[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

New report - "Hi-tech crops are bad for the brain"



This was posted by the Natural Law Party in the UK:

It has taken nearly two generations of applied science to discover
this. For nearly 40 years we have been ignorant of these effects
despite the 'knowledge' of modern science.

Meanwhile the much more radical changes to global agriculture being
precipitated by genetic modification are proceding at much faster pace
than the original 'Green Revolution' of the 1960s and 70s.  How many
generations of scientists will it take before the real effect of GM
technology in agriculuture is known?

Meanwhile many scientists and governments around the world are willing
to say they know all they need to know about the GM crops that they
are approving.

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex
========================================================================
http://www.biotech-info.net/hi_tech_crops.html

"Hi-tech crops are bad for the brain"

Geoffrey Lean
Environment Correspondent
Independent
April 23, 2000

"Miracle" crops, hailed as the answer to global famine, are
contributing to widespread brain impairment in the developing world, a
new report concludes. It says that the high-yielding rice and wheat
varieties that brought about the much-heralded "Green Revolution" are
among a range of environmental factors undermining human intelligence.

The study, which looks at environmental threats to human intelligence,
is part of the £15m Global Environmental Change Programme, financed by
Britain's Economic and Social Research Council. It is published
tomorrow. It concludes that a deadly combination of soil erosion,
pollution and inadequate diet is affecting the intelligence of
millions of people, with effects ranging from severe intellectual
disabilities to "sub-clinical decline" in whole populations.

The Green Revolution crops, introduced in the late 1960s and early
1970s, produce several times as much grain as the traditional
varieties they replaced, and they spread rapidly. They enabled India
to double its wheat crop in seven years, dramatically increasing food
supplies and averting widely predicted famine.

But the report says that the new crops, unlike their predecessors,
fail to take up minerals such as iron and zinc from the soil. So even
as people consumed more calories, their intake of these key
"micronutrients" fell. "High-yielding Green Revolution crops were
introduced in poorer countries to overcome famine," the report says.
"But these are now blamed for causing intellectual deficits, because
they do not take up essential micronutrients." The report is written
by Dr Christopher Williams, a research fellow with the Global
Environmental Change Programme. Using already published UN data he has
calculated that 1.5 billion people ­ one quarter of the earth's
population ­ are affected by "Green Revolution iron deficiency". He
claims the condition impairs the learning ability of more than half of
India's schoolchildren. He concludes that, eventually, the evolution
of the brain could go into reverse as humans develop more extensive
digestive systems to cope with the lack of nutrients ­ sacrificing
intelligence in the process.

The professor's sources include the Food and Agriculture Organisation
of the United Nations which has compiled evidence that the amount of
the metal in people's diets fell throughout most of the Third World in
the 1970s and 1980s, making iron deficiency the only form of
malnutrition to increase over the two decades. The greatest drops in
the intake of iron took place in South and South East Asia, the very
areas where the Green Revolution was most successful. Other UN figures
show that half the world's pregnant women are anaemic, because they
have too little iron, putting both them and their babies at risk. The
condition is thought to be responsible for 200,000 deaths a year. And
the World Bank reckons that deficiencies of iron, iodine, and vitamin
A together wipe out some 5 per cent of the GDP of developing
countries, a crippling blow to poor economies.


To Unsubscribe:  Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg".  If you receive the digest format, use the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".

All messages to sanet-mg are archived at:
http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail