Genetically Modified Barons

Our Opinion/Don’t harvest what you didn’t plant

By Cindy Gomez-Schempp
Editor

It turns out that Monsanto’s two main promises have been broken. They created magical seeds that promised farmers no more bugs and no more weeds. Now that farmers have changed their operations, driven out farmhands, and let their licenses to handle and spray dangerous pesticides and herbicides lapse, Monsanto says, “OOPS!”

New super weeds and super bugs are taking over American fields like wildfire.
Didn’t these Bozos ever hear about the perils of messing with mother nature, or watch Jurassic Park? Nature always finds a way. Better yet, what the hell was our government thinking letting a corporation patent life!? Since the Bush “Dubya” administration was in bed with Monsanto executives- - who then became White House justices, department directors, and politicos—they were probably thinking “I’m gonna get lucky!”

And lucky they did get. So lucky in fact that GM products have almost single-handedly changed the face of farming worldwide. Farmers whose lands have been overrun by GM products they never ordered, who were later sued for patent infringement and theft by Monsanto and lost their farms, probably are still pretty pissed. But, the rest of the farming world was ecstatic. Here was a way of increasing the yield and decreasing cost of labor and maintenance. Except it was all too easy. They broke all the rules of nature (and decency) and will probably end up leading us to a world food crisis, if not holocaust, from which we will have to claw our way back from for decades.

All moving parts working together, the government worked to eliminate barriers for corporations to patent life, pass FDA and EPA standards with a clean bill of healthiness, and align policy and politics to fit the agribusiness giants’ vision of world domination by American GM grown foods. Our government had done a great job of cracking down on immigrant farm labor, especially the type that does farming best – Mexicans. Many farmers, given the chance to switch back to non-GM crops, couldn’t even if they wanted to. Non-GM seeds are scarce and farm labor difficult to come by. Hand weeding is a bitch!

But Mexican and other immigrant farm labor of the brown persuasion should be very careful. While the farming world tries to avoid hitting a wall that is quickly approaching them, they have desperately used more and more deadly brews of herbicides and pesticides. They are pouring tons of highly toxic poisons on the ground and on the plants. But the chickens will eventually come to roost, and then brown reinforcements will be brought in. Unfortunately for them, many of you won’t show up.

Mexican farm workers beware! Who knows what these genetically modified barons will poison you with, or what they will do to hide the deformities in your children, the cancers in your wives, or the deaths of your husbands? Likely the same thing they did to the farmers: plow them under. Put the hoe down, back away from the farm work, and let the farmers, the government, and the big GM creating gods at Monsanto figure this one out on their own. They haven’t had your backs when it has come to worker’s safety, rights, or human dignity. Don’t worry about the rotting crops, the malnutrition, or food shortages that will follow. You didn’t create these problems, you don’t have to solve them. You just have to keep surviving.

Don’t worry, if you are willing to work at the back-breaking, soul-sucking, dirty and dusty job of a farm laborer, you are probably able to lift vehicles with one hand and jump small buildings in a single ‘brinco’. You’ll find some other equally exploitative and poorly paid job that is just as much a threat to your health and well being. There are still plenty of those jobs left. This threat of imminent death in the farm fields of America is too dangerous for you to chance it.

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