My post on the how to keep Monsanto out of your home garden seems to have really hit a nerve with supporters of GM foods.
This morning, I received an email from the CEO/President of a large soybean seed company in the Midwest who writes:
I just read your article “The Four Steps Required To Keep Monsanto Out of Your Garden”. I favor choice when it comes to the food you eat and agree with you on that part . I do not agree that it is right to attack Monsanto and all the good work that they are doing to increase yields for farmers to keep the price of food low enough so the poorest of the poor can afford to eat. If we all had to eat organic many people in this world would starve due to the higher cost of food and lower production.
I respect your views but attacking Monsanto is not in the interest of poor people and world food production. GMO’s are not bad and have passed all the standards set by regulatory systems around the world and are proven safe. Thanks for listening.
My word for word email response?
Stop drinking the Kool-Aid my friend.
GMOs are far from “proven safe” as this CEO claims and the sob story that Monsanto is somehow helping the poor and starving people of the world is nothing but a PR stunt that while effective, has no basis in truth or reality.
As Mark Twain once said, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
There are many highly capable and obviously intelligent people that have completely bought the scam that GMOs are safe and going to feed the world baloney.
Perhaps this most recent news out of Europe will give them a much need kick in the pants to wake them up to the reality of the situation.
Independent Experts Find GM Foods Contain Dangerous Gene
The European Union’s official, independent food watchdog group, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), is reporting that the approval process for GM crops failed to identify a poisonous gene discovered in 54 of 86 GM plants.
Most alarmingly, this viral gene known as “GENE VI” was discovered in the most widespread GM crops, notably corn and soy, which are heavily used in animal feed for livestock producing meat, milk, and eggs.
How did the viral gene get into the GM crops in the first place?
The problem starts right in the laboratory where GM foods are synthesized by an army of scientists playing God with millions of unsuspecting guinea pigs blithely buying unlabeled GM laced products at the supermarket.
These scientists insert foreign genes from other organisms (plant or animal) into a target plant using a technique which allows these foreign genes to “piggyback” on common soil or plant based viruses.
Assumption is the Mother of Error it seems as these scientists had expected that the virus genes transporting the foreign genes into the target plant would not be present once the GM plant was actually grown in the field.
The EFSA research (Independent Science News) has now conclusively shown that this major assumption upon which the supposed “safety” of GMOs is based is not the case.
Not. Even. Close.
How the presence of this viral gene could have been missed by the biotech companies, government regulators, and even university scientists is beyond comprehension.
The EFSA research indicated the following:
This situation represents a complete and catastrophic system failure.
There are clear indications that this viral gene might not be safe for human consumption. It also may disturb the normal functioning of crops, including their natural pest resistance.
A reasonable concern is that the protein produced by Gene VI might be a human toxin. This is a question that can only be answered by future experiments.
Dr. Julian Little, chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC) which represents the biotech companies, had this to say in response:
... nearly three trillion meals containing GM ingredients have been eaten without a single substantiated case of ill-health. The combination of these two facts can give consumers a huge amount of confidence in the safety of GM crops.
I guess Dr. Little isn’t really paying attention to the skyrocketing cases of food allergies and digestive complaints in the past decade or so, particularly allergies to corn and soy, the top two GM crops.
It’s always easier to just continue with business as usual and hide behind PR campaigns focusing on starving children and fudged reports about the “safety” of frankenfoods when the corporate bottom line (and the McMansion mortgage payment) is at stake, isn’t it Mr. CEO?
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Sources
Uncovered, the “toxic” gene hiding in GM crops: Revelation throws new doubt over the safety of foods
Remember the good-old-days when a farm was owned by a farmer, not a CEO/President.
I LOVE you Sarah!!!!
You want to save the poor? Give them land, give them seed (organic non gmo) and let them thrive on their own hard work. Don’t feed us this BS of feeding the world, it’s political not humanitarian.
I took the “feed the world” part to mean agricultural countries, that have the climate and the means to get the job done, are, literally, feeding the world… California grows food for USA as well as other countries who simply can’t do it well, or easily, themselves. Strangely enough, we supply tons of RICE to China! We supply wheat to Russia (we sell the rice, I think, but the wheat is some kind of beneficient program or other.) Someone else stated here, teach/show poor people how to grow their own gardens, I have to agree. Of course there will still be strong need for able countries/states to provide staples for those who can’t do it themselves. What I can’t understand is why the EEUU has banned GMO foods (to my understanding), and America has to continue soil stripping practices, GMO foods are pretty much unavoidable without labeling, and citizens dont get to have a say in this process??? I was recently told California (or is it the whole country?) no longer ALLOWS Country of Origin on fresh meat products. Now you have no idea WHAT you’re eating. Is that Salmon from Alaska, or a fish-stye on the Atlantic Coast?!
Wow, Sarah…..your article about home gardening SANS Monsanto is just wildly pleasing, and I joined your email list faster than I could type my address. Pleasing too, are the many comments above mine. Let’s hope THIS is a virus that goes crazy and is one that can wipe out the diabolical intentions of the world’s toxic polluters and fascist corporations. One wonders initially how humans could be this nihilistic and ‘bad’. Indeed, but then we vow not to get bogged down in this depressing thought, but to move forward with speed and agility towards the goal: freedom from authoritarianism, freedom to practice peaceful means of living, freedom to pursue the avenues in which these diabolical forces are SHUT DOWN.
Thank you for the article, and especially for that brief, humorous and thoroughly cogent response to the CEO….
STOP DRINKING THE KOOL-AID MY FRIEND!!!
Hi Sarah –
The information that you are exposing to people is well founded – simplified, but grounded in proven results. Two years ago, before the first crops of GM alfalfa and sugar beets were planted (after pitifully brief consultation to Barack Obama – whose sole decision deferred the approval or went ahead with the planned distribution of seed stock by Monsanto) I contacted Prof. Emeritus Don Huber of Purdue University concerning his chilling discovery of a new, hybrid organism (basically half virus and half fungus) which thrives in the toxic environment created by the effects of Roundup (glysophate), which causes a host of diseases and infertility in the livestock which are fed on the crops. What glysophate essentially does, on a persistent basis, (meaning it does NOT bio-degrade), is interrupt the ability of non-resistant plants (ie: non-GM crops which do not have a genetic code introduced artificially, to combat the effects of glysophate on a molecular level) to absorb soil nutrients and minerals on a microscopic scale – glysophate is essentially a re-uptake inhibitor which blocks the receptors in the very finest roots of plants, which have evolved to metabolize these nutrients into the plant organism – thus, literally starving the targeted plants to death. Glysophate remains latent in the soil and water, slowly leaching further into the earth, and eventually, into the aquifers which entrap naturally filtered precipitation which drains into the ground. These aquifers are the source of the majority of irrigation water, and potable water which all living things require to survive. As it stands, there is nowhere on this planet which has not been tainted by glysophate, other than glacial ice. The atmosphere, soil and water are accumulating more and more of it every year, and it has been proven dangerous to life. I lobbied the Canadian and US governments to hesitate on the approval of the planting of GM alfalfa – an aggressively self-seeding perennial plant – until proper scientific study could be performed on the side effects of this new kind of ‘toxic micro-climate’ produced by the incessant use of glysophate and necessarily-increasing amounts of fertilizers needed to keep the crops alive (due to the literally sterile condition of the soil). Our pleas and petitions were ignored, and the alfalfa went to field. It is now absolutely and terrifyingly impossible to reverse the spread of the GMO alfalfa throughout North America, and eventually, the entire planet. Alfalfa is a grass…. They have accomplished the unthinkable at Monsanto – they have forever alterered the DNA of the biosphere of the planet, without having the faintest idea of what the repercussions will be for creating plants which naturally excrete lethal and persistent poisons into the environment, and the clinical trial is being done on YOU, your CHILDREN, and everything else that is alive. It is genocide, folks- plain and simple; and it is directly caused by the evil greed of a handful of immoral capitalist oligarchs. Joseph Stalin would be proud. We, personally, will probably only witness the initial symptoms of the burgeoning disease in our lifetimes – but after two or three generations, the ill-effects of this massive irresponsibility could be incalculable.
The underlying reason for Monsanto to forcibly push Roundup Ready crops on the world so aggressively and unscrupulously, was to create a permanent demand for their precious herbicide, Roundup. Monsanto’s patent for the formula expired in September, 2000 – opening the glysophate production market up, to the corporation’s Agri-business competitors; Dow Chemical, Syngenta, BASF and Cargill (to name the four majors). By saturating the monoculture-driven, factory-farming system with RR-GM seeds, and legally binding the farmers to continue to buy new stocks of seed every year from Monsanto by the sheer nature of the tainted plants that grow on their dead land, it was neatly and diabolically sewn up. Monsanto has created the majority of it’s genetically modified cash crops, in order to sell increasing amounts of PESTICIDES. Monsanto is not in the food business – it is, in fact, in the POISON business – and always has been. Prior to the ‘discovery’ that dioxin was a persistent, lethal, and genetically toxic pollutant (“gee, I thought it was pretty harmless – didn’t you, Jim-Bob?”) – PCB’s were Montanto’s most profitable product (used as a coolant and insulating barrier in electrical transformers), since DDT (Monsanto’s first big cash cow) was banned in the USA in 1972 by the EPA, as a general-use pesticide, and eventually throughout the rest of the developed world by 1984; (it was still manufactured and sold by Monsanto in the hundreds of tons to impoverished nations, well into 1987) – due to it’s out-of-control and lethal properties, exposed in the book Silent Spring, by environmentalist Rachel Carson.(a thesis on persistent inter-generational toxicity of persistent pesticides as a cause for catastrophic declines in the populations of birds and other wildlife – published in 1962). Monsanto sued the Environmental Protection Agency for banning DDT – and lost. There has been a long-standing impasse between the EPA and Monsanto, in regards to the chemical manufacturer’s consistently irresponsible handling of the by-products of it’s industry – the most toxic man-made substances known to humanity. The disposal methods they employed, were basically of the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ variety (dump and bury), and were/are the cause of a few of the planets most devastating industrial waste leaks… Monsanto has always been an underhanded and dishonest player – illegally dumping millions of gallons of the most lethal waste chemicals in the world, all over the world. They employ an army of lawyers and lobbyists to protect their corporate interests (as well as a private militia), and have created a culture of conspiracy in the regulating bodies like the FDA, EPA and Department of Agriculture – which exist to oversee and police the corporation’s activities – by populating their ranks with scientists and bureauocrats whose educations, schools, laboratories and pensions, are funded by the very corporation they are meant to keep in check and balance – and penalize for infractions (would you slap a hefty fine on your boss for keeping his business profitable, and expect to have a job the next day?) Every time there is a regime change in the Government, those experts who no longer have taxpayer-funded jobs, are welcomed among the ranks of the faithful at Monsanto; and handsomely paid, in a revolving door manner. It is a sham, a lie, a cheat, and one of the most disgusting, wilfully planned and orchestrated – long-term abuses ever perpetrated on their unwitting victims – the population of the world. Read a little bit about the history of Monsanto, and develop your own opinions about how benevolent and beneficial that filthy, lying order is… Like I’ve said before, and I will say again – Monsanto must be tried for crimes against humanity at an international tribunal, dismantled completely and dissolved forever; and it’s entire vast wealth dispersed among it’s most worthy victims as reparation for the irreparable damage inflicted upon their lands and their people. Amen.
Go ahead. Argue with me. I dare you.
Well, I guess you told him! LOL! I love it when the truth prevails! Thank you for sharing the truth about the horrors of GM food. We all have to fight this evil together.