Originally published August 20 2014
Multinational scientists request help from the Pope to get destructive GMOs banned in Brazil
by PF Louis
(NaturalNews) When independent scientists and farmers start protesting GMOs to their governments without success, to whom can they turn? Well, the GMO resisters in the predominately Catholic country Brazil have decided to go papal. They intend to get the Pope on board to help ban GMOs and all the affiliated toxins that wind up having to be used more rather than less.
Lately, Brazil has been mounting a counterattack on the biotech invasion heavily endorsed by US elites to benefit Brazilian elites for quick, high profits and enhance biotech industry's control over the food supply.
Earlier, Brazil rolled over for the biotech industry, especially with their insect-resistant corn seeds. Now, farmers are realizing the folly of their fateful decisions, but they're locked into a scarcity of non-GMO seeds that are overwhelmed by GMO seed presence. [1]
Brazilian government agricultural agencies were originally sold on the biotech lies that Bt corn, purportedly able to prevent insect infestations of corn with its own genetically inserted pesticide, would enable less expensive pesticide use and damage to the environment.
Now the farmers are lamenting their agricultural cave-in to US and multinational agrochemical corporate hegemony.
Their crops are failing, and the GMO companies who have monopolized the corn seed supply are telling them to spray pesticides more than ever to compensate for the worms and other insects that have become resistant to Bt corn's GE pesticides.
This puts farmers in a position of paying more than usual for pesticides after paying premium prices for Bt corn seeds. Lower yields with higher costs have Brazilian farmers and farm groups in an uproar. [1]
Environmentalists and independent scientists have joined the opposition. They recognize that increased pesticide applications will lead to chemical runoffs that endanger water supplies, with no guarantees that the crop yields will improve while the farmers go broke.
But even this coalition feels that they're outgunned by GMO advocates and their country's politicians who stand to gain by going along with the GMO push to control all of agriculture.
Calling for the Pope
In 2013, Cardinal Peter Turkson addressed an audience of GMO advocates in Des Moines, Iowa, about the Vatican's concerns regarding the rise of GMO agriculture. He had the audience squirming in their seats and looking at the floor as he presented the Vatican's moderate GMO concerns. [2]
Prior to Pope Francis's recent arrival to the Vatican, the outgoing Pope Benedict appeared to be pro-GMO after considerable waffling. It appears as though the current Vatican office is resisting GMO lobbying and beginning to focus on the actual issues.
Perhaps due to an awareness of that apparent shift, international scientists, social activist groups and farmers are collectively appealing to Pope Francis to join forces in an attempt to persuade the Brazilian government to ban growing and using genetically modified foods and all those worse-than-ever pesticides and herbicides in Brazil.
In April of 2014, the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) sent the Vatican and Pope Francis documentation provided by eight researchers from six countries with several studies that credibly show how harmful these foods can be to biodiversity, the larger environment, and the health of humans and animals. [3]
The letter also addressed the folly of patenting manipulated forms of life, a subject normally of concern for Catholic orthodoxy. This outrageous, unethical legal process threatens seed options and the core values of family farming. It is legalized biopiracy and agricultural plundering. [3]
After the 1964 military coupe ousting of Brazil's popularly elected Jaoa Goulart, a.k.a. Jango, Brazil endured 20 brutal years in which hundreds went "missing" and tens of thousands were jailed and/or tortured. [4]
Why? According to an article by Michael Uhl, an American attending a Catholic university in Brazil around the time of the coupe, the communist threat from Jango was a hoax.
Uhl stated, "[T]he contest was never between the Marxist Left and the Right. It was between a centrist reformer [Jango] who had a vision of gradually developing a Brazilian capitalist economy... and the internationalists who would happily sell their country's labor and resource[s] to the highest bidder, so long as their own profits were high and nothing was done to endanger their spectacular privileges." [5]
Some things never change, but hopefully Brazil will be part of a successful growing international opposition to GMOs.
Sources for this article include:
[1] http://www.naturalnews.com
[2] http://www.gmfreecymru.org
[3] http://www.brazzilmag.com
[4] http://nacla.org
[5] http://www.counterpunch.org
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