Vandana Shiva Invites Us to Act For Seed Freedom

“GM is similarly lauded as a silver bullet. What Elliot does not discuss is the limited shelf-life of GM seeds that are soon mapped by pests and disease, a potentially catastrophic reliance on technology instead of the natural resistance developed by seeds – through natural selection – when crop diversity is promoted. In 1999 the academic James Boyce released an outstanding paper on the globalisation of market failure. Boyce noted that 2.7 million Mexican smallholdings (increasingly squeezed by the free trade that apparently empowers us) used fewer fertilisers and pesticides in growing 5000 varieties of maize, while half of the US’ 200 million ton maize output was comprised of just six varieties. Boyce notes that a pest destroyed 20 per cent of US maize harvest in 1970, and that even genetic modifications rely on real life crop diversity to engineer high-tech solutions to problems that maize species would otherwise adapt to naturally. This is to say nothing of the ill-effects of genetic modifications in the food chain, and nothing of the social conflict caused by Mexican farmers moving to find work in US cities when industrial agriculture makes small farms nonviable.” : https://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/julian-sayarer/is-end-of-cheap-food-just-agricultural-problem