Watch out for ‘Agent Orange corn’ coming to the stores

http://times-news.com/opinion/x1139580445/Watch-out-for-Agent-Orange-corn-coming-to-the-stores

To the Editor: Cumberland Times-News

It’s time to start listening to our weeds and cooperating with Mother Nature.

Thanks to her blessings and good farmers many of us can relish delicious delights like soon-to-be-harvested locally grown and farmers market-sold corn on the cob, popcorn, and several other variations on the great grain corn.

Thanks to certain chemical corporations and unscrupulous federal regulators we can tastily anticipate “Agent Orange corn.” It’s anticipated that approval is awaiting for putting a genetically modified corn kernel in our markets (not our farmers market) that produces corn plants that won’t die when sprayed w/copious amounts of 2,4D.

Any Vietnam vets out there who remember that awful stuff? That potent pesticide was in the mixture of Agent Orange defoliant which exposed our troops and innocent Vietnamese civilians to horribly debilitating physiological damage in that Asian war. The side effects are still with us today.

Certain agribusinesses and their feds do claim that 2,4D was not the deadliest chemical of the killer defoliant, which they use as a deceptive justifier for permission since “according to them” it hasn’t been exclusively proven to cause cancer in humans. That’s why we may see it Love Canalled across America.

So, for consumers worried about the untested long-term consequences of the modified corn and the carcinogenic dangers of digesting more 2,4D, tough! 2,4D is used to help kill various weeds, but the herbicide is so strong that it also kills nature’s own version of corn plants.

Hence, genetic engineers went into their corporate lab and created a new corn that’s immune to the weed killer. This allows the chemical maker to profit from selling the patented seed kernel, plus loving a gigantic increase in sales of its 2,4D herbicide.

Also, when sprayed, this herbicide vaporizes and spreads for miles, killing crops that are not immune, poisoning the surrounding environment and endangering the health of innocent farmers and townspeople throughout the area.

We’re downwind from Moorefield. PROBLEM!

Mother Nature is rebellious. So much poison was spread across America in the past decade that weeds naturally developed a resistance to it bringing America’s agribusiness giants to practice their usual approach when confronted with similar dilemmas of overpowering nature.

All I want to say is that they can take their genetically modified corn kernel and shuck it.

We need non-chemical, non-GMO, sustainable systems that work with nature. For more info go to Organic Consumers Association at www.OrganicConsumers.org.

Bill Arnold

Romney, W.Va.