[lbo-talk] GM something...

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Dec 21 21:22:28 PST 2004


I'm tempted to counter-demonstrate. I don't want Monsanto running it, but what, in principle, is wrong with biotech? You guys probably would have opposed traditional animal and plant breeding too. Doug

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As I tried to explain to my kid on Sunday, the issue is not the science or the `safety'. The issue is the political economic of GM. It is a means (a new, more pervasive, deeper and more thorough means) of corporate control over the production of food. The grain seed species are modified to fail reproduction, so that they can not be used as planting seed more than one season. It absolutely locks in particular grains, particular methods, particular production schemes to be subsumed under some asshole corporate board's arbitrary decision making. It also erases or replaces former methods and cultural histories, with those that giant US capital can make more money on.

If you like all that sort of thing. Fine. GM is for you.

The whole domain of biotech, is specifically driven by this fiendish control freak mentality that underlies corporate capital's neoliberalism. Whole swathes of the bio-sphere become the potential target for this kind of perforced `development'.

The issue is not that some how there isn't enough food. There is plenty of food. Distribution is the problem, and biotech+gm is the perfect solution to making that distribution problem exponentially worse--by amplifying central control over distribution systems to an ever greater and greater extent. This is how you make money.

For some reason the early anti-GM forces decided that `safety' and its thoroughly anti-science stand was the way to go. Who knows why? I don't. That stand obfuscates the economic control issue by claiming GM is a disease. It probably makes for more effective propaganda, but it also alienates the very people (the scientific community) that most needs to understand what they are doing and why their work is a profoundly bad idea.

CG



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