SCARED I AM

There is nothing new here, I have been eating poison right from my childhood and knew nothing about it. The body gets immune to the slow poisoning, the way ladies used to take arsenic in the 19th century. Perhaps it has affected my body, I don't know. Fertilisers and pesticides are nothing new. We are all aware of their ill effects. Believe me the pesticides go inside every grain.

I took off for 3 days to Karnataka on an invitation from my friends Mani and Balaji of pollachi.
Suddenly every thing looked scary.

Mani and his friend Vivek had organised a farmer's meet to promote organic farming at a village near HD Kote Karnataka, and came to know some disturbing facts on how we are poisoning our body, To add to the panic we are eating genetically altered or modified food specially in the western countries. And we in India are mindlessly following them.

They go to villages conducting such meetings at the grass root level and are doing their best to promote organic farming. I thought just by washing or cooking the food like rice vegetables and fruits its pretty safe to eat. All the pesticides sprayed are washed off.
I was wrong.
There are some pests which grow inside the fruit which cannot be killed by spraying of pesticides. So the entire plant is poisoned to ward off the threat of pests affecting the fruit or vegetable.

Now the process of evolution comes into play. Every new breed of pests are getting more and more resistant to present pesticides. Stronger pesticides are mixed with the soil which poison the entire plant and the fruit. The normal farmer is concerned only with the yield, and we see the produce in the supermarket. Here in rural India the farmer is extremely poor, burdened with the loans from private loan sharks or banks and paying interest all their lives ultimately most of them end up becoming bonded labourers. Some cotton farmers committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh recently, under these circumstances it is hard to tell them to experiment with organic farming, they want sure result, they want yield. Their survival is at stake. Though the government is willing on paper but doing almost nothing to promote organic farming by offering incentive or the loss coverage to the farmer. Now it is left to the NGOs and environmentally conscious people like Mani vivek and Blalaji to promote organic farming in rural Karnataka.

Things get worse, genetically altered or modified food products may not be new to you, they are new to us Indians and the people of other third world countries. Consumption of such food products is good or bad is a different subject and is under active debate.
Is that good for the environment ?
Every fruit vegetable or grain is poisoned before it reaches us.

Things get weird from here, genes from a completely different species are introduced in a plant. I don't have much information, for instance genes of a pig are introduced in fruits. I was upset that western countries, United states in particular are funding Indian agricultural universities to conduct such research.

We Indians and the people of other third world countries have become guinea pigs of big research foundations of the United States.
They are trying it on us.
This is not another joke like the American companies patenting basmati rice which we have been eating for hundreds of years.

If we keep altering the natural process of growth the evolutionary process will one day take a disastrous wrong turn. The process of evolution has taken a wrong turn in the past, and many species like the giant reptiles have gone extinct long before humans came, and the process of evolution has rectified its blunders and keeps rectifying from time to time.

For the planet the whole damage that we are causing now would perhaps last only a few seconds and it may not wait for the next minute.
The planet has the capacity to heal itself but we may not live to see the healing process.
We humans may not exist till then.

One day the evolutionary process may decide that we human are a big blunder and wipe us all out.
Believe me we are facing extinction.

Most of the junk food available in the US is genetically modified, and are considered 'nutritional disasters' by the experts.

The organic food produce that is available in the market is far too expensive and is beyond the reach of poor and middle class families.

The big business houses are playing with your life and the future of your children for a few dollars more.

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