This is perhaps the scariest story around right now, but I don’t see it getting much attention.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) - A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.

Why is this so important? Because so much of the food we eat relies on pollination by honeybees:

At stake is the work the honeybees do, pollinating more than $15 billion worth of U.S. crops, including Pennsylvania’s apple harvest, the fourth-largest in the nation, worth $45 million, and New Jersey’s cranberries and blueberries.

While a few crops, such as corn and wheat, are pollinated by the wind, most need bees. Without these insects, crop yields would fall dramatically. Agronomists estimate Americans owe one in three bites of food to bees.

Now, no one knows for sure right now why this is happening, but I’m gonna venture into another territory that’s not mentioned in these stories, which may or may not be impacting the bees in this area, though we know it does affect them. This topic gets very little consideration overall, but let’s talk about something that can end our way of life faster than global warming - genetically engineered foods.

With little or no regulatory restraints, labeling requirements, or scientific protocol, bio-engineers have begun creating hundreds of new GE “Frankenfoods” and crops. The research is done with little concern for the human and environmental hazards and the negative socioeconomic impacts on the world’s several billion farmers and rural villagers.
An increasing number of scientists are warning that current gene-splicing techniques are crude, inexact, and unpredictable-and therefore inherently dangerous. Yet, pro-biotech governments and regulatory agencies, led by the US, maintain that GE foods and crops are “substantially equivalent” to conventional foods, and therefore require neither mandatory labeling nor pre-market safety-testing.

This Brave New World of Frankenfoods is frightening. There are currently more than four dozen GE foods and crops being grown or sold in the US. These foods and crops are widely dispersed into the food chain and the environment. Over 80 million acres of GE crops are presently under cultivation in the US, while up to 750,000 dairy cows are being injected regularly with Monsanto’s recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH). Most supermarket processed food items now “test positive” for the presence of GE ingredients. In addition, several dozen more GE crops are in the final stages of development and will soon be released into the environment and sold in the marketplace. The “hidden menu” of these unlabeled GE foods and food ingredients in the US now includes soybeans, soy oil, corn, potatoes, squash, canola oil, cottonseed oil, papaya, tomatoes, and dairy products.

GE food and fiber products are inherently unpredictable and dangerous-for humans, for animals, the environment, and for the future of sustainable and organic agriculture. As Dr. Michael Antoniou, a British molecular scientist points out, gene-splicing has already resulted in the “unexpected production of toxic substances… in genetically engineered bacteria, yeast, plants, and animals with the problem remaining undetected until a major health hazard has arisen”. The hazards of GE foods and crops fall into three categories: human health hazards, environmental hazards, and socio-economic hazards. A brief look at the already-proven and likely hazards of GE products provides a convincing argument for why we need a global moratorium on all GE foods and crops.

It’s really not that hard to put 2+2 together here. The bees’ immune systems are impacted by GE foods, loss of native plants, and pesticides. We continue to destroy our environment in hundreds of ways, and it is rapidly catching up to us. What will happen when our ability to grow food is greatly weakened by a few powerful corporations? I don’t want to find out.

I urge everyone to further investigate this issue on their own. The Organic Consumers Association is a great place to start. GE Food Alert is another, as well as many others you can find on a google search.