Parental Alert: Selling GMO to Schoolkids!

CBI’s lies are designed specif­i­cally for chil­dren, and intended for use in classrooms.

At a crit­i­cal time in his­tory when our planet is veer­ing toward a melt­down, when our youth are suf­fer­ing the health con­se­quences (obe­sity, dia­betes, aller­gies) of Big Ag and Food Inc.’s over-processed, fat-and sugar-laden, chemical-, and GMO-tainted foods, a time when we should be edu­cat­ing tomorrow’s adults about how to reverse cli­mate change, how to cre­ate sus­tain­able farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties, how to pro­mote bet­ter nutri­tion, the biotech industry’s pro­pa­gan­dists are infil­trat­ing class­rooms with mis­in­for­ma­tion in the guise of “edu­ca­tional” materials.

Brainwashing chil­dren. It’s a new low, even for Monsanto.

You don’t have to read beyond the first page of Look Closer at Biotechnology to real­ize that this is pure propaganda:

Hi Kids! Welcome to the Biotechnology Basics Activity Book. This is an activ­ity book for young peo­ple like you about biotechnology—a really neat topic. Why is it such a neat topic? Because biotech­nol­ogy is help­ing to improve the health of the Earth and the peo­ple who call it home. In this book, you will take a closer look at biotech­nol­ogy. You will see that biotech­nol­ogy is being used to fig­ure out how to: 1) grow more food; 2) help the envi­ron­ment; and 3) grow more nutri­tious food that improves our health. As you work through the puz­zles in this book, you will learn more about biotech­nol­ogy and all of the won­der­ful ways it can help peo­ple live bet­ter lives in a health­ier world. Have fun!

Before we take a closer look at the lies laid out in Look Closer at Biotechnology—lies that are repeated over and over again, the bet­ter to imprint them on young minds—let’s take a closer look at the book’s pub­lisher. The Council for Biotechnology Information describes itself  as “a non-profit 501(c)(6) orga­ni­za­tion that com­mu­ni­cates science-based infor­ma­tion about the ben­e­fits and safety of agri­cul­tural biotech­nol­ogy and its con­tri­bu­tions to sus­tain­able development.”

According to the Internal Revenue Service, a 501(c)(6) orga­ni­za­tion is a “busi­ness league” devoted to the improve­ment of busi­ness con­di­tions of one or more lines of busi­ness. The mis­sion of a 501(c)(6) orga­ni­za­tion “must focus on the advance­ment of the con­di­tions of a par­tic­u­lar trade or the inter­ests of the community.”

The bot­tom line is that CBI exists to advance the inter­ests of the cor­po­ra­tions that it was formed to promote—in this case, the biotech indus­try. While it pur­ports to com­mu­ni­cate “science-based infor­ma­tion,” in fact, that’s not its mis­sion at all. Its mis­sion is to max­i­mize the prof­its of Monsanto and the biotech industry.

Not sur­pris­ingly, CBI is funded largely by the biotech, chem­i­cal, pes­ti­cide, and seed indus­try giants: BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow Agro Sciences, Dupont, Monsanto, and Syngenta.

There’s noth­ing new about cor­po­ra­tions lying to the pub­lic. Corporations rou­tinely lie to their employ­ees. They lie in adver­tis­ing. They lie in the lop­sided so-called stud­ies and research projects that they self-fund in order to guar­an­tee the out­comes that sup­port their often false, but self-serving premises. They buy off politi­cians, reg­u­la­tory offi­cials, sci­en­tists, and the media.

Although here we’re focus­ing on the biotech indus­try try­ing to brain­wash our kids, CBI cer­tainly does not limit its pro­pa­ganda to just chil­dren. CBI recently con­tributed $375,000 to the Coalition Against the Costly Labeling Law—a Sacramento-based indus­try front group work­ing to defeat the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act of 2012. If passed in November, this cit­i­zens’ bal­lot Initiative will require food man­u­fac­tur­ers and retail­ers to label foods con­tain­ing genet­i­cally engi­neered ingre­di­ents, as well as ban the rou­tine indus­try prac­tice of label­ing or adver­tis­ing GE-tainted foods as “nat­ural” or “all nat­ural.” CBI, the Farm Bureau, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association are cam­paign­ing furi­ously to pre­serve their “right” to keep con­sumers in the dark about whether their food has been genet­i­cally engi­neered or not, and to pre­serve their “right” to mis­la­bel gene-altered foods as “natural.”

Clearly, the Council for Biotechnology Information has lit­tle or no regard for “science-based” infor­ma­tion. But lies aimed directly at kids—under the guise of sci­ence edu­ca­tion? In our schools?

Let’s take a closer look at the claims made in Look Closer at Biotechnology.

Lie #1: “Biotechnology is one method being used to help farm­ers grow more food.”

This state­ment is patently false.

In 2009, in the wake of sim­i­lar stud­ies, the Union of Concerned Scientists exam­ined the data on genet­i­cally engi­neered crops, includ­ing USDA sta­tis­tics. Their report—Failure to Yield—was the first major effort to eval­u­ate in detail the over­all yields of GE crops after more than 20 years of research and 13 years of com­mer­cial­iza­tion in the United States. According to the defin­i­tive UCS study, “GE has done lit­tle to increase over­all crop yields.” A num­ber of stud­ies indi­cate in fact that GE soy­beans, for exam­ple, actu­ally pro­duce lower yields than non-genetically engi­neered varieties.

Research con­ducted by the India research group, Navdanya, and reported in The GMO Emperor Has No Clothes turns up the same results:

Contrary to the claim of feed­ing the world, genetic engi­neer­ing has not increased the yield of a sin­gle crop. Navdanya’s research in India has shown that con­trary to Monsanto’s claim of Bt cot­ton yield of 1500 kg per acre, the real­ity is that the yield is an aver­age of 400-500 kg per acre. Although Monsanto’s Indian adver­tis­ing cam­paign reports a 50-percent increase in yields for its Bollgard cot­ton, a sur­vey con­ducted by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology found that the yields in all trial plots were lower than what the com­pany promised. (Page 11).

The claim that GE crops increase agri­cul­tural yields is a bla­tant lie. Equally untrue is the industry’s claim that it is moti­vated by the desire to feed the hun­gry of the world. As the Union of Concerned Scientists points out: “For the most part, genetic engi­neer­ing tech­niques are being applied to crops impor­tant to the indus­tri­al­ized world, not crops on which the world’s hun­gry depend.” Where does all the genet­i­cally engi­neered soy and corn—two of the largest GE crops—end up? In ani­mal feed, processed junk foods—and school lunch­rooms. Precious lit­tle goes to feed the hun­gry in impov­er­ished regions.

One of the sub-arguments related to increas­ing yields is the biotech industry’s claim that GMO crops are more resis­tant to pests—hence more of the crops sur­vive. In Look Closer at Biotechnology kids are told that agri­cul­tural biotech­nol­ogy is a “pre­cise way to make seeds with spe­cial qual­i­ties. These seeds will allow farm­ers to grow plants that are . . . more resis­tant to pests . . .” In fact wide­spread com­mer­cial­iza­tion of herbicide-resistant and Bt-spliced GE crops has engen­dered a grow­ing army of super­weeds and super­pests, obliv­i­ous to all but the most pow­er­ful and toxic pesticides.

What we should be teach­ing kids in sci­ence class is what sci­en­tists have been warn­ing for years—that any attempt to increase resis­tance to pests through genetic engi­neer­ing will ulti­mately fail. Insects—and diseases—will build up a tol­er­ance over time, and evolve into stronger and stronger strains. That’s how nature works—and even Monsanto can’t fool Mother Nature. Organic agri­cul­ture, on the other hand, uti­liz­ing crop rota­tion, bio­di­ver­sity, nat­ural fer­til­iz­ers, and ben­e­fi­cial insects, reduces crop loss from pests and weeds, with­out the col­lat­eral dam­age of toxic pes­ti­cides and fertilizers.

Recently, 22 lead­ing sci­en­tists told the US Environmental Protection Agency that it should act with “a sense of urgency” to urge farm­ers to stop plant­ing Monsanto’s genet­i­cally engi­neered Bt corn because it will no longer pro­tect them from the corn root­worm. Bt corn is genet­i­cally engi­neered with bac­te­r­ial DNA that pro­duces an insec­ti­cide in every cell of the plant, aimed at pre­vent­ing corn root­worm. Except that corn root­worms have now devel­oped resis­tance to these GE mutants.

Just as sci­en­tists had pre­dicted years ago, a new gen­er­a­tion of insect lar­vae has evolved, and is eat­ing away at the roots of Monsanto’s Bt corn—a crop farm­ers paid a high price for on Monsanto’s promise that they would never have to worry about corn root­worm again. Scientists are now warn­ing of mas­sive yield loss and surg­ing corn costs if the EPA doesn’t act quickly to dras­ti­cally reduce Bt crops’ acreage and ensure that Monsanto makes non-GMO vari­eties of corn avail­able to farmers.

“Massive yield loss” doesn’t sound like “more food”—whether you’re 12 years old or 112.

What we should be telling kids is what respon­si­ble sci­en­tists and farmers—experts at the United Nations—have been say­ing all along: Eco-farming can dou­ble food out­put. According to a UN study:

• Eco-farming projects in 57 nations showed aver­age crop yield gains of 80 per­cent by tap­ping nat­ural meth­ods for enhanc­ing soil and pro­tect­ing against pests.
• Projects in 20 African coun­tries resulted in a dou­bling of crop yields within three to 10 years.
• Sound eco­log­i­cal farm­ing can sig­nif­i­cantly boost pro­duc­tion and in the long term be more effec­tive than con­ven­tional farming. 

Lie #2: “Biotechnology can help farm­ers and the envi­ron­ment in many ways.”

Two lies for the price of one.

Biotechnology—specifically genetic engineering—helps nei­ther farm­ers nor the envi­ron­ment, accord­ing to the major­ity of legit­i­mate sci­en­tists and econ­o­mists. In fact, the oppo­site is true. Genetic engi­neer­ing of seeds has wreaked havoc on the envi­ron­ment and brought mis­ery to hun­dreds of thou­sands of small farm­ers all over the world.

The major­ity of farm­ers in devel­op­ing coun­tries strug­gle to afford even the most basic require­ments of seeds and fer­til­iz­ers. Their sur­vival depends on the age-old prac­tice of select­ing, sav­ing and shar­ing seeds from one year to the next. When multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions move into areas pre­vi­ously dom­i­nated by small farm­ers, they force those farm­ers to buy their patented seeds and fertilizers—under pre­tense of higher yields, and under threats of law­suits if they save or share the seeds. Every year, they’re forced to buy more seeds and more chem­i­cals from corporations—and when the promises of higher yields and higher incomes prove empty, farm­ers go bankrupt.

Compounding their cor­po­rate crimes, when Monsanto’s patented seeds con­t­a­m­i­nate the non-GMO crops of small farm­ers (because the seeds drift across prop­erty lines) Monsanto rou­tinely sues farm­ers for grow­ing their patented seeds ille­gally, even though the seeds were actu­ally unwanted tres­passers. Further, the com­pany has ruined the liveli­hoods of small farm­ers by harass­ing them for ille­gally grow­ing patented seeds, even in cases where no patented seeds have been grown, either know­ingly or by accident.

As Monsanto and oth­ers have expanded world­wide, into India, China, Pakistan, and other coun­tries, the effect on small farm­ers has been dev­as­tat­ing. In India, for instance, after World Trade Organization poli­cies forced the coun­try in 1998 to open its seed sec­tor to com­pa­nies like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta, farm­ers quickly found them­selves in debt to the biotech com­pa­nies that forced them to buy cor­po­rate seeds and fer­til­iz­ers and pes­ti­cides, destroy­ing local economies. Hundreds of thou­sands of India’s cot­ton farm­ers have com­mit­ted sui­cide.

And accord­ing to a Greenpeace report, poorer farm­ers in the Philippines were sold Monsanto’s Bt corn as a “prac­ti­cal and eco­log­i­cally sus­tain­able solu­tion for poor corn farm­ers every­where to increase their yields” only to find the oppo­site was true: Bt corn did not con­trol pests and was “not eco­log­i­cally sustainable.”

Which brings us to one more of the Council for Biotechnology Information’s lies to kids: That agri­cul­tural biotech­nol­ogy is good for the environment.

Study after study, over more than a decade, has warned us of just the oppo­site. Even the pro-biotech USDA has admit­ted that GE crops use more pes­ti­cides, not less than non-GE vari­eties. Genetic engi­neer­ing results in ever­more pes­ti­cides being dumped into the envi­ron­ment, destroy­ing soil and water, human and ani­mal health, and threat­en­ing the bio­di­ver­sity of the planet.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at AlterNet.org.