Monsanto // Current

Mutant Seeds For Mesopotamia

It was not just oil they went into Iraq to get. There is only one word to describe this: evil. And make no mistake about it, they... more

JanforGore
added this

Monsanto: feeding a company to starve a country

Monsanto purchased a brazilian sugarcane ethanol company for 290 million dollars. Who the hell is that going to feed?

From the article:

At a time when many people were questioning causes of the recent food crisis, many more were investigating how our food systems can move forward to sustainably feed the increasing world population. Recently, the U.N. Task Force on Trade, Environment and Development released a report touting the noteworthy yields and economic benefits of organic agricu... in Africa. Even recognizing that organic production offers significant hope for increasing food security. Another report released earlier this year by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Scien... noted that a "radical change" was needed for agriculture, and that agricultural biotechnology held little promise. But corporations like Monsanto took a different approach to the problem -- exploiting the food crisis as a means to sell more of their own biotech seeds.

Monsanto's website is rife with articles discussing how its applications of biotechnology will supposedly solve the food crisis. Back in June, on the cusp of the World Food Summit, Monsanto announced plans to double crop-yields by 2030 with biotechnology. The New York Times covered the story including a quote from a soybean genetics expert at the University of Nebraska who stated, "The hype-to-reality ratio of that one is essentially infinity ... seeing an exponential change in the yield curve is unlikely." But while experts were doubting Monsanto's claims, a Business Week article quoted Hugh Grant, the head of Monsanto, saying, "That isn't a feel-good thing ... Satisfying the demand curve is a great business opportunity." Grant may consider that quote a gaffe, but it was a telling sign regarding where Monsanto's true interests lie: not with people, but with profits.

Last week Monsanto purchased Aly Participacoes Ltda, a Brazilian company involved in sugarcane breeding and sugarcane ethanol. Monsanto's press release noted, "Global demands for raw sugar and biofuels are beginning to rise at a faster pace than the current production levels in sugarcane, a crop that is essential to meeting these demands," said Carl Casale, executive vice president of global strategy and operations for Monsanto. Last time I checked, hungry people can't eat ethanol and probably can't afford sugar. So why, in the middle of a food crisis, is Monsanto investing in sugarcane ethanol?Monsanto purchased a brazilian sugarcane ethanol company for 290 million dollars. Who the hell is that going to feed? From the... more

JanforGore
added this

14 responses

1 day ago

Obama appointing Monsanto buddy Tom Vilsack as USDA head would be a terrible idea

* Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack;s support of genetically engineered pharmaceutical crops, especially pharmaceutical corn: ... more

JanforGore
added this

39 responses

3 days ago

GMO Get's banned on Big Island, Hawai'i

Companies continue to create superior plants and animals by modifying its’ DNA, some plants such as the Taro (Kalo)... more

Kepano
added this

0 responses

4 days ago

Who owns nature?: Monsanto & biotech companies move to monopolize biodiversity

They may be moving to do so but they are coming up against much resistance from farmers, consumers, and various organizations that... more

JanforGore
added this

22 responses

5 days ago

Study: genetically engineered food: potential threat to fertility

How many studies will have to be performed to get GM ingredients listed on labels in the US? How much transgenic contamination? Environmental toxification? Where are the independent studies that conclude that GE foods unequiviocably do not contribute to allergies, diabetes, thyroid conditions, cancer, Morgellon's Disease, early puberty in children fed GM soy formula, and other diseases that have been on the rise since GM foods hit the market? Why is Monsanto and the FDA fighting consumer disclosure which is a democratic right of the people if these foods are safe?

Personally, I do not believe that GM foods are benign. I believe there are health effects to them that we are not being told about because it would hurt the profits of Monsanto and other agrbusiness /chemical/ poison making companies.The majority of the world is against genetic modification of food. The only ones really pushing it are governments and world organizations like the World Bank that seek to make profits. There is no real need for it except profit motive by chemical companies looking to exploit the poor and now the climate and food crises with their ethanol.

Yet, the U.S. government in collusion with Monsanto allows it to be sold in our country without disclosure to the public. I think that if labelling is not to be allowed on foods in this country containing their GM ingredients that there needs to be a MAJOR boycott in this country of all companies that sell any corn and soy processed foods. They then need to feel it where it will hurt THEM the most until they disclose the source of their ingredients. I am tired as a citizen of having to deal with the secrecy of a government that cares more about their own profits and political cronyism than the health and wellbeing of the American people and the environment. ANY food that is also a registered pesticide is not something I want my child or myself to consume.
____
From the article:

A study published today by the Austrian government identified serious health threats of genetically engineered (GE) crops. In one of the very few long-term feeding studies ever conducted with GE crops, the fertility of mice fed with GE maize was found to be severely impaired, with fewer offspring being produced than by mice fed on natural crops. Considering the severity of the potential threat to human health and reproduction, Greenpeace is demanding a recall of all GE food and crops from the market, worldwide.

The study, sponsored by the Austrian Ministries for Agriculture and Health, was presented today at a scientific seminar in Vienna, Austria. Prof. Dr. Jürgen Zentek, Professor for Veterinary Medicine at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study, summarised the findings: Mice fed with GE maize had less offspring in the third and fourth generations, and these difference were statistically significant. Mice fed with non-GE maize reproduced more efficiently. This effect can be attributed to the differences in the food source.
snip
Owned by Monsanto, the GE maize variety tested in this study is tolerant to a herbicide and resistant to certain insect pests. It has been approved for planting and food use in a variety of countries, including the US, Argentina, Japan, Philippines and South Africa. In Mexico and the European Union(1), it is approved for food and feed use.

"This study is yet another example that the food and feed safety of GE crops and food cannot be guaranteed. The reproductive toxicity of this GE maize was a totally unexpected result, but regulators around the world had considered this GE maize variety as safe as non-GE varieties - a potentially devastating error," said Dr. van Aken.How many studies will have to be performed to get GM ingredients listed on labels in the US? How much transgenic contamination?... more

JanforGore
added this

11 responses

7 days ago

Current Presents Digg Dialogg: Al Gore

Hosted by Digg's Kevin Rose, viewers have a rare opportunity to hear from former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner... more

current
added this

48 responses

11 days ago

Thank you.

Thank you.
Because of you, I have been once again privileged to retain the confidence and trust of the voters in my Congressional District so I can continue serving them and all Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives. It is an honor, and, in these troubled times, a challenge that I am eager to face because I know that I have your support, your encouragement, and your prayers.
I owe great thanks to the people of Ohio's 10th District as they make it possible for me to serve them on a local and a national level. I hope everyone appreciates what a truly special constituency I have, how fortunate we all are for the resolve of those who have chose me again and again to be their representative to Congress.
Every campaign is an intricate jigsaw puzzle of different shapes and sizes that are pieced together to achieve victory. It's people with the ability to contribute to get the message out. It's others willing to invest their time knocking on doors or making phone calls or posting signs in their windows and on their lawns. Still others who inspire us all with their letters and emails of support.
Because of you, individually and collectively, we were able to:
place more than 5,000 yard signs throughout the District
knock on more than 25,000 doors
contact 90,000 households by telephone
deliver campaign literature into almost 100,000 homes
run television commercials more than 800 times on cable channels and dozens and dozens of times during prime time on the major broadcast networks
And because of you, individually and collectively, we won convincingly.
I look forward to continue representing all of you and working to address the major issues of the day: the economy, the foreclosure crisis, jobs, health care, pension and retirement security, and the need to revitalize our industrial base and rebuild our infrastructure.
As we make progress, I will keep in touch. And if progress is too slow or off track, I may reach out to you to ask that you exercise your power as citizens to raise your voices so they are heard in Washington.
I also want to mention the role Elizabeth played in the campaign. She made an outstanding contribution to every aspect of our efforts, including issues development, fundraising, organization and special events. It's one thing to have a spouse be supportive. That is essential. Elizabeth went far beyond that by her spirited, intelligent and selfless involvement. Love abounds and is grand.
We both simply want to say, "Thank you" - for being there, for helping, for standing for what you believe, and for having confidence in me to represent your best interests.

With great appreciation and expectations for the year ahead, I am sincerely yours,

DennisThank you. Because of you, I have been once again privileged to retain the confidence and trust of the voters in my Congressional... more

covelogibbs
added this

0 responses

11 days ago

Digg question for Al Gore on the global food crisis

Thank you for the opportunity to hopefully have this question asked of Mr. Gore on Digg. Through so many years he has been and... more

JanforGore
added this

11 responses

13 days ago

Indian government accused of 'gaps' in genetically modified trial regulation

The Indian government has drawn criticism from civil society organisations over gaps in regulating trials and safety data on genetically modified (GM) crops in recent months.

The international nongovernmenal organisation Greenpeace told reporters last week (15 October) that India's monitoring and enforcement of GM crop trials "are in shambles". They say state governments often have no knowledge of field trials being conducted and biosafety tests are being increasingly outsourced to private firms, with no evidence of government oversight.

India is currently testing 56 GM crops, including 41 food crops, developed by public and private institutes. Genetically modified Bt cotton, containing a gene that is lethal to bollworm pests, is the only GM crop grown commercially in India. GM aubergine, mustard, rice and tomato are undergoing trials.

But a senior official at India's Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), which clears trials of GM crops, told SciDev.Net that regulatory standards were being maintained. GEAC has authorised state agricultural universities to regulate GM crop trials in their respective states "and so far we have found them to be competent in their job", she says.

Trials of Bt rice in the central Indian state of Jharkhand also came under sharp criticism by the Delhi-based nongovernmental organisation Gene Campaign in September. Gene Campaign's convener Suman Sahai says an independent survey of the trial sites by her organisation reveals serious gaps in the methods of the Maharashtra Hybrid Company (MAHYCO), an Indian partner of biotechnology company Monsanto.

Especially worrying, says Sahai, is that Jharkhand is home to rich rice biodiversity that could be seriously affected by contamination with GM crops.

Sahai says that in addition to both farmers and the state agricultural university being unaware of the trials, rice was grown during months when there are no pests making the study of pest resistance difficult, there was no physical containment of the trial sites from surrounding farmers' fields, and trials were conducted uphill of normal fields allowing water containing seeds and soil to flow onto them.

Indian government officials and MAHYCO did not respond to Sahai's charges made public last month (September 16).

The Indian government has proposed that a National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority (NBRA) be set up as a 'single-window clearance system' for all genetically modified crop and medicinal products. A draft bill on the NBRA is in circulation for comments.

But Pushpa Bhargava, former director of the Hyderabad-based Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology and appointed by an Indian court to the GEAC in August, told SciDev.Net, setting up a new body is meaningless, "without first identifying what is wrong with the existing regulatory system and the remedies".The Indian government has drawn criticism from civil society organisations over gaps in regulating trials and safety data on... more

JanforGore
added this

1 response

14 days ago

The Future of Food

There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America -- a revolution that is transforming the... more

covelogibbs
added this

19 responses

17 days ago

Biotech snake oil: a quack cure for hunger

Commercialized GM crops are confined to soybeans, corn, cotton and canola. Soybeans and corn predominate, and are used mainly to feed animals or fuel cars in rich nations. For instance, Argentina and Brazil export the great majority of their soybeans as livestock feed, mainly to Europe and Japan, while more than three fourths of the U.S. corn crop is either fed to animals or used to generate ethanol for automobiles. Expanding soybean monocultures in South America are displacing small farmers, who grow food crops for local consumption, and thus contribute to food insecurity, especially in Argentina and Paraguay. The only other commercial GM crops are papaya and squash, both grown on miniscule acreage.

Most revealing, however, is what the biotech industry has engineered these crops for. Hype and promises of future innovations notwithstanding, there is not a single commercial GM crop with increased yield, drought-tolerance, salt-tolerance, enhanced nutrition or other attractive-sounding traits touted by the industry. Disease-resistant GM crops are practically non-existent.

We have yet to see genetically modified food that is cheaper, more nutritious or tastes better, says Hope Shand, research director for the Ontario-based ETC Group. Biotech seeds have not been shown to be scientifically or socially useful.

The industry's own figures reveal that GM crops incorporate one or both of just two traits; herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Insect-resistant cotton and corn produce their own built-in insecticide to protect against certain, but far from all, insect pests. Herbicide-tolerant crops are engineered to withstand direct application of an herbicide to kill nearby weeds. These crops predominate, with 82 percent of global biotech crop acreage.

Herbicide-tolerant crops (mainly soybeans) are popular with larger farmers because they simplify and reduce labor needs for weed control. They have thus helped facilitate the worldwide trend of consolidating farmland into fewer, ever bigger farms, like Argentina's huge soybean plantations. According to a 2004 study by Charles Benbrook, former executive director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences, herbicide-tolerant crops have also led to a substantial increase in pesticide use. Benbrook's study found that adoption of herbicide-tolerant crops in the United States increased weed-killer use by 138 million pounds from 1996 to 2004 (while insect-resistant crops reduced insecticide use by just 16 million pounds over the same period).

The vast majority of herbicide-tolerant crops are Monsanto 's Roundup Ready varieties, tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, which is sold under the brand-name Roundup. The dramatic rise in glyphosate use associated with Roundup Ready crops has spawned an epidemic of glyphosate-resistant weeds, just as bacteria evolve resistance to an overused antibiotic. Farmers respond to resistant weeds by upping the dose of glyphosate and by using greater quantities of other herbicides, such as the probable carcinogen 2,4-D (a component of Agent Orange) and the endocrine-disrupting weed killer atrazine, recently banned in the European Union. Glyphosate-resistant weeds and rising herbicide use are becoming serious problems in the United States, Argentina and Brazil.

Commercialized GM crops are confined to soybeans, corn, cotton and canola. Soybeans and corn predominate, and are used mainly to... more

JanforGore
added this

7 responses

24 days ago

Are biotech crops a moral choice?

The most common argument from proponents of GM crops is that genetically engineered food will be necessary to feed a growing world... more

JanforGore
added this

24 responses

29 days ago

The risk of nutritionally enhanced GM plants on human health

The above paragraphs summarize published data that clearly show the following:

(1) Compounds structurally related to a common small molecule can have a lethal effect when present as even a minor contaminant in a food supplement.

(2) The GM enhancement of a metabolic pathway by the overexpression of genes for that pathway can have unpredictable consequences in the form of synthesizing a toxin.

(3) Finally, in the case of golden rice, it is argued that biologically active compounds derived from aberrant plant carotenoid synthesis could have profound effects on human development.

Similar arguments can be made for NEP-derived fatty acids that are directly incorporated into brain lipids and about NEPs overproducing vitamin E. Aberrant fatty acid composition of brain lipids is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease,45,46 and vitamin E has a role similar to RA in mammalian development.47 The excess consumption of a nutrient can also have negative effects. For example, a clinical trial with vitamin E supplementation showed that a relatively small dose increased the risk of heart failure,48 and smokers who supplemented their diet with -carotene had an increased risk of lung cancer.49 Therefore, there is a potential for nutrient toxicity in NEPs because upper tolerable levels of many nutrients are not well established (p. 107)35 and are likely to vary between individuals and lifestyles.

The information presented here shows that not only the potential harm of the product should be considered for risk assessment, but the GM process itself. The data clearly invalidate the argument that "the regulatory trigger for risk assessment should be based upon the physical features of the product rather than the process by which the product was generated."50 While it is true that traditional breeding methods can give rise to potentially hazardous products, the most recent assessment of GM food safety by the National Research Council35 stated that GM “has a higher probability of producing unanticipated changes than some genetic modification methods" (p. 118), but it curiously concludes by stating that the risk of GM technology is no greater than conventional breeding methods.

There are, in fact, no data comparing the food safety profiles of GM versus conventional breeding, and the ubiquitous argument that since there is no evidence that GM products make people sick, they are safe (see, for example, McHughen and Smyth,50 Bradford et al.,51 and Miller et al.52) is both illogical and false. There are, again, simply no data or even valid assays to support this contention.53 Without proper epidemiological studies, most types of harm will not be detected, and no such studies have been conducted.

The necessity of labeling all GM products and particularly NEPs is therefore critical if there is any hope of monitoring adverse health consequences due to their consumption. For example, it would have been impossible to identify the source of the toxic tryptophan supplement if the product were not traceable through labeling. It follows that before NEPs producing biologically active molecules such as -carotene, omega-3 fatty acids, or vitamin E are introduced into the food chain, great care must be taken to do rigorous, multigenerational animal safety assessments with the hope of identifying risks to health (for methods, see, for example, the 2007 publication by the National Toxicology Program54 and Pusztai and Bardocz55). In addition, the products must be labeled and traceable, and the unpredictable and unintended metabolic changes that may occur in NEPs require the thorough testing of the entire edible portion of the plant, not just the designated product as is almost always done by biotech companies...

David R. Schubert
Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California

JOURNAL OF MEDICINAL FOOD
J Med Food 11 (4) 2008, 000–000
The above paragraphs summarize published data that clearly show the following: (1) Compounds structurally related to a common... more

JanforGore
added this

11 responses

29 days ago

Hawaii bans genetically modified taro and coffee on Big Island

The genetic modification of taro and coffee on the Big Island is now a banned practice. The Hawaii County Council voted 9-0... more

JanforGore
added this

22 responses

1 month ago

Paraguayan farmers occupy Brazilian owned farms to block entry of genetically modified soy

Campesinos in the department of San Pedro occupied Brazilian-owned farms on Oct. 1 to block the entry of transgenic soy, and began planting other crops such as sesame and yucca on the plots.

Some 120 campesinos occupied two 600-hectare (1,480 acre) farms, according to local media reports.

Cristino Peralta, the San Pedro correspondent of the daily ABC Color, said that the farmers immediately began planting the sesame and yucca after occupying the plantations.

"There was no law enforcement intervention," he said. "The group's leader Florencio Martinez said that the occupation marked the start of the recovery of Paraguayan territorial sovereignty."

San Pedro is considered Paraguay's best farmland, but it is also the country's poorest department. President Fernando Lugo worked as a bishop there for a decade.

Land is concentrated in the fewest hands in Paraguay than in any other Latin American country. Only 351 landowners hold 9.7 million hectares (24 million acres), while, according to civil society organizations, there are more than 350,000 families with insufficient quantities of land or no land at all.

The demonstrators said that they took over the Brazilian-owned plantations in protest of what they called the government's failure to implement land reform. Paraguay has also seen other campesino protests against transgenic soy plantations and the indiscriminate use of farming chemicals.

Lugo had requested that the campesinos give his government 100 days starting Aug. 15 to seek financing for land reform. The period ends on Nov. 22.

According to campesino leader Elvio Benitez, the government "continues without finding a solution to the lack of land of thousands of our compatriots, while the Brazilian's presence is getting bigger and bigger. We can't do anything else but occupy the Brazilian-owned haciendas because the soy crops are causing deforestation, eliminating natural forests and contaminating people with its pesticides."
-Latinamerica Press
_______________
People are standing up worldwide to the hoax that is GM food. We have enough conventional NATURAL food to feed the people of this planet. Good to see people standing up to the fake unnatural test tube food these mutli nationals are trying to shove down their throats for profit.Campesinos in the department of San Pedro occupied Brazilian-owned farms on Oct. 1 to block the entry of transgenic soy, and began... more