Global organic genocide

Mischa Popoff

Author, Is It Organic? Mischa Popoff is the author of the critically-acclaimed book, Is it Organic? He earned a B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan where he specialized in the history of nitrogen for fertilizer and warfare. He then worked as an Advanced Organic Farm and Process Inspector, inspecting over 500 organic farms and processing facilities on both sides of the border. He stopped inspecting when he realized there was no appetite in the industry to eliminate fraud and gross negligence, nor to improve the quality of organic food. He now works as a public speaker, political columnist and radio host.

Global organic genocide

Genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) are the result of 35 years of science and have over 20 years of commercial success. Even European farmers and scientists agree they’re perfectly safe, leaving only urban organic activists on both sides of the Atlantic standing in the way of this vital agricultural technology.

Contrary to all the negative propaganda, GMOs are not all about pesticides and higher yields. Golden Rice is just one of a handful of new GMO crops that could help help millions in the Third World by preventing blindness and death due to Vitamin-A deficiency. But it remains in regulatory limbo thanks to tax-funded lobbying by organic activists based on the claim it will contaminate organic rice, which is patently absurd.

But rather than confront this disinformation, people like Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo are planning to give organic activists a national, voluntary GMO labelling system that will include an even stricter regulatory apparatus for new GMO crops and a threshold level for GMO content. Activists have been demanding a law like this for quite some time, seeking to confirm their claim that there is something wrong with GMOs, and very nearly got everything they wanted when Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer proposed a similar bill last year but failed to get it passed.

Everyone knows how the City of New York tried limiting the size of soft drink its citizens could be trusted with, and that the courts struck it down. American law makers should not make it their business to “babysit” citizens. And yet, we’re about to see a threshold-limit put on GMO ingredients across North America, with not a shred of evidence of any consequence resulting from growing or consuming GMOs. And you can rest assured that organic farmers won’t hesitate to sue their neighbors when organic crops are found to have GMO content above that level, whatever it is determined to be. Is this America? Or Europe? Why do we need this GMO labelling law?

Food labeling, just like food safety, should never be directed by whim or popular vote. Labels are either mandatory and driven by science, like warning labels on cigarettes, or they’re driven by the free market, like the term “hybrid” on a gas/electric car. New laws are not required in either case.

But, Vermont just passed the first “clean” GMO labelling bill in America, and Oregon became home to the sixth county in America to ban GMOs. And so Pompeo seeks to saddle us with more law. Rather than respond directly to threats like these from organic activists at the local level, he’s being egged on by nearly every farm and food organization in the land to risk abandoning America’s leadership role in agriculture with a rejigged version of Boxer’s failed GMO labelling bill.

So get ready to negotiate with people who claim GMO farmers are poisoning our children and the environment, and who believe there are too many people on the planet, without any evidence for either claim. Some say it’s a green religion leading activists who’ve never worked a day on a farm to oppose GMOs. But it’s far worse.

Every other anarchistic revolution throughout history was always restricted by physical limits. Whether it was how many people could be beheaded in France, shot to death in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, gassed in concentration camps, starved to death, forced into slave labor, or have their heads smashed in with rifle butts to save on ammunition in communist Cambodia… every other revolutionary-horror inflicted by man upon his fellow man had hard, physical limits.

But what we face now is a genocidal horror-show that only nuclear holocaust even comes close to approximating; the environmentalist horror of what Maurice Strong, the father of the Kyoto Protocol, refers to as a “glimmer of hope… the reduction of the human population to the point that those who survive may not number more than the 1.61 billion people.”

1.61 billion, by no coincidence, is the number of people who walked the earth before Fritz Haber – the brilliant German Jew – cracked the code in 1917 that allows us to pull a literally limitless supply of Nitrogen fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) from the earth’s atmosphere, freeing humankind from the toil of naturally-composted fertilizer. It was the rejection of Haber’s process that launched the organic movement in Germany in the 1920s. How telling that leading environmentalists see this as a turning point we must return to.

But organic activists know they’ll never ban ammonium nitrate. It’s not only the most important fertilizer in farming, but also the key ingredient in gunpowder and TNT. So instead they’re bottlenecking the single most-promising form of technology to hit agriculture since Haber’s discovery: the ability to develop new crop varieties through genetic engineering, thereby forcing the next generation of American farmers to be less efficient than the last, for the first time ever.

This is the “total” in the term “totalitarianism,” like never before expressed.

It’s one thing if organic activists decide to reject a form of technology for themselves as they did with Haber’s ammonia synthesis process, and as they did later with pesticides. But to force everyone to reject a form of technology as they’re now doing with GMOs – and with a helping hand from otherwise well-meaning politicians like Rep. Pompeo – is unprecedented.

Organic activists simply don’t care how many kids will die this year after going blind from Vitamin-A deficiency, or the next… or the next. It’s not a problem that requires a solution. It’s already a solution in their jaded eyes. A final solution.

And why would anyone even consider passing a law that provides legitimacy to something as depraved and un-American as that?

Mischa Popoff is a former organic farmer and USDA-contract organic inspector and is the author of Is it Organic?

www.rightedition.com