Monsanto has had presidential cabinets stacked for forty
years, "they own this place".

It would be a pity if we lost the hay market in Europe. Gee, you'd think it would be cheaper to raise hay in Europe than shipping such a bulky crop all the way across the ocean.

"These researchers found there has been a rapid rise in weeds resistant to the herbicide Roundup (so-called superweeds) that could rapidly undercut any environmental or economic benefits of GE crops."

I caught you...

Oh ok...so left wingers DO admit there can be environmental or economic benefits to GE crops. Why admit that now? I thought GE/GMO crops had NO benefits whatsoever. Now leftists admit there MAY be benefits. Left wingers are making a positive step here in admitting science may really be science.

I have read that the Irish potato famine actually had its beginnings in the U.S.

The world's Ocean Blight began in the U.S. I wonder if the world's Food Blight famine will begin here too?

the recent news that pesticides containing organophosphates are now linked to ADHD in children should remind us why caution is warranted with new technologies.

What I don't understand is how Monsanto products can pollute the crops of a non-user, and then the guy who suffers from their pollution is held liable. This is contrary to all principle and common sense. The polluter should pay restitution and prevent further damages to those who don't buy into Monsanto's bid to own the world's crops - and continue pollluting the natural environment without penalty - in fact, they get PAID to do it !!! Insanity is becoming the new norm in the US - has been every since 1980. Don't ordinary people see the problem in this? Why haven't farmers organized to stop this insanity - and other related corporate abuses?

If the US Supreme Court is like the govt of India, prepare to be arrested for protesting or even questioning GMO.

In the Spring issue of The Heirloom Gardener, not yet online, under the heading of Frankenfood News, one sub heading relates the following:

1. Three Approved GMO's Linked to Organ Damage
In what is being described as the first ever and most comprehensive study of the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers have linked organ damage with consumption of Monsanto's GM maize. All three varieties of GM corn, MON810, Mon863, and NK603 were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities.

The Committee of Research and Information on Genetic Engineering and the University of Caen and Rouen studied Monsanto's 90-day feeding trials data of insecticide producing Mon819, Mon863 and Roundup herbicide-absorbing NK 603 varieties of GM maize.

The data "clearly underlines adverse impacts on kidneys and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs as well as different levels of damages to heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system," reported Gilles-Eric Seralini, a molecular biologist at the Univfersity of Caen.

Their December 2009 study appears in the International Journal of Biological Sciences.

Frankenfood: you are what you eat

Buck May,

GM crops can help prevent yield loss, just like a pesticide can. In fact, the GM crops currently on the market are basically pesticides. Don't confuse increased yields with prevention of yield loss. (I suspect your confusion is intentional.) There isn't ONE GM crop that contains a transgene which can demonstrably increase its yield.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS MAY PASS HELPFUL TRAITS TO WEEDS, STUDY FINDS

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sungene.htm

The corporate bottom line is killing us all.

I feel GMO should be banned, completely, from fields. The technology poses too many long term threats to this planet and its environment. We may be causing permenant damage to the genome of the food we eat, and to ourselves, adn damage that may last and alter this planets environments for millions of years. What we are doing with GMOs is frightening, as we are introducing changes to plants that would not occur in nature over millions of years of evolution of any kind.

This is not irrational, these are real serious ethical concerns, about the power and control a few have to manipulate life itself, our food and this planet, and the fact that GMO is not safe, it has been proven to cause cancer, kidney and liver damage, allergies, to name a few, it creates new diseases, due to the cross pollination issue and the fact that if we have a health effect that has long term latency it may appear too late for the damage to be undone to corruption of the genome stock of the planet.

Like a food additive, a GMO crop is artificial, introduces even greater dangers, unlike a food additive, it reproduces itself and may be impossible to recall if it causes cancer.

We could easily destroy this planets ecosystem adn our own food and unleash a global ecological collapse.

The risks of GMOs are simply not worth taking, and the ethical problems alone should necessitate them being banned. We are manipulating the evolutionary sequence and perhaps life on this planet forever, systems which have developed for billions of years by evolution we are able to impelement changes instantaneously tht would never occur in nature. In doing so we are raping future generations and violating their basic rights to whole, natural, organic foods and a clean, unaltered environment.

The transnational GMO marketing could actually be ripe for RICO-type prosecution. In the long run though the law of karma will bring down the gavel.

interesting article on organized crime

http://www.georgetownlawjournal.org/issues/pdf/97-4/Smith.PDF

Nature is very subtle. GMO crops that require insect pollinators may be killing their reproductive facilitators. However, honeybees and the crops they pollinate are not native to North America, they were imported from Europe. North America would have a full complement of native plants left, if only in fairly scanty amounts, if they all went extinct. The problem doesn't solve itself quite so nicely with wind pollinated plants like corn. We may end up needing to eat that roundup resistant pigweed some day, not that it would be anywhere near as healthy as the non engineered variety. And Europe is very wise to resist any and all GMO's.

"there has been a rapid rise in weeds resistant to the herbicide Roundup (so-called superweeds)"

That's fantastic. Just like Al Qaeda's 9/11 attack a opened the doors of opportunity for the USA's imperial steamroller, so does the challenge that nature poses. The whitey with the protestant work ethic will create new "super-toxics" to deal with the new "super-weeds", and expand the dominion.

Let's look at a few facts about our planet: There are only two ways to increase the amount of food a country can produce. Either wheedle greater yield out of the existing farmland or find extra space to grow more. Today, crops are grown on nearly 40% of earth's land, and it takes 70% of its water to do it. Farming is, by its nature, an assault on the earth. Tilling, plowing, reaping, sowing are not environmentally benevolent activities and never have been. Pests, viruses, and fungi reduce agricultural productivity by more than a third. Crop cannot be turned into edible food without killing pests, and pest cannot be killed without poison, man-made or natural. We can only wage so much war on our environment, and we have just about reached our limit. 3/4s of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of the population suffers from chronic hunger, has become nutritionally useless; more than 40% of the African continent suffers from desertification.

It would be nice if everyone had the means to shop at farmers markets and Whole Foods, but the fact remains that organic and small-scale farming is a luxury, and one that very few of us can afford. Only a handful of earthlings has the means to pay for membership in the Western cult of organic food, which to the earth's starving majority is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the very rich. The organic movement, fueled by rural nostalgia and pastoral dreams, eschews mass production, emphasizes tradition and seeks to return to less complicated times, a desire that may be genuine and well meant, but it is based on a dangerous myth: that the old days were better. We can think that as long as we don't have to live it, because it was never true. The old days were treacherous and painful. Nasty, brutish and short was the rule, not the exception. Life expectancy two centuries ago - it is only 200 years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture - in Europe and America was about half of what it is today. That revolution brought us power - and freedom from a life spent in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton balls or potatoes. Freedom, in short from an existence ruled by agony, injury and pain - one that most farmers (agriculture is still among the most dangerous of American professions and is associated with one of the highest rates of early mortality) and most humans have always had to endure. Until science came along.

All food we eat has been modified, if not by genetic engineering, then by plant breeders or by nature itself. Farmers have always relied on genetic engineering. Only in the old days it was called breeding, which is the art of choosing beneficial traits and cultivating them over time. Farmers have done that for thousands of years by crossing sexually compatible plants and then selecting among the offspring for desirable characteristics. Evolution, which works on a different time scale than we do, and has no interest in easing the life of any particular species, does the same thing: selects for desired traits.

We must come up with ways to feed our starving planet, and hateful, ignorant, Tea-Party-style assaults on science contribute nothing to this very important subject. We must have a rational discussion about our food policies, and we should be guided by facts and common sense, not emotions, prejudice, and denialism (and I - and I’m a card-carrying liberal (and proud of it) democrat – highly recommend the book, Denialism, by Michael Specter).

I would like to address the diatribe by "elluskott".

elluskott writes:
"Freedom, in short from an existence ruled by agony"

We are all well aware of the core tenants of white male supramcy that promise to give us "freedom" from the natural world by doing voilence to it. This is based on the demented christian dualitic view of the world that nature is bad or evil and the human mind is all good.
The human mind of white supremacy is so consumed with violence against the earth that the white man creates devices and machines for the omnicide of the earth and every living thing on it. We will not listen to the white man because the white man is totally insane !

elluskott writes:
"Farming is, by its nature, an assault on the earth."

NO, western style white supremacy farming is a violent assault on the earth and every living thing on it. western style white supremacy life is a violent assault on all reason and all western life style gains are made by stealing from and killing others.

There are other people on earth who do not view the earth or nature as something evil to be overcome. There are many people on earth who do not view the products of the human mind to be superior to the earth.
There are many people on earth who view the earth as the generative closed system it really is and for them a "good life" is to honor and work with the beauty and artistic generative capacity of the earth without doing any violence to her at all. No other life is worth living no mater how long your violent technology can extend life. Your western violence is a life not worth living at all.

The violent white supremacy world that "elluskott" lives in is an illusion. everything is stolen. everything is borrowed. every bite of crappy hollow cancer ridden food he speaks of is just a bite of stolen oil from the earth. oil now carbon in the atmosphere sending the earth back into a state of poisoned seas and back to the warm period when the oil was layed down in the first place. A time of no humans at all.

As all white supremacists always do "elluskott" makes many desparaging comments about non whites.
"elluskott" writes:
3/4s of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of the population suffers from chronic hunger, has become nutritionally useless;

This chronic hunger that you speak of is a result of western colonization and violence and extraction of resources from colonized lands and the destruction of tribal ways of subsistense by white mens violence.

Today We in America continue to push small farmers the world over off off their land. How do we do this ? We subsidise our huge violent food production system and then sell the end result for less than half the production costs. This floods the world food market with food that is priced way below the true cost of production. Today we see the violence in Tailand. Have you ever wondered what hapens to the 4 million rice farmers in Tailand When the US floods the market with rice atrificially sold at half true production costs ? Those rice farmers go out of buisness and then starve. So "elluskott" writes or third world "chronic hunger" when it is clear that the western violent food system is designed specifically to destabalize and drive poor nations into hunger in order to create a monopoly food system for the benifit of a few very wealthy white man companies. We can see the results of these white man systems on countries like Tailand now.

White mans violent food system is just exploitation.
Genetically altered seeds have absolutely nothing to do with food production.
Never have even been meant to increase overal food production.
Genetically altered seeds is 100% about stealing the resources of the earth pretending like the generative force of the earth is something white men thought up and can own and patent and sell to everyone else. You simply take a food seed from some local third world person. a seed that has been domesticated carefully and lovingly for millions of years. you steal it and change just a little fake thing like some insignificant genetic code and then the white man owns it and get a patent on it and has exclusive rights to all life and seeds.
Large corporations are simply trying to take ownership of plant life so humans canot have food to eat without paying the white conlonizers for food.

Its about starving people not feeding them.

Obama never violates the deregulate, "free" market philosophy.

Call the deregulators and "free" marketers privateers.

Make make privateers a dirty word. Spread fear about the unaccountability and exploitation of the public good by the tyranny of privateers. Bush proved it.

regulation is a good thing. Accountable, elected regulation.

Famer's have not use genetic engineering for thousands of years. They crossbred compatible species like a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey.

GE technology combines genes from species that could NEVER co-mingle in nature without the technology. Like a flounder genes in a tomato.

These novel genes can have all sorts of untested unknown consequences. but more importantly they are PATENTED, and they spread in the wind, water, and by insects.

If your crops are infected, and they WILL be, then you owe a royalty to the patent holders of that lifeform.

You get it? GE technology is legalized ownership of lifeforms. That is the true goal. "Feeding the hungry" my ass.

Fight Codex with all your heart and your might. It is the end run around local laws, using the UN to enforce their agenda.

Keep in mind that just before LA started closing medical marijuana shops, the UN said LA's distribution system was against international treaties about drugs.

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

Now would be an excellent time for an organized Left to appeal much more broadly to the middle-class to support a Keynesian Green New Deal including organic food purity laws outlawing GM crops, but the American left, such as it is, did not prepare or organize enough to seize this opportunity and, unfortunately, America and the world will pay for the ongoing failures of the American right AND left regardless of how insanely idiotic they become.

That said, the current obsolete 19th century political spectrum from communism to fascism has failed to honestly or comprehensively address the two greatest problems of our age: Global environmental degradation and human over-populations' acceleration of the degradation of the biosphere due to the resource demands placed on the planet by our sheer numbers and the inefficiency of prevailing resource distribution, energy systems, waste disposal and recycling systems around the world. I no longer believe that economists and politicians are either fit or capable of constructively influencing governance or governing. Their ideologies are too personal, too self-interested, too capitalist, and especially, too SUBJECTIVE. Wantonly so now on a globalist scale that is operating out of control at the peril of humanity and too many other living species.

A new Third Way is called for and I believe that way must be an attempt to create a global system of environmentally sustainable resource management and humane human population reductions that harmonizes human population groups and their activities to the specific ecological and resource limits of the regional habitats they inhabit on a long-term sustainable basis. To achieve this would require a global participatory economic (parecon) democratic body of scientists employing a scientifically OBJECTIVE decision making process based on regional optimized habitat/population plans generated by the most advanced computerized biospheric and resource information gathering system ever attempted. One that combines real time biosphere data gathering with verifiable geographic annual resource extraction and utilization data into one system. Such a system should be able to develop "down-growths" plans for populations and economies.

Under such a system capitalism could only be allowed to remain under heavily regulated and enforced conditions with the profit incentive confined by scientifically imposed limits that absolutely prevent capitalism from continuing to undermine the biosphere.

The failure of doctrinal communism was its vain notion that it could entirely stamp out capitalism. Capitalism will always find a way to thrive in secret in black markets and always has. It operates on a psychological level of reptilian brain gratification than can only ever be carefully regulated and conditionally limited--with eternal vigilance--but never fully eliminated. Capitalists, especially American capitalists know this. Even so they whine endlessly about any attempts to regulate them as being somehow "destructive" of capitalism. Utter nonsense. I believe it can and must be gelded and broken like a headstrong stallion.

I just saw a documentary about what happened in Canada with one particular, extraordinarily courageous farmer. The one Vandanta Shiva always references.

It is so far beyond the pale, the total control monsanto has. And the canola is the only flora that isn't destroyed by Roudup. I thought i knew how horrifically insideous this situation is. I couldn't have even imagined the absolute control they have over farmers.