Vote Yes on GE FREE BUTTE
-----Original Message-----
From: Garza, Luisa
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 9:31 AM
Hi friends, (everyone in my address book!)
Here is an article from today’s ER. If anyone of you are still uncertain about how to vote on Measure D, please feel free to call, or email and chat with me. I will answer as many of your questions as I can. I strongly believe that we need to take a stand and Vote YES to ban GE Crops. Some of you have asked me how are we going to contain the GE pollen if other counties allow GE Crops. The answer is we can’t. Because this is such a huge issue, citizens are thinking globally and acting locally-one county at a time. If this measure is defeated (and the money being poured into it is significant as well as their scary commercials) then farming in the world as we know it will be in the hands of bio-tech companies and we will have lost our freedom of choice to grow and eat non-genetically engineered foods.
The information about the science is available at numerous sources and can be found on the internet. You can also access web links through the http://www.gefreebutte.org/ web site. Genetically engineered pollens will fly freely in the wind, into our back yard gardens and organic gardening is at risk. Our choice to grow our own food is at risk when pharmaceutical pollens (Genetic engineering of foods like rice engineered to make proteins for research, rending the commodity inedible) are flying through the air. We will never know where cramps, intestinal ailments and allergies might be coming from. It is this unknown that makes me want to put a stop to unleashing the science prematurely. We no longer have Canola on the market available as a commercial or organic crop, it is all GE or GE contaminated- think about it.
Old fashion plant selection, hybridization is tried and true. It is not genetic engineering as the term implies today. Genetic engineering is the splicing of a gene from one type of organism into another organism to produce a given quality. These qualities are for resistance to herbicides, insecticides, to produce proteins that normally don’t occur, to increase vita A (a fat soluable vitamin which means it builds up instead of being urinated out. Excess Vita A causes kidney damage!), the grass seed industry is rejecting a new GE Bent grass resistant to Round Up because it will be impossible or require more toxic chemicals to eliminate it from taking over….as grasses can do. The list of craziness can go on and on. We need to slow this technology down until it can be better studied or crops should be grown in controlled environments only to keep pollen from contaminating. Many nations across the world are rejecting GE foods from America.
The article in the paper today is telling people to vote no because a bunch of miscreants are defacing their signs. Please think deeper than that writer, vote because you have a core value on an issue, not because some people out on their own have chosen to deface the opponents signs.
Oakland Institute founder visits Chico State to speak out on genetic engineering
By HEATHER HACKING - Staff WriterFriday, October 29, 2004
Chico Enterprise-Record
The Nov. 2 election will come and go, but the debate over genetically engineered crops is not going to go away, said Anuradha Mittal, founder of the Oakland Institute and author of several books on human rights, world trade in third-world countries and globalization.
She spoke at Chico State Wednesday as part of the college's Environmental Advocates series on genetically engineered foods.
Mittal's lecture plays into the debate over Measure D, which is on Tuesday's ballot and would ban GE crops and animals in Butte County.
She urged citizens to "vote with your dollars" and seek out non-GE foods.
She said the fact the GE issue is being debated is "already a victory." The hope is to lead to labeling GE foods, she said.
Mittal, a native of India, spent 10 years working for the Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, serving as its coordinator from 2000-2004. The group advocates access to food as a basic human right.
She said her current project, the Oakland Institute, http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/, is a nonpartisan policy think tank on economic and social issues.
The debate over GE foods has been "raging" for more than a decade, Mittal said.
A strong opponent to the current use of GE foods, Mittal echoed many of the sentiments expressed by previous GE speakers over the past weeks. She said a lot of hype surrounds the crops: hype about world population exploding and how biotechnology is needed to feed them.
In the developed countries, 842 million people are "food insecure," Mittal said. In India, 380 million are food insecure, she said.
In Brazil 30,000-40,000 die each year due to hunger and 40 million Americans go to bed hungry, she said.
The companies that make GE crops are "prostituting" the images of starving people to further their products.
"Beautiful, adorable Asian children" are used to push "golden rice," a rice genetically engineered with a daffodil gene to help with Vitamin A deficiency, Mittal argued.
Mittal said that rice is the poster child of the biotech industry, but it is not ready for field trials.
Many countries where people are hungry have surplus food but instead of giving it to the poor, they hold on to it to sell to make money, she said.
Politics also plays a role when genetically engineered food aid is pushed on countries that don't want it, she said. In 2002 Zambia was offered $51 million in GE corn, but
Zambia refused.
"The government said they should be tried for crimes of humanity," Mittal said.
However, what the media didn't report, she said, is that there were offers of non-GE food aid from Kenya, Tanzania, India and China.
With GE, Mittal said it is the farmers who pay the price to support large corporations that have patents on GE seed. With mass GE production, native varieties of crops are disappearing, she said, or being contaminated.
She said the number of farmers who choose GE crops is declining about 13 percent a year. However, the acreage has gone up overall because of large, corporate farms are going to GE.
Mittal said it is appalling that only 1 percent of the USDA budget on biotechnology goes to risk assessment. Studies that are being conducted are done by the companies that sell the GE seed, she said.
During the question-and-answer period, Farm Bureau members and farmers Les Heringer and Ryan Schohr voiced opposition to Mittal's views. They cited studies that determined less pesticides are used with GE crops and that yields are higher with less need for tilling.
Heringer said Science Magazine reported there is less pesticide poisoning in China due to GE crops.
Schohr said he has visited India and "people are screaming to get a hold of" GE seed, so much so that they smuggle it in.
"When the government tried to burn the crops they rioted," he said.
posted by Annie at 2:35 PM
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