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
Thank you for this post Sarah; well done and well said!
xoox
Monsanto has frightened me for a long time now, ever since I heard that they not only own the patents for genes of plants they manufacture, but they also own the patent of the gene that controls how fast a pig grows, so now even it a farmer produces a pig from natural selection that has this gene, monsanto will take them to court. This company makes billions from taking something that is a natural part of nature, & a natural way every living thing improves their genes pool, & calming it as their own, & they should NOT HAVE THE RIGHT to do that.
The scariest thing is, if they have already started to patent animal genes, how long will it take before they patent a gene humans share. We share 36% genes with fruit flies, 7% with bacteria, 15% with mustard grass, 21% with round worm, 85% with zebra fish & 98% with chimpanzees to name a few, so how long will it be before every one will have to pay for a gene that is part of our body, or even worse in our children.
As I said, they HAVE NO RIGHT TO OWN GENES, if they want to work with them, then as long as they don’t do any harm, that’s ok, but for anyone to think they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, then you are easily fooled. If they want to help feed the world, then they shouldn’t be making a profit, they should only making enough to cover cost, but that’s not what monsanto is about.
my question is if cotton is now a GMO ( I had read that Monsanto was selling it to India) is wearing cotton(GMO) going to effect the body ? . . . for women they say to wear cotton next to the body is healthier (underwear) . . . is there any reason to worry ? just asking
And I’m pretty sure I remember reading in my research that GMO and related methods of food production actually DECREASE yield and sustainability. (That ought to particularly be the case once Monsanto owns patents to all the food crops on the planet. ‘Cause, you know, once their seed contaminates your field or garden, all that crop is theirs, too.)
What the heck happened to common sense and sound logic?
I run a small farmer’s market business dealing in vegetable plants for home gardeners and will only buy seed from companies with the safe seed pledge or a guarantee that they have non-GMO seeds. It just isn’t worth the long term health risk to play with the genes. I’m afraid that our water supply will be contaminated by all the round-up chemicals that make farming with GMO crops convenient.
Monsanto might just be the Anti-Christ.
we need, as Americans, to let “the world” feed itself. usually those talking about doing so are out to make a profit. and we fall for it every time, because most Americans would love to end world hunger, we want to help. this is not the way to do it, even if we have no other way. it would be better to not “help” than to force gmos on people
“…this is not an official EFSA output. It was authored by a former member of EFSA staff and the current Vice-Chair of the GMO Panel in an independent capacity. This paper has been known to EFSA’s GMO Panel from the outset; Members of the Panel’s Molecular Characterisation Working Group are acknowledged in the paper for the advice given to the authors as the research was being undertaken. In accordance with its Science Strategy, EFSA encourages its scientific staff to contribute to the scientific literature in their specific area of expertise.”
“… the data published in the paper ‘Possible Consequences of the overlap between the CaMV 35S promoter regions in the plant transformation vectors used in the viral gene VI in transgenic plants’ do not represent a new discovery of a viral gene nor do they indicate safety concerns in previously evaluated GMOs.”
You GO…awesome response….and his or hers??
***Crickets**** **Crickets***