We shall rue propaganda on biotech foods being pushed down our throats

This time it seems real. Officially, we are about to start growing and eating genetically engineered foods.

None other than Deputy President William Ruto has told us that the ban on the foods will be lifted in two months.

And for being allowed to do so, we are supposed to be thankful to the government and our eminent scientists for being so kind and concerned about our collective hunger.

But I am not thanking anyone. Neither government officials nor scientist deserve any praise for attempting to push down our throats a technology that none of them originated with and one which, for that matter, serves extraneous interests – and is being championed for very sinister motives – by powers that are not for us to wield.

Before I can muster enough courage to praise them for being unpatriotic, I demand the public release of the findings of the task force on the effects of GMOs on health and safety. But I am not sure that this will happen. So I will digress a little bit. There is something called “a crisis of the now”.

This is a terminology attributed to a very concerned American, Mike Adams. In one of his analyses, Adams lambasts governments and the media for incessantly bombarding the population with what he terms “a never-ending stream of contrived crises that demand immediate attention in the present.”

He says that this psychological bombardment is waged primarily via the mainstream media which assaults the viewer or reader with images of violence, war, emotions, famines and conflict and denies the citizen “the mental breathing room to apply logic, reason or historical context.”

He says that to protect the propaganda from scrutiny, governments and the media never allow citizens the luxury of reflection. “Logic and reason are condemned. Critical thinking is derided. Historical context is obliterated and whatever happened just a few short years or months ago is actively rejected if it does not reinforce whatever present-day delusion is being pushed as facts”.

EXISTING DIVERSITY

Many of the people who sing alleluia to the foods are quick to brush off some really nagging issues. Among this is that our country best exemplifies an existing, albeit declining global agricultural order, in which the peasants feed 70 per cent of the global population.

For thousands of years, smallholder farmers have, by and large, been dishing out healthy foods free of aggressive agrochemicals and genetically modified organisms.

This means that feeding our population does not require high-tech, high-risk crops in which use of expensive chemicals manufactured by the same multinationals now subtly pushing GMOs down our throats. We are far much better off maintaining the existing diversity of seeds which are in the hands of millions of our farmers.

If we are not careful, we will end up squeezing peasant farmers out of their farms and rendering them hopeless. If you do not believe this, please remember that already we have a law that criminalises the type of farming we have practised for millennia.

This is The Crops Act that partly requires seed inspectors to be visiting your farm and without any search warrant, to seize whatever seed you could be having. And should you resist, the Act says you will be taken to court and if found guilty, imprisoned for three years or fined Sh2 million or both.

The GMO evangelists have refused to accept the little bit about health effects of the GMOs. The reason why a former Public Health Minister Beth Mugo banned GMO-food imports was because a seasoned scientist, Giles Seralini, proved beyond doubts that feeding rats on GMO maize led to development of unsightly and horrendous cancers and destroyed the poor creatures’ internal organs.

When Seralini published the peer-reviewed research in Food and Chemical Toxicology journal, elaborate machinery was put in place to rubbish his work, forcing the editor to retract the original publication in 2012 despite conceding that the methodology Seralini and colleagues used and the findings were scientifically sound and valid.

But even after the study was re-published in the Environmental Sciences Europe Journal on June 24, 2004, a development that restored the study’s international scientific respectability, the condemnation of Prof Seralini has prevailed to date.

Mr Mbaria is a freelance journalist who specialises on environmental issues. ([email protected])