Food safety is this year’s theme for World Health Day, an annual health awareness day held each April 7 and sponsored by the World Health Organization. Food experts around the world have taken this year’s day as an opportunity to warn about genetically modified crops, calling them “false miracles.”
Thirty-nine winners of the Right Livelihood Award — also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize –endorsed April 1 a declaration regarding the future of nutrition, stating that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are “false miracles” toward food security.
The statement was originally drafted by Vandana Shiva, the 1993 winner of the Right Livelihood Award, along with several coalitions of women in India in relation to this year’s International Women’s Day (March 8).
“Genetically engineered Golden Rice and GMO Bananas are being proposed by corporations hiding behind the cloak of academia as a solution to hunger and malnutrition in the Global South. But these are false miracles,” the statement said.
“Indigenous biodiverse varieties of food grown by women provide far more nutrition than the commodities produced by industrial agriculture,” the declaration said, adding that compared to biodiverse alternatives, genetically engineered Golden Rice is 350 percent less efficient in providing Vitamin A.
“When we consider the number of patents involved in these initiatives, it becomes all too clear that the only beneficiaries of these supposedly ‘people-led’ ventures are large companies operating for profit – not for people,” the statement read. “This needs to stop now.”
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