Mark Schapiro > Quotes

“In short: the spread of a uniform set of seeds across huge parts of the United States is encouraging monocrop farming and leading to the narrowing of seed diversity that scientists warn could lead to significant crop losses. Insects and weeds are developing resistance to ever-higher volumes of chemical poisons tied closely to the cultivation of genetically engineered crops. Partly as a result, the yield bonus that was promised when GMOs were introduced has not materialized. Serious concerns are being raised about the public health consequences of the chemicals used to sustain GMOs in the field—including the world’s most popular herbicide, glyphosate. And the technical requirements for creating a GMO seed are so capital intensive that the effect is to concentrate evermore power in the few companies which can afford to produce them.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“The expense and complexity of producing genetically engineered organisms, and the aggressive patent prerogatives needed to defend them, led to a concentration of power within a secretive group of companies over the most basic element of our existence—seeds, and the food from which they grow.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“Europe has learned to grow more food per hectare and use fewer chemicals in the process. The American choices in biotechnology are causing it to fall behind Europe in productivity and sustainability.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“These days it’s ICARDA that’s getting a lot of attention because so much of the earth is coming to resemble their specialty—“Dry Areas.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“In other words, turning a tree into a desk just slows down the release of carbon dioxide, it doesn’t prevent it.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“it’s the weeds that are learning to resist the weed killer.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“(This of course would be laughable were it not for the fact that the country’s largest timber company, Sierra Pacific Industries, successfully demanded that the CO2 sequestered in its “wood products” be counted by the state of California as saved carbon when tallying up the company’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“Yields per acre were already increasing before the onset of GMOs, so a key question was whether the yields of genetically engineered crops were increasing at a quicker rate than the yield increases of conventional crops.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“The “they” in this case was “us”—meaning those who do not live in the Amazon, namely Americans and Europeans who have come to recognize the central role played by forests in the earth’s ecology. If the forest is so important for us—for the planet—then its time to pay for it. Braga suggested I visit an offset project he’d helped establish south of the city.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“California issued a notice of intent to add glyphosate to the list of “Prop 65” chemicals that present a danger to the public. This action kicked off a historic battle as Monsanto sought to defend the chemical and undermine the authority of the world’s premiere public health organization.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“The major global association of weed scientists, representing experts in eighty countries, identifies twenty-four species of weeds that are now wholly immune to the effects of Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate.14 New generations of super-weeds are proliferating across some sixty million acres of soybean fields that no longer respond to the toxins in Roundup, reports the Union of Concerned Scientists.15”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“A “tax or emission trading scheme on livestock,” they argued, “could be an economically sound policy that would modify consumer prices and affect consumption patterns.” In the end, as climate impacts increase, the web of costs associated with cultivating plants and animals for food grows ever more complex—”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“The newspaper also found no difference in the rate by which yields increased on farms growing genetically engineered corn in the United States and non-GE corn in France;”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“At the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the United States, Britain, Norway, and other developed countries committed $4.5 billion to launch a global initiative that would begin to assess the value of the world’s tropical rain forests. Four years later, in 2013, at the Warsaw Climate Change Conference, further rules set criteria for tropical countries to meet in order to receive payments in return for reducing deforestation or launching sustainable forest management strategies. Now global efforts focus on what the forests are worth, and who will pay to keep them standing.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“The Syrian and Iraqi seeds, Ceccarelli told me, “could hold the secret to adaptation to drought . . . After ten thousand years more or less of evolution in a very dry place, we can see what natural selection has left behind.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“Carey Gilliam, whose book Whitewash probed into the hidden history of Monsanto and glyphosate.32”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

“The level of uniform germplasm throughout the world, we’re just waiting for some bacteria or fungus to find a spot of vulnerability. It’s not a matter of if, but when. Eventually it will catch up with us.”
― Mark Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply