Having just seen the new
French documentary ‘The World According to Monsanto’, I am sure that lurking
closely behind this world food crisis is the aforementioned multinational biotechnology
corporation whose only intent is to increase its profits through controlling
what the world eats and if the world eats at all!

In the year 2007, wheat
prices rose 77 percent and rice 16 percent and already this year, the price of
rice has soared just over 140 percent. Experts around the globe attempt to explain
that much of this increase in food prices can be blamed upon the increasing
demand for biofuels meaning less grains for food, and that the effects of
climate change and rising oil prices cannot be overlooked. Add to these
unfavourable circumstances there are more people to feed with a population
growth of 78 million people each year, and the new demand on world food as rich
Chinese and Indians eat more dairy and meat.

However we must not forget that our global food industry is not about feeding
people and that sadly it is all about the profits of corporate agribusiness. In
seeking to understand the current food crisis and its origins I have to agree
with Mercola.com that

‘Although the names of any particular biotech companies are never
mentioned, it walks, talks and reeks like poorly cloaked Monsanto
propaganda.’

Profits from Monsanto’s
genetically engineered seeds have risen from $90 million to $256 million,
largely due to the growing demand for food and alternative fuel sources.

All over the world people are
robbed of their livelihoods and health as corporate agribusiness forces the use
of GE technology and once its seeds are spread throughout the world there is no
going back. In ‘The World According to
Monsanto’ we learn that in many parts of the world only 2 percent of the
farming lands are owned by the locals and that those families who have remained
are rapidly lost to city slums; their former health and happiness destroyed by
the relentless pesticides that poison their children, their food and their
water supplies.

Traditional farming has been
traded away and in its place we have a world food system that has millions of
people starving. India, where over one-fifth of the population is chronically hungry and 48%
of children under five years old are malnourished, exported US$1.5 billion worth of milled rice and $322
million worth of wheat in 2004. Kenya was self-sufficient in food until about 25 years ago
and today tragically it imports 80% of its food.

Multinationals are making
billions in profit out of growing global food crisis: Monsanto’s net income for
the three months up to the end of February 2008 had more than doubled over the same
period in 2007, from $543m to $1.12bn.

Genetic engineering is not the
answer to the world food crisis. World hunger will only end when people
can secure their basic right to food in
the form of means to purchase their needs or in having access to the farmland
and natural resources so they can grow food. Genetically engineering crops does
nothing to address the poverty that causes hunger, in fact as we know it is one
of the ways that traditional farming has
been destroyed.

The World According to Monsanto
is a nightmare which we must not allow to happen!

helen lobato

www.informyourself.com.au