International Resistance to the the Modification and Control of Life

Resistance comes in three shades: passive, occasionally active and active.
The corporate and political powers who aim to take a controlling influence over the food chain count on the majority of civil resistance being of a passive ‘dumbed down’ nature. They can tolerate a certain amount of ‘occasionally active’ interference in their master plan, but they do not tolerate genuinely active resistance. So those of us who hammer continuously on genetically modified corporate doors are monitored, harassed and generally marginalised by the prevailing ’status quo’ and its media poodles.

We should have little doubt that the prevailing corporate backed government agenda is financed by the big agribusiness and pharmaceutical corporations, who turn-in annual combined profits in double figure billions and who do, indeed, aim to wrest total control over the human food chain. “Control oil and you control the State. Control food and you control the people” said Richard Nixon’s ex secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

What is the best way to control the food chain?

Answer: Hit the seeds. The starting point of our genetic resource base and the foundation of the biodiversity of the planet and all its edible (and inedible) products. The true battle lines of the GMO resistance and acceptance war are being drawn up around the future of our right to grow our own food and to live lives independent of the crushing conformism of corporate greed. Food sovereignty is the absolute right of every citizen and every human community on this planet, and those historically most actively engaged in defending this sovereignty are the world’s peasant farmers.

They are a breed of humanity professionally engaged in the maintenance of permanently evolving living seed banks, set in the fields and community plots that are responsible for feeding the great majority of the world’s ever expanding population. And it is for this reason that, for the corporate controlled status quo, they remain amongst the most denigrated working peoples of our divided planet.

Peasant farmers are the last line of absolute resistance to the global corporate take over of the food chain. The red blood that runs through their prominent veins is the
most valuable human asset mankind possesses – it is quite literally the key to our survival as sentient, loving, humane beings. No wonder then, that the World Trade Organisation, The International Monetary Fund, The United States Department of Agriculture, the European Union and virtually all national governments and self declared dictators
wish to see the last of them. They are, infuriatingly, holding up the ultimate submission of mankind to the great genetic experiment with its accompanying tool kit of overt and covert mind control techniques and technologies, mindless materialism and psychopathic, unbridled megalomania.

We need, at this point, to be fully aware that the devil’s brew does not stop at genetic engineering of our crops and animals, it is about to embark on the genetic modification of human babies. The British government is now debating “The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill” which is being introduced with one of its aims being legalising production of genetically modified human embryos – a techno-science that can lead on to the unrestrained creation of patented GM babies. Without a major outcry, this bill will pass into UK law sometime this year. Where is the resistance?

Should it fail to be blocked, the passing of this act will constitute another big step towards establishment of the Orwellian society familiar to readers of ‘1984′. It is currently by-passing most opposition by making claims of eradicating otherwise untreatable sicknesses. This is the reasoning that can open the Pandora’s box for unrestricted eugenics.

In the meantime, in the sky above our heads, another highly visible weapon in the armory
of ‘advanced human control syndrome’ is regularly manifesting itself. “Chemtrails” – congealing high flying (military) jet fuel particles that remain stuck in the sky failing, unlike normal jet trails, to disperse and disappear into the atmosphere. ‘Chemtrails’ stick in the sky and form thin veil-like clouds that filter sunlight and release on those below, an as yet not fully diagnosed cocktail of chemicals including aluminium, silicon and barium; chemicals with neuro-toxic side effects, including disturbance of the human neocortex as well as climatic modification capabilities.

Fogging the human mind and altering the weather are two useful adjuncts to the imminent introduction of a new generation of ‘climate engineered’ GM seeds, currently awaiting a green light from the European Commission, incuding the infamous ‘terminator’ self destructing seed. A host of new patent applications are currently awaiting official clearance which, it is claimed, will provide a whole new range of novel, patented GM seeds capable of providing our ‘food future’ in the oft’ predicted extreme conditions of drought, flood and salinity. The European Commission, in the mean time, is winning some muted public applause through pretending to declare a certain level of opposition to first generation GMO.

Joining forces with peasants, as has happened in France, India, South America, Poland, Romania, Turkey and all across the world, helps form a powerful alliance against these forces of sterility and destruction. Indigenous farmers often have very little contact with the outside world and easily become victimised by smooth talking seed salesmen and government primed subsidies. Civilian activists, who have been resolutely defending the
future of GM free “Real Food”, can offer crucial support to peasant farmers; not least by informing them of the tactics of predatory transnationals and helping to link them in to the international resistance movement. Via Campesina has set an excellent example in this field, but much more can be done and needs to be done by a wide cross section of NGO’s.

In Poland, The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and the Coalition for a GMO Free Poland are jointly engaged in confronting government and corporate covert – and sometimes overt – attempts to slip GM seeds and plants into the system under the cover of darkness. The current Polish administration is playing with adopting classic EU ‘co-existence’ rules of the game. Faced with a Commission fine for failing to lift the
current GM seed ban, introduced by the previous administration in 2006, the Polish government’s Environmental and Agricultural ministers are juggling consumer resistance with corporate and Brussels based pressures to accept the ludicrously described “safe” adoption of barrier zones that, it is claimed, would prevent cross pollination between GM and non GM crops. All this, long after science and common sense have shown that pollen travels hundreds of kilometres on the wind and via bees, insects, birds, human feet
and lorries.

Poland’s 1.5 million small scale peasant farmers are only dimly aware of the battle going on above their heads, including a call upon the Black Madonna, made at a conference (April 24th) organised by the Coalition for a GMO Free Poland in the famous shrine at Jasna Gora, to (once again) support the cause of the defence of Poland against the forces of repression. The conference was presided over by a Franciscan Father and marked what we hope may be a more open intervention by the Church in what is clearly a critical test of
the fortitude of classic Judeo Christian moral and ethical beliefs. So far,signs of solidarity from the church have been few and far between, but how can sentient human beings, who also claim religious guidance, ignore the fate of the gene pool which is our common inheritance and whose health and welfare is our incontrovertible collective responsibility?

As we all battle on to expose the grinding poverty being exerted upon the world’s food producers by the GM monoliths, cotton farmers in the Indian province of the Punjab and elsewhere on the continent have been taking their lives, tragically unable to cope with the repeated failure of their much hyped (Monsanto) GM Bt cotton crops to produce a viable harvest. Left with no home saved seeds to fall back on, these farmers have been exposed to the ultimate betrayal of their human dignity and right to life. Their death constitutes a direct ‘crime against humanity’ perpetrated, as it has been, upon innocent farmers struggling to earn just enough income to support their families from day to day.

How much worse does it need to get before the ‘passive’ resistance finally rises up to join the fight for the freedom of mankind and our liberation from the forces of global repression?

Julian Rose (President, The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside)
July 2008