The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is once again busy funding efforts to promote the spread of the agricultural cancer that are genetically-modified (GM) crops, this time in the form of a $10 million grant it recently issued to a group of British scientists working on new GM crops that require no fertilizer. According to the U.K.'s BBC, the justification behind the need for such research is that the GM crops will supposedly benefit African farmers that are unable to afford fertilizer.
Researchers from the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich will specifically use the grant, which happens to be the largest single investment into GM crops ever made in that country by a private organization, to create novel varieties of corn, wheat, and rice that pull nitrogen out of the air rather than from material fertilizers. Certain crops, including beans already do this naturally, which is what led scientists to begin a process of trying to artificially splice nitrogen-pulling genes into various other crops.
"We believe if we can get nitron fixing cereals we can deliver much higher yields to farmers in Africa and allow them to grow enough food for themselves," said professor Giles Oldroyd from JIC, lead author of the new study. Sounds great, right? Except that the genetic alterations will plunge even more African farmers into a vicious cycle of having to purchase licenses every year from corporate giants like Monsanto, which prohibit the saving and reusing of their proprietary seeds. And if the new crops fail to deliver as promised, which has happened time and time again with GM crops in the past, the farmers that adopt the patented technology will be in worse shape than if they simply continued on with their traditional crop systems.
"If you look in America, yields haven't increased by any significant amount and often go down," said Pete Riley, Campaign Director at GM Freeze, an alliance of organizations that is raising awareness about the deception of GM technologies, about the overall failure of GM crop systems to produce more food than conventional and organic crop systems. "Now we're seeing real, major problems for farmers in terms of weeds that are resistant to the herbicides which GM crops have been modified to tolerate," added Riley.
Africa's best bet; in other words, is to stick with trying to implement more organic polyculture crop systems that utilize what the natural environment has to offer rather than what Monsanto's marketing department claims to offer. Organic crops are still the safest, most nutritious crops available to mankind, and they come with none of the many health and environmental problems caused by GM crops.
