The ability of private U.S. citizens to grow their own food and store their own seeds is on the verge of being severely restricted if not outright eliminated:
A Senate bill to protect against contamination could leave small East Texas farmers and others across the nation devastated. The Food Safety Modernization Act has been called the “most dangerous bill in the history of the United States.”
Daren Rozell, a local peach farmer, owns a store that sells farming chemicals. He says, the bill essentially puts all food sold here in the U.S. under government control. “They (government) can control your whole farming operation,” he says.
Local farmers say the bill would create more regulations and paperwork for small farmers, which would switch food supply power from small farms to large corporations.
Rozell says that all the farmers that are retired or hobby farmers are just going quit, and it’s going to force the big guys to downsize.
Read more at KETK-TV.
Meanwhile, huge corporations like Monsanto are consolidating their agricultural monopolies around the world, creating a real threat to biodiversity. This news comes from Guatemala:
A new report by ETC Group[1] reveals a dramatic upsurge in the number of patent claims on ‘climate-ready’ genes, plants and technologies that will supposedly allow biotech crops to tolerate drought and other environmental stresses (i.e. abiotic stresses) associated with climate change. The patent grab threatens to put a monopoly choke-hold on the world’s biomass and our future food supply, warns ETC Group. In many cases, a single patent or patent application claims ownership of engineered gene sequences that could be deployed in virtually all major crops – as well as the processed food and feed products derived from them.
Read more at The Guatemala Times.
