How typical.  The same company that tells you to believe genetically engineered food is healthy because THEY say it’s healthy, has now sponsored a World Food Prize that’s been given to… guess who?  Their own Robert Fraley, Exec.VP & Chief Technology Officer.

Journalist Mark Bittman (“on food and all things related”) from the New York Times makes a grand case for a “Food Sovereignty Prize” to showcase the many people around the world who are actually working to create a sustainable and fair food system. (We could nominate some of our farmer-veterans in “Ground Operations”!)

Zeyaur Khan, a plant pathologist  in sub-Saharan Africa has developed the “push-pull” system of pest control — where you plant a crop to “push” stem borers away from your desired crop by planting a different crop nearby that “pulls” them in.  The cost of farming decreases while the yields are doubling!! Neither can be said of Monsanto’s BT-corn with the pesticide genetically injected into the plant tissue itself.

My personal hero is Olivier De Schutter, United Nations special reporter on The Right to Food. After years of traveling to dozens of countries to learn about food insecurity (America is one of them, we’ve got a staggering hunger issue in this country) he came up with solid studies (hundreds of farms worldwide) that prove that so-called “conventional” agriculture  that uses fertilizers, chemicals and GMO seeds creates a cycle of debt and dependency… drug addiction for the soil that depletes the capacity of the land to grow food without them. Just like Monsanto wants it.  Turns out that harvests are doubling and tripling yields when small farmers get off the chemicals and back to diversified farming (several crops, not just one) using agro-ecological (organic) growing methods.  Drug addiction isn’t any better for plants than people.

For an easy read and a better understanding of these issues, try Mark’s article: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/the-true-deservers-of-a-food-prize/?_r=1