The Article posted below provides a glowing endorsement of another food based horror: irradiating seeds to induce mutations which change the characteristics of plants. The mutated seeds are then integrated (that means not labeled or identified) into the general crop stock and you eat their products.
You also eat the mutant proteins that mutated seeds produce, not knowing if they cause cancer, infertility, auto immune diseases, birth defects, etc., etc., etc. How big is the “etcetera”? Who knows.
Genes code for proteins. Novel genes code for novel proteins. Change one gene and you change not only what that gene does, you change the function of every gene in its vicinity. Genes are not simple, uni-function units. Their presence of absence near another gene affects what it does, too.
To understand this phenomenon, take a thick rubber band and, using a pen, place a 1/8 inch dot on one side of it. Now, holding one end between your left fingers and thumb, start twisting the top of the rubberband and continue twisting it in one direction with the fingers and thumb of the other hand. Keep twisting.
First you get a spiral. They you get a complex twist winding back on itself. Keep twisting and you get a very tightly multiply-twisted double helix upon double helix shape. You will see that the black dot is closely associated with many other parts of the original rubber band.
If the dot is a gene, the rubber band is composed of a huge number of genes and each one of them is influenced by what is present, or absent, in its neighborhood. And your life depends upon what that influence is. Literally.
Scientists often loose track of the concept of “HUBRIS”. Originally a term for a category of crime in ancient Athens, hubris is used in modern English to mean “self-confidence, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution. Hubris also refers to the actions of those challenging the Gods or their laws resulting in their downfall.
Just because we CAN do something does not mean that we SHOULD do something and if we do that thing, we had better make sure that we understand fully what we are doing before we do it and inflict the results on humans, nature and the future.
What kind of careful, neutral, non commercial science has been carried out to make sure – very sure – that the impact of this technology are beneficial, or at least benign, over large numbers of generations? That is a critical question, wouldn’t you think? I have great fear that the answer is much the same as with GMOs – none and any independent science which questions the technology ruthlessly suppressed.
At the moment, organic, heirloom food is still worth eating. Grow your own. All it takes is a few square feet and some planning. The Natural Solutions Foundation will be inaugurating a new eNewsletter to help you do just that.
Think about food and buy from local farmers from whom you can speak with to determine what seed, what fertilizer and what soil amendments, what seeds and what pest control they use. If the name of any of their products has more than 3 syllables (ask to read the labels), go find another farmer.
Food production is perhaps the defining issue of our times. You, and I, will live and die by it.
Because of its central important to health and health freedom, the Natural Solutions Foundation, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org, www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org, has created the International Decade of Nutrition, www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org, to help us all, farmer and non-farmer alike, take back the production of food from the corporations, national and transnational organizations which are determined, for one reason or another, to force feed us industrial toxins.
And, out of this concern, we are creating the Valley of the Moon Eco Demonstration Project, www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org, in Panama. This comprehensive health freedom project, unlike any other health freedom initiative, will include intensive agriculture seminars and hands on practice for non farmers and a Zero Emission, BeyondOrganc, Bio Dynamic(TM) farm and farm school. Some of us will live there full time, some of us will come to participate for a period of time in the training programs as teachers and as students.
Some will come for the healing and natural medical center’s offerings, some will come for the retreats and seminars, some for the opportunity to live for a time in the glorious Panamanian Chiriqui Highlands.
The requirement to take back the production of foods and support a “culture of agriculture” is essential to our continued ability to survive on the planet.
The article below says that we need to support a culture of agriculture. That is the only thing with which I agree in the entire article. Read it and take action to reclaim YOUR food in order to protect your health now.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
DEVELOPMENT: New Food Must Go Nuclear
By Sanjay Suri
LONDON, Dec 2 (IPS) – Better crops on the one hand, and nuclear power on the other might be, you would think, at extreme ends of the technological, and for some, even the moral spectrum. But it could be time to make agriculture more nuclear.
A lot of it is, already. Hundreds of millions of hectares of cultivation around the world is already nuclear assisted. And this technology goes back all of 80 years. Now the world needs this as never before, nuclear and agricultural scientists say.
“Currently there are over 3,000 officially released crop varieties that have involved radiation induced mutations, and over 100 countries routinely make use of this technology, which is one of their favourite strategies for crop improvement,” Chikelu Mba, head of the plant breeding unit at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told IPS in an interview in London. The IAEA is promoting use of nuclear techniques for new crop mutations jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
“These crops, grown all over the world, now form an integral part of our daily diet. They are raw materials in industries, and give countries billions of dollars in additional income for farmers.”
Essentially, the technique treats seeds with x-rays and gamma rays to produce new mutations of crops that are better resistant to difficult conditions and changing climate. Nature would of itself produce new mutations of crops to adapt to changing conditions, but only in time, and a long time at that. But this technique can speed up that change dramatically, here and now.
“Once seeds have been irradiated, the seedlings are integrated into normal crop breeding procedures of the countries,” says Mba. “Compared to any other technology you could think about, this is cheap, cost effective, robust, environmentally friendly, and based on results. It is proven, and it is applicable anywhere in the world.”
But a frightening thought, nevertheless, to think of a meal made possible by something nuclear. And the thought raises the ghost of genetically modified (GM) crops, that this could be another, and far bigger instance of misusing science to fool around with nature.
Mba says the world can rest — and eat — assured.
“There is nothing that can be produced through radiation induced mutation that is not within the spectrum of possibilities of what nature can bring out in that crop, given sufficient space and time. All radiation induced mutation is doing is to facilitate a naturally occurring phenomenon.” And there is no residual radiation left in a plant after the mutation induction, he says.
Dinner can include a newly developed strain of rice using nuclear induced mutation, but the ingredients in the rice preparation will not be nuclear.
This technology can be critical in addressing world hunger and food security, the IAEA says. It leads to plant varieties that are not just high yielding but adapt to harsh climate conditions and are resistant to certain diseases and insect pests. “The IAEA is urging a revival of nuclear crop breeding technologies to help tackle world hunger,” IAEA director general Dr Mohamed ElBaradei said in a statement. He has asked for allocation of more resources around the world for use and development of this technology.
The IAEA and the FAO together say that in addition to 850 million people worldwide already going hungry, a million more are being pushed below the one-dollar-a-day poverty level. Increased use of this new technology can improve health and livelihood, they say.
In Japan, the Institute of Radiation Breeding has figured that crops developed with radiation induced mutations have yielded 62 billion dollars in returns, for an investment of 69 million dollars between 1959 and 2001. That amounts to a 900 fold return. In Pakistan, use of the technique quadrupled cotton production in ten years. China and the U.S. are the other countries where the technology is in widespread use.
But the technology has still not been used as widely as it ought to be, scientists say. “In 1928 it was found that x-rays would change the blueprint of plants in a manner in which that which is hidden can become obvious and be used to create new crop varieties,” says Mba. And it was in 1964 that the IAEA and the FAO came together and set up a joint programme for using nuclear techniques in food and agriculture to “mimic nature.” Now, he says, given the recent agricultural shocks, “we can no longer wait for chance discoveries to give us new crop varieties.”
The IAEA, he said, is calling the attention of the world to the looming threat of global climate change and variation. “This year, prices of all basic foodstuff went to their highest level in the past 50 years, and this situation is only going to get worse,” Mba says.
“The countries most at risk are their developing countries, with their fragile ecosystems, with their agriculture that is rudimentary, no effective irrigation, where farmers do not have enough resources to buy fertilisers. So when the environment changes so much, there will not be enough resilience in the crops to withstand these new conditions.”
The IAEA, he said, is “calling for a revival of culture, if you may, of supporting agriculture.” (END/2008)
COMMENT:
An expert I know [not further identified by the author – Dr. Rima] commented as follows when asked; ” What proportion of crops are already in circulation influenced by this
technology?”
An EXTREMELY tiny proportion were generated via “nuclear breeding.” Maybe or
two veggie varieties. “Nuclear breeding” was a fad in the 60’s but it failed
to yield anything very relevant or useful. Almost all breeding is not
dependent on generating additional genetic diversity by use of mutagenesis,
but by making use of the existing genetic diversity within the genepool of a
given species. There is sufficient diversity to address virtually any need,
because the genepool of any given species contains the capacity of the
species to adapt to and deal with essentially every condition, stress,
challenge with which the species and its predecessors have been confronted
since the beginning of time (yes some diversity and capabilities are lost
over time, but there is still a HUGE range of capabilities there). Breeders
develop selection schemes for identifying these pre-existing traits and
thereby make use of nature’s existing capabilities (virtually ALL
POSSIBILITIES!).
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44952