My major goal for this project was to was to inform the Queens College campus about the possible health, environmental and economical hazards of purchasing and consuming GMOs and possibly intrigue my audience to want to do something about this growing problem through letter writing campaigns to support mandatory labeling and/or a five year moratorium of GMOs, phone raps to local and federal representatives, and possibly to get people interested in setting up a renegade labeling project
Larger Context:.
This problem affects all of us, nearly 86 percent of our food is genetically modified, the main culprit: corn and corn products. Genetically modified food is all around us; people with moral objections to meat and meat byproducts do not know that tomatoes, and most other seasonal plants have DNA fragments of some type of animal, mainly fish. Proteins produced by these crops could cause allergic reactions in people.
Organic and local crop growers can be put out of business thanks to corporate greed by monopolization of certain crops such as corn induced by introduction of terminator genes in Round-up Ready products. .
Wild species mainly butterflies and moths (related to corn borers) are in danger of becoming extinct due to the introduction of Bt into the cells of these plants. If genetically altered animals, which are bigger, faster, and tend to have more voracious appetites, are introduced into the wild (mainly salmon and carp) they could wipe out their wild relatives and then create a serious imbalance in their ecosystems.
In 1998 twenty five percent of all corn grown, thirty eight percent of all soy, forty five percent of all cotton grown in the U.S. was genetically modified. Today the percent of corn doubled, and the others stayed relatively around the same. .
Methods/ General Log:.
I first came up to Evelyn (President of the Environmental Club) and asked her for plenty of background information.
