Roundup Ready Superweeds destroy US cotton crops and ABC reports without saying Monsanto or Roundup!

I note that you have another (likely excellent!) seed on deck about an anti-trust investigation of Monsanto, so I'll give that a read now.

It's excellent only in the measure of visibility that's finally coming to the privatization of the food supply. An active discussion of health effects is another place to find the like minded concerns.

Bottom Line: Monsanto is destroying nature's sufficiency and ability to feed the Earth's population, and we stop them right now.

Stop the madness is the right answer and we consumers have the power one purchase at a time.

You don't think that the self-appointed Elite eat this GMO crap, do you?

There's an irony to that concept; while some may believe their upscale markets protect them it's not true. The ingredients are too pervasive to avoid completely and a challenge even with my skills for identifying possible gmo ingredients. If they become sick the entire medical nutrition options from IV-TPN to the saline drips are filled with %$#@. It's not like a gated community where the unwanted rabble is locked out. They're all swallowing it too.

Hawai'i is the world capitol for development and produces the parent lines for the corn seed planted worldwide. The poorer and more remote the population the better biotech like it. Here's one news release from Monsanto, but there's the same infiltration of rural poor globally.

Monsanto News - In December 2002 YieldGard Corn Borer insect-protected corn was approved for propagation, which set a milestone for Philippine agriculture as the first biotech food crop approved in Asia. YieldGard Corn Borer corn was planted on 54,000 hectares (133,000 acres) in 2004, benefiting mostly small-holder Filipino farmers.

The Elites' retailers buy their food at the same places our retailers do? Really?

That surprises me.

The agribusiness ingredients are too pervasive to segregate from the prepared foods, even in NYC's top restaurants. Every business looks to boost the bottom line and when people don't know there's a choice that affects quality they add the gmo %$#@ without knowing like using olive oil/canola blends etc. What's more most American kids want to eat what they see on TV and even the strictest parent is vulnerable when it comes to the whining there!!

nonStitiousZealot, your comment is deleted to show this moderator does have standards and they prohibit personal attacks and off topic spamming.

Whatever the downstream effects, there is far more we do not know than we do and the real impact may be might not be evident for generations. Many efforts at tweaking Nature with upside only assumptions have been shown the costs over time, like hormone therapies.

There's no doubt in my mind that whatever Monsanto makes by adding chemicals and profits won't be nearly as good for the living creatures of the planet as what God or Nature has developed over millenniums to sustain us all.

Wouldn't you think there would be unintended metabolic effects causing changes in the plant's appearance? Or any deformities reported?

Genes are very complex elements and the effects are not necessarily visible to the observer. The biggest questions are what these genes do to complex living organisms, including people. That said there have been visible disasters like the recent corn crop in Africa.

Farmers in South Africa have suffered millions of dollars in lost income due to the failure of their genetically modified (GMO) corn to produce kernels. The three varieties of plants look lush and healthy from the outside, but when the husks were pulled back there are no kernels.

Apparently Monsanto is upset too. It has offered immediate compensation to all the farmers experiencing crop loss. Damage estimates are being collected buy local farmer cooperatives, and Monsanto is standing by with its checkbook. Locals are saying they are satisfied that Monsanto is doing a good job to protect them. This kind of largesse is uncharacteristic of Monsanto, a company more widely known for its use of strong arm and bullying tactics, and total disregard for people's rights. It implies that Mayet's concerns over the failure of bioengineering may be justified.

Thanks for the links CG, this has been a long time in coming to light in our media.

Thank you for the link above. That was exactly the type of information I was hoping to read.

Glad to be of help and feel free to ask for any specific type of information or evidence in the future. Keeping tabs on the who and what of the gmos is my best sport and being called to pinch hit citations is always a happy occurrence for me.

Sure, they can have their powerful attornies spin the effects anyway they want, but if the courts and juries are looking at negative evidence of what this technology is capable of doing - I don't see how they can so easily sweep that under the rug - unless every judge and jury is bribed.

For me it is a more basic issue of individual freedom and the right to choose what we swallow. It is the violation of all principles of a Free Market Democracy when one product is protected from competition and consumers are denied basic product information. Lack of safety testing offers us an unknown risk in a product.

Subjecting people to that risk without informed consent or in the face of informed objection is tantamount to criminal human experimentation. Shut up and swallow seems at odds with all the life liberty and happiness spirit in that pesky piece of paper Dubbya found bothersome too.

Your willingness to spread your knowledge is the highest form of altruism there is; you are a prodigy in my book! -- (sorry about misspelling 'attorneys')

Even with the little red line under it misspellings rarely catch my eye and that sure didn't. My aim is not purely altruistic. This battle found me in 1997 when my oldest child suddenly began reacting to foods, yet had no food allergies, just an acute sensitivity to chemical exposure.

It took two years and thousands of hours of searching to finally come across the fact that our corn and soy had been genetically engineered and that 89 differennt ingredients listed on the label, including Vitamin C, came from this gmo she was allergic to.

The best way to fight is with consumer dollars. When individuals choose not to buy things like Rice Krispies, and Coke the producers will source and label GMO-Free substitutes so fast it will make the wheels of commerce spin. Letting greed work is a quicker route than searching for reason!

Do I understand correctly that Vitamin C is relative to gmos?

Not exactly. It turns out that the supplement forms of Vitamin C can be made from corn as well as citrus so it was going into everything a while back like green tea now. There's still a lot of C products and supplements and unless it specifically states that the product is corn and soy free or it's organic you can figure a high probability you are buying a gmo corn product.

Do you have a current list of all nutritional sources/foods/beverages that have been exposed to - GE, GM or GMO technology? I remember you having a sentence in one of your posts commenting on the most frequent being: corn, soy, rice, and a couple of fruits and a few vegetables.

Those are the biggest gmo crops in the US food supply along with canola, cotton, Hawai'ian papaya and sugar beets which are nearing their first commercial harvest this year.

There are wonderful guides out there and it's great to ask for a link rather than struggle to find a needle in a haystack. Center for Food Safety is a solid source for all the gmo issues and they have been consumer focused for ages with GMO-Free information download and print guides as well as other consumer tools. Jeffery Smith recently put together another Non-GMO guide to grocery shopping and their efforts have been helpful in the school food areas as well.

And all of this time I thought greed was a one-way street!

Tee hee, it's a given you can count on like gravity the trick is making sure it's working with you not against you. The tables can always be turned which is why good business plans have exit strategies. Now we simply need to change the revenue dynamics.

In reading one of the links from GMO-free info, "Crops in the Pipeline" - the foods in 'orange' say they have been approved, but not grown commercially or sold in the US. I know you mentioned somewhere that many GE foods are imported back here that fall in this category, for instance rice, wheat, plums - from China or Chile - so, how can the site say not "sold" in the US??

No country has lower GMO standards than the US. Saudi Arabia and China and places known for human rights abuses don't allow livestock feed to contain what Americans have in our people foods.

The imports to the USA that I was referring to are things like the GMO corn that the Monsanto WTO gang manage to force on the EU and those are largely processed by Nestle and other multinationsal to send back to the US in packaged foods.

There are all sorts of fruits and vegetables in test plots and various stages of readiness but they are not being planted commercially so that's the only reason we're not eating them.

2) -I didn't know that Monsanto wormed their way into the WTO (a helping hand from the Rockefellers, no doubt); although, I don't understand how the gang can force the EU to cooperate and take the seed.

The WTO is a fairly new organization and their first order of business was dairy agreements as we see back in the 1995 WTO News. Why so much dairy needs to imported and exported across the globe never gets questioned, but using the Monsanto rBGH dairy and allowing hormone dairy products access to markets was job one. So far Pakistan and a few other poor regimes have joined the US in allowing the rBGH dairy.

It's a Petrochemical Business Plan with operational units and the WTO is one of the most effective by taking food and safety laws of Sovereign Nations and forcing them to conform to a corporate bureaucracy that has set itself up as the arbiter of "Free Trade" for the globe. What a scam!

It works by buying influence, by putting industry representatives in positions of power and leveraging financial clout to strong arm trade agreements that are good for agribusiness.

3) -Once the testing is done and final stages of readiness are in place on the f & v, they will eventually be planted commercially here? Or seeds are harvested and sold overseas? Or both?

The delay in bringing newer forms to market isn't related to regulatory or safety issues in the US, but market share returns. The GMO trees are growing now and the patent holders certainly plan to selll seeds, but how it unfolds is a matter of what happens with worldwide consumers and the "regulatory" framework we see. No way to guess that.

What I was missing was the method of the Petrochemical Business Plan's involvement with the EU - they must have key players set in motion in the EU as well.

GMWatch tracks global players with an emphasis on the EU members of the Biotech Brigade.

as for the "regulatory" framework, well I hope the regulations work in our favor

If you're a multinational petrochemical company, yes it works for you. This isn't a regulatory framework at all if we examine it. America's biotech framework is a deregulated policy ushered in by Bush Sr. in the Gingrich era. Akin to the deregulation of banking in that it lets government turn a blind eye to greed run amok and industry is responsible for self regulating.

If you read the notification for the introduction of the Roundup Ready soy, the first commercial tem on the menu, you see Monsanto doesn't get FDA approval, but instead gives the FDA a heads up on the plans and Monsanto's best guess that the %$#@ is equivalent enough to be safe.

Biotechnology Consultation Memorandum of Conference BNF No. 000001

...Wholesomeness Studies
Monsanto described the results of wholesomeness studies they carried out in rats, chickens, catfish, dairy cattle, and bobwhite quail. On the basis of their consideration of the totality of these studies, Monsanto has concluded that there is no significant difference in the wholesomeness of glyphosate-tolerant and traditional soybean varieties, as expected from their compositional analysis. These data are summarized on page 49 of Monsanto's September 2 submission.

Conclusions
Monsanto has concluded, in essence, that the glyphosate-tolerant soybean variety they have developed is not significantly altered within the meaning of 21 CFR 170.30(f)(2) when compared to soybean varieties with a history of safe use. At this time, based on Monsanto's description of its data and analysis, the agency considers Monsanto's consultation on this product to be complete.

F. Owen Fields, Ph.D.
September 19, 1994

It is a fitting irony that for all the billions invested the biggest yield is pig weed!

Is that a horror flick??

Those scare me, scarier is to watch Soylent Green look almost like a Documentary!