Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Sowing The GM Seeds Of Depopulation?

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Sowing The GM Seeds Of Depopulation?

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from East by Northwest.

While most of the literature on GMOs is concerned with the impacts of crops that have been genetically modified to deal with pests or herbicide spraying, there are very worrying trends regarding plants being genetically modified to contain industrial pharmaceuticals or possess possible contraceptive traits.

Then in the next paragraph he attacks the overpopulation argument that capitalist ideologues often make as the basic problem that threatens survival today:

The world’s problems are not being caused by overpopulation, as Turner states, but by greed and a system of ownership and global power relations that ensures wealth flows from bottom to top. The issue at hand should not be about stopping population growth in its tracks but about changing a socially divisive global economic system and the unsustainable depletion of natural resources.

While I think this attack is valid, I think it is inadequate because it does not make clear that overpopulation is an effect of capitalism rather than a cause of many economic problems. His argument leaves out the underlying reasons why the system, which results in such extremes of wealth and poverty, causes overpopulation: the extreme insecurity imposed by the capitalist system on the majority of the world's adults. Please spare me the effort of repeating my argument by reading the commentary in this previous post entitled "OVERdevelopment, OVERpopulation, OVERshoot".