charlottealacitrouille:

charlottealacitrouille:

charlottealacitrouille:

anyone interested in almost 1k about gmos, monoculture and capitalism cause i just got very angry at a google doc

tldr gmos arent the problem, capitalism is

long version:

so yeah my issues arent directly abt gmos, they’re about capitalism. gmos are just a link in intensive agriculture and capitalism’s firm grip on the neck of food production professionals.

gmos are just accelerated natural selection made in a lab by a human. its good bc it makes crops more resistant and more productive, or makes for examples bananas or watermelon have actual edible flesh and not be just a bunch of seeds.

so! wild bananas? just seeds. some evolved to have more flesh, and some (cough the cavendish cough) were modified to *only* have flesh. the cavendish is completely seedless and thus sterile. to grow a new cavendish plant, you have to use the rhizomes of a first plant (parts of its roots) that you separate from the “mother plant" and plant on their own. you get a whole plantation from one “mother plant”

so what does that mean! that means all cavendish are genetically identical. and that means that since all plants and all fruits are *completely identical,* if one plant or one fruit catches a disease, all others *can* catch it, bc if one is sensible to the disease, it means ALL OF THEM ARE.

with seeds, the plants are all different and thus some can have resistances that others don’t. it’s kind of like vaccination and herd immunity. here though?…

the funniest (/sarcasm) part is that the precedent most widespread banana species, the Gros Michel, was raised the exact same way, and was wiped out by the panama disease or whatchamacallit… which the cavendish is also sensible too.

yeah.

but let’s talk about crops more common where im from like wheat, corn and canola. tomato. most vegetables. these kinds of crops, when they’re gmos, are either intentionally made infertile (as in, you do get seeds but these seeds either won’t grow crops or will grow crops that won’t bear fruits) or are under a certain number of contractual obligations.

one of these obligations is that you can’t keep seeds to plant them again the next year. if you grow wheat, it’s very easy to keep a part of your grain and plant it again the next year you want wheat. forbidden. buy seeds every year.

another can be that you have to use a certain kind of herbicide, that is sold by their own company. im not screaming monsanto rn but thats exactly what im doing. monstanto sells gmos, contractually makes you buy roundup, they get double the money and double the fun.

another thing is monoculture. this isnt directly linked to gmos but gmos and monoculture are both the degenerate children of capitalism.

im from the south of france, we’re the third biggest corn exporters of the world. all the fucking fields are corn. everywhere. all the time. if you havent worked in a corn field you’re either rich or not from here. monoculture, monoculture, monoculture.

when you plant something, this plant will take elements from the soil and reject other elements. if you only plant 1 kind of crop over and over, you create a buildup of the crop’s “wastes" and an exhaustion of the soil’s ressources in what the crop needs.

monocultures basically creates giant deserts. the soil, the ground is drained over and over by the same cultures, or yearly changes, but like i said, here its corn, wheat, canola, corn. it sort of varies but its still always the same stuff pulled from the ground. so if you wanna keep growing your shit, you gotta use fertilizers. triple the money for monsanto.

in my garden, i wanted green beans. green beans reject nitrogen in the soil. if i only plant green beans, my ground is going to get a nitrogen build up. i don’t want that. soil with too much nitrogen stunts root growth, makes the plants over produce foliage and tire themselves, and then salt burns the foliage my plant tired itself for. it also pollutes groundwater.

however! corn and cucurbits love nitrogen. love the shit. corn allows the beans to go up and around. cucurbits have large leaves that protects the ground from drying up and thorns that deter most pests.

(this isnt something i invented lol. Natives  Americans from north and central america have been doing this since forever. Maya people used the technique. in the south of france it’s been used for a while with local beans and corn first imported from Mexico i dont know when but a while ago. Mexico has semi recently started using this technique again bc its good! it’s good for your ground!)

the problem, lmao, the problem is that you can’t use the three sisters garden layout is absolutely in intensive agriculture. and thats whats up isnt it? you gotta produce more.

not better, not smarter, not renewable

more

hence gmos. they grow more. they grow better. they grow faster.

but my problem isnt with them, it’s what they represent. they start as a good idea, being able to make more food for people. but the result is that: france produces 17.1 million metric tons of corn per year, and barely eats any of it.

so basically: to grow corn over and over you need to buy the seeds and transport them, buy fertilizer (bc monoculture) and transport it, buy insecticide and transport it. then you use gigantic tractors to fertilize your fields, plant your corn, spray roundup all over it. pay a bunch of teenagers to spend hours in the sun during summer to cut the male flowers of 70% of your crops so the right male flowers fertilize the right female flowers. more giant tractors to gather your corn. nobody buys it here so you transport it to an exporter, who transports it elsewhere, and it moves around until it’s transformed, and then it’s moved around again to a seller.

so much fucking diesel and ruining the soil for what?! and do we talk about food waste????!!!!!

im too angry to write a conclusion 🙃 either you get what i mean or you dont. maybe i’ll say more about alternatives later. idfk

obligatory im not a pro just someone with a brain and an access to both google & common sense