Price Charles - Small Family Farming, Organic Farming, GM Free World, Genetic Modified(GM) Food Is Not Essential
Genetic Modification - A global moral issue.
Watch Prince Charles Giving The Sir Albert Howard Memorial Lecture
On YouTube Video:
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=5dadwzpIbfo
For the first time in history this would lead to "one man's system of farming effectively destroying the choice of another man's" and "turn the whole issue into a global moral question." He quoted Mahatma Gandhi who condemned "commerce without morality" and "science without humanity". He added: "One must surely ask the question whether - if only from a precautionary point of view - it might be wise to keep some areas of the world free from GM-based agriculture."
Calls for global research for family farming with at least as much funding as the billions for GM.
GM is not sustainable, not wise.
To love the world.
Nurture a more just and non-exploitive society.
Improve quality of life for rural communities.
Reduce deforestation.
Restore equilibrium of humans and nature.
Organic agricultural ways can be sustainable for the world.
Use precautionary point of view - keep at least some areas of the world free from GM agriculture.
Not making profits at the expense of future generations.
Trust individual farmers.
Natures natural balance.
Small business are the mainstay of any economy.
Family farmers are the backbone, and the lifeblood and the guardians of the rural environment.
Nature's limits are not short comings that need to be fixed, but guidelines we need to understand and work within. Recognizing that they place limitations on our ambitions and the ways in which we pursue them.
Ghandi - "We may utilize the gifts of nature just as we choose, but in her books the debts are always equal to the credits."
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Why Prince Charles is right: we need GM free food and agriculture for food security
Dr Vandana Shiva Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 21/08/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/21/eashiv...
http://openseeds.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-prince-charles-is-right-we-need-gm.html
We are grateful to Prince Charles for cautioning the world on the blind and head long rush worldwide to spread GM seeds and crops especially the Third World.
Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest environment disaster http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/12/eachar... Prince Charles accused by scientists of abusing position over GM comments http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/13/eachar... Why we need GM trees http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/20/eagm12...
His comments had become necessary because the biotechnology industry is using the food crisis to push GM crops on grounds that they increase yields.
This is doubly false. Firstly, because the current crisis is a result of speculation and diversion of food crops to biofuels, it is not a crisis of production.
Secondly, genetic engineering so far has only achieved transfer of single gene traits such as herbicide resistance and Bt. toxin production.
Yield and environmental resilience are multigenetic traits, and there is no GM crop currently engineered for high yields.
Monsanto has claimed that its Bt. Cotton in India yields 1,500 kg/acre. Most independent studies have found 300-400 kg/acre as an average, with many farmers facing total crop failure due to pest attack and some getting more than 1,000 kg if the weather was not too dry or two wet.
While Bt. Cotton is supposed to control the bollworm, it is evolving resistance and new pests which were not significant have exploded, requiring higher doses of pesticides.
As a pest-control strategy GM crops are a failure. Integrated pest management and controlling pests through mixtures is much more scientific and effective.
The more the industry makes unscientific and false claims about GM crops giving higher yields and using less pesticide the more they refer to "science" based decision.
The UK's Environment Minister, Phil Woolas said it was the government's moral responsibility "to investigate whether genetically modified crops could help provide a solution to hunger in the developing world. We see this as part of our Africa strategy."
One would imagine an environment minister would want to investigate whether biodiverse and ecological farming could help provide a solution to hunger, especially in Africa.
The recently concluded International Assessment on Agriculture Science and Technology has concluded that GMOs and industrial agriculture is not the solution. Small scale ecological agriculture is the answer to poverty and hunger. Mr Woolas should read the report.
He should also read Navdanya's reports on farmers' suicides in India. The suicides are concentrated in the Bt. Cotton belt.
Monsanto's Bt. Cotton is, in my opinion, costly, non-renewable, and unreliable. Farmers are getting trapped in unpayable debt and are ending their lives.
When I visited Krishna Rao Vaidya's widow on 10th Oct, it was evident he was driven to suicide because of debt.
On average a farmer like Vaidya takes his life every 8 hours in Vidarbha, over the past decade, 200,000 farmers in India have committed suicide.
Prince Charles said that GM crops and corporate control of agriculture "risked creating the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."
Two things were clear in the Prince's statement. He was addressing the risk of creating a disaster, not a disaster that has already occurred. He was also addressing the issue of disaster in a broad and comprehensive sense not in a narrow perspective of "safety".
As he stated "Relying on gigantic corporations for mass production of food would threaten, not boost future food supplies."
He warned that we would end up with "millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness. I think it will be an absolute disaster."
For Prince Charles, the large scale uprooting of peasants and small farmers is a social disaster, a human rights disaster and a tragedy.
Corporate monopoly over our food systems is a food security disaster. And while in some places like India these disasters have already had an impact at a global level, they are a disaster in the making.
It is therefore unscientific, illogical and irresponsible for the Environmental Minister Mr Woolas to say that Prince Charles must provide "proof" that a disaster has happened.
I would imagine that he is aware of the environmental principle on which the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change rest.
The principle is called the Precautionary Principle. It is based on the recognition that when an activity or technology has the potential to cause harm, and there is no conclusive evidence to establish the harm that can be caused, then policy and decision making must err on the side of caution.
The Environment Minister also said "Government ministers have a responsibility to base policy on science and I do strongly believe that we have a moral responsibility to the developing world to ask the question: 'Can GM crops help'?
Minister, if you could travel with me through Vidarbha and see the tears in the eyes of farmers' widows, you would be compelled to ask the question:'Can GM crops harm'? That is your moral responsibility.
It is also your responsibility to sincerely base your decisions on real science, not pseudo science. Science based policy would recognise that an agriculture that conserves biodiversity also produces more food and nutrition per unit acre.
Science based policy would recognise that if farmers fall into debt, it is not an instrument for ending poverty, but a recipe for ending the lives of small farmers.
A science based policy would not blindly spread GM crops to Africa without assessing their role in India's agrarian crisis. A science based policy would not be based on unscientific principle of "substantial equivalence" which has prevented independent and serious testing of GM foods and crops.
That is why the Supreme Court of India has served notice on the Government of India to ask why a GMO moratorium should not be imposed till proper testing protocols and tests and facilities for biosafety are in place.
We are proud that Prince Charles will be delivering the Ninth Howard Memorial lecture for Navdanya this year. We organise the lecture to honour Sir Albert Howard, the imperial agriculturist sent to India in 1905 whose "Agricultural Testament" is based on the knowledge on sustainable farming he learnt from India's peasants.
We organise the lecture on Gandhi's birth anniversary to celebrate non-violent farming which protects all species, the farmers, the soil and our health.
GMOs are the latest step in a violent tradition of industrial agriculture which has its roots in war and has become a war against the farmers, the land, and our bodies. Prince Charles, like many of us, wants this war to end.
And all that the biotech industry and its allies in governments can talk about is the smartness of their weapons.
It is time they realised the debate is much wider and deeper. It is about the planet we live on, the societies we are shaping, the exclusions billions are condemned to, the super profits the gene giants and grain giants harvest, while the real harvest in the fields of real farmers shrink.
The industrial/mechanistic mindset has destroyed our farmers and food security. It cannot offer solutions to the agrarian crisis and food crisis it has created. We need to move to an ecological perspective based on diversity.
Unfortunately, GMOs fail the test of both ecological sustainability and socio-economic viability. They have accelerated non-sustainability, and deepened injustice and inequality.
It is time the world listened to the important message from Prince Charles.
Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, author of numerous books and environmental campaigner. She is the founder of Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers' rights.
Charles Targets GM Crop Giants in Fiercest Attack Yet
In a provocative address to an Indian audience, the Prince echoes Gandhi with a stinging attack on 'commerce without morality'.
It is less than two months since Prince Charles was on the receiving end of a fusillade of scientific, political and commentariat criticism for voicing, yet again, his concerns about GM crops and foods. He was widely accused of "ignorance" and "Luddism"; of being too rich to care about the hungry, and even of trying to increase sales of his own organic produce. It was put about that Gordon Brown was angered by his intervention.
![[Prince Charles has again stirred controversy with his strong views over GM crops.(Getty Images)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/1005-1.jpg "1005-1.jpg")
Prince Charles has again stirred controversy with his strong views over GM crops.(Getty Images)True to his word, he plunged straight into the most controversial and emotive of all the debates over GM crops and foods by highlighting the suicides of small farmers. Tens of thousands killed themselves in India after getting into debt. The suicides were occurring long before GM crops were introduced, but campaigners say that the technology has made things worse because the seeds are more expensive and have not increased yields to match.
The biotech industry strongly denies this, but two official reports have suggested that there "could" be a possible link.
Prince Charles expressed no doubts in his lecture, delivered at the invitation of Dr Vandana Shiva, the founder of Navdanya, and one of the leading proponents of the technology's role in the deaths. He spoke of "the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming in part from the failure of many GM crop varieties".
Much of the controversy surrounds claims of failures by a Monsanto GM cotton called Bollguard. The GM company says that "farmers in India have found success" with it, and cites a survey in support. Its opponents produce evidence of their own to show the opposite.
But Prince Charles did not stop there. Broadening his offensive, he said that "any GM crop will inevitably contaminate neighbouring fields", making it impossible to maintain the integrity of organic and conventional crops. For the first time in history this would lead to "one man's system of farming effectively destroying the choice of another man's" and "turn the whole issue into a global moral question." He quoted Mahatma Gandhi who condemned "commerce without morality" and "science without humanity". He added: "One must surely ask the question whether - if only from a precautionary point of view - it might be wise to keep some areas of the world free from GM-based agriculture."
The Prince attacked the contention that "GM food is now essential to feed the world", saying that the evidence showed that modified crops' yields were "generally lower than their conventional counterparts". He called them "a wrong turning on the route to feeding the world in a sustainable or durable manner" and "a risky and expensive distraction, diverting attention and resources away from those real, long-term solutions such as crop varieties which respond well to low input systems that, in turn, do not rely on fossil fuels." There was substantial evidence "to show that a growing world population can be fed most successfully in the long term by agricultural systems that manage the land within environmental limits".
Recent research had shown, he added, that organic farming techniques had increased yields in Brazil by 250 per cent and in Ethiopia were up fivefold, while the world's biggest international agricultural study - headed by Professor Bob Watson, now chief scientist at Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs - had backed organic farming, rather than GM to tackle word hunger.
Kirtana Chandrasekaran of Friends of the Earth said: "Prince Charles is right that GM crops and industrial farming are profiting big businesses, not feeding the world's poorest."
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Use Science, Not Propaganda, to Decide Issues
http://www.progress.org/gene07.htm
Prince Charles Challenges British Government To Be Scientific Regarding Safety
Prince Charles has launched a scathing attack on genetically-modified products, and the UK Government has responded with annoyance and propaganda rather than science.
In an article in last week's Daily Mail, Prince Charles poses a series of questions about the safety of GM foods and attacked the lack of independent scientific research. And he rejects the hype that GM crops represent a solution to feeding the world's growing population as a case of "emotional blackmail".
Asserting that the argument sounded ``suspiciously like emotional blackmail,'' the prince said the countries that could be expected to benefit took a different view. Representatives of 20 African countries, including Ethiopia, had published a statement denying that gene technologies would help farmers to produce the food they needed.
``They think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems . . . and undermine our capacity to feed ourselves,'' said the prince.
Deep divisions emerged within the British Government following the Prince's challenge. Although the prime minister's spokesman refused to be drawn into a direct clash with the prince, it was clear there is considerable anger in Whitehall at the way he has reignited the debate in Britain on the issue. The prince's intervention has delivered a body blow to the government's attempts to reassure corporations that their people could be made to accept unproven genetically modified crops as safe.
Here are the ten important unanswered questions posed by the Prince:
1. Do we need GM food in this country?The Prince: The benefits, such as there are seem to be limited to the people who own the technology and the people who farm on an industrialised scale.
2. Is GM food safe for us to eat?
The Prince: Only independent scientific research, over a long period, can provide the final answer.
3. Why are the final rules for approving GM foods so much less stringent than those for new medicines produced using the same technology?
The Prince: Before drugs are released on to the market they have to undergo the most rigorous testing...Surely it is equally important that [GM foods] will do us no harm.
4. How much do we really know about the environmental consequences of GM crops?
The Prince: Lab tests showing that pollen from GM maize in the United States caused damage to the caterpillars of Monarch butterflies provide the latest cause for concern. More alarmingly, this GM maize is not under test.
5. Is it sensible to plant test crops without strict regulations in place?
The Prince: Such crops are being planted in this country now - under a voluntary code of practice. But English Nature has argued that enforceable regulations should be in place first.
6. How will consumers be able to exercise genuine choice?
The Prince: Labelling schemes clearly have a role to play, but if conventional and organic crops are contaminated by GM crops, people who wish to avoid GM food products will be denied choice.
7. If something goes wrong with a GM crop, who will be held responsible?
The Prince: It is important that we know precisely who is going to be legally liable to pay for any damage - whether it be to human health, the environment or both.
8. Are GM crops really the only way to feed the world's growing population?
The Prince: This arguments sounds suspiciously like emotional blackmail to me.
9. What effect will GM crops have on the people of world's poorest countries?
The Prince: Where people are starving, lack of food is rarely the underlying cause. The need is to create sustainable livelihoods for everyone. Will GM crops really help or will they make the problems worse?
10. What sort of world do we want to live in?
The Prince: Are we going to allow the industrialisation of Life itself, redesigning the natural world for the sake of convenience? Or should we be adopting a gentler, more considered approach, seeking always to work with the grain of nature?
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