GM Foods and Farm Subsidies

Interesting and thoughtful writeup by Howard over at Oraculations: bq. I know, one day per month feeding Africa is topic du jour in all the right places; NY Times, CNN, and the other lying media circles; the Hollywood Left, the LA Times, and Yale. All are careful to be politically correct. In the case of food PC means that only organically produced food is OK for the starving black bastards, because genetically engineered food screws with NATURE. One would think from these PC experts that genetically engineered food is new. That it has never been done before. They are liars. bq. The Indians in America started engineering food 9,000 years ago. Just look at corn. bq. Corn started out as something called Teosinte 9,000 years ago as a grassy-like plant with many stems bearing small cobs with kernels sheathed in hard shells. Corn was genetically engineered by Indians over time til it was the corn on the cob the Europeans discovered in the New World. See HERE and then look HERE for some history on rice and wheat also genetically engineered by Indians... And talking about Farm Subsidies (specifically the big corn and sugar industries): bq. Forgetting the individual farmer, let's just look at the money. The government sent out 22 million farm subsidy checks just two years ago. Starting with sugar; cane sugar subsidized eighteen cents a pound and beet sugar at twenty-two cents a pound; the world price is between five and seven cents per pound.. The sugar subsidy cost you and me $1.4 billion per year in higher food costs. According to the GAO study, 33 sugar farmers have received more than $1 million each in government subsidies, with one Florida family receiving $65 million in one year alone. bq. Because the subsidies go directly to sugar processors and not the farmers there is a labyrinth of business and farming interests involved in keeping the sugar program in place. Growers are part owners of processing plants and so on. bq. ADM and Carghill, who are CORN processors, lead the charge for higher SUGAR subsidies. Corn processors? Sugar? Corn farmers and processors need higher sugar prices in order to force candy, soft drink, and other users of sweeteners to use expensive corn syrup, and the only way they can do this is if sugar costs more than sixteen cents a pound. bq. Get it? If domestic sugar costs more than sixteen cents a pound instead of the world price of seven cents a pound all the farmers and grain processors get to shove expensive corn syrup down the throats of all the soft drink and candy makers. As part of the subsidy no foreign sugar can be imported. This corn agribusiness interest is also behind the unnecessary corn created gasoline additive called ethanol. Ethanol costs us around two or three cents per gallon of gas. Corn subsidies are a part of the sugar deal. And it's deeper than that but you get where I could go here. And there is a growing school of thought that HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) is much worse for people than the equivalent amounts of dextrose (sugar). Interesting stuff...