Thread: Food safety, GMOs and the global fight against Monsanto

^ waste of time - Monsanto always wins on appeal.

Originally Posted by pseudolus

^ waste of time - Monsanto always wins on appeal.

Or not...

Feds delay approval of new Monsanto crops over environmental concerns

Biotech giant Monsanto faced a surprising setback after federal authorities refused to approve a new generation of genetically-engineered crops that could survive an unprecedented use of herbicides.


Feds delay approval of new Monsanto crops over environmental concerns ? RT USA

"delay"

Not come across the word "delay" yet?

Anway, Monsanto owns the courts and in 2016 they will have one of their own as POTUS. Hillary "heh, wheres my retainer Monsanto" will be elected by the system, and monsanto will have a free riegn to do what they like.

buggered if I would let my family live in the US then; unlabelled GMO food in everything already and no matter what your try to do, they will slip it in there somehow. the only non GMO food in the US due to cross contamination is imported from Europe.

Thanks Obama - you're great.


hahahhahahhha

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Anway, Monsanto owns the courts

^ More wingnut conspiracy nonsense from Pseudo-troll. Like all of your other batty ideas you haven't a shred of evidence to support this laughable notion, do you?

Uh oh, more bad news for Monsanto-

Chemical, used by Monsanto, found in urine of Europeans - study

Chemical, used by Monsanto, found in urine of Europeans - study ? RT News

Another thread where tony is showing his ignorance.



Heh Tony - still claiming Clinton was never impeached?

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Another thread where tony is showing his ignorance.

I see that your ignorance of all things American extends to the Judiciary as well. Dumb and dumber

Heh hot shot - was Clinton impeached?

How can you be so dumb that you absolve Obama and the democrats of any responsibility for the GMO nightmare unleashed on the world by american companies? How is that possible? Its almost as if you have had a complete labotomy.

Address just once the Monsanto employees that Obama hired. He hired. no one else. He hired them. Address that.

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

More wingnut conspiracy nonsense

Try and sound a little different at least

Originally Posted by TonyBKK

Uh oh, more bad news for Monsanto- Chemical, used by Monsanto, found in urine of Europeans - study

No tony, that's bad news for Europeans, not monsanto

Originally Posted by Neo

Paris - More pest species are becoming resistant to the most popular type of genetically-modified, insect-repellent crops, but not in areas where farmers follow expert advice, a study said.

The paper delves into a key aspect of so-called Bt corn and cotton - plants that carry a gene to make them exude a bacterial protein called Bacillus thuringiensis, which is toxic to insects.

Publishing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, US and French researchers analysed the findings of 77 studies from eight countries on five continents that reported on data from field monitors.

Of 13 major pest species examined, five were resistant by 2011, compared with only one in 2005, they found. The benchmark was resistance among more than 50 percent of insects in a location.

Of the five species, three were cotton pests and two were corn pests.

Three of the five cases of resistance were in the United States, which accounts for roughly half of Bt crop plantings, while the others were in South Africa and India.

The authors said they picked up a case of early resistance, with less than 50 percent of insects, in yet another US cotton pest.

And there were “early warning” signs (one percent resistance or less) from four other cotton or corn pests in China, the United States and the Philippines.

The scientists found big differences in the speed at which Bt resistance developed.



Study shows pests resistant to GM crops - IOL SciTech | IOL.co.za

^ Interesting... Now, help me understand something.

Traditionally Bacillus thuringiensis was a pesticide that was sprayed on crops, but these new GMO plants actually contain Bacillus thuringiensis within the plant, right?

So unlike a pesticide that's been sprayed on and can be washed off, there's no way to remove the Bacillus thuringiensis from these GMO plants?

So, if you consume these GMO plants you consume the Bacillus thuringiensis that they contain, right?

A quick google reveals that Bacillus thuringiensis is harmful to human health:

" there is evidence that Bacillus thuringirnsis (Bt) cry 1 toxin will impact directly on human health through damage to the ileum"

"The study shows that Bt Cry 1 toxin which is used extensively in corn and cotton products (oil and seed meal) used in human and animal food damages the mammalian ileum. Damage to the ileum can produce chronic illness such as fecal incontinence and/or flu like upsets of the digestive system."

"Comments on the human health impact of Bacillus thuringiensis toxin gene product in genetically modified crops"

Who here still thinks GMO's are the way forward?!

Wow, who'd have ever thought the Tea Baggers and Libtards would actually ever agree on anything?!

Tea Party lashes out at ‘Monsanto Protection Act’


"Members of the Tea Party have joined protesters standing up against the ‘Monsanto Protection Act’, calling the provision a ‘special interest loophole’ for friends of Congress.
The provision has now sparked so much outrage that both the far right and the far left are uniting in their condemnation of Section 735 of the Agricultural Appropriations Bill"
Full Article: Tea Party lashes out at ?Monsanto Protection Act? ? RT USA

GM Food Debate in China
Joyce Xu
(Joyce Xu is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong)
WED,29 JANUARY 2014


No, no, not the stake

As GMO imports grow, suspicion rises

Last August, Peng Guangqian, a People’s Liberation Army major general and deputy secretary-general of China’s National Security Policy Committee, claimed that China’s growing imports of genetically modified food was a western conspiracy that would threaten China’s security.

However, with Chinese agriculture facing difficulty in the campaign to feed its 1.3 billion people, the country’s agricultural authorities are turning increasingly to the domestic development and importation of genetically modified crops, a controversial decision in a country where few trust even the current conventional food supply. Currently, the country is the world's importer of GM soybeans, most of which come from the US. It has become one of the leading countries that promote biotechnology development.

That hasn’t meant there is trust. In December, Chinese authorities announced they had blocked US corn imports for violating a ban on certain types of GM foods, returning 545,000 tonnes of corn in 2013 because of the presence of MIR162, an insect-resistant strain that is permitted in the U.S., Japan and Europe but not approved by China's agriculture ministry.

Doubts over corruption have also been raised. Professor Zhang Qifa, proponent of GM food petition, has been found receiving funds with his team from the American GM food company Monsanto, which brought GM soybeans to China since 2009. Li Jiayang, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, reportedly served on the biotech consulting committee of DuPont, a US-based international technology development company advocating GM food, from June 2007 to March 2012. In March 2012, DuPont was pressured to remove Li’s name.

Nonetheless, as the supply of Chinese crops produced by traditional farming seems unable to address the growing demand, there is a growing demand for more extensive commercial production of GM food. In spite of this, it is not unreasonable for the Chinese government to drag its feet for authorizing commercialization since there is so much uncertainty over GM technology – not to mention conventional products that unscrupulous food producers deliver, including fox meat for pork and adulterated milk products spiked with melamine. Thus, commercialization might sound impractical without a reconfiguration of the government regulatory system, a more effective labeling scheme and information transmission system as well as a more forceful legal supervision mechanism.

At the moment, there seems little oversight on who is creating what in the laboratories

Chinese agricultural authorities have carried out substantial research on developing genetically modified (GM) food technology, in particular, transgenic crops e.g. rice, wheat, corn and soybean. Scientists, however, have criticized the existing regulations as too restrictive for a favorable environment for developing biotechnology and pressed for expanding commercialization crops, while environmental organizations like Greenpeace have raised concerns about the potential risks of GMOs. Hence, the Ministry of Agriculture, as the main government agency overseeing GM food in China, has been caught in a crunch from both sides.

Indeed, the current institutional framework for regulating agricultural biotechnology is complex at both national and local levels, where overlapping or conflicts of interests might easily occur. For instance, both the agriculture ministry and the General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine are in charge of imports and exports of GM food.

In addition, there is lack of an effective management system in guarding GM food safety, coupled with limited information transparency. The GMO Biosafety Committee under the ministry has done little publicity or consultation regarding safety. Although China has invested heavily in genetic engineering research, better coordination among different departments and consolidation of agricultural biotechnology programs are still needed to dispel public fears about GM food.

Moreover, there have been criticisms over delayed commercialization. According to the Huazhong Agriculture University in Wuhan, Hubei province, although two of their GM rice varieties were granted safety certificates in 2009, the ministry has still not promulgated any specific proposals for commercial cultivation of GM rice and further field experiments are still in progress as reported by state-owned Xinhua News Agency.

The existing legal supervision for GM food is rather weak. Although the State Council’s Food Safety Committee was established to coordinate the work of various regulatory authorities, its duties are not clearly enshrined in the Food Safety Law. As a result there have been incidents like one in Hunan in 2012, when Tufts University from the US conducted a joint Sino-US test on genetically modified “Golden Rice” on a group of children aged six to eight without prior notification of the nature of the test. Three Chinese officials involved in the test were then sacked for violating regulations, academic integrity and scientific ethics.

Since 2002, China has adopted a mandatory labeling system for agriculture GMO, stating that products containing GM ingredients must be labeled clearly before being sold. Many scholars have praised this, as China is the only developing country promoting a mandatory labeling scheme for governing GMO products.

However, there are loopholes in its law enforcement. For instance, in 2003, a Shanghai consumer sued Nestle for not labeling GM ingredients in its products and when the Municipal Agricultural Bureau of Beijing conducted random sampling and inspected 22 brands of soybean oil and soybean meal containing GMO, it discovered that none of them was labeled.

In fact, standardization of GM food labels should be set with stringent rules stipulating how and where the labels should be placed on the products to prevent any fraud by manufacturers or illegal sales in the markets. Besides, unlike EU countries, China has no traceability mechanisms to monitor the supply chain in order to look over which producers have used the GMO raw materials. This undoubtedly weakens the law enforcement process.

Given that there are numerous food industries in China, implementation of such a system would be hard. Nevertheless, the central government could start with large manufacturers, revising the policies,and then could extend the scope to smaller industries. Meanwhile, the MOA should also shoulder the responsibility of disclosing more guidelines and information, especially the review process and a set of safety standards. All these could enhance accountability.

asiasentinel.com

Will have to look for the article again, but I read the other day where Monsanto isn't doing GM research and development any longer for crops meant for human consumption. There has been too much protest against it so they have gone back to old fashioned cross breeding.

Still doing GM r&d for crops destined for animal consumption, though.

so it's still in the food chain and I'll wager the market for stock feed is expodentially larger .

Monsando is evil through and through .

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Heh hot shot - was Clinton impeached?

the answer is yes and no...

he was impeached by the house and aquitted by the senate

so... ????

^^ Monsanto is still Monsanto, and they are still suing the pants off of farmers.

However, this is a big change in the way they are doing business.

I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT GMO

Agriculture giant Monsanto may be best known for genetic modification—like creating corn that resists the effects of Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup. But when it comes to fruits and vegetables you buy in the store, genetic modification is off the menu.

Monsanto thinks no one will buy Frankenfoods, so the company is tweaking its efforts—continuing to map the genetic basis of a plant’s desirable traits but using that data to breed new custom-designed strains the way agronomists have for millennia. Here’s how it works—and how the results differ from GMO crops. Thanks to this cross between high and low tech, a new era of super-produce may be upon us. —Victoria Tang

The Old Way
Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
Crossbreed those plants together.
Grow the offspring.
Wait to see if the traits show up. Repeat as necessary.

The Genetic Modification Way
Identify plants or other organisms with recognizable, desirable traits.
Isolate the genes that manifest those traits.
Use enzymes to clip out those genes and paste them into the genomes of other plants, or inject them using a “gene gun” (for real) or by piggybacking them on a bacteria or virus.
Grow the plant with the inserted gene. If the gene has successfully incorporated into the plant, you’ll have a novel phenotype.

The New Monsanto Way
Identify plants with recognizable, desirable traits.
Crossbreed the plants.
Sift through the offspring genome for known markers for desirable traits.
Grow only the plants with those markers.

Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie - Wired Science

Originally Posted by misskit

Monsanto is still Monsanto, and they are still suing the pants off of farmers.

I'm not a fan of GMO foods, but the only people that Monsanto has sued, as far as I know, are the ones that broke their contracts with them.

53% of the world's commercial seed market is controlled by just three firms – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.

Meanwhile genetically-altered commodity crops – and thus the influence of patent protection – have spread to become overwhelmingly dominant. In the US some 93% of soybeans and 86% of corn crops come from such seeds.

What's needed is biodiversity legislation to stop these arseholes destroying nature's means of protecting itself.

They are just parasites, excuse any pun.