Fed Up!
Of the 1999 crops, 60% of the Canadian canola crop, 90% of the Argentine soybean crop, 50% of the US soybean crop, and 33% of the US corn crop were genetically modified. Industrial agriculture destroys the foundations of future production. We have soil erosion, soil compaction, salinization, waterlogging, destruction of beneficial biodiversity, reduction of natural enemies of pests… all of this is happening at an alarming rate.
For the green revolution to work, three things have to happen at the same time. One of these was the development of specific high-yielding and often dwarfed varieties of wheat, rice, and maize through special outcrossing and hybridization techniques that Norman Borlaug perfected and worked on in Mexico and the Southwest United States. Second, the Rockefeller Foundation and World Bank funds have invested heavily in helping poor countries develop a broader food base based on these resources. Third, the availability, inputs, and demands of pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation are enormous, all of which add value to supporting this type of agricultural commercialization.
The Ford and Rockefeller foundations worried in the 1950s that if hunger in the Third World was not addressed, the poor in those countries might be overthrown by communism. The Green Revolution was actually the forced introduction of chemical agriculture, which was the antidote to the pattern of social change and exacerbated inequality in India. Smallholder farmers lost their land because they couldn’t pay the loans associated with the Green Revolution, water usage skyrocketed, effectively degrading vast swathes of land, agricultural diversity was wiped out, and yes, rice and wheat production increased, but it didn’t Not an absolute increase in food.
Given a series of crop failures and the resulting global famine, the use of pesticides and herbicides seemed inevitable. Pesticides come from the arms industry. The first modern synthetic chemical insecticides were derived from nerve gases developed by the Germans during World War II. They’re made by simple changes in molecules, and they’re probably most toxic to insects, not humans.
