January 2001 | Hightower Lowdown
New Markets for Toxic Products
by Jim Hightower
When American industry manufactures a product that is so dangerous to human health that consumers rebel against it or government bans it — the manufacturers withdraw the stuff from the market and move on to make something else...right?
I’m afraid not, Pollyanna. Instead, American manufacturers have an atrocious history of simply moving their banned nasties to Third World countries, dumping the products on unsuspecting poor people. Take DDT...please! When the makers of this cancer-causing pesticide were stopped some forty years ago from selling and spreading this deadly poison in the U.S., they jumped to Mexico and other Latin American nations.
Now, here we go again. Monsanto and other U.S. manufacturers of genetically-altered crops literally have come a cropper in trying to sell their Frankenfoods in Europe, where they’ve been banned, and in our country, where a growing consumer rebellion has spooked retailers and processors from buying these genetically contaminated foods.
So, Monsanto and the rest are trying to peddle their tampered foodstuffs to the world’s poor. Particularly disgusting is their shameful claim that they’re doing this out of humanitarian concern. The lab techs, they say, can splice foreign genes into rice that will juice up its vitamin A content, thus improving the health of millions of Third World children. Kit Bond, the senator from Monsanto, even put thirty million of our tax dollars into a foreign aid spending bill to buy Monsanto’s Frankenrice for distribution to the poor, piously saying that the funds will "liberate millions from the tyranny of hunger."
Hogwash. Genetic food tampering is about putting millions into the coffers of Monsanto. These products have not been proven safe for use by us — so why should the world’s poor be Monsanto’s guinea pigs? What the world needs is affordable food that’s widely distributed — not genetic technology pushed by cold-eyed profiteers.
Jim Hightower is a columnist and author. To subscribe to The Hightower Lowdown, send $15, and your name, and address to: Lowdown, P.O. Box 20596, New York, NY 10011. Visit his web site for more info.
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