Monday, March 27, 2006
Genetically Modified Foods 10/23/05
Dear Editor,
I was enchanted with the delicious pictures on page B2 Nisqually Valley Spice. Taste of the Future. It wasn’t until I started reading, that I realized it was a virtual advertisement for the Biotech/Genetically Modified food industry. Rather than take what was said as fact, I would like to counter their comments.
On the website Nature.com, they discuss the fact that in 2003 99% of all GM foods were grown in just 6 countries. Although there are field tests in 34 other countries, the rest of the world’s 153 countries feel that the technology is not trustworthy, and many see it ruining their farming communities? (The profit-hungry GM industry would require third world farmers to buy their expensive seeds every season instead of using century’s old seed saving methods).
There have been huge battles as companies like Monsanto & DuPont have unsuccessfully tried to lobby and bribe other countries. (Six government scientists testified before the Canadian Senate that a Monsanto official offered them a bribe of $1-2 million, if they approved the company’s GM bovine growth hormone (rbGH) without further study).
Most Americans don’t know that most of the rest of the world won’t eat genetically modified food, and that just about all the milk on our shelves has rbGH in it.
Yes it is true that 70% of food in American supermarkets is already genetically modified. Monsanto once claimed that PCB’s, DDT and Agent Orange were safe! Are we part of a huge secret health experiment?
Ask people if they would rather buy regular food or genetically modified food, most would rather buy food that hasn’t been messed it.
This is why companies like Monsanto, and Syngenta, lobbied for food on our supermarket shelves not to be labeled as genetically modified.
Big money talks. Monsanto, one of the largest corporations pushing this technology has had an interesting group of employees. Working for it, or one of its subsidiaries have been, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Anne Veneman and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Receiving large donations were U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson, Chairman of the House Agricultural Committee Larry Combest and John Ashcroft.
As usual, spin is all important. It hasn’t been proved that yields are greater, in fact other countries are finding that organic methods are more productive, and although they say that GM foods resist pests and weed killer, they have the pests and weed killer in them, which you then eat! Over time pests and weeds get used to them and create super bugs and super weeds, which is a real problem for farmers who have to use even more weed killer.
Farmers have cross pollinated plants for centuries, but they always crossed same species, like roses with roses or tangerines with oranges.
These corporations say there is no difference, but research disagrees. Does it feel right to implant fish genes in tomatoes, or root worms in your corn. If God had wanted to cross fish and tomatoes, he would have made it easy to do. The technology pushes unnatural modifications. The process of gene insertion creates dangerous gene mutations and is consistently uncertain and may be dangerous.
Personally, I feel these foods are more difficult to digest. It would be interesting to see if this nation’s digestion problems have been worse since these foods appeared silently on supermarket shelves. Research by Russian scientists showed that GM Soy flour caused 46.6% more deaths in rats that regular soy! http://www.regnum.ru/english/526651.html Although there was no follow up tests, soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50%.
The World Health Organization developed a list of criteria designed to minimize the likelihood that a foreign protein from a GM crop will be allergenic. Unfortunately, the GM soy, maize, and papaya already on the market fail those criteria, (and they are all in last weeks recipes)!
For more information read: Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith, or go to http://www.organicconsumers.org/
I was enchanted with the delicious pictures on page B2 Nisqually Valley Spice. Taste of the Future. It wasn’t until I started reading, that I realized it was a virtual advertisement for the Biotech/Genetically Modified food industry. Rather than take what was said as fact, I would like to counter their comments.
On the website Nature.com, they discuss the fact that in 2003 99% of all GM foods were grown in just 6 countries. Although there are field tests in 34 other countries, the rest of the world’s 153 countries feel that the technology is not trustworthy, and many see it ruining their farming communities? (The profit-hungry GM industry would require third world farmers to buy their expensive seeds every season instead of using century’s old seed saving methods).
There have been huge battles as companies like Monsanto & DuPont have unsuccessfully tried to lobby and bribe other countries. (Six government scientists testified before the Canadian Senate that a Monsanto official offered them a bribe of $1-2 million, if they approved the company’s GM bovine growth hormone (rbGH) without further study).
Most Americans don’t know that most of the rest of the world won’t eat genetically modified food, and that just about all the milk on our shelves has rbGH in it.
Yes it is true that 70% of food in American supermarkets is already genetically modified. Monsanto once claimed that PCB’s, DDT and Agent Orange were safe! Are we part of a huge secret health experiment?
Ask people if they would rather buy regular food or genetically modified food, most would rather buy food that hasn’t been messed it.
This is why companies like Monsanto, and Syngenta, lobbied for food on our supermarket shelves not to be labeled as genetically modified.
Big money talks. Monsanto, one of the largest corporations pushing this technology has had an interesting group of employees. Working for it, or one of its subsidiaries have been, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Anne Veneman and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Receiving large donations were U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson, Chairman of the House Agricultural Committee Larry Combest and John Ashcroft.
As usual, spin is all important. It hasn’t been proved that yields are greater, in fact other countries are finding that organic methods are more productive, and although they say that GM foods resist pests and weed killer, they have the pests and weed killer in them, which you then eat! Over time pests and weeds get used to them and create super bugs and super weeds, which is a real problem for farmers who have to use even more weed killer.
Farmers have cross pollinated plants for centuries, but they always crossed same species, like roses with roses or tangerines with oranges.
These corporations say there is no difference, but research disagrees. Does it feel right to implant fish genes in tomatoes, or root worms in your corn. If God had wanted to cross fish and tomatoes, he would have made it easy to do. The technology pushes unnatural modifications. The process of gene insertion creates dangerous gene mutations and is consistently uncertain and may be dangerous.
Personally, I feel these foods are more difficult to digest. It would be interesting to see if this nation’s digestion problems have been worse since these foods appeared silently on supermarket shelves. Research by Russian scientists showed that GM Soy flour caused 46.6% more deaths in rats that regular soy! http://www.regnum.ru/english/526651.html Although there was no follow up tests, soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50%.
The World Health Organization developed a list of criteria designed to minimize the likelihood that a foreign protein from a GM crop will be allergenic. Unfortunately, the GM soy, maize, and papaya already on the market fail those criteria, (and they are all in last weeks recipes)!
For more information read: Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith, or go to http://www.organicconsumers.org/
# posted by Florence Vincent @ 5:01 PM 
