World According to Monsanto, pt 2

At CivilEats, Paula Crossfield deals, ever so much more patiently than I, with the pointlessness of promoting our failed biotechnology models abroad:

... Instead of teaching poor countries to fish, so to speak, we are selling them the fish with the hook still in its mouth.

That hook infers dependence, but there is also another catch: depleted resources. Biotechnology as it is used right now cannot be sustainable. It relies heavily on three things that are waning: surplus water, cheap oil and a stable climate. As much as biotech proponents claim their technologies could be used for sustainable aims, we don’t have decades to wait while the technology is perfected. And what if it is never perfected? In addition, in putting all of our eggs in one basket with biotech, the problem is misrepresented, and solutions that are already out there are being ignored.

It seems, therefore, that the only real solution to hunger is to transform the food system from the ground up. In Africa, 80% of the population is rural, and there are 33 million small farms (those farming less than 2 hectares), which produce 90% of the continent’s food (Patel and Giménez, 2009). Why don’t we, then, instead of promoting an intensive agriculture that is ruining our environment, our health and is lining the pockets of a few corporations, increase aid to agriculture? ...

Again, in a place so dependent on small-scale, local agriculture, introducing dodgy and expensive biotech traits, as well as export-oriented policies that encourage people to "get big or get out", as they say in the US, is a recipe for disaster. There's no housing or employment infrastructure to turn them all into urban professionals, or even a blue-collar working class, as we would think of those things.

With many of African countries decimated by AIDS, drought or civil war, they can't bear the cost of our capital and input intensive agricultural models. They need the best modern agricultural research, the cheapest and the most effective, which happens to be ecological agriculture methods.

Anyway, here's more documentary goodness. This second part starts off talking about the PCB chemicals Monsanto has been releasing since early last century, knew were toxic in the 1930s, and continued to produce until forced to stop. They've contaminated the entire world, and these abusive liars want us to trust their word on the safety of biotech crops: