Posted on 06/04/2013 4:55:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
On Memorial Day weekend, 2 million people marched in protests against seed giant Monsanto for the purpose of bringing awareness to hazards from genetically modified food, which it and other companies manufacture. Organizer Tami Canal said protests were held in 436 cities in 52 countries.
Genetically modified plants are grown from genetically modified, or engineered, seeds, which are created to resist insecticides and herbicides so that crops can be grown to withstand a weed-killing pesticide or integrate a bacterial toxin that can ward off pests.
The Chicago Tribune reported that because genetically modified organisms are not listed on food or ingredient labels, few Americans realize they're eating GMO foods every day. Genetically modified crops constitute 93 percent of soy, 86 percent of corn and 93 percent of canola seeds planted in the U.S., and are used in about 70 percent of American processed food.
The Tribune reported that the Food and Drug Administration has permitted the sale and planting of genetically modified foods for 15 years and that the Obama administration has approved an "unprecedented number of genetically modified crops," such as ethanol corn, alfalfa and sugar beets. The Alliance for Natural Health USA added that the U.S. Department of Agriculture now wants to eliminate any regulatory controls from genetically altered corn and cotton.
And Monsanto, the world's largest seed-maker and a publicly traded American multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation, is leading the pro-GMO march and moving full steam ahead in being the No. 1 U.S. and global farm supplier.
CEO Hugh Grant said this past week, "We're in a growth mode, and with the combination of momentum in our core businesses and new layers of growth coming online from an increasingly global portfolio, we have the strategic drivers in place to continue our growth trajectory next year and beyond."
However, Europe's resistance against GMOs paid off, as Reuters reported last Friday that Monsanto is "not pushing for expansion of genetically modified crops in most of Europe, as opposition to its biotech seeds in many countries remains high."
And The Washington Post also reported the same day that South Korea recently joined Japan in suspending imports of U.S. wheat after an experimental and unapproved strain of GM wheat, designed to resist the deadly effects of Monsanto's most popular herbicide and weed killer, Roundup, was discovered growing on an Oregon farm. (Just this last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found the rogue Monsanto wheat sprouts in the Beaver State, when a farmer who was attempting to wipe out a field by spraying Roundup couldn't kill the wheat crops.)
There's good reason that most European countries, Japan, and South Korea are resisting GMO crops. Business columnist Al Lewis summarized the dilemma Monsanto faces in his column for Dow Jones Newswires: "For Monsanto, it comes down to saving the 9 billion people expected to populate the planet by 2050. Monsanto is the company that allows farmers to grow more food with less land, water and energy. But it is also the company that brought us products we now know were far more dangerous than advertised, including the insecticide DDT, the toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs and the Vietnam-Era defoliant Agent Orange, which poisoned our own soldiers with dioxins. Monsanto also brought us saccharine -- sweet, yet artificial, and known to cause cancer in laboratory rats."
The Alliance for Natural Health USA cited the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and one of the first scientists to speak out about the dangers of genetically engineered foods: "Recombinant DNA technology (genetic engineering) faces our society with problems unprecedented, not only in the history of science, but of life on the Earth. ... Now whole new proteins will be transposed overnight into wholly new associations, with consequences no one can foretell, either for the host organism or their neighbors. ... For going ahead in this direction may not only be unwise but dangerous. Potentially, it could breed new animal and plant diseases, new sources of cancer, novel epidemics."
So instead of eradicating the need for insecticides and herbicides, genetically modified plants eventually could warrant stronger and more intense pesticides in order to outwit and overcome superbugs and greater strains of diseases. And who's to say what GMOs will do -- now or in generations -- inside our bodies as we consume them on a greater scale and they become a part of the bacteria in our digestive tracts?
With more and more U.S. foods being grown, manufactured and imported from places like South America and Eastern Europe -- the precise areas outside the U.S. where Monsanto's biotech seeds are gaining their greatest foothold, food imports are quickly becoming a recipe for disaster. Remember, too, much of the GM crop grown around the world is used for livestock feed, so there's more than one way for GMOs to be ingested in your diet, such as from meat and dairy products.
Equally alarming is a study that was just published in the journal Neurology. According to Medical Daily, a review of 104 studies conducted around the world revealed that exposure to pesticides, insecticides, weed-killers, fungicides, solvents, etc., increased the risk of developing Parkinson's disease by 30 to 80 percent.
Dr. Emanuele Cereda -- author of the study, by researchers from the IRCCS University Hospital San Matteo Foundation in Pavia, Italy -- told the British newspaper Daily Mail: "We didn't study whether the type of exposure, such as whether the compound was inhaled or absorbed through the skin and the method of application, such as spraying or mixing, affected Parkinson's risk. However, our study suggests that the risk increases in a dose response manner as the length of exposure to these chemicals increases."
Eat local and organic, period. And fight GMOs invading U.S. food industries and American homes.
I hope they continue to eat these foods then. And feed them to their children. There will, ultimately, be fewer of these people.
The grant proposals on the Gates Foundation website are just chilling. Chilling.
I absolutely agree. Estrogenic soy in our diet is a huge problem. But I think it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Growth hormones play a part too
So, that'll feed about 600milliion people ... how do you proposed to feed the other 6.4 billion?
You’ve bought the ‘do it our way or you starve all the little children’ line.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/16/india-rice-farmers-revolution
“In a village in India’s poorest state, Bihar, farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide. Is this one solution to world food shortages?”
Most of the 3rd world poverty comes from the small plot holders inability to afford ‘green revolution’ inputs. Special seeds, herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers cost money. Money they don’t have because they don’t have the amount of land necessary to generate that profit. Until now it’s been a circular means of failure for them.
Straw man argument, but yes, it can work in the desert.
They “harvested” 12 million chickens a day, except for holidays and weekends. That’s why chicken is dirt cheap and universally available.
CAFO's like this are prime breeding grounds for enhanced pathogens. That's how we got whe H1N1 version of E-coli and why those types of operations have to load up on antibiotics(how do you like eating that with your cheap chicken.?)
If we get the governmental regulators out of the local farmers hair and let them do what they do best, we can meet our food needs with food that is actually tasty and good for us.
The result these activists are looking for is eliminating a large swath of the population through starvation.
Total BS. Look at the people behind the GMO's and their agenda.
“Perhaps you need to do a little research before you reach a baseless conclusion. For example:
- have you taken into account the increase in lifespan (lifespan has increased 10 years since 1960, from 67 to 77)? As we have gained greater knowledge about life risks, things like herat disease kill less people, allowing us to live longer and become more susceptible to diseases that primarily afflict older people, such as Parkinson’s disease.
- Or possibly that medical science has greatly increased its ability to detect medical issues and label them, whereas before they were attributed to natural causes?
- In 1960, food represented 30% of an average American family’s budget. Now it is 12%.”
I have taken lifespan into consideration. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Have we ever seen the rate of type II diabetes that we see now? Have we ever seen early-onset, precocious puberty at the rates we see now? No! How about all the endocrine disorders that are appearing in young children? Where are those things coming from??
As far as the cost of food, cheap isn’t always better. We’re mass-producing food that contains chemicals & by-products that are destroying our health. And I don’t see many FReepers here who seem to give a damn. Instead, I’m called a lefty, a “greenie”, etc. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I just wish to be left alone to eat what I want, grow what I want, and be informed about what’s in the food I’m eating.
For a bunch of free-market, freedom-loving conservatives to be so opposed to that truly stuns me.
When GMOs are allowed to exist, there is no free choice to eat natural food because GMOs contaminate the food supply.
Greenpeacers are ultimately hippies. But even they are starting to get the picture that the big population control wackjobs aren’t JUST trying to control the populations of those black and brown people on far off continents.
They mean to control population here, at home, in the US as well. THAT’s what has the Greenpeacers and hippy types up in arms. It’s ‘OK’ for the population in Africa or South America to be ‘controlled’ in the name of saving the planet. They didn’t think it would be them too.
Do browse the grant publications on the Gates Foundation website. I fail to see how any pro-life individual can support Microsoft after having read those...
897,000 shares would have represented 1.5% of Monsanto stock. The actual largest shareholder of Monsanto, with a little over 6% ownership, is FMR, an investment fund controlled by the Johnson Family. Although not nearly as intriguing as rumor and innuendo, current ownership records are easily found at sites such as Yahoo Finance.
p.s. also notice that this posted article, is from The Guardian, one of the UK’s most leftist, progressive newspapers that have led the anti-GM movement for years and is a huge supporter of Friends of Earth, who lead the support for banning GM crops and have supported the burning of GM corps in testing....they could care less about labelling. Like all far-left movements, they are not about choice, they really want to tell you what you can eat and do....they want to control our lives.
One village in India is your answer ???
Then YOU eat the GMO’s. Feed them to your kids, your grandkids and your pets! Mangia mangia!
As I said before, just because the left opposes them does NOT mean they are great things. The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend.
ALL the global elites want you gone. Your kids too. And your grandkids. It isn’t a left or right proposition. If it were, the biggest supporters of this tech, Obama supporters BTW, wouldn’t be so invested in population control.
GMO seeds have been genetically modified to produce their own pesticide, survive the spraying of Roundup and self terminate. They are also incredibly expensive compared to traditional seeds. As a result, farmers in India were forced into total dependence on Monsanto by having to purchase new seeds annually. Because of Monsanto’s ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground, 125,000 farmers took their own lives after being driven into a hopeless cycle of debt and losing their lands and homes.GMOs, which were never adequately tested for safety, have failed catastrophically. At least 70% of our food contains genetically engineered food brought by Monsanto. GMO is endangering our health and environment at an alarming rate. Cross contamination is irreversible and good organic crops are being jeopardized.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto
Great reply. Gives me the opportunity to post a link I meant to but forgot:
http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/index.html
Hardly one village in India.
http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/countries/index.html
Lots of nifty pictures. Especially interesting are the before (using green revolution techniques and planting criteria) and after using SRI techniques.
Exactly! I can't help but remember back when animal fats were 'bad', so they started making all vegetable oil, then WHOOPS! hydrogenated vegetable oil and creating trans fats turned out to be even worse!
Now there using DNA in seeds like tinkertoys without a CLUE as to what the long-term affect of their tinkering on the people will even be.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Your post that Gates didn’t own any stock was erroneous. He does, via his Foundation.
“Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job” - Philip Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications. “Playing God in the Garden” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1998
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto
If it isn’t a leftist/progressive movement, why are all the leftists politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer big supporters of banning GM crops? Why are all the progress Green groups like Greenpeace, Sierra Club and Friends of Earth the major movers of this agenda? Just go back and look at who contributes money to this movement and you will find 90% of it comes from the far left. This is really a form of fascism when leftist politicians, in league with the Big Organic industry are trying to tell us what we can eat and what we can eat. Don’t worry, I will continue to eat GM food, and if you and the Greens are correct, it will kill off all of us GM supporters and you will get your wish and all of your opponents will eventually die off!
1. How do people get infected with West Nile virus (WNV)? People get West Nile virus from the bite of a mosquito that has fed on an infected bird. Mosquitoes can't transmit the virus from one person to another.
It's also possible to get West Nile virus from a blood transfusion or an organ transplant from an infected donor. Since all blood donated in the U.S. is tested for the virus, the blood supply in this country is considered safe.
I guess they just forgot about mentioning free range chickens.
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