by BRUCE A. DIXON
Scientists Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson PHOTO/Huffington Post
Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are science educators, all over TV and the internet. Nye is an aeronautical engineer, a one-time member of the team that delivered the Boeing 747. Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of NYC’s Hayden Planetarium. Over the years both have had lots of mostly sensible things to say about the disastrous prospects of human caused climate change.
But Tyson and Nye now assure us all that GMO technologies in the hands of the same corporate profiteers and rent extractors who are melting the North Pole, Greenland and a good deal of Antarctica to get the last few trillion in fossil fuel profits are nothing to worry about, are perfectly OK and no cause for concern.
To their credit, Tyson and Nye don’t themselves say “Trust your corporate overlords, Bill Gates and Monsanto just want to feed the world…” But they do come pretty close. Bill Nye’s Netflix show included a Monsanto exec to say exactly those words and Tyson appeared opposite a scientist and organic farmer who declared that not one person has ever been poisoned, maimed or killed by a genetically modified product. Ever since then that’s been their position.
They’re talking like lawyers, not like scientists. Nye and Tyson fail to take into account the the waves of tens of thousands of excess suicides among hopelessly indebted poor farmers in India the last 15 years, farmers whose debt load had been greatly increased dependence on costly commercial seed and pesticide.
They lost their land, their hope and their lives. Even if Monsanto didn’t poison them, the seed and pesticide and biotech entrepreneurs were part of the machine that killed them.
Farmers had been planting seed, feeding people, saving exchanging and planting more seed ten or twenty thousand years without having to pay Monsanto and its allies. But the investors at Monsanto had a vision. They called it “value capture” in global agriculture, the establishment of new private property rights which would enable them to extract revenue, to collect rent on the ordinary operation of seeds and natural processes. Investors in the new “life science industries” tirelessly lobbied judges and government officials to establish “intellectual property” rights over seeds and genetic material, including those found in plants, animals and humans. Once they got this written into case law and treaties, as I wrote back in 2005
“American corporations beginning in the 1990s were able file a blizzard of patents claiming varieties of rice and wheat grown for centuries in India, beans cultivated before Columbus in Mexico, a staggering array of medicinal plants known and used by local inhabitants of Africa, of South and Southeast Asia, of Amazonia and elsewhere, along with the foods and medicines derived from them, and their methods of preparation as the private “intellectual property” of those corporations.”
That was plan A for the new genetic engineering entrepreneurs, and it’s the clearest possible indication that in their hands this is a purely parasitic operation, a jacked up raiding party.
Their Plan B was even worse. It was development of something called the terminator seed . Terminator seed technology amounts to the ability to guarantee a seed of some vital crop only lasts a single generation so that your farmers, your victims are forced to pay the owner whose “intellectual property” they had been carelessly saving, eating, exchanging and cultivating for thousands of years until now. The genetic engineering entrepreneurs wanted to use their new property rights to turn seed germination off until you, or third world farmers, paid them.
Black Agenda Report for more