Free Republic

Government plans clampdown on vandalism after lobbying from biotech firms Genetically modified crops may be grown in hidden locations in Britain amid fears that anti-GM campaigners are winning the battle over the controversial technology, the Guardian has learned. Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) confirmed they are looking at a range of options to clamp down on vandalism to GM crop trials, after intense lobbying by big crop biotech companies. The firms have warned that trials of GM crops are becoming too expensive to conduct in Britain because of the additional costs of protecting fields...

For a long time now, Americans have been told by the scientists who developed genetically modified (GM) crops and organisms that GM is safe and wonderful. This was done with the blessing of government regulators, such as the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It was alleged that GM crops, such as Bt and Roundup Ready, to use the best known biotech products, are good for biodiversity, increase yields, are resistant to pests, reduce the need for pesticides, are more profitable for the farmers, and less labor intensive. But a close examination of...

In August, Bayer Cropscience reported to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that some of the American long grain rice crop had been commingled with its genetically modified (GM) LL-601 rice. LL-601 is the abbreviation for the gene that confers resistance to the Liberty Link herbicide. LL-601 rice, which has not been approved for human consumption, was field tested between 1998 and 2001 and was dropped by Bayer when other varieties proved more productive and it judged that the time was not ripe for introducing GM rice. No one currently knows how the LL-601 rice got commingled at a...

Escaped golf-course grass frees gene genie in the US 09 August 2006 Andy Coghlan A nondescript grass discovered in the Oregon countryside is hardly an alien invasion. Yet the plant - a genetically modified form of a grass commonly grown on golf courses - is worrying the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) enough that it is running its first full environmental impact assessment of a GM plant. It is the first time a GM plant has escaped into the wild in the US, and it has managed it before securing USDA approval. The plant, creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera, carries a...

GENEVA -- The WTO has ruled that the EU broke international trade rules by stopping imports of genetically modified foods, officials said Tuesday. The preliminary judgment by a World Trade Organization panel concluded that the European Union had an effective ban on biotech foods for six years from 1998, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is a confidential report. The report sided with a legal complaint brought by the United States, Canada and Argentina over an EU moratorium on approval of new biotech foods, the officials said. The panel ruled that individual bans in six...

Go Back to Planting Trees Wangari Mathai become the first African woman to win the Nobel prize...the media have glossed over this celebrated tree-planter's unusual views about AIDS. She believes there is a widespread conspiracy to target blacks with disease and death... ..."AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did..." ...The KGB claimed that the Pentagon was behind AIDS¯a bogus charge that was picked up by Dan Rather on his broadcast... ..."We know that the...

Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko are true believers in the power of biotechnology in agriculture to improve life as it generates bounteous profits for innovative companies with the vision to invent and develop "superior" genetically modified (GM) plants. The fly in their ointment is overly zealous government regulation stimulated by vocal and paranoid bio-skeptic activists whose alarmism impedes biotech companies from feeding a hungry world. They make many valid points. It is indeed a crime against humanity that some African leaders, egged on by radical European Greens, decided to let their people starve rather than distribute corn they deemed...

Coalition of the Tilling by Waldemar Ingdahl [ 14/05/2003 ]TCS European debates on the issue of genetically modified organisms (GMO) and their use in agriculture tend to become rather predictable, considering that most of the pro and con arguments are fairly well known and the opposing sides are firmly entrenched. So it is good sometimes to get out of those trenches, and re-connect with the real issues at stake. Now that the US and several other nations have decided to lodge a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization against the EU moratorium on GM crop approvals, the issue is...

The government of Zambia — with three million people facing death by starvation — on October 29 gave its final refusal to distribute U.S. grain already stored there to help feed its starving population. Zambia's Agriculture Minister Mundia Sikatana invoked the "precautionary principle" as his rationale — that is, since the grain was produced through the use of modern biotechnology, it has not been proven to be perfectly safe and may present some future risks to people or the environment. The Zambian government also said it fears European Union countries would refuse imports from Zambia since their crops might...