Good News From Codex
Day One: Attending the Codex Working Group on Labeling GM Foods, Accra, Ghana
January 28, 2007

The Revolt of the Health Conscious Nations…

General Stubblebine and I have been traveling for days, now, and we finally arrived in Accra to attend the Working Group on labeling of foods obtained through Genetic Modification (GM) or Genetic Engineering (GE).

First, a definition: what is GE? I have no idea. As far as I can tell, it is another term for Genetic Modification (inserting a gene into the DNA of something to make that something into something else so you can patent it and then, if you are in the US, getting the FDA [if it is food] and USDA [if it is food that now produces drugs or vaccines] to collude with you in order to pretend that it is the same as the thing that it used to be before you changed it so that you could patent it in the first place.

Of course, if it were really the same thing as it was before you messed with its genome, you would not be able to patent it and make vast profits from selling it to people who do not realize –YET – that it is bad for them and the environment). While you are at the GM/GE process, you will insert some bacterial genes, too, that are resistant to some antibiotic or other so that you can check whether your insertions have worked (spreading antibiotic resistant genes around, of course) and will probably use some other types of handy-dandy DNA, like viral stuff, for example, while you are at it. Don’t worry about the fact that bacteria pick up and share DNA, like the stuff you introduced into the food in the first place, or the antibiotic resistant gene you inserted for your laboratory convenience.

Those shared DNA bits can, of course, make ordinary, beneficial bacteria (“pro-biotics”) drug resistant and their anaerobic cousins, the pathogens or disease causing ones, drug resistant, too. After all, unless you get an infection and want to have it treated with antibiotics (say, for example, Multi Drug Resistant Tuberculosis or MSRA (methycillin resistant Staph Aureus) which was apparently created in a Big Pharma lab in Europe and dumped down the sink into the sewers of the world by the same careful, caring type of lab workers who have brought you GM/GE foods.

And then, not only do the new genes do what you want, maybe, they also do things that no biological thing has ever done before and create (“code for”) substances in your body that no living creature has ever created before. These Franken Molecules (from Franken Foods) are the Biotech industry’s great, and to me, illegal experiment: you have not given them your signed informed consent for the great program of “Let’s see what happens when we adulterate 80% + of the American Diet with these Franken Genes and not tell anybody that they are eating them because we have convinced the FDA to declare Franken Foods administratively identical to natural ones without examining the science behind them or conducting their own tests.

We will also convince our dear friends at the FFDDA (that’s the Franken Food and Deadly Drug Administration) that they will NOT ALLOW, that’s right, NOT ALLOW, people who make foods to label food that do contain Franken Molecules. And, showing that those health friendly folks at the FDA have a great sense of humor, they indicate on their website that the issue of liability (that is, payment if you are harmed by this Franken Food, will be determined “by the Courts”. Neat trick, of course, if there is no labeling since without it, there is NO traceability and therefore NO liability. By the way, according to the World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration, experimenting on people without fully informed, voluntary consent is a gross violation of basic Human Rights.

While the good people of the US have stood still for this (remember that fluoride in their water made the political prisoners of Stalin’s Russia so complaint that their keepers could do anything they wanted with them without their putting up a fuss), a good deal of the rest of the world has not bought into this “Better living through GM” routine.

The European Union, for example, although it imports huge amounts of GM corn and soy from the US to feed its animals (which get the foreign DNA stuck in their own genes and then transfer them to you when you eat them!) still insists that food containing GM components MUST be labeled so the consumer – that would be you if you are buying or eating food in Paris or Rome or Bratislava – can decide if they want to eat it or not. Norway believes that the right of the consumer to know what they are getting when they buy food is so compelling that the government requires that food be labeled if it has any GM ingredients.

Brazil, Japan, Russia and a host of other countries have mandatory labeling requirements for GM foods which the US opposes with all of its corporate-directed might. It has been opposing the right of countries to self-determine in this way through Codex for the best part of two decades. And in one of the most inspiring displays of national autonomy and decision making that I am aware of in Codex history, a consortium of nations have been opposing the US’s bitter battle to make sure that they can not, may not, must not, inform their consumer’s of the GM components in their food. Why? Because, as the US delegate told the assembled folks last year at the same meeting we are attending this year, the FDA’s own research and independent research both confirm that consumers will reject food if they know it is GM’d or GE’d. In fact, research all over the world shows the same thing. People instinctively know that turning food into “food” is not OK with them and they don’t want to eat it if they can help it.

The FDA wants to “protect” you from making a “bad” decision about what to put into your own body… no matter that its “concern” for us food consumers is just a cover for its real agenda; no matter it is acting contrary to US law. The US Supreme Court held in 2002 in the case of Thompson v Western States Medical Centers, “If the First Amendment means anything, it means that regulating speech must be a last – not first – resort. … We have previously rejected the notion that the Government has an interest in preventing the dissemination of truthful commercial information in order to prevent members of the public from making bad decisions with the information.” [535 U.S. 357]

More and more people also know that the foods that the FDA has administratively decided are safe is, in fact, more and more clearly dangerous in a big way. [Link to: Mae Wan Ho article]. Click here (link) to read the latest summary of why you really don’t want to eat this stuff written by a gifted and dedicated independent scientist. By the way, organic food is actually your only defense. Yes, it is more expensive but how much does cancer, auto immune disease or infertility cost?

So two years ago, at the 2005 Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL) in Ottawa, the US tried something new. It proposed to CCFL that they drop the discussion totally and let countries do whatever they wanted. Its bid to compel the rest of the world to adopt its own weird (and potentially deadly) prohibition on consumer right to know about GM foods had failed miserably to attract adherents on a global basis. True, the usual cast of suspects, Argentina, Australia, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, supported the US in dismissing the rights of consumers to know what they are eating, but more and more countries have passed what they call “mandatory labeling regulations” which say that foods MUST list their GM ingredients. Now, at first blush that might seem like a great thing. The reality is that the mandatory labeling countries realized that without some international agreement, the US could ship them whatever they wanted and they would not be able to keep it out of their countries even if, like the EU and Norway, they have the sophisticated labs necessary to detect the contamination. If they did keep it out, the World Trade Organization (WTO) could well imposed huge trade sanctions against them for creating a “Barrier to Trade”.

Norway, figuratively, leaped to its feet and said, “NO! Let’s keep talking! Let’s hold a working group (semi formal group often used in Codex to work out problems which the full committee cannot seem to solve or accomplish a special task) to find what Codex loves to call “a Way Forward”. Ghana agreed to co chair and so did Argentina.

A year ago next week, the Working Group session was held for 2 days in Oslo. The US was there, and so was the Natural Solutions Foundation. You may recall that the US delegate famously explained why the US forbids the labeling of GM “foods” in order to prevent consumers from knowing the truth about the food since it might lead them to reject it when they should not and therefore, said Dr. Barbara Schneeman, the truth would be “false and misleading”. This year, the meeting is being held in the home country of a co-chair, Ghana. And instead of two days, it was a 3 day meeting since more time was needed. And, of course, the Natural Solutions Foundation was there representing your interests, making contacts with nations who, in turn, need to know that they have support in opposing the US and the multinational corporations in order to protect their people and their land. And, oh by the way, the world food supply is increasingly planetary. As long as “cheap” oil lasts, many of these countries are, or are about to be, food exporters so you will be eating what they produce. If it is laden with pesticides and contaminated by wandering DNA, you’ll be eating it. If it is clean and wholesome, you’ll be eating that, too.

So General Stubblebine and I left Thailand, where we were working on alliances with other like-minded people and NGOs and went to Panama to find the land for the Panama project. We found that land and if you would like to know more, and perhaps get involved, use the link below to read more.

http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=511

Then we got on a plane, had a long enough stop over in New York to have a No Forced Vaccine lunch with a group of vigorous and committed activists and then got on the plane for Ghana.

Want to know more about why forced vaccination is on your horizon and your children’s and what you can do about it? Click the link below to join the No Forced Vaccination Forum –

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/no-forced-vaccination/join

We got to Ghana and got picked up by the GIMPA Executive Hostel folks (that’s where the meeting was being held. That was the good news. The bad news was that internet was only a figment of someone’s imagination. Over the next 3 days, despite paying a lot of money (now refunded) for connection and waiting literally hours for pages to load (which they never did) there was no way for me to reach out and touch anyone (or write to you or pay bills, etc.)

What happened? Well, Day 1 was a day like all other days in Codex. The US tried mightily to control the process to the ends of its multinational friends. Among those friends were the Biotech Industry and the International Grocery Manufacturers Association whose representatives, as near as I could make out, were once again on the US delegation. The US and Canada, along with Nigeria, presented a background paper as “a Way Forward” which contained selected Codex texts to guide countries which wanted to determine their own labeling strategy (voluntary or mandatory). Although I did not have internet access in (or out of ) the meeting room and could therefore not check the cited texts or others, it seemed pretty clear to me that these three countries had rather carefully chosen just those texts which helped them in the chess game by planning several moves ahead. What chess game? The WHO tournament where the stakes are high enough to destroy the fragile economy of a developing (read “poor”) country. You see, it looks to me as if the US were carefully choosing only those sections which could be interpreted against a mandatory labeling country seeking to keep unlabeled US products out of their country in their “Background paper” and carefully defining things in ways which seemed benign on the surface but which were booby trapped from here to Kingdom Come once adopted.

The “Background Paper” was so useful to a variety of nations that they wanted to see it become an official Codex document (score 1 for the US). Once that happens, its contents could then be the basis for forcing countries to admit unlabeled GM foods since there a pot full of essential principles (like the protective – in this case – Precautionary Principle that says that if something is not known to be safe, you cannot use it under Codex, like any mention of how to evaluate GM foods for safety, which is weak enough in Codex but completely absent from this document, etc.)

The US modestly accepted the praise of the other states and agreed that “the Way Forward” could include getting this very lop sided document (as I see it) into the process of making it an official Codex document. It was a bit weird procedurally, I thought, to try to make things that were already part of Codex a separate Codex text, but, then, I am not in the “12-moves-ahead-get-ready-for-the-WTO-dispute-resolution-process” game.

Norway continually reminded the group that the Right of Consumers to Know was paramount and the US opposed that notion in a variety of ways. People raised safety issues and the US said that the safety issue was already settled by the time a food came to market so there was no safety issue to be considered… (!)

That’s all for now.

Rima E. Laibow, MD

PS – We are on the scene for you and your health. To be able to be here, we need your support. Please make your donation to help us bring you reports such as the above –

http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189

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Days Two and Three:
http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=513