Genetically Modified foods, crops and seeds should be banned

Dear Editor,

The list of countries refusing Monsanto’s Genetically-Modified (GM) crops continues to grow. Highlighting the world divide on the issue, Brazil recently refused all United States grown GM crops.

However in Guyana we are continually being force-fed unaware that we are consuming GM foods. They are in approximately 80 per cent of all packaged and conventional foods in grocery stores throughout Guyana. Other countries are refusing to import them, grow them, or even sell them within their borders.

As more nations pass laws that impose trade regulations on GM goods, despite World Trade Organization back-room deals, Monsanto and their cut-outs opt for ever-more devious strategies to insinuate their wares onto the world.

Despite this, as a Bloomberg article points out: “In recent years, some of the largest commodity trading companies have refused to take certain GMO crops from farmers because the seeds used hadn’t received a full array of global approvals, something that can lead to holdups at ports or even the rejection of entire cargoes.”

Take Brazil, for example, chicken farmers won’t feed their birds GM corn; but there are other countries opting out of GM crops, too.

Ironically, Brazil is the second largest producer of GM crops in the world after the US, and grows over 20 varieties of GM corn, so they are likely pulling rank for trade rather than hoping to save their population’s health — but at least the chicken farmers see the detriment of using GM corn.

This doesn’t mean that a resistance in Brazil isn’t growing as well. Female members of the Landless Worker’s Movement broke into a São Paulo State lab and destroyed millions of samples of GM prototypes not long ago that contained a carcinogenic pesticide.

There is a good reason for banning GM crops, even if they are only meant for livestock consumption. A new study says that the very first GM crop, introduced way back in 1996, was highly toxic to farm animals over the long-term.

That study produced by a United States research instruction known as Seralini, highlights problems such as “partial paralysis (paresis) accompanied by great fatigue, and problems in the kidneys and mucosal membranes in the animals, followed by death in ten per cent of cases”, all from feeding the animals genially modified feeds. Modified crops such as corn, soy, and alfalfa.

Not surprisingly, that study finds that GM maize are the most toxic of all.

Can anyone imagine what was and still is being done to the animals’ health since the1990s, and to ourselves and generations to come with the use of GM foods?

Fortunately, some Brazilian farmers recently joined a growing, international resistance against cultivating Generically Modified seeds. Russia recently banned all United States corn and soy imports due to possible GM contamination. Nineteen additional countries in the European Union also banned all GM crops, and dozens more have banned GM crops for import or growth in their country.

Genetically modified foods or GM foods, also genetically engineered foods, are foods produced from organisms that have had changes introduced into their DNA using the methods of genetic engineering. The genetic engineering techniques allow for the introduction of new traits as well as greater control over traits than previous methods such as selective breeding and mutation breeding.

It seems Editor, we are all unsuspected victims unfortunately, of genetically modified foods!

The powers that be in Guyana should ban all GM foods, crops and seeds!

Yours faithfully,

Rooplall Dudhnath