Wanjiku Unlimited

• Genetically Modified Foods - The Good The Bad And TheUgly

  Posted: July 18, 2008, 4:10 pm by Shiko-Msa

  The East African Standard can now reveal that mysterious seeds whose sale is being monitored by secret agents are being sold in Kenya.

  This is scary but hardly surprising. Like a lot of other desirables and undesirables from the west, Genetically Engineered Foods are finding their way into African Markets and African Governments and the people as a whole are being urged to embrace the technology. Biotech companies are selling the idea of GM foods as the savior of the world in the wake of population explosion, droughts and severe food shortages. Super crops with enhanced nutritional value and resistance to pesticides and drought. Super seeds that produce higher yields thus ensuring higher financial returns. Super seeds with bug and weed killing capabilities so that farmers spend less time spraying and manually extracting weeds. Just what the doctor ordered for Africa which suffers the most severe food shortages.

  GM food companies don’t come any bigger or any more sinister than Monsanto – a US Agricultural giant and world leader in genetic modification of seeds. Monsanto is spreading it’s tentacles all over the world, Kenya included, and radically altering agricultural practices as we know them. The company is known for some bone chilling practices and the characteristic vice-grip they have on the farmers they deal with. It’s no wonder that their agents are profiling and secretly storing personal data of unsuspecting farmers who buy seeds from them. If their activities in the US are anything to go by, we may soon have a scenario where local farmers are slapped with lawsuits or penalties for breaking this big brother’s rules. Perhaps Monsanto’s most controversial contribution as far as agriculture is concerned is the terminator gene – a gene engineered to make plants kill their seeds so that farmers have to purchase new seeds every time they want to plant.

  Chances are we have all eaten generically modified foods either knowingly or unknowingly because a lot of times it’s challenging to separate engineered and non-engineered foods. For instance, Nakumatt and other leading stores are awash with products like soya beans, soya mince, soya chunks, and powdered beverage soya among others. Some of these products are imported from the US which is one of the biggest producers of Soya beans. So if the beans from different areas are pooled together for processing and packaging, how then can we, the consumers isolate the un-engineered version? To the layman, the foods look identical and can only be told apart through laboratory analysis. Do our stores and supermarkets have the capacity to sort, isolate and label GM foods so that consumers can only eat them by choice? And are consumers sensitized enough to read labels in the first place? It’s only fair that we know what we’re eating. Soya is just an example and one can avoid it. But what about foods like maize and it's products?

  As much as science is getting braver and braver, it needs to know how far is too far. It is one thing to clone a sheep but quite another to make unsuspecting consumers eat foods whose effects on human health have not been fully established. Otherwise the cost on human health could turn out to be something the world is not prepared to deal with.

  Someone may soon have absolute control over what you put on your plate.

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes