To understand the complexities in the details, a modern urbanite needs to understand a little bit about farming traditions. My own eyes were opened to this just recently I was on a field tour in southern Ontario with a small group of folks learning about heritage seed. The farmer looked on as we examined a few modest rows of beans. Some plants looked strong and healthy while others looked, well, pathetic. These few rows were the second season of an experiment.
While on a trip to Latin America, our farmer friend had bought a handful of beans at a village market and stuffed them in his pocket. He went on to explain that instead of eating those beans, he planted the handful from his pocket in the ground just to see what would happen.
Low and behold, he had a few germinate and grow to produce new seed. Just a few. This crop we were looking at was the second season of growth, selected from those few beans that grew the first year. Now he had two full rows and greatly improved germination. We were witnessing an ancient practice at work. His beans are adapting to the climate and soil with a little help from the farmer.
The farmer selects the best and replants them the next season. Those seeds grow and the process begins again. The current system is an artificial system that is only propped up by large government subsidies, which are starting to disappear. This leaves farmers in a system where they are completely vulnerable and almost unable to make a living. Research in Canada has demonstrated that glypohsate residue is mimicking the symptoms that people have from wheat sensitivities and there have been all kinds of health problems that disappear, in children when they go on an organic diet.
This will be the problem in the marketplace; there is no way to differentiate it. The first time we end up with a boatload of wheat in Tokyo bay where they find traces of GMOs will produce a huge fall out. Who will pay for the GMO contaminated wheat that is rejected in faraway countries.
We have already seen some boycotts of US wheat in when unapproved GE wheat was discovered in fields in Oregon. More recently there were other cases of unauthorized, unapproved GE wheat found in a Montana experiment station and in a field in Washington.
Although these finds did not trigger the economic fall out that the Oregon find triggered, they raise serious doubts about how GE wheat will be controlled if it is approved and released. Contamination seems a certainly and huge loss of markets to the detriment of US wheat growers seem a high probability. Surrendering those choices to just a few agrochemical companies who prohibit farmers from keeping seed they grow for planting means that the companies will now provide all the seed and all the chemicals in a very controlled way.
Farmers will have no say over price, they will have no say over what seeds they can use, and what chemicals they can spray with. Farmers will be sold a promise that this will make them more money but once they buy into it they will be worse off than they already are now, because they bought into a closed system which is totally dependent on the chemical company. When the prices of the commodities go down and the prices for the chemicals go up they are stuck in a system they cannot escape.
Beyond the many concerns around the impacts of GE wheat on both the farmer and the environment there is an underlying tension that is being propagated by the chemical companies pitting the conventional and organic farmers against one another. They are being put at odds.
The chemical companies are putting out the image of conflict and controversy and battle. Of course they are afraid to lose market share.
There main claim is that only they [the chemical companies] can feed the world and now people are starting to see research coming out more and more that debunks that notion. At the end of the day farmers simply want to support their families and farms and grow nutritious food for a hungry world, and chemical intensive crops are not the solution.
The future is organically produced food. Only this type of agriculture can feed the world. It is important to understand that with every dollar consumers spend on food; they are voting for chemical or organic agriculture. For example, biotechnology giant Monsanto Co. This bacterium gene allows the soybeans to resist repeated applications of the herbicide Roundup also produced by Monsanto. Monsanto abandoned its efforts to develop Roundup Ready wheat in However, Monsanto has experimented with genetic engineering in wheat to produce drought-resistant and higher-yielding wheat strains.
However, none of these products are market-ready, and they're only being grown currently as experiments. There have been a few isolated cases of GMO wheat Roundup Ready wheat being detected on farms but there has been no evidence that the wheat has entered the food supply. That doesn't mean wheat hasn't changed over the last half-dozen decades, though—it has, as the result of a process called hybridization which is different from genetic engineering.
And some scientists have speculated that those changes could be one cause of an increase in the number of people who have an inability to tolerate gluten. In hybridization, scientists don't tinker directly with the plant's genome. Instead, they choose particular strains of a plant with desirable characteristics and breed them to reinforce those characteristics. When this is done repeatedly, successive generations of a particular plant can look very different from the plant's ancestors.
That's what's happened with modern wheat, which is shorter, browner, and far higher-yielding than wheat crops were years ago. Dwarf wheat and semi-dwarf wheat crops have replaced their taller cousins, and these wheat strains require less time and less fertilizer to produce a robust crop of wheat berries.
However, a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reported that there's not really any more gluten in modern wheat than there was in s-era wheat. Studies do show a significant increase in the incidence of celiac disease over the last several decades.
However, it's not at all clear why the number of people affected by these two conditions might be rising. Donald D. Kasarda, the U. Department of Agriculture scientist who authored the study on s wheat, wonders whether it's possible that increased consumption of wheat in recent years—rather than increased gluten in the wheat actually consumed—might be in part to blame for increased incidence of celiac disease.
He also says the use of wheat gluten as an ingredient in processed foods might contribute. However, he says that much more research must be made to evaluate these other possible contributors. However, no one really knows why celiac disease and possibly gluten sensitivity might be affecting more people.
There's one thing that's certain, though: Genetically modified wheat can't be to blame.
0コメント