Navaho Gunleg

Earlier this month results from research by Greenpeace indicated that a certain brand of rice that is sold in Dutch supermarkets is contaminated with genetically modified crops. (I wouldn’t have caught this if I didn’t check Indymedia.)

According to the article, it’s contaminated with a type of modified rice that can survive a certain weed-killer.

The article doesn’t at all mention the name of this weed-killer, but I think I can deduce that that has to be the weed-killer named ‘Round Up‘. Which, really ain’t no weed-killer — it kills everything organic. I saw some pretty nasty shit a couple of years ago — where genetically engineered crops resisted Round Up, whilst all the other crop almost litterally ‘burned’ away.

Some pretty nasty toxic stuff, well, unless you are a genetically engineered crop, of course. It’s like, genetically modifying mankind to sustain nuclear radition and dropping a bomb on the planet.

When I was a kid and I read technological magazines, they would talk about how genetically engineered crops will be able to grow, say, in unhabitable places such as the Sahara desert. That it would cure the world of famine and marketing it as such they probably got a lot of money for the research — but the way this technology now really is used really scares me.

What is even more worrying, the last time I went to some store for some stuff for my garden — I noticed these ordinary shops are pushing that Round Up stuff to the regular consumers now too. I guess it will be just a matter of time before they will start to sell modified grasses and bulbs, so everybody can have that weed and hassle free lawn.

Thinking about how mankind basically ‘genetically engineered’ the killer bee into existance and the impact of that mistake, I really hate to see where this stuff is heading. In my point of view they are, once again, too soon trying to make some quick money of a technology that isn’t fully developed yet.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) states that the long-term effects of genetic modification have not been sufficiently investigated. And they’re right — it could surely be that, in the future, certain hybrids of genetically engineered crops could have a very negative impact on our environment or ourselves. And that can easily happen because pollen travels by wind and insects carry it around and so it can furtilise flowers in far away places.

The EFSA is playing down the danger of this rice contamination though, saying that there is probably nothing to worry about but this is one of the few times that I’m glad I’m a picky eater and don’t eat rice at all.

The LL601 strain of rice is illegal in Europe but as mentioned in this article, recently a shipload of American rice in the Rotterdam harbour was discovered to be contaminated — which implies that the stuff is still getting shipped into Europe.

The producer of the rice denies the alligations saying that they carefully check their rice, but they have only guaranteed their rice to be gentech-free since the 23st of August this year. Rice from before that date were not removed from stores, though.

It seems like a zombie-movie, but what if the genetically engineered crops have already begun infecting the natural crops? It would be as good as impossible to rid the world of it.