The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.

For more information on our global programs, including the International Decade of Nutrition, and our US based ones, please visit us at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and join the free email list for the Health Freedom eAlerts to keep you in the loop, informed and active defending your right to make your own decisions about your health and wellbeing!
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Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org

The funny thing about Truth is that it has a way of getting out, escaping confinement, growing like a seed sprout towards the sunlight. And, like a sprout, it pokes first one tender shoot up towards the light, and then another, gaining strength and finding its direction from the sunlight it is reaching for. Sometimes, however, the obstacles overhead (for example, concrete paving, tramping jack boots, broad leaf herbicides) are just too much for the tender sprout and it fails while its twins try reaching for the light elsewhere. As long as there is light, there will be some seed that makes it. Unless, of course, the seed has been genetically altered and has contaminated its brothers and cousins and distant relations so that there are no more of its kind.

That, of course, is part of the threat from genetically engineered (called variously “GM” or (“GMO” or “GE” )foods: their modifications wander, not only inside the nucleus of the cell coding for novel effects never before seen (like cancer-producing proteins, for example) but that DNA wanders into the wind through pollen and pollinators changing crops and weeds forever since currently there is no way known to reverse the genetic changes which “volunteer” pollen produces in the same and different species.

Animals (that means birds and bees and wasps and horses and pigs and chickens and you and me and our children) are impacted in ways which we know and ways which we do not know yet. Using the “Precautionary Principle” of Codex, GM foods would all be illegal because they have not been proven to be safe. Indeed, the US, which forbids indicating a food has GM ingredients because they know that consumers would reject it, approves all GM foods once a patent is obtained because then-President George H. W. Bush declared GM foods to be identical to normal foods. Since then, the FDA follows the same principle: a voluntary
Certificate of Equivalence (CE)” may be applied for and obtained by the owners of a patent on a GM food, but it is only a frill. Whether there is, or is not, a CE on file somewhere, GM crops and animals are allowed in the food supply by the US Government without a shred of safety testing on their impact on animals, plants, the environment or humans. Astonishingly, the FDA and other agencies assert, without having examined the data, that these genetically manipulated foods are safe. All independent science with which I am familiar makes it clear that not only are these foods not safe, they are downright dangerous to your health and that of the environment.

Romania, unlike most of the rest of the European Community, had bought into the GM story lock, stock and agricultural barrel. Read the report below to see how things are a’changin!

Then consider that, as we told you in our eye-witness reports from Oslo in February, 2007 and Accra in February, 2008, other countries, including an emerging African coalition, are not so happy with the FDA’s bland friendliness to GM crops and animals. These days, because of this turning tide, the Biotech Industry (think, for example, Monsanto) is often described as “beleaguered”. So may it be! Beleaguered to the point of legal and economic barriers to the manufacture, planting and selling of ANY genetically modified food or food anywhere in the world. Beleaguered to the point of a total ban on pharmaceutical GM crops and animals like the drug producing rice that contaminated much of Louisiana’s rice country for 5 years before Bayer, a major player in GM and GM drugs bothered to inform either the noq-contaminated neighboring rice growers or the end users, the consuemr who got this stuff in their rice bowls.

Beleagured to the point that the drug-producing cows in New Zealand, a once pristine pesticide and GM free island contaminated by 3 years of “accidental” shipement of GM seeds by the US, no longer have a market for their milk and cattle can return to being cattle, not dangerous factories of dangerous drugs.

The Natural Solutions Foundation will be at the next Codex meeting dealing with GM foods to participate with, and help lead, the coalition of African pro-health countries from April 26-May 2, 2008 in Ottawa Canada. At the last meting, Africa’s newly emerging coalition (which we have spent the last 3 years supporting and building in Africa and at Codex meetings) led Switzerland, Norway, Russia and Japan, among others, in opposing the US assertion that foods on the market are regarded as safe.

Good for them. Now the next (and much larger) task is for this pro-health coalition is to hold the line on this issue (which is really a set up by the US for tanking any country which keeps our GM foods to the World Trade Organization and socking them with huge trade sanctions until they cave in). We’ll be there to give you daily eye witness reports if you send us there!

Your tax deductible donations are urgently needed. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to help assure your voice and your interests will be at Codex and you will hear what actually happens there! Thanks for your support.
Remember, freedom is not free!

Romania reconsiders its welcome of biotech corn

By James Kanter
Published: March 26, 2008

PARIS: Romania, which has been one of the most receptive markets on a skeptical Continent for genetically modified crops, is moving toward a reversal of its stance, in what would be another setback for the beleaguered biotechnology industry in Europe.

Attila Korodi, Romania’s environment minister, said he would ask a committee of experts Thursday to revaluate a gene-altered version of corn, MON810, the only modified crop that has been approved for commercial planting in the European Union.

During an interview, Korodi said not enough studies had been done to gauge the effects of the corn on ecological systems in Romania, including in the Black Sea area.

In addition, he said, banning biotech crops could increase rural prosperity by allowing farmers to take advantage of a growing global demand for organic feed and foodstuffs, which, in addition to being unaltered, are grown without chemical pesticides or fertilizers.

Such products can command higher prices – although experts question whether farming practices in much of Eastern Europe are developed enough for such a specialized market.
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“I think becoming an organic country is a good thing,” Korodi said. “We have to analyze the true costs of growing GMOs,” he added, since the technology was potentially harmful to the environment and had become widely unpopular in Romania.

An actual ban would still be some ways off and could require parliamentary support, he said.

But its consideration, coming a month after France imposed a similar ban on the corn variety, would be another obstacle for the industry in Europe, where there is widespread skepticism about biotech foods. Specifically, it would hurt the U.S. seed company Monsanto, which produces MON810.

Romania, the biggest corn grower in the 27-member EU by hectares under cultivation, represents a vast potential market for Monsanto and other biotechnology companies. MON810 is designed to combat pests and enhance yields.

“We would be very disappointed to see Romania following France even in attempting to ban such a product, which has proved its benefits to farmers in Romania,” said Cristina Cionga, the manager for public and government affairs for Monsanto Romania. “Our products are completely safe for planting and consumption.”

EU authorities approved MON810 for cultivation a decade ago, but since then four EU countries – Austria, Greece, Hungary and, most recently, France – have imposed bans. Poland operates restrictions on the sale and import of gene-altered seeds, and very little cultivation takes place there.

Most of these countries, including France and Hungary, which are the second- and third-biggest corn growers in Europe, justified the bans on the grounds that the crops potentially could harm soils and reduce biodiversity.

Even in countries that do not operate formal bans, there are impediments.

Italy, which grows roughly the same amount of corn as Hungary, has delegated decisions on biotech crops to its regions, many of which operate de facto bans. In Tuscany, for example, the supply of gene-altered produce is prohibited in catering for schools, hospitals, convalescent homes and in local and regional government offices.

Romania planted only about 325 hectares, or 800 acres, of MON810 in 2007 and this year is expected to plant about 10,000 hectares. That still represents just a fraction of the roughly 2 million to 3 million hectares of corn planted each year in Romania.

Even so, Korodi’s strategy would mark a major change for Romania.

Over the past decade, Romania became the largest producer of gene-altered crops in Europe because of large amounts of modified soy, mostly produced by Monsanto and Pioneer, a unit of DuPont. That crop was approved for use by farmers in Romania but not in the EU, and the government had to pledge to stop growing the crop when Romania joined the bloc in 2007.

In the future, Korodi said, farmers – particularly those with small plots in mountainous areas – could prosper from selling smaller quantities of unmodified produce, as it would command higher prices on local and international markets.

“GMOs mean crops are cheaper to produce,” Korodi said. “But if we look at the market price that GMO-free crops earn, and we look at the costs to biodiversity of using GMOs, then non-GMO crops are better,” he said.

Early this month the Hungarian agriculture minister, Joszef Graf, said his country’s seed industry earned 25 percent more by selling seeds that had not been cross-pollinated with altered crops.

But Nathalie Moll, a spokeswoman for Europabio, a group representing the biotechnology industry, said seed companies had disputed the minister’s statement.

Klaus Reinsberg, a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe, said growing nonbiotech crops was often more expensive, requiring more manual labor to remove weeds and to control pests. But labor costs in Romania remain low compared to other parts of the EU, potentially giving the country a competitive advantage.Even so, Romania would still have to prove it could grow produce to high standards for specialized markets and finicky consumers, and deliver those goods to markets on time.

“Countries like Romania and Ukraine are dreaming of producing organic products and to export them for the profits they can bring,” Reinsberg said. “But organic products can have diseases and fungus.” He also said that a big problem for countries like Romania was a “lack of logistics.”

Despite such hurdles, environmental groups welcomed signs of a change of heart in Romania.

“It marks a seismic change,” said Geert Ritsema, who campaigns against genetic engineering for Greenpeace International in Amsterdam.