This is how much biotech's poster children have been costing:
"The Biotechnology Industry Association spent $7.5 million to tout the potential benefits of bio-engineered products, using bio-engineered rice as a leading example."
Put that cost (just in the US) together with the huge development costs of a crop like 'golden rice', and all the time and political commitment put into backing it (from Clinton down). Then imagine that same financial clout and political will invested into actually solving problems like VAD with the low-cost means already to hand. And judge the obscenity of what is going on.
Feeding or fooling the world?
1. Study: Interest groups have spent almost $30 million on ads
2. Feeding or fooling the world? relevant quotes
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Study: Interest groups have spent almost $30 million on ads
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer The Associated Press. April 26, 2001
WASHINGTON: Interest groups have already spent almost $30 million on issue ads this year, a sign that political campaigning never stops these days, says the author of a study. "Interest groups do not stop trying to influence public policy on Election Day," said Ken Goldstein, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin- Madison who wrote the study. Almost a third of the money was spent by abortion rights groups. Abortion rights groups have spent more than $8 million of the $28 million spent this year as they mobilized for an expected confrontation with the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.
Anti-abortion forces spent just over $20,000, according to the study. The Biotechnology Industry Association spent $7.5 million to tout the potential benefits of bio-engineered products, using bio-engineered rice as a leading example. Some foods with bio-engineered elements have come under suspicion in foreign markets. The plastics industry spent $2 million promoting the virtues of plastics. Goldstein said Thursday that interest groups no longer start issue ad campaigns as a political confrontation heats up, but now start them "very early, and frame public opinion before the actual battle happens."
The year-round political battle that once focused on Washington, D.C., is now taken around the country on many political fights, Goldstein said, but the leading television market for those ads remains Washington. "At the state level," Goldstein said, "we're also seeing tons of advertising about local issues."
Goldstein uses data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which monitors political and issues advertising in the nation's top 100 media markets. His study was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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2. Feeding or fooling the world?
"As compared with the challenge of controlling protein-energy malnutrition, elimination of VAD [Vitamin A Deficiency] can be achieved rapidly. The cost-effectiveness ratio is also highly favourable. It is therefore a test case of political will, and managerial capacity to implement known technologies and known solutions." *World Health Organisation, 2000
"Some Green Revolution crops are poor in vital nutrients such as calcium, iron, and vitamins C and A. But often, under-utilised crops are rich in these nutrients. One study found four African home-garden crops, leafy vegetables with twice the micronutrients of spinach." *Stefano Padulosi, International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Rome
"We already know today that most of the problems that are to be addressed via Golden Rice and other GMOs can be resolved in matter of days, with the right political will." *Hans Herren, Director General, The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, Kenya; winner of the World Food Prize 1995
"If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not”¦To feed the world takes political and financial will" *Steve Smith, SCIMAC and Novartis (now SYNGENTA), Tittleshall Village Hall public meeting on proposed local GM farm scale trial, 29th March 2000
"We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly nor economically beneficial to us. On the contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millenia and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves." *Delegates from 20 African Countries to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN on Plant Genetic Resources, 1998.
"Seeking a technological food fix for world hunger may be the most commercially malevolent wild goose chase of the new century." *Dr Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet
"I don't think any of us would disagree that, if an alternative exists to a GE solution, it's to be preferred" *Mr Hodson QC, acting on behalf of the Life Sciences Network at the New Zealand Royal Commission on Genetic Modification, 8th Feb 2001
"The poor and hungry need low-cost, readily available technologies and practices to increase food production." *Professor Jules Pretty, Director of the Centre for Environment and Society, University of Essex
"Low-tech 'sustainable agriculture,' shunning chemicals in favour of natural pest control and fertiliser, is pushing up crop yields on poor farms across the world, often by 70 per cent or more... The findings will make sobering reading for people convinced that only genetically modified crops can feed the planet's hungry in the 21st century... A new science-based revolution is gaining strength built on real research into what works best on the small farms where a billion or more of the world's hungry live and work... It is time for the major agricultural research centres and their funding agencies to join the revolution." *New Scientist editorial, February 3 2001
``Organic agricultural production based upon cheap, locally available materials and technologies provides an important alternative in the search for an environmentally sound and equitable solution to the problem of food security.'' *Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN
"Bangladeshi people do not need GM food. GM food means the destruction of farmers and letting the companies take over. We need to preserve a biodiversity-based food production without the application of poisonous chemicals. Bangladeshi farmers are rejecting the idea that GM food can meet the needs of hungry people. This is nonsense. GM can feed the GREED of the companies, not the NEED of the hungry people. People are hungry not because we are not able to produce, but because the food production base is being systematically destroyed by the interventions of the profit-seeking companies. They want to make business out of our hunger!" *Farida Akhtar, UBINIG. Policy Research for Development Alternatives, Bangladesh
"We consider the use of the South's rural poverty to justify the monopoly control and global use of genetically modified food production by the North's transnational corporations, not only an obstructive lie, but a way of derailing the solutions to our Southern rural poverty. It is the height of cynical abuse of the corporations' position of advantage." *Joint statement signed by over 40 developing country NGOs