International leaders attending the Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology in Sacramento, California next week should let sound science determine the future of agricultural technologies in developing countries, according to the AgBioWorld Foundation, a global coalition of academics and scientists which includes over 20 Nobel Prize winners.
"Special interest group activists have been planning to disrupt the conference for months by promoting fear rather than science," said Dr. C.S. Prakash, AgBioWorld's president. "The voices of protest must not be allowed to deny starving people access to technologies which can improve the lives of over 1.3 billion people who live on less than one dollar a day."
These technologies include crops improved through biotechnology which have already been proven to increase yields, reduce pesticide use and curb soil erosion in developed countries, while other crops currently under development will provide enhanced nutrition and offer salt tolerance and drought resistance - valuable traits in parts of the world where water resources are scarce.
"The people protesting plant biotechnology are the same ones who protest the use of fertilizer and pesticides, who want all farming to be low yielding organic," said Prakash. "But that is precisely why there is so much hunger in developing countries - they already are organic, not by choice, but because they lack modern agricultural inputs and advanced seed varieties."
Support for the safety and benefits of crops derived through biotechnology has been voiced by dozens of respected organizations such as The British Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the French Academy of Medicine and the American Medical Association. The benefits of biotechnology improved crops are already being realized in China, South Africa, Argentina, India, the Philippines and other developing countries.
"It is easy for well-fed activists in wealthy industrialized countries to denigrate new agricultural technologies because they face no risks by doing so," said Dr. Prakash. "But for farmers in developing countries, shunning improvements in agriculture can mean the difference between life and death for themselves and their children. Their future success hinges first on improved agricultural production."
The thousands of AgBioWorld members strongly urge the protesters and the organic industry interest groups which fund them to abandon their campaigns of fear, and encourage them to instead support the application of all our best tools and science, including biotechnology, toward alleviating the ravages of hunger and malnutrition. The annual budget for Greenpeace alone redirected to science-based crop research could help improve the lives of millions. Spending that money on food-fear propaganda and campaigns which promote the destruction of agricultural research in the face of global hunger is an affront to human decency.
mindfully.org note:
The sound science of CS Prakash is quite different than what most of us take for
granted. In a word, it is a sham—no more than expensive smoke and mirrors. It
involves vicious underhanded tactics on attack any person, scientist, or
organization that speaks out against genetic engineering. It includes
multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, implicit and explicit threats,
lawsuits, and any other means to discourage negative public comments from being
known and/or believed. Personal attacks are more common than scientific attacks.
This is because he, quite simply, lacks the one thing that he claims others do
not possess, that being......sound science.
These attacks are financed and led by the likes of Monsanto, the company that we all know as the maker of Agent Orange, and other fine chemicals that have left the environment and people ruined. Prakash sound science is extremely myopic in scope—not at all inclusive of known facts. He is otherwise known as an industry flack or hack.
His own financers are the special interests who have arranged this Ministerial Conference in Sacramento. It is a "Dog and Pony Show" for biotech and irradiation corporations. The safety of biotech crops could not have been proven because they have been around for only a few years. Since there is no precedent to them, how can anyone know of their safety without long-term testing, which has not been done.
The benefits are so slim and/or negative that Monsanto has been bared from doing any business in one major state of India. There are hunger strikes by farmers against these crops. The farmers also burn GMO fields in protest and pull the crops. If a farmers field becomes contaminated by GMO pollen or seeds that farmer may be sued by the owner of the patent. And many farmers have been sued by Monsanto. They make vicious attacks on farmers in an attempt to ruin them financially and to tear apart the social structure of our society.
Prakash touts the endorsement of such people as Norman Borlaug. His ideas brought us the Green Revolution, which the "Gene Revolution" is supposed to remedy by making pesticides obsolete and increasing harvests. Neither of these promises has been delivered.
Genetically modified crops have nothing to do with feeding starving people. They are meant to control the food supply and make unforeseen profits for the people at the top of these corporations.
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