"Jolly gene giant" - My Summer Reading

[NashVegas]

A review of Claire Hope Cummings' Uncertain Peril

In October 1996, a spokesman for Monsanto told Farm Journal why his company was buying up seed companies left and right: "What you're seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it's really a consolidation of the entire food chain."

Today, Monsanto is the world's largest seed company -- and makes more money selling seeds than chemicals. The company's biotech seeds and traits accounted for 88 percent of the worldwide area devoted to genetically modified seeds in 2006 -- and Monsanto earns royalties on every single one. No one needed to tell Monsanto: Whoever controls the first link in the food chain -- the seeds -- controls the food supply.

What better way to understand the perilous state of industrial food and farming than by starting with the seed? Claire Hope Cummings' new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds is a sharp and elegant analysis of the biotech seed debate.

Beginning with the tragic story of how the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq led to the destruction of Iraq's seed bank, and the subsequent dependence of Iraqi farmers on U.S. aid and multinational agribusiness, Cummings explains what's at stake when farming communities lose the crop diversity that they've nurtured and managed for thousands of years.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/1/9299/91567

I'm going to pick this one up.

[LiberalEsto]

1. Great post!

This book will be extremely helpful, since I'm going to give a sermon on this issue as part of the summer solstice service at our UU church on June 22. It's a serious matter, and frankly I think this is one of the most evil corporate practices of all time.

Full disclosure: I'm not a minister, just a lay leader who organizes an occasional service as a member of the Sunday services committee.

Recommended.

[NashVegas]

2. Thanks for Looking

It's just not a very sexy subject to very many people. How many of us bother to grow our own food? I know I don't. I should start trying but have *such* an amazing black thumb :(

[The2ndWheel]

3. Monsanto is really the ultimate endgame of what we've been doing

We've been consolidating more aspects of life for thousands of years. We don't like diversity. Diversity is inefficient for the needs of production, the needs of standardization, the needs of predictability. Globalization doesn't work if the world is diverse. How is business to be easily done if you have thousands of different languages? How is government able to function if you have more than one? Different currencies have different values. Different borders have different amounts of people within them.

We can cry about Monsanto and the like all we want, but something like Monsanto is the only possible outcome with the way we structure our reality. No matter who holds power, that reality is always built upon with the same bricks as were previously used. One sides want business to have more power. The other side wants government to have more power. We go back and forth between the two. The size of both dominant institutions today never decreases, except in relation to the other. The solution? Increase the size of the other. We have to end up with Monsanto, or whatever it is that comes along after Monsanto has been merged and incorporated into either another corporation or some government agency. This is a world of, by, and for the institution. It's not about you.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1911taylor.html

"In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first."

[NashVegas]

4. Who Is This "We," Kimosabe?

In our desire to stamp out suffering in the world, we are losing the ability to cope emotionally with loss, proportionately to our technological successes.

Control only leads to the necessity for more control which can only be accomplished by enslaving others; physically, psychologically.

The these global Utopians want to build isn't a world that's fit for thinking, feeling, adult human beings of conscience. It's been tried already in the USSR. They didn't do so well, ultimately.

"What I demand of the worker is not to produce any longer by his own initiative, but to execute punctiliously the orders given down to their minutest details." - that's what the guy at your link said.

[The2ndWheel]

6. I never said I agreed with it

Then again, I didn't say that I didn't, either.

I don't agree with it. I do agree with what you stated though. I was just looking at the world the way I think I see it, not the way I want to see it.

[LiberalEsto]

5. Remember the European monarchies?

Members of various European families consolidated their power by marrying only among other European royalty for generation after generation. This eventually led to frail, severely inbred offspring with undesirable traits like hemophilia. Inbreeding, which limits biological diversity, is ultimately harmful to vigor and survival.

Likewise, the disease that destroyed Ireland's potato crops was able to cause such havoc because only one variety of potato was being planted. Planting a diversity of varieties might have allowed some potato varieties survive. Planting a variety of grain crops in addition to potatoes would also have made it possible for people survive. (I'm a bit hazy on history, but wasn't all the Irish grain harvest being shipped to England at that time?)

If we destroy diversity, we increase the likelihood that a disease could wipe out an entire population or crop around the world. Allowing MonSatan to continue to do this could result in widespread famine.

[The2ndWheel]

7. Completely agree

As we destroy diversity, we increase the likelihood that a financial crisis could wipe out an entire global economic system.

As we destroy diversity, we increase the likelihood that a virus could wipe out X amount of humanity around the globe.

It works with pretty much any example. But that process has been going on for thousands of years. How else did members of European families get to be European royalty?

Diversity just doesn't work with mass production. It doesn't work with government trying to regulate business. We have too many governments around the world. They're all working in their own self-interest. So China doesn't have to have worker or environmental laws, while America has them(at least some anyway). That's why business moves there. Globalization has passed governments by. Diversity is too inefficient for civilization.

[NashVegas]

8. The Question Is

How to fight it w/out turning into the Unabomber.