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TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-06-08
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQkQXyiynYs
thank you arm virgin revolution a given this on my goodness the second school fast %HESITATION sorry I have you need to him imagine imagine agriculture if you're a farmer you take risks and one thing that you have to deal with his weeds the weeds are overwhelming we've management is the number one preoccupation of the farmers at least in and and the developed world industrial agriculture eighty
percent of all the pesticides that we use in agriculture are herbicides that's how important that we thought imagine that a company comes with the magic herbicide a magic herbicide what is this week got it the magic of the side that's basically like water it is safe it is innocuous it does not affect the environment it is absolutely safe to your minds to animals to the soil
you don't worry about your weeds anymore you just plant your crops never mind the weeds and when you're ready or whenever you want whether you're a garden or farm and you just pray that stuff the water and all you with his appear and your vegetables in your garden are still standing and your crops are there it's magic and the same company comes and then found the
magic insecticide again you don't have to worry about past the insecticide is built in your crop you don't even need to spray anymore these two technologies H. did stands for herbicide tolerance BT is the name of bacteria bacillus thuringiensis and these two technologies have been invented in the last twenty five years they have completely taken over agriculture this chart shows you that over ninety percent of
soybean grown in North America and in other countries in the world he's now engineered to be herbicide tolerant eighty percent over eighty percent of the chlorine is also herbicide tolerant and canola and sugar beet and all the big crops have now been engineered to be herbicide tolerant and the beauty is only twenty percent of that but it's still significant it's a major coup it's a revolution
in agriculture and all the farmers have adopted it obviously because it is so magic it has simplified their life and there's very little risk anymore with with weeds twenty five years ago and I was part of that twenty five years ago when the technology became important it was a it was like a green technology it was going to allow us to perform miracles to %HESITATION plants
which just turned to insects to nematodes and to do many other things that were really quite significant another time because it was somewhat greed at the time the concept of substantial equivalence was put forward basically the technology involved just picking a gene from an organism could be a bacteria our fishery doesn't matter where you take a genius like a piece of DNA and DNA is absolutely
not toxic take a piece of DNA and you put it in the plants and you grow the crops and the magic happens and that's substantial equivalence it is calling it is engineered it expresses a gene from a bacteria but it does look like corn and taste like corn and there's no difference it is substantially equivalent so the engineered crops were basically registered to be commercialized without
really being tested because nobody expected any problems but more and more over the last ten to fifteen years there's been some evidence building up and it's really it's really building up rather fast in the last few years that there are some problems are some difficulties there are some dark clouds one of them is super weeds probably most of you have heard of that this super weeds
are basically weeds are regular weaves they look like normal they look normal weeds that I don't I don't grow giant or anything like that but they have evolved to become resistant to that technology so that the magic herbicide is not working anymore it has lost its who've it has lost its magic the weeds have become resistant and so now the farmers are stuck with this technology
which is not quite performing and right now today there are thirty eight species of weeds that are resistant enough America and half of the acreage in the USA is now infested with these weeds and the magic doesn't work anymore the farmers have to pull the weed by hand or use other herbicides and I'll come to that same thing with the insecticide again the magic doesn't work
the insects have become resistant not as fast as the weeds and it's still growing and it's growing very fast and we don't have them here in DC but it's growing all over North America and other parts in the world it appeared in India on a engineered cotton the first one another problem is contamination contamination of the environment basically a farming used to be that if I
was a farmer and you were a farmer and my cattle went into you feel to it your crop it was my responsibility to bring them back in and to fans that man not so anymore if I'm growing genetically engineered corn and you are an organic grower or conventional drawer and your field of corn is next to mine you can be sure that the pollen engineer pollen
is blowing into yours contaminating your crops and eyes created problems in Canada we have lost our flax export and we have lost our canola export to the European Union because of that there are also some difficulties with genetic pollution I call the genetic pollution I haven't seen it written that %HESITATION anywhere else but it is genetic pollution basically the trans change the genes that are %HESITATION
engineered into the crop into the plants they can move bacteria move genes between themselves it's called lateral transfer lateral gene transfer vertical gene transfer is sex you gave your genes to your children lateral gene transfer ease you give your genes so the person sitting next to you and bacteria delete all the time and so it is probably these highly probable that the gene the engineer jeans
and those crops will find their way into the soil and into the bacteria it is also demonstrated that if you eat engineered corn are engineered soy the trials genes will show up into the guts into your bacterial got there's got senior bacteria of the bacteria in your gut sorry there is a survey about was done in China and that was published last year the Chinese looked
for automotive resistance in bacteria and the rivers in China this sample six rivers multiple samples they found out about it resistant bacteria in every river this sample with the antibiotic resistance came from synthetic jeans jeans that were either came from the lab or from local engineered crops it is not known but the odd thing about it resistance is very real and the medical community is very
worried that and we should all be very worried that we are losing antibiotics because the building up of antibiotic resistance in the bacterial populations so it's not just Cafu's that are responsible apparently the and you have crops also could be responsible and then there are two other aspects two other difficulties I'm sure the Krazy on JI engineered crops also contains allergens and toxic proteins and I'm
going to come back to these in a little bit more detail because this is actually quite alarming there's a lot of research has been done in the last twenty years on engineered crops on genetic engineering and there's basically two different kinds of research better research thoughts being paid for by the biotech industry one way or another it can be a direct grant or indirect I'm not
gonna go into the details but a lot of academics are doing research physically sponsored by the biotech industry and then there's a lot of research also done mostly and foreign countries in Europe by foreign are %HESITATION country %HESITATION agencies %HESITATION kind of foreign universities and somehow it is quite remarkable that Mostar if not all of the research done sponsored by the biotech industry it shows that
the technology's completely innocuous and very safe and most if not all of the research done that's where shows that there are serious problems and these technologies should be thoroughly reviewed and tested before it is put on the grocery shelves in nineteen ninety six the scientists of the food and drug administration nineteen ninety six is the first year when the crops were commercialized by Monsanto and the
FDA scientists were all in agreement that the engine of crop could or would bring other Chinese today toxic proteins nutrient deficiencies and other problems that's documented that's published two years later I was in Edinburgh in Scotland for a conference nematodes you conference and during the conference there was a bit of a brouhaha that was the sanitation Scotland who had come out on TV and he had
been doing toxicity tests he had seeing that his rots you have fed rats %HESITATION of potatoes engineered potatoes and he's running for he had done that for several months and and after several months he looking inside to see what he found was hit with the effect could be and he found very alarming results he found definitely damage to Oregon that he found that he could be
in this tiny fun damage to the kidneys to deliver to the brain and the testicles it was very alarmed he went on TV to talk to the public about it and that created quite a scandal it paid dearly for it because it's a sand it's on already it's our a mortal sin for a scientist to talk about his research before these peer reviewed and published he
was he was fired the next day government experts who are hired because it was a huge uproar in the %HESITATION scientific community my goodness time is going past I have to speed up %HESITATION there was a a bit of a scandal E. is research was shown to be by experts was shown to be lacking and he was given back his papers because Islam has been closed
on these these papers confiscated and he went on to publish and he published his results inviscid doctor apart pushed yeah from %HESITATION the road institute in Scotland he published his results in one of the best %HESITATION medical journals in the world the lancet that was the first alarm bells about the technology and there's been many sins in two thousand and two %HESITATION ten years ago there
was the completion of the %HESITATION genome project and the genome project showed that we had we function as human beings with a hundred thousand genes a hundred thousand proteins are so and the genome project to everybody's surprise announced that we only have less than twenty five thousand genes every Jhene course from over on one pro take that means that the rest of the DNA that ninety
five percent of the DNA but I'm not quitting are full of regulatory sequences that actually tells the gene what pro thing to make and we don't know how that works every gene makes several pro taste many palm of them many proteins according to the weather according to the environment of the sale and we really don't have a clue as to how that works what we know
is that basically NJ engineered crops there are many many pro things are created and we really don't know what they are they are triggered by the biotech industry and the government agencies on many other scientists they're treated as background noise and they are there and and I was just waking up to these problems this is a western blot it shows you that there are many pertains
where there should be on the one the research scientists of the food and drug administration in nineteen ninety six predict analogies and since then there I'm in many publications showing allergies allergies to BT proteins in mice with the corn soybean same thing they show and also %HESITATION that %HESITATION though the publication or social toxic toxicity of the engine of crops to my son right and this
is published there's no dozens and dozens and dozens of publication peer review in very serious publications organ damage so I don't know what the future of agriculture is and I don't know what the future of the chain revolution is by I am very concerned and that's why I'm here one thing that is happening I talked about the super weeds well the chemical industry the biotech industry
used to be chemical industries the chemical industry is basically responding to that by saying well we have what you need you need another herbicide so here instead of using instead of using %HESITATION roundup you're going to use to for deep and the combat there there and we have magic herbicides again and how many years will it be before that fail and by the way there are
several publications quite a few publications in the last few years that our showing that a round up the guy who was at the active ingredient in roundup is actually not water it's not innocuous at all it is a very insidious and there's a router is a kilometer even holes %HESITATION metals and proteins many pro things need metals to work I'm around that Okafor state is stealing
