Approximately 80 percent of our processed foods now contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). If the foods contain soy, or were fed with soy, then 91 percent contain GMOs.

Our government, under its doctrine of “Substantial Equivalence,” claims that crops modified with genes from another species are safe because they are substantially similar to the original species, and thus may be regulated as conventional crops. This is very convenient to industry, as it allows GMO crops to be grown, processed, and consumed with no studies made as to their efficacy.

In very simple terms, GMOs are safe because government says they are safe.

For some reason, or reasons, many do not believe the government’s substantial equivalence assurance. One of the reasons may be that the person who developed the doctrine was Monsanto Corporation’s Michael Taylor, who is now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s “Food Safety Czar.”

Another reason for the skepticism might be that many of GMO crops are failing their designed purpose: Crops modified to survive glyphosate herbicides are now fostering the development of glyphosate-resistant super weeds; and crops modified with biological pesticides are fostering the development of resistant super pests.

Consumers wonder: If GMO crops will not do what they were designed to do, what will they do? And so we pause to ask…

Why say

Quote:

No!

to GMOs when government says

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Yes!

Food Chain Radio #745)

This from Tony in Missouri...

In reality everyone alive in 1st world countries (who are not growing your own organic food) is a defacto GMO themselves - you are what you eat and I am certain (unscientifically) that the stuff in the veggies, grains, & meats is coursing through our veins - changing us a wee bit at a time - including our offspring - we are forcefully evolving and adapting to this bulky, tasteless, herbicide, insecticide, growth hormone, antibiotic laced diet - we are organisms being genetically modified - I feel better just talking about it - I've been modified!

This from Kelly in Illinois...

I am a supporter of American agriculture, across its vast geographical, production method, and ideological varieties. I have worked on multiple farms, and am deeply attached to many wonderful food producing families, both organic and progressive. My family used to raise grassfed beef (some was corn-finished, but most of it was pastured) and spent my 4-H and FFA years raising natural rabbit meat.

I do have a few concerns to share.

Because of GMO's, farmers can use fewer inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, actually moving the production methods closer to a natural means. Many GMO's are able to make use of land space that would otherwise be lost for food production (specifically drought-tolerant alternatives). I have trouble understanding the logic in protesting technology that can save human sight, like Golden rice.

I am an advocate of choice. I am a supporter of variety in the food system. I personally believe that there is no one, single, fix-all way to fill all the food needs and wants of this country and the world. I do, however, feel that our population growth and resource demands are such that GMO's are a vital part of that system. I do believe that we should have more variety of product, and should shift a little bit away from the massive corn push. I believe that organic and natural raising methods introduce a valuable, necessary, and wholesome alternative to the conventional foods most of us choose to pursue.

I appreciate your viewpoint. I hear your concerns and understand them. At the same time, I beg of you to be open-minded to the other side of the issue. Too often, we in agriculture are willing to shut off our listening mechanisms and resort to blindly spewing the propaganda that matches our agenda. As a communicator, farmer's daughter, and advocate for agriculture and food choice, I strive to open those channels of dialogue.

Best wishes on your work, and I hope you take some of what I've said to heart.

This from Mischa Popoff...

I’m wondering if you’d like to interview someone with a dissenting opinion on the supposed negative relationship between humankind and genetic engineering? I agree with your views on corporations like Monsanto; they constantly overstep the bounds in my opinion. But I couldn’t disagree more on the premise that GMOs are inherently bad for the planet or the human race. And, interestingly, President Bill Clinton agrees with me.

I draw your attention to pp. 477 – 479 of my book where I discuss the only anti-GMO study ever carried out… way back in 1999. I’ve included the excerpt below. Believe me when I say that being anti-GMO is just a diversionary tactic; a way for organic activists to avoid discussing the real issue surrounding certified-organic food, namely that it is not purer and more nutritious as claimed, not yet anyway.

Let me know if you’re interested.

And what about the rumors that genetically-modified foods cause disease? Well, like many of the organic industry’s claims, it turns out they’re just rumors. Wasn’t there something about liver cancer in lab rats? I hear some asking. It turns out the “study” (and I use the term loosely) was deeply flawed.

A very lonely anti-GMO study

The infamous study the organic industry clings to in its battle against genetic engineering is Stanley Ewen and Arpad Pustzai’s “Effect of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine,” which was published in The Lancet way back in 1999.[1] The Lancet’s editorial team was divided on the merits of the study and, after requesting three rewrites, finally compromised by running dissenting comments in the same issue by Harry Kuiper of the National Institute for Quality Control in Agriculture Products at Wagengin University in the Netherlands.
Kuiper points out that Ewen and Pustzai’s rats ate a poor diet of pure potatoes which contained only 6 percent protein, far less than the 15 percent which is the standard for lab rats. He also points out there was no control group, a group of rats which should have eaten a good rat diet for comparison. Yeah… just a tiny oversight on Ewen and Pustzai’s part; they must’ve missed that bit when they took first-year biology. As to Ewen and Pustzai’s anti-GMO conclusions, Kuiper’s opinion is that “no consistent patterns of changes were observed.”
Meanwhile, Stephen Taylor, a toxicologist at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who has studied allergic reactions to GMOs and who should’ve made a great ally for Ewen and Pustzai, noted that

it’s hard to decipher exactly what the experimenters did. That’s unforgivable. The first thing you learn in graduate school is that you write up your research results in such a way that another person could repeat your experiment.

Most damning is the fact that even with all the billions of dollars floating around in the organic industry, Ewen and Pustzai’s simple, inexpensive experiment has never been repeated. Is this the best the organic industry can come up with? Yup.
Organic activists have been trying for years to convince the media to do its part to help convince the public to be scared of GMOs, but to no avail. Science simply won’t sustain the thesis that someday we’re going to see deleterious effects from consuming genetically-modified foods, so why the hell should the media pick up the slack?
Putting science aside for the moment, ask yourself this: Just how many farmers in North America would still use genetically-modified feed for their livestock if it actually caused, as anti-GMO activists claim, heavier livers, false pregnancies, sterility, abnormal blood-cell and liver-cell formation, and mysterious death? It defies logic. They’d go broke! And, to add to the puzzle, GMO-feed is routinely allowed into Europe! Wouldn’t European farmers be speaking out, maybe launching a lawsuit or two, if the health of their livestock was in any way affected? You bet they would. But they’re not because GM feed is perfectly safe.
So, instead, the activists keep extending the time frame for their thesis, staying ahead of the actual science which is now over twenty years old. Should we worry that scientists of the future might, sooner or later, find some harmful effect to GMOs? For an answer, many activists turn to the words of the man who coined the term “organic,” Lord Walter Northbourne, who warned that “it will be left to future generations to pay for our mistakes, but they may not have the wherewithal.” [2] Ah yes… some pithy organic wisdom to sink our teeth into. But, when asked when we might expect scientific proof that organic food is better to grow and better to eat, Northbourne’s response was, revealingly, that

…if we waited for scientific proof of every impression before deciding to take any consequential action we might avoid a few mistakes, but we should also hardly ever decide to act at all.

Oh oh. Something tells me the activists aren’t going to like where this is going. Northbourne continues…

In practice, decisions about most things that really matter have to be taken on impressions, or on intuition, otherwise they would be far too late…. We have to live our lives in practice, and can very rarely wait for scientific verification of our hypotheses. If we did we should all soon be dead, for complete scientific verification is hardly ever possible. It is a regrettable fact that a demand for scientific proof is a weapon often used to delay the development of an idea.[3]

If such reasoning is good enough for the organic movement, surely it’s good enough for the science of genetic engineering. Case closed.
In this “green” industry called “certified organic” which has failed to provide customers with any guarantee, much less even made any effort to reduce the toxicity, extend the sustainability, or increase the safety or nutrition of food, being 100 percent anti-GMO simply becomes a natural, default marketing position. It’s purely strategic, nothing but a smoke screen, a diversionary tactic to distract the consumer while, one by one, individual family organic farms fall victim to bureaucratization and cheap, untested “organic” imports.

This from Mila...

And don't forget to mention that GMO stands for God Move Over--(Tongue in Cheek). Oh and please mention "the rat gene" in lettuce. Their reasoning is that rats produce 8 times the vitamin C that humans do and didn't get scurvy on ancient ships. But there is no reason good enough to put "the rat gene" in our food supply. It is usually the point that gets everyone's attention. I think there is still the list on the FDA sight of what is in what. Chicken Gene in Potatoes and Flounder Gene in Strawberries should really make vegetarians happy.

Mischa Popoff needs to look further!

Canadian university study finds 93 percent of unborn babies contaminated with GMO toxins...

Researchers from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Sherbrooke Hospital Centre in Quebec, Can., have proven that Bt toxin, which is used in GM corn and other crops, definitively makes its way into the blood supply, contrary to what Big Bio claims -- and this toxin was found in the bloodstreams of 93 percent of pregnant women tested. Read on...
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93 percent of unborn babies contaminated with GMO toxins, study finds

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032510_unborn_babies_GMOs.html#ixzz1ZWX1fSxY

(NaturalNews) A landmark new study out of Canada exposes yet another lie propagated by the biotechnology industry, this time blowing a hole in the false claim that a certain genetic pesticide used in the cultivation of genetically-modified (GM) crops does not end up in the human body upon consumption. Researchers from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Sherbrooke Hospital Centre in Quebec, Can., have proven that Bt toxin, which is used in GM corn and other crops, definitively makes its way into the blood supply, contrary to what Big Bio claims -- and this toxin was found in the bloodstreams of 93 percent of pregnant women tested.

Published in the journal Reproductive Toxicology, the study explains that Bt toxin enters the body not only through direct consumption of GMOs, but also from consumption of meat, milk and eggs from animals whose feed contains GMOs. Among all women tested, 80 percent of the pregnant group tested positive for Bt toxin in their babies' umbilical cords, and 69 percent of non-pregnant women tested positive for Bt toxin.

The only reason many countries even approved GM crops in the first place was because they were told that GM crops were no different than conventional crops. The biotechnology industry has purported for years that the alterations and chemicals used in GM crop cultivation pose no risk whatsoever to human health, and that any GM substances that remain in food are broken down in the digestive system. Now that it has been revealed that such claims are complete fabrications, many groups are urging governments to pull GMOs from their food supplies.

"This research is a major surprise as it shows that the Bt proteins have survived the human digestive system and passed into the blood supply -- something that regulators said could not happen," said Pete Riley from GM Freeze, an alliance of organizations united against GMOs. "Regulators need to urgently reassess their opinions, and the EU should use the safeguard clauses in the regulations to prevent any further GM Bt crops being cultivated or imported for animal feed or food until the potential health implications have been fully evaluated."

Most of the studies that have been used to validate the safety of GMOs have been conducted by the companies that created them in the first place, so they are hardly a credible source for reliable safety data. Governments in North and South America, as well as throughout Europe, have essentially welcomed GMOs into the food supply based on flimsy reassurances rather than sound science.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032510_unborn_babies_GMOs.html#ixzz1ZWX1fSxY
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Most do not consider the whole picture, which includes all the related agricultural practices (i.e. pesticide and herbicide applications). The U.S. government is remiss, as they allow international multi billion dollar GMO corporations to self regulate. Consider BP Oil and their self regulated Gulf Oil Spill.

There is too much at stake. Consider Monsanto's GMO insect-killing corn, which is already failing and toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance to the genetically modified crop...read on...

Monsanto Corn Falls to Illinois Bugs as Investigation Widens
September 02, 2011, 5:30 PM EDT

By Jack Kaskey

Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Monsanto Co.’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance to the genetically modified crop, according to one scientist.

Michael Gray, an agricultural entomologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, said he’s studying whether western corn rootworms collected last month in Henry and Whiteside counties are resistant to an insect-killing protein derived from Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, a natural insecticide engineered into Monsanto corn.

The insects were collected in two fields where corn had toppled after roots were eaten by rootworms, Gray said today. Planting Bt corn year after year increases the odds that the bugs will develop resistance to the insecticide, he said. While the symptoms parallel bug resistance that’s been confirmed in Iowa, analysis of the Illinois insects won’t be complete until next year, he said.

“Whatever is the cause, it is generating a lot of concern.” Gray said in a telephone interview. “I wouldn’t say at this point it’s just an isolated field here or there.”

Monsanto takes reports like Gray’s “seriously” and follows up on all accounts of unexpected damage and other performance questions, said Lee Quarles, a spokesman for the St. Louis-based company. Monsanto’s monitoring hasn’t found rootworm resistance to its Bt corn and the product is performing well on more than 99 percent of acres planted, he said.

Preliminary Findings

Monsanto dropped $3.13, or 4.5 percent, to $65.80 as of 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have fallen 5.5 percent this year.

Gray detailed his preliminary findings last week in the university’s Pest Management and Crop Development Bulletin. He said he’s since been contacted by more farmers whose Bt corn is succumbing to corn rootworms.

“It’s very, very significant damage,” Gray said. “Producers buy these Bt hybrids to protect their root systems, so it understandably makes them not very happy.”

In July, Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann reported the first rootworms confirmed as being Bt-resistant, which he found in four of the state’s cornfields.

Gray advised growers with performance problems to rotate corn crops with soybeans and to plant corn with a different type of Bt technology.

Monsanto’s SmartStax corn introduced last year is engineered to produce a second Bt insecticide that, when used with crop rotation and a refuge of non-Bt corn, will extend the usefulness of the insect-fighting technology, Quarles said.

--Editors: Simon Casey, Charles Siler

To contact the reporter on this story: Jack Kaskey in Houston at jkaskey@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Simon Casey at scasey4@bloomberg.net.

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Just because Monsanto and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration say GMOs are safe...you don't have to believe it...Read On...

Michael McNeill is an agronomist who owns Ag Advisory Ltd. in Algona, Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in quantitative genetics and plant pathology from Iowa State University in 1969 and has been a crop consultant since 1983. He was among three experts invited by county officials to testify at the Aug. 10 meeting of the Cropland Policy Advisory Group (CPAG). “When you spray glyphosate on a plant, it’s like giving it AIDS,” he says. Read on...

Expert: GMOs to blame for problems in plants, animals
By Jefferson Dodge | Boulder Weekly | Aug. 11, 2011

One of the experts set to testify at Wednesday’s long-awaited meeting about the county’s policy for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on open space says scientists are seeing new, alarming patterns in plants and animals due to increased use of the herbicide Roundup.

Michael McNeill is an agronomist who owns Ag Advisory Ltd. in Algona, Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in quantitative genetics and plant pathology from Iowa State University in 1969 and has been a crop consultant since 1983. He was among three experts invited by county officials to testify at the Aug. 10 meeting of the Cropland Policy Advisory Group (CPAG).

CPAG, which has been meeting since February, serves as a sounding board for the county’s parks and open space staff as they develop a new cropland policy on matters like what may be grown on county land. The group has only touched briefly on the hot-button GMO issue in its past meetings; the Aug. 10 meeting was devoted entirely to the subject.

McNeill told Boulder Weekly before the meeting that he and his colleagues in the industry are seeing serious, negative effects produced by the use of glyphosate, which is the primary ingredient in Roundup weed killer. (Monsanto, the company that makes Roundup, has generated controversy by genetically altering crops to make them resistant to the herbicide.)

McNeill says that in the Midwest and other areas of the country, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, weeds like water hemp, giant ragweed, lamb’s quarter and velvet weed have become Roundup resistant through natural selection, due to a particular genetic mutation that survived the poison and therefore reproduced successfully and wildly.

The problem is, farmers’ natural reaction has been to simply apply more Roundup to their crops, which is having deleterious impacts, McNeill says.

“Used judiciously, it can be a useful product, but as with anything, if you abuse it, it can have negative effects,” he says.

McNeill explains that glyphosate is a chelating agent, which means it clamps onto molecules that are valuable to a plant, like iron, calcium, manganese and zinc.
“When you spray glyphosate on a plant, it’s like giving it AIDS,” he says.

The farmers’ increased use of Roundup is actually harming their crops, according to McNeill, because it is killing micronutrients in the soil that they need, a development that has been documented in several scientific papers by the nation’s leading experts in the field. For example, he says, harmful fungi and parasites like fusarium, phytopthora and pythium are on the rise as a result of the poison, while beneficial fungi and other organisms that help plants reduce minerals to a usable state are on the decline.

He explains that the overuse of glyphosate means that oxidizing agents are on the rise, creating oxides that plants can’t use, leading to lower yields and higher susceptibility to disease.

McNeill acknowledges that Monsanto could simply find a new chemical that kills the newly resistant weeds, but the weeds will simply find a way around it again.

“It’s mother nature’s plant breeding program,” he says. “It’s very widespread, and it’s a serious problem.”

McNeill says the situation is causing “sudden death syndrome” in soybeans, which means they are dying at increased rates when they go into their reproductive phase. He adds that corn is showing a higher incidence of Goss’s wilt, which has been a problem in Colorado since the early 1970s, and

studies show that glyphosate causes a rise in both diseases.

And the problems are not limited to plants, it’s extending to the animals that eat them, according to McNeill.

He says he and his colleagues are seeing a higher incidence of infertility and early-term abortion in cattle and hogs that are fed on GMO crops. He adds that poultry fed on the suspect crops have been exhibiting reduced fertility rates.

McNeill, who works with universities, the federal government and private companies, says his advice to his farmer clients is to rotate chemicals — or don’t use them at all. While it is more labor-intensive, organic farmers usually cut their weeds as an alternative to herbicides. He says he consults for about 160,000 acres of conventional farmland and 5,000 to 6,000 acres of organically farmed land.

“My clients are my farmers, and I want what’s best for them,” he says. “And my clients are the consumers who consume the farmers products, and I want what’s best for them.”

McNeill compares the Roundup situation to the way science eventually caught up to another poison: Just as DDT was initially hailed as a miracle pesticide and later banned, researchers are beginning to discover serious problems with glyphosate.

“Some issues are starting to arise with technologies that probably needed more research before we started using them,” he says. “It’s a moving target.”

The other two experts invited to the CPAG meeting, Kent Davis of Crop Quest and Phillip Westra of Colorado State University, did not return calls by press time.

http://truthalliance.net/Archive/News/tabid/67/ID/8074/Expert-GMOs-to-blame-for-problems-in-plants-animals.aspx

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MOST IMPORTANTLY: See the potential nightmare of GMOs with your own eyes and ears from big U.S. farmers...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEX654gN3c4&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1

View this film of interviews with U.S. farmers across America, which have been growing GMOs and have real hands-on information, in other words–they speak the truth. These farmers are urging great caution to be exercised by UK and European farmers in adopting this technology. Once you see this film, you will understand that you don't have to be a scientist to see how vulnerable big agriculture is and how close we are to falling down the rabbit hole of GMOs. Farmers around the world are indeed becoming the GMO Monsanto serfs, healthy/unadulterated/non-GMO seeds are being lost to the pollen drift of GMO seeds, and consumers are trustingly ingesting what our government says is safe. It's simple...slow this thing down until we fully understand and know what we are doing...before it is too late and we can't put the cat back in the bag.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEX654gN3c4&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1

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And, I suppose India vs Monsanto sums up about everything...read on...

21/09/2011

India vs. Monsanto: seeds of discord and bio-piracy

For the first time ever, a country - India - is accusing a multinational company of "bio-piracy". That means stealing indigenous plants, and then trying to develop genetically modified versions of them, without giving any compensation back to the local people or nation where the plant originally came from. Our reporters traveled to one of the affected areas and spoke to those who say it's their environment which has been stolen.

View filmed interview:

http://www.france24.com/en/20110921-india-monsanto-gmo-brinjal-bio-piracy-biopiracy-steal-seeds-terminator-cotton-onion-melon-debt-suicide