Pope Francis Celebrates World Food Day With Powerful Polemic Against GMOs And The Biotech Industry
As biotech and GMOs come under an increasingly harsh spotlight on the news that Bayer and Monsanto are planning an unholy $66 billion merger that would give the combined entity control over 29 percent of the world’s seeds, more and more people are waking up to the frightening direction all of this could be heading.
Political leaders around the world are starting to take notice of the fact that people overwhelmingly disapprove of not only the principle of genetically modified seeds that don’t reproduce, thus forcing farmers to buy new seeds each year, but also the rampant overuse of chemicals like glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup brand herbicide, which has been found to be a probable cause of cancer.
And now no less a luminary than Pope Francis has come out in criticism of the industry and its practices, penning a harsh indictment of the greed and short-sightedness of biotech in a powerful letter delivered to the Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on World Food Day:
“[T]here is a growing number of people who believe they are omnipotent, or able to ignore the cycles of the seasons and to improperly modify the various animal and plant species,” he wrote, “leading to the loss of variety that, if it exists in nature, has and must have its role. Producing qualities that may give excellent results in the laboratory may be advantageous for some, but have ruinous effects for others.”
The letter was doubly powerful when one considers that Pope Francis is far from being a mush-headed ecclesiastical with no real knowledge of how the real world actually works, only visions of angels and cherubs floating around in his tiny mind.
He is actually a food chemist–or was before he got so busy, you know, poping–so he has no little expertise when it comes to growing crops and what might be the best ways to go about feeding the world’s hungry.
And this isn’t his first foray into science and controversy. The pope famously drew the wrath of even evangelical politicians in the U.S. when he issued a condemnation of the dangers of global climate change, and calling out climate change deniers.
But this latest broadside against the entire GMO industry should make even more peoiple wake up and smell the organic coffee, because it isn’t just about crops–the issue encompasses so much more:
“From the wisdom of rural communities we can learn a style of life that can help defend us from the logic of consumerism and production at any cost, a logic that, cloaked in good justifications, such as the increasing population, is in reality aimed solely at the increase of profit,” he wrote.
Amen, brother, amen.
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Pope Francis Slams Biotech Industry and GMOs in World Food Day Letter