being quietly corporatised, centralised in Washington and becoming remote from farmers in the developing world. They argue that having promoted the "green revolution" of the 1960s - which  introduced high-yielding, chemically dependent crops - Cgiar is now using  large amounts of public money to develop GM foods, once again without consulting the people who the technology will most affect (10).

With hundreds of millions of small farmers around the world already in crisis because they cannot compete with US or EU subsidies which mainly go to corporate farmers, the Gates donation is seen to be supporting something irrelevant to most farmers - another kick in the teeth for those in poverty and an endorsement of a widely questioned technology dominated by vested big science interests. Cgiar says its work is for the public, by public servants and it is aware of the power of GM companies to muscle in. But its backing of GM goes well beyond honest research. Last year it controversially invited the Syngenta Foundation on to its board.  This charitable, nominally independent organisation is owned by the largest GM company in the world and run by a former British civil servant who worked at the Department for International Development. Insiders believe it is only a matter of time before the Gates foundation is offered a place, too. But why should the Gates Foundation be interested in a small, obscure organisation like Cgiar? Apart from strongly influencing the direction of world agriculture, one answer is that it is the custodian of more than 600,000 seeds, something that has been called the "collective wealth of nature and the food security of the world". Almost every crop that has ever been grown is held in trust, and the unpatented genetic bank is of immense potential wealth to life science  companies, not just for food but medicine. Already many have been investigating partnerships.  Bill Gates's foundation appears the innocent newcomer to the mucky world of global malnutrition and food security. The trouble may be that his foundation's increasing influence on the world stage makes it a prime target for those who have an agenda well beyond the public good, sayd John Vidal, the Guardian's environment editor (11).

___________
*) More information and  address source for Bee-produce from beekeeping considering the character of bees - for instance: comb honey with natural cristalization (not heated) and honey from natural combs  (neither extracted nor stirred nor heated before filling) as well as pure beewax without residuals under :
List of beeproduce
Centre for social Medicine and Natural Apitherapy
Centre for Ecological Apiculture.
Beekeeping courses (practical and distance) in the Centre for Ecological Apiculture: start now with ecological top-bar-beekeeping for beginners!!
**) see also "Apicultural Review Letters I"

Notes and literature
see full version
 
Part III 


Full version in:  Natural Science Vol. 3 Issue 1/2004

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