Health Freedom Action eAlert(TM)
News, Alerts and Other information related to your health freedom.
~ Actions You Can Take Now ~ Products That Support Your Health and Your Freedom
December 30, 2008
Welcome! In This Issue:
Urgent – Impact the New Administration – Opportunity Ends 12/31
* The General’s Communiqué
* Legal Eagle – Silver Safety
* Health Freedom Action eAlert – Our 2009 Wish List – And Yours!
* Dr. Rima Recommends – Natural Products to Stimulate Your Own Stem Cell Response
* Kathy’s Corner – New Year, New Opportunity
Urgent – Important Opportunity to
Support Health Freedom Ends December 31, 2008.
ONLY 5000 Votes Needed NOW!
Click here http://www.change.org/ideas/view/health_freedom
to Bring Health Freedom’s Perspective to the New Administration
And don’t forget to check the Health Freedom Blog frequently – you’ll find it on our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
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Friendly Food Certified – Friendly to the Environment, Consumer, Workers
Valley of the Moon(TM) is Friendly Food Certified. That means it is:
* Friendly to the Consumer because it is GMO Free, Pesticide Free, Toxin Free
* Friendly to the Environment because it is shade grown, helping birds and the eco system and no toxic chemicals are used to grow or produce it
* Friendly to the Workers because their health, as well as yours, is safeguarded by the way the coffee is grown, harvested and produced
For each $25 donation you make to the Natural Solutions Foundation, we will gladly send you 1/2 pound of the most wonderful coffee you’ve ever tasted – it really is A Little Bit of Heaven in a Cup(TM). Click here http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=1130 to get yours now. And thanks!
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And thanks for your friendship and support in 2008 from the Natural Solutions Foundation Trustees, Community Organizers and Volunteers . . Together, we ARE the Voice of the Health Freedom NetRoots.
Maj. Gen. A. N. (Bert) Stubblebine III (USA, Ret.)
Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III (USA, Ret)
President, Natural Solutions Foundation
The General’s Communiqué
Urgent – Important Opportunity to
Support Health Freedom Ends December 31, 2008.
ONLY 5000 Votes Needed NOW!
Click here http://www.change.org/ideas/view/health_freedom
to Bring Health Freedom’s Perspective to the New Administration
SUMMARY: Health Freedom is Alive and Well – And It’s Only Going to Get Better in 2009!
We’re coming up to another new year… and we’re almost a decade into the new millennium. Time certainly moves on! Our HealthFreedomUSA.org web site and the Natural Solutions Foundation were founded in 2004; in 2005 we announced the Codex 2 Step Process – http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=220 – to allow countries to defy Codex and provide – and trade – clean, unadulterated food; we published our seminal ” Nutricide” DVD – http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=156 – telling people – including Codex Delegates! – what Codex really is and where it came from; we announced our overall strategy to achieve and maintain free access to healthy foods, dietary supplements and natural remedies. We called that strategy “The International Decade of Nutrition” – www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org – and have initiated three major projects to demonstrate ways to reclaim food production, ending under-nutrition and the diseases that go along with it, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity, the major killer diseases. Two of those projects are in West Africa and one is in Panama. You can click here – http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=1711 – to read about the extraordinarily positive developments in the Valley of the Moon(TM) Eco Demonstration Project in Volcan, Panama and here – http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=1130 – to taste our very first “Friendly Food” Certified Valley of the Moon(TM) product: GMO Free, Pesticide Free, Chemical Free Shade Grown Valley of the Moon(TM) Coffee!
I am drinking some right now and it is spectacular! To bring that to you we had to find, and apply, a natural solution to the fungus that destroys the crop here and we have done that. Now we will provide that all-natural solution to the local farmers so they don’t have to use toxic chemicals for their crops!
With your strong support we’ve achieved some remarkable successes. Take a look at our List of Accomplishments at: http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=195
But, of course, such success sometimes comes with the odd Internet denizen or two (and they really are odd!) nipping at our heels and complaining about… all sorts of bizarre irrelevant matters. You may have seen some of the recent Internet furor fueled by poison pen emails from two or three of these odd malcontents.
These attacks always happen when we are getting close to major breakthroughs. And that is what this eblast is about: our hopes and plans for the coming year. Without your help, we will achieve nothing. With your help we will achieve amazing results!
And that’s the truth. During the past few weeks of unrelenting Internet attack our Health Freedom Action eAlert mailing list has grown by over 10,000 new members!
THANK YOU! You have spoken loud and clear. We are humbly appreciative of your continuing support!
This year will provide us with great challenges and choices for change.
If you are in the US, one way to make change is to visit www.Change.org – http://www.change.org/ideas/view/health_freedom – and vote for Health Freedom as a vitally important area of consideration and change for the new administration. This is definitely worth the effort.
Click here – http://www.change.org/ideas/view/health_freedom – to read what the Natural Solutions Foundation Trustees have posted and then add your voice. “Voicing” ends on December 31, 2009. We only need 5000 voting voices to make Health Freedom the number 1 priority of the Change.org system. This may be a real opportunity to raise our collective voices to bring about a real change in the US to re-establish health freedom in place of the growing trend toward health tyranny. Do it now.
Click as if your life depends on it — because it might !
I wish you a wonderful, peaceful, healthy and free New Year. Please check below where we set out the Natural Solutions Foundation’s Wish List for 2009…
Legal Eagle
Ralph Fucetola, JD
Council and Trustee, Natural Solutions Foundation
SUMMARY: Nutritional Silver Safety is Now Easy to Calculate with the Silver Safety Pyramid
The Natural Solutions Foundation is deeply impressed with the capacity of nano silver to protect against all know biological pathogens (disease causing agents) and enthusiastically recommends the use of a laboratory-tested nano silver product, available at www.Nutronix.com/naturalsolutions (-> products tab -> “Silver Solutions” on left hand side of page).
Questions arise frequently about the safety of silver because of vastly over-rated reports and fears of argyria (bluish-tinged skin following profound overuse and abuse of silver solutions). Nano silver is not stored int the body because of its extremely small particle size and so poses no threat to humans. Many people either have questions or use other forms of silver so we want to offer you a gift of knowledge on this issue.
Along with a number of other professionals involved in advanced healthcare and the health freedom movement, I am a member of the Silver Safety Committee for our Foundation. I’m pleased to announce that the Committee has created the Silver Safety Pyramid and an online calculator so you can determine the safe level of nutrient silver for you.
Is silver safe? Here is what one of my fellow committee members has to say:
“The two things we treat children for most often in poison control centers are toxic intake levels of water and of table salt. Anything in excess is toxic. With normal responsible usage, silver supplements are entirely harmless to humans.”
Jeffrey Blumer, MD, PhD; Director of the Center for Drug Research
You can read more, with a link to the calculator, on my blog:
http://vitaminlawyerhealthfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/silver-safety-pyramid.html
Health Freedom Action eAlert
New Year’s Wish List for Us All (+ All US!)
1. FDA Divested of Food Regulatory Authority
US Congressional Hearings on Divesting the FDA, supported by appropriate public outrage leads to a new Cabinet Level Department of Agriculture and Food headed by a Consumer Protection advocate with a separate watchdog agency with no budgetary ties to the organization it is overseeing. Anyone with ties to industry is barred from serving in either a decision making or advisory capacity. Conflict of Interests render the person ineligible to serve in any capacity in the agency. All boards are dominated by consumers, scientists and physicians specializing in health, not illness, to promote open market access to nutritious food, dietary supplements and natural remedies.
2. FTC Bans Advertising and Sale of Vaccines in Interstate Commerce
Federal Trade Commission holds hearings on dangers of vaccines, as requested in our Citizens Petition, and correctly concludes that there is no compelling scientific proof of either vaccine safety or efficacy. FTC then bans advertising which states or implies that vaccines are either safe or effective and bans advertising for, and the interstate commerce of, vaccines until they are proven safe and effective.
3. FrankenFoods Banned
Genetically Modified Foods are banned from the human and animal food supply and may not be grown pending a detailed scientific study on their safety for human, environment and animal health. All GMO plantings must be burned. No GMO crops which produce any industrial or medical products are permitted either in greenhouses or open plantings.
4. All GMO Patents Rescinded
All Biotech (GMO) patents are rescinded since the science upon which such patents have been granted is now understood to be false and inaccurate. No new patents are permitted and all current ones are suspended until further investigation is concluded. International shipment of GMO foods is interdicted for commercial, safety and scientific reasons.
5. Natural Medicine Receives Government and Insurance Incentive, Support
The financial crisis created for the US and global economies results in natural medicine receiving insurance and government support to reduce the amount of money spent on medical care from 16+% to 8% over the next 5 years.
6. Organic Family Farming Receives Financial Incentives, Organic Standards Raised to Meaningful Levels
Organic family farming and foods receive government subsidies while the Codex and National Organics Board standards are revisited to permit upward revision of each and every standard to a level which supports and enhances human, animal and environmental well-being.
7. US Codex Participation Limited to Consumer and Health Advocates, Corporations Barred from Participation
US Codex participation is declared off-limits to corporate interests. Only consumer advocates and health scientists may participate as US delegates to all Codex meetings and activities. Codex reverses course and becomes a force for global health, as its original Statute contemplated.
8. Forced vaccination and Drugging Declared Illegal
All forced vaccination and medication programs are declared illegal through unanimous consent of Congress.
9. Non Toxic Farming Becomes US Domestic and Foreign Priority
Food Production US Domestic and Foreign aide programs are developed to teach chemical free agriculture in the US and elsewhere
10. Poisons Forbidden for Humans and Animals
The use of fluoride, mercury and other toxins, including pesticides, herbicides and industrial sludge, are banned for foods, medicine, dental, agriculture and similar applications.
11. Antibiotics are Banned in Food Animals
Veterinary antibiotic and other drug use is banned for food animals and natural medicine is encourgaged for animals intended for consumption
12. US Joins Global Movement Against Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Other Persistent Toxins
The US ratifies the Stockholm Convention banning the 12 most toxic chemicals known, 9 of which are pesticides and engages on educational and regulatory programs to ban all toxic chemicals associated with food or agriculture from the environment. Seven of these POPs are permitted by Codex in food without labeling or other identification.
13. The Production of Food is Shifted Away From Industrial, Toxic Methods to Totally Natural Ones in the Hands of Family Farmers
Advanced technologies which produce chemical free, safe, clean food are subsidized for family farms while industrial farms are taxed so heavily for their pollution, inhumanity and health degradation that they cannot stay in business. Local production feeds local communities.
14. What’s next?
Write to us at dr.laibow@gmail.com and tell us what YOUR wish list for 2009 holds. We are listening!
15. R&R
General Bert, Ralph and I all get a vacation sometime this year! Mine involves skiing!
16. Natural Solutions Foundation’s Net Roots Take Wing
We have not just the 193,000+ people on our Health Freedom Action eAlert list that we do today, but 20 million+ active, concerned and involved people around the world spreading the word and making sure that the global message goes out: “My body is my property and I can make my own health decisions freely and without interference!”
17. Blessings Descend Upon Us All
Your year, and that of those you love, like ours, is truly blessed with peace, prosperity, health, joy and accomplishment in the company of those you love and those who love you.
18. Resources Become Available to Win the Codex and Health Freedom Struggles
Sufficient funds to carry out all our objectives make themselves available. For example, a couple of million dollars, judiciously used, would solve the Codex problem by creating an effective voice for consumers and galvanizing the “Coalition of the Unwilling” — those countries unwilling to submit to the current Codex agenda of support for industrial food and destruction of organic foods, natural remedies and nutritional supplements. Also, 100 strong supporters for the Valley of the Moon(TM) Eco Demonstration Project will move us forward substantially in teaching farmers and others around the world the methods and skills necessary to reclaim food production.
19. Disinformation Attacks Disappear
All irrational disinformation attacks on us will vaporize into the mists of morning and the energy they consume will actually go to solving the problems we are facing instead of creating divisions and strife which serves the other side but weakens health freedom.
20. The Natural Solutions Foundation’s International Decade and its Valley of the Moon(TM) Eco Demonstration Project show the way in Ending Hunger and Its Deadly Consequences
The Valley of the Moon(TM) ‘s type of food production and Eco Community organization sets the standard for farmers, consumers and countries around the world through education and participatory agriculture and health practices.
21. The Health Freedom Battle is Over – We Have Won!
I can go back to the full time practice of natural, drug-free medicine.
22. Everyone Who is Interested Gets to Experience the Valley of the Moon(TM) Eco Demonstration Project
You and I get to meet when you visit the beautiful, bountiful, temperate Highlands of Panama and experience the Valley of the Moon (TM) for yourself!
23. You Get to Experience “A Little Taste of Heaven in a Cup (TM)”
You try our Shade Grown, Valley of the Moon(TM) GMO Free, Pesticide-Free, Chemical-Free Coffee – http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=1130#order
and love it so much you give it as gifts to everyone you know for either beverage or detox use. Your tax deductible donation says “Thanks!” in your morning cup of Java and you are loving it!
24. Right Makes Rights Once Again
The looming crises to our way of life and constitutional rights, health freedoms and other invasions of our liberties vanish.
May it all be so for all of us in 2009, a year of health, prosperity, productivity, joy and happiness.
Dr. Rima Recommends
Stem Enhance – Nature’s Healer
Today I want to talk about 2 products.
Individually they are each remarkable. Together they are extraordinary. I use both of them daily and so does General Bert. I have seen exceptional success with them in my natural medical practice and know how wide their impact can be. Since they stimulate and enhance natural healing processes, the range of conditions they deal with is exceptional. After all, give the body/mind/spirit/energy unit (that’s a human being, by the way) what it needs to heal and, most of the time, it will do just that, regardless of the pharmaceutical/allopathic dogma!
Health Aid 1: Stem Enhance ( http://www.wealthbuilderssystem.com/site/index.asp?DL=140935&page=103264&ad=0 ) is an extract of blue green algae which has the proven ability to signal your bone marrow to release adult stem cell – YOUR adult stem cells.
Stem cells are the renewal system of the body because they have unique, nearly limitless healing abilities to detect areas of the body that need help and flock to that site. Once there, they set about altering themselves to become – literally – whatever type of cell is needed, whether it is a heart cell, or a brain cell or a kedney, etc.
Of course, the trick is getting the body to pay attention to the danger and release adult stem cells. All too often, although we are making adult stem cells, we keep them “hidden away for a rainy day” in our bone marrow and other physiological hidey-holes. As we age, or with the stress of illness,
Stem Enhance knows that trick and literally calls forth stem cells lurking in the bone marrow and elsewhere.
Stem Enhance is totally natural, easily available and, in my experience, strikingly effective in helping the body to correct serious, long term and often devastating problems – in short, to return to normal structure and function despite serious or even lethal diagnoses.
Click here – http://www.wealthbuilderssystem.com/site/index.asp?DL=140935&page=103264&ad=0 – to learn more about Stem Enhance and its amazing ability to stimulate release of adult stem cells in your body and here – http://organics4u.stemtechbiz.com/quickorder.aspx – to get started using Stem Enhance to harness the power of your own adult stem cells.
Naturally Enhances Circulation and Detox
Health Aid 2: Stem Flo – http://drrimatruthreports.com/store/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=1239 – reduces oxidative stress and enhances circulation within 30 minutes of taking this all natural combination of widely known circulatory stimulators according to laboratory studies. That means that the adult stem cells released by your body when you take Stem Enhance are carried with greater effect to every part of your body. Of course, even without Stem Enhance, increasing circulation is helpful for a great many people. Click here – http://www.stemflo.com/index.html – to see the natural ingredients which have been synergystically combined to provide circulatory support and then imagine what increasing blood flow to the brain, heart, kidneys, lung, etc., can do to bring stem cells, nutrients and oxygen to them while removing debris and toxic waste at the same time!
Together with Stem Enhance or alone, I find that Stem Flo is a unique and highly effective circulatory aid to help the body return to normal structure and function.
Click here – http://organics4u.stemtechbiz.com/quickorder.aspx – to start enjoying the benefits of Stem Flo (and don’t forget Stem Cell stimulation for your pets, too!)
Kathy’s Corner
Kathy Greene
Community Relations and Development Director
SUMMARY: It’s a New Year and that means New Opportunities.
I’ve said it before, but it deserves repeating: we are here because YOU care. You care about your health and that of your family. You care about your freedom. And, as we’ve learned in the past few weeks, you care about us.
I take care of the hundreds of emails that come to our Foundation every day, forwarding to Gen. Bert, Dr. Rima and Counsel Ralph your messages, answering those that I can. What has most impressed me recently have been the hundreds of messages of support and good wishes. That, and the impressive growth in our Health Freedom Action eAlert list tells me that we can count on you, just as you can count on us!
Please remember to ask everyone you know to join the Action eAlert system at: http://www.healthfreedomusa.or/index.php?page_id=187
And, of course, your generous year-end donations are certainly appreciated: http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189
A Word From Dr. Rima
My personal wish for your 2009 is exactly the same as my personal wish for my year and that of my family: peace, prosperity, health, joy, accomplishment and, not least, freedom. Personal freedom, health freedom, civil freedom, and the freedom to learn, share information and think your own thoughts free from harassment, inhibition or interference. Oh, yes, I urgently wish us in the US all a return to to the Constitutional form of Government which protects and directs a free society.
2009 CAN be a year of decisive forward movement for freedom – all freedom – if we join hands and hearts, ignore the distractions and disinformation (which indicate just how effective we are!), focus on committing ourselves to taking back our legitimate power and using it for making our voices ring loud and clear in the halls of power, in our homes and hearts.
Happy New Year!
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
Copyright © 2008 USA.NET, Inc.® All Rights Reserved. Users of this site agree to be bound
by the Terms and Conditions of USA.NET’s messaging service.
Here is what GMO technology brings: crops (and animals) controlled by corporations like Monsanto whose superficial commitment is to generate as much money as possible but whose deeper commitment is to accomplish a level of control never before seen: total control of the world’s food supply. Who lives and who dies clearly is of no importance to these corporations. Who controls the lives and deaths of farmers and consumers is literally at stake here.
We are well on the way to seeing the “Suicide Belt” of Maharashtra, India, in our own farmlands. If you think that this tragic and horrifying scenario cannot occur in your community, think again.
Monsanto takes over 500 family farms per year away from their owners because their GMO seed “volunteers”., that is, trespasses and invades, the fields of the family farmers. Claiming that their patented intellectual rights have been invaded, Monsanto seeks damages against the farmer which are so steep that the farmer looses his home and his farm – another win for Monsanto. And, of course, Codex, driven by the US FDA, allows all GMO FrankenFoods as if they were safe and wholesome.
What you are about to read is real and is coming to a farming community near you. But the final word is not yet in. Although more (much more, we believe) of the US food supply contains, or comes from, genetically modified “foods” (aptly called “Frankenfoods”), consumer outrage can, if properly harnessed, literally save the day.
Here are the steps you can take to prevent this disaster:
1. Band together with others of like mind. No one of us can do this alone, but as an electronic community, we have immense power.
a. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187) to become part of the rapidly growing Natural Solutions Foundation Health Freedom eAlert Community. It’s free, it’s secure and it’s powerful!
b. Take the Action Steps in each free issue.
c. Pass the eAlerts along to your entire email list, urging them to join and take the Action Steps, too.
2. Click here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25920) to urge your Congressional Legislators to become co-sponsors of the GMO labeling and safety study bills proposed in the House of Representatives by Denis Kucinich (D-OH). This is a trans partisan issue and only public pressure will compel Congress to support our health instead of the BioTech industry’s profits
3. Commit yourself, without exception, to buy ONLY products which are labeled “Organic”, or “GMO-Free.
a. Many nutrients and supplements are made with, or sourced from, Genetically Modified Organisms like yeast, corn, soy, bacteria modified to produce vitamins, etc even if those products do not appear on the label. GMO ingredients are literally torn apart in vats and new “foods” assembled from them. If the word “organic” is not on the label, it isn’t organic. If the words “GMO-Free” or “Free of GMOs” are not on the label, then the product IS a GMO product.
b. The Natural Solutions Foundation has created an online store, www.Organics4U.org, where you can find GMO, organic health products. All profits from www.Organics4U.org sales go to this battle.
4. Purchase only fruits and produce whose code number on the small, oval tag (UPC code) begins with the number “9”. This signifies that the item is organic. If the UPC code begins with “4” it has been raised with conventional farming techniques (including fluoride sprays, herbicides, pesticides, soil de-mineralizing synthetic fertilizers, possibly mercury sprays and other toxic substances and procedures).
5. Write to the companies whose products you buy and ask if they use GMO ingredients in their foods. If they tell you that they “meet or exceed FDA standards” that means that the products are made with GMOs.
a. Write back to them and tell them you will not patronize them any longer and that you will share this information.
b. Send a copy of their letter to me at releyes@gmail.com and we will add the company and the specific product to either the Natural Solutions Foundation “GMO Hit List” or our “GMO Kiss List”. We’ll publicize these lists to help others make GMO free food choices as well.
6. Talk to your friends and neighbors, parents of other kids your kids play with, folks in your Seniro Center, people in your church or community organizations. Spread the word. Most people have no idea that they are eating foods which are killing them, making them infertile and damaging their loved ones as well as themselves.
a. Become a Natural Solutions Foundation Community Organizer. Hold meetings, get on the radio, start letter writing campaigns. We’ll show you how. If you write to Kathy Greene at kathy.greene@usa.net and put “Organizer” in the subject line, Kathy will send you a Natural Solutions Foundation Community Organizer’s Handbook and help you get started.
b. Use your creativity to organize your community awareness. Tell us what you are doing and we will assist you in any way we can.
7. Donate here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to the Natural Solutions Foundation so that we can keep on keeping on to make sure that our health freedoms stay free. Right now, it is illegal to label GMO containing foods to say that they are toxic industrial force feeding products. We need to change that and we need to eliminate Bio Tech altogether for our sake, the planet’s sake and, perhaps most of all, our children’s sakes.
8. Become involved in, visit, participate in, and/or lend your support to, the Natural Solutions Foundation Valley of the Moon Eco Demonstration Community (http://naturalsolutionsfoundation.org/) in the beautiful, fertile and temperate Chiriqui Highlands of Panama where we will
a. Create a demonstration BeyondOrganic Bio Dynamic Zero Emissions(TM) Farm and Farm School to help farmers from around the world re-learn how to grow food without chemicals and teach pollution-free Zero Emissions farming
b. Share the techniques of intensive “foot square gardening” to eliminate under nutrition in people who do not live on farms so that people everywhere can grow fresh, organic vegetables and fruits in very little space and at virtually no cost
c. Create a natural healing and wellness center
d. Offer seminars to guests from the area and beyond on a large number of topics (If you want to run a seminar at our new facility in Volcan, Panama, contact me at releyes@gmail.com!) with an all organic restaurant providing outstanding food in the near future
e. Raise pure, unadulterated food for ourselves and others. For example, we are already harvesting the chemical free, delicious Valley of the Moon Coffee. Every bag supports your health and your health freedom at the same time. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=1130) to make sure that you put A Little Taste of Heaven in a Cup(TM) and give everyone on your gift list the same delight in their cups, too!
f. Create a small boutique hotel where guests at the medical center and the seminars can stay.
How can you support this innovative effort to help farmers around the world reclaim the production of clean, safe food? By one of more of the following options:
1. Become personally involved by bringing your skills and abilities to the Valley of the Moon
2. Provide tax deductible donation or “friendly financing” support which has significant financial return
3. Connecting us with Foundations or potential donors who will find what we are doing interesting and worth considering for support. Visit www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org to find out more and then contact me at releyes@gmail.com with questions, suggestions or thoughts.
It’s really up to us. Reclaiming the production of food worldwide is essential to solving the problem. But so is making sure that we are buying clean, unadulterated food. Every time you make a food purchase, you are either helping the Bio Tech companies to destroy your health and the planet while they take over our food supply or helping to keep them from doing it.
Every time.
If we buy the food that the Bio Tech companies have poisoned we are giving them a profit from harming us. Let’s not do that, shall we?
The FDA and the USDA are worse than useless – the are literally paralyzed by a 1992 Executive Order by then-President George H. W. Bush which says that GMO foods are “substantially equivalent” to unmodified ones and forbids them to require or examine safety testing except for the most basic evaluation early in the development process which has been done by the Bio Tech company itself. There is no safety testing, there is no clinical testing, there is only a Bio Tech Fox in the consumer health hen house.
Think about it: the employees in Monsanto’s UK Headquarters in London refused to eat food in the cafeteria made with, or containing ANY GMO food. What do they know that you need to know? That all GMO food is dangerous, can have astonishingly high levels of pesticide, that this technology can cause hidden and as-yet unsuspected diseases, horrifying environmental damage, antibiotic resistance, birth defects, sterility, kidney, gut and immune system damage, infant deaths, cancer and on and on and on.
Read the article below, take it very, very seriously and then let’s get started putting an end to this collective nightmare which has been foisted upon us by a government to weak to stand up for any of our rights or for our health, too corrupt to care about either and too industry-friendly to even ask questions. It’s really up to us.
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
The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops
By Andrew Malone
When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.
The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father’s body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.
As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a
grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low.
Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own
life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.
Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years’ earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.
There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on – they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless – as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting.
Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.
As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. ‘He was a loving and caring man,’ she said, weeping quietly.
‘But he couldn’t take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.’
Shankara’s crop had failed – twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story.
But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.
Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.
Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts – and no income.
So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.
The crisis, branded the ‘GM Genocide’ by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a ‘global moral question’ – and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.
Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by condemning ‘the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India,
stemming… from the failure of many GM crop varieties’.
Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.
The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace ‘the future’ and follow suit.
So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the ‘suicide belt’ in Maharashtra state.
What I found was deeply disturbing – and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.
For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.
Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.
It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.
Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll.
But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.
In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands – only to kill themselves as well.
Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed – two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.
She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. ‘He
cries when he thinks of his mother,’ said the dead woman’s aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.
Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.
The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.
But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were ‘magic seeds’ – with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.
Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.
The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new
bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.
In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.
But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers’ lives have slid back into the dark ages.
Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years – up to 17 million acres – many famers have found there is a terrible price to be paid.
Far from being ‘magic seeds’, GM pest-proof ‘breeds’ of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.
Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.
With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.
Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.
When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.
But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.
As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.
Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children.
As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a geneticallymodified plant created by Monsanto.
‘We are ruined now,’ said the dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’
Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. ‘He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,’ she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her
home to pay their respects. ‘He was dead by the time they got to hospital.’
Asked if the dead man was a ‘drunkard’ or suffered from other ‘social problems’, as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. ‘No! No!’ one of the dead man’s brothers
exclaimed. ‘Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes.
‘He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.’
Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a ‘factor in this tragedy’. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.
Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds – no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.
During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three ‘independent’ surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more
expensive – and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.
(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is ‘only double’ the price of ‘official’ non-GM seed – but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by ‘unscrupulous’ merchants, who often also sell ‘fake’ GM seeds which are prone to disease.)
With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. ‘We just want to escape from our problems,’ one said. ‘We just want help to stop any more of us dying.’
Prince Charles is so distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he is setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM.
India’s farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant
costs of GM seeds.
This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. ‘I told him that we can survive,’ his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. ‘I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.’
But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of
paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children’s schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.
Cruelly, it’s the young who are suffering most from the ‘GM Genocide’ – the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these ‘magic seeds’.
Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Andrew+Malone
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Th
ousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.h
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What Do the FrankenFood/FrankenCrop/FrankenAnimal Defenders Have to Say for Themselves?
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Reason Denied
Reason Magazine may be a voice of libertarian politics and economics, but, at least on the issue of Genetically Modified Crops, it has made a serious mistake. Kerry Howley, a Senior Editor at Reason, http://www.reason.com/news/show/125722.html, has somehow forgotten a critical element when writing an ringing apologia full of industry propaganda for the apotheosis, the pinnacle in the triumph of free market over sense or, indeed, reason (and perhaps survival) itself. What he has forgotten is science. Fact, the handmaiden of science, lies trampled in the dust as well. And so does health, yours, mine and the planet’s.
In fact, although unbridled free market economics is the central chord of the libertarian song, the chorus is “As long as your freedom does not hurt me”. And therein lies the rub: Genetically Modified ANYTHING hurts me, and you, and every sufferer of Morgellon’s Disease and every biological function of the earth. But, at least until recently, it certainly has been good business!
But since when is damaging the biosphere not hurting me?
Since when is modifying bacteria which take up residence in our soil and in my gut with potentially lethal long and short term consequences, not harming me?
Since when is creating corn which ensures permanent male sterility and mixing it, unlabeled, into my food, not harming me?
Since when is altering crops to produce so much of a natural pesticide that farmers and their families die from the allergic reaction they experience to breathing the crop’s pollen not harming me?
Since when is introducing “food” into my body, without my consent, which increases allergic reactions, including deadly ones, by 50% not harming me?
Since when is modifying fish so that they are larger, more aggressive and breed earlier in their life cycle so that they will replace native, unmodified fish in the wild, leaving me no choice to eat non GM FrankenFish (because they have been made extinct) not harming me?
Since when is inserting unstable genes into my food which then, undigested by a gut not prepared by long acquaintance to digest them, wander around my body and insert themselves in unpredictable locations in my genes and those of a baby I am carrying if I am pregnant not harming me?
Since when is creating materials which infect and infest me with pseudo life forms bringing a new plague upon the earth, the horrifying and disfiguring Morgellon’s Disease, not harming me?
Since when is creating foods whose wandering genes turn on, or off, my own genes in a totally unpredictable way leading to disruption of the orderly process of genetic control in my body not harming me?
Since when is introducing genetic material which, in the random context of where it happens to land this time in this or that cell, produces proteins never before made inside of any living body (or, perhaps, outside of one, either) without my explicit permission not harming me?
Since when is lowering fetal survival rates though the food the pregnant woman eats during pregnancy, or ate during her own child hood, perhaps, not harming me?
Since when is introducing food into my children’s diet which, in laboratory studies, has been shown to cause damage to the gut, the kidneys, the immune system and the survivability of the young not harming me?
Since when is creating super weeds through genetic drift not harming me?
Since when is creating bugs which, in response to super pesticide production in genetically modified crops, have become resistant to pesticides and capable of new crop devastation without available control not harming me?
Since when is invading farms where non GM crops are growing and destroying their millennia-old genetic material (which I have the enzymatic capacity to digest) not harming me?
Since when is providing food which contains enzymes which confer tolerance for deadly pesticides to a genetically modified plant, but which, in my gut, may transform to produce the same deadly pesticide (a known cause of cancer, infertility and other highly dangerous conditions) they were altered to tolerate not harming me?
Who asked my permission to introduce these things into my body and my world. I would remind Mr. Howley that it is, indeed my world, as well as the world of his commerical free market buddies.
I do not recall signing an informed consent to be a trial subject for the greatest (and possibly most deadly) experiment in human history. Interestingly, I also do not recall signing a contract to allow the degradation and dangerous contamination of 75-80% of every bit of food that I eat with Genetically Modified ingredients. Do you recall signing those documents? So the libertarian chorus, “As long as it does not harm me” seems a little flat in this particular song. Dead flat.
When then-President George H. W. Bush declared that GMOs were equivalent to non GM food and determined public policy, do you recall any safety testing used to guide that decision? Neither do I. When the FDA permits GM foods on the market – that means in your body and mine – without ANY safety testing or a review of the internal safety assessment of the companies that have patented these foods, do they ask us to concur with their decision to allow GMOs in our food which are either under moratorium or banned in a large part of the world, developed or not? But here, in what is alleged to be the most developed nation in the world (with little to back that up in the health and food safety areas!), we are subjected to “foods” and crops and animals which are simultaneously declared to be exactly the same as unmodified foods yet sufficiently unique to patent. And those products of innovation and free market success are, according to the FDA’s website, to be judged in their safety and product liability through the sorting out process of the Court system.
Of course, without traceability there can be no liability. Without labeling there can be no traceability. Thanks for nothing.
So where is the free market, libertarian ethic here? What it comes down to in Mr. Howley’s underlying, structural view is that if you can get away with selling it, not only must that be a good thing to do (“free market”), but hey, “caveat emptor”, let the buyer beware – if they can get away with selling the stuff, they sell it, so it must be good. Of course, the ever-industry-friendly FDA and USDA tie the buyer’s hands and blindfold their eyes by making sure that the consumer has no knowledge whatsoever of what foods do and do not contain GM ingredients. They actually specifically prohibit such labeling because they know full well that consumers will shun the contaminated, altered and potentially very dangerous products which their industry friends have created if they know what they are eating or buying.
Full Free Market Speed ahead and Damn the Facts
GM food crops which have been modified for pesticide tolerance lead to more, not less, pesticide use. Since they are proffered by the maker of the very pesticide they tolerate so well, farmers are encouraged to use more and the free market gets another boost while the food supply, both the consumer’s and the farmer’s health and the environment all take substantial hits.
I attended a meeting in Africa at which Sylvia Matsebo, then Minister of Health of Zambia, was present and we had a chance to talk. I do not know when I have met a more clear sighted and dedicated woman in public life, unless it was the Minister of Health of Kenya, also present at that meeting. When President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia rejected GM food for his people, as referenced by the article below, I cannot but believe that Ms. Matsebo was at the head of his advisers, telling him what was good for his people, not for his pockets. Would that our advisers and our leaders had the courage and wisdom on this issue of President Mwanawasa!
In 2004, author Robert Paarlberg noted, “Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.” Today the situation is worse with more products and more percentages of crops grown in the US and elsewhere modified to the point that the supply of GM ingredients to manufacture organic foods is not in jeopardy. For Natural Solutions Foundation concerns, see above.
Reason rests its comfort level with this technology on the assertion that Mr. Paarlberg makes that there are no studies showing the danger of GM foods. That is as patently false as the statement made to me, personally, in a meeting on June 9, 2005, by Dr. Edward Scarborough, the US Codex Contact Point, that there is simply no literature showing the impact of nutrients on health. I sent him, in response, a bibliography containing references to 10s of thousands of peer reviewed articles and books showing the impact of nutrients on health, a good part of them sponsored by grants, or conducted directly by, the US Government. He never responded, of course. My letter, and that bibliography, were published through our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and the bibliography was referenced in our Citizens Petition to the FDA to compel them to cease their illegal “HARMonization” of US dietary supplements to Codex standards. You can join this legal challenge to US Supplement Codex policy here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=184).
Mr. Paarlberg exudes joy over the fact that plants modified to make their own pesticides do so at levels up to 10,000 time the amount made by the organism that manufactures it in nature. It is quite effective at the lower level in nature but at these enormous concentrations not only do insects, both crop pests and beneficial ones, die, but the impact on our bodies when we eat the food from the crops – or wear the clothing made from these fibers – modified in this way, is completely unknown. What is know is that the pollen can cause pneumonia and kill people exposed to it as happened in the Phillipines during cotton pollination time.
What is also missing from this enthusiastic recounting of the wonders of this technology is the 22,000 farmers who have killed themselves in the State of Gujerat (India) in their final grim protest against what this crop has done to them – driven them off the land because they cannot afford to pay the intellectual property tax added to the cost of the seed after they were given the seed free for the first year, destroyed their cultures and devastated their families. Somehow that does not count in the economium of free market thinking.
Happily publishing Mr. Paalberg’s unsubstantiated (and inaccurate) assessment that there is no damage to the environment, in the face of well-documented information to the contrary, and blithly accepting the premise that “gene flow”, aka “contamination” is no different from natural crop cross pollination (which does not require the payment of taxes to the “owner” of the natural gene), and the prohibitions against saving seed because of intellectual property rights which accrue to the owner of the patented genes), Reason has lost its reason.
On the issue of organic farming, things get even weirder. Instead of using vermicluture (adding worms to soil) and returning nutrients and soil organisms (or adding them for the first time) through natural means such as composting (every village produces waste: using it properly returns nutrients to the soil – see the Songhai videos here (http://www.youtube.com/naturalsolutions) – the answer of this industrial agriculturalist and Reason seems to be using synthetic fertilizers which deplete the soil more and more with each growing cycle, leading to green, but non nutritive plants. Both Mr. Howley and Mr. Paarlberg seem to have forgotten, or have never known, that organic agriculture replenishes and enriches the soil as a basic technique of food production, rather than wresting contaminated and demineralized plants from an increasingly devitalized soil. Their intentions may be good, but their information, and hence their conclusions, make no biological sense whatsoever. True, they make free market sense. That’s the problem, as I see it.
However, despite his frustration with the lack of penetration of GMOs in Africa, Mr. Paalberg genially recounts that he sees hope on the horizon “Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the [GMO] drought-tolerant maize project.” Mr. Paalberg may find hope in that. I find it depressing and frightening in light of the aptly named “Doomsday Vault” in which native seeds are being stored by the hundreds of millions in the frozen wastes of Norway above the arctic circle in the bowels of a hollowed-out mountain. The Doomsday Vault was sponsored, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same people who brought nearly universal vaccination to the children of Africa.
If you are a believer in the wonders of vaccination, that is a generous and humanitarian project. If you are familiar, however, with the literature, not just the propaganda, on vaccination and the impact it has on human populations (autism, cancer, immune collapse, heavy metal poisoning, auto immune disease, etc.), then this “generosity” becomes a cause for concern. The concern is, in my mind, equal to the concern on learning that Mr. and Mrs. Gates have chosen yet another way to forward the biological nightmare of genetically modified foods in yet another vulnerable population.
The Natural Solutions Foundation will attend the 2008 Codex Committee on Food Labeling (April, Ottawa) where the African nations will deal, once again, with the US attempt to push unlabeled GM foods on them through both product and seeds. We will be actively engaged in supporting their leadership to prevent this effort from succeeding. In February, at a meeting on this issue in Accra, the African nations created a de facto coalition which elicited the support of Norway, Russia, Japan, the EU and Switzerland. They, unlike the free market folks, understand that governments have a role to play in protecting the health of their people from corporate desires to expand markets.
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Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
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Demon Seed
How fear of life-saving technology swept through Africa
Kerry Howley | March 28, 2008
In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,†President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.â€
The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.â€
Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.
reason: Was there a particular experience with African farmers that led you to write this book?
Robert Paarlberg: Partly it was the strong impression made on me by my own visits to rural Africa, working with African organizations, working with USAID, working with International Food Policy Research Institute. I started visiting small farms in Africa 15 years ago. I’d seen a lot of poor farmers in Asia and Latin America but absolutely nothing like this. There was simply no uptake of any modern productivity-enhancing technologies at all in some cases. And I wondered why I hadn’t been aware of this. And then, when I saw more and more narrative in the NGO community and the donor community that was frankly hostile to science, I thought “I have to put this down and write a book for younger people in the donor community who may not remember the importance of technology uptake in Asian agriculture 40 years ago.â€
reason: You suggest that your understanding of modern ideas about food production arises from interactions with your students. What is it that they want?
Paarlberg: My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.
reason: Can you give an example of a genetically modified seed or organism, something in use today?
Paarlberg: Bt crops have been engineered to contain a gene from a naturally occurring soil bacterium that expresses a certain protein that cannot be digested by caterpillars. Mammals can digest the protein with absolutely no problem, but caterpillars cannot. When the caterpillars eat the plant, they die.
What’s wonderful about this is that it’s so precisely targeted at the insects eating the plant. The other insects in the field aren’t affected. Using conventional corn instead of Bt corn, you have to spray the whole field and you end up killing a lot of non-targeted species. With this variety, you don’t have to spray.
reason: That sounds less scary than “Genetically Modified Organism.â€
Paarlberg: The book makes the argument that the overregulation of this technology in Europe and the anxieties felt about it in the United States are not so much a reflection of risks, because there aren’t any documented risks from any GM crops on the market. I explain that reaction through the absence of direct benefit. The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders. Consumers don’t get a direct benefit at all, so it doesn’t cost them anything to drive it off the market with regulations. The problem comes when the regulatory systems created in rich countries are then exported to regions like Africa, where two thirds of the people are farmers, and where they would be the direct beneficiaries.
reason: How pervasive are genetically modified foods in the U.S.?
Paarlberg: Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.
reason: Are there documented safety risks that merit caution?
Paarlberg: There aren’t any. It’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash.
reason: What about environmental risks? Don’t GM crops affect surrounding plantlife?
Paarlberg: The only impacts they have different from conventional crops are beneficial to the environment. They allow you to control weeds and insects with fewer sprayings of toxic chemicals. And they don’t require as many trips through the field with your diesel tractor, so you burn less fossil fuel. And there is more carbon sequestered because you’re not tilling the soil the way you otherwise would.
There are environmental impacts; there is gene flow. The pollen from a genetically modified maize plant will flow into a neighboring field and will fertilize the crops in that neighboring field. Some of the seeds, as a consequence, will contain the transgene, but that’s no different from pollen from a conventional maize plant flowing into the next field. It’s only if you decide arbitrarily to define gene flow from genetically modified crops as “contamination†and flow from all other crops as natural. Only then does it start to become describable as an adverse effect.
The worst environmental damage ever done by American agricultural was the dustbowl of the 1930s, when we plowed up the southern plains to grow wheat, and all the topsoil blew away. The way we increased production back then was to expand crop area, which was environmentally disastrous. It was a calamity. That was the way we tried to increase production before we had high yielding crops, before we had high yielding wheat varieties, before we had hybrid maize, before we learned to increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation.
reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?
Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.
reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.
Paarlberg: Everywhere!
reason: Right, everywhere. But Asia has moved on in recent memory. The Green Revolution introduced new biological breakthroughs to Asian agriculture to the point where no one today thinks of South Korea as a rural backwater. Why was Africa not a part of this?
Paarlberg: One reason is that Africa is not easily irrigated. The big irrigated crops like rice aren’t to be found in Africa and the big investments in the Green Revolution went into improving Asian crops like rice. The crops Africans grow weren’t the crops that were being improved during the green revolution.
But I don’t blame it all on the Asia-focus of the original green revolution; we have had plenty of time to invest in scientific research for Africa’s crops, and to make investments in rural public goods like roads or power to make it affordable for African farmers to purchase fertilizer. But African governments have not done that job. In my book I show that typically African governments will spend less than 5 percent of their budget on agriculture even though that’s where two thirds of their citizens work. And if you don’t have larger public sector investments than that, there is just not going to be any uptake in the countryside. But then I go around and show that you can’t blame African governments, entirely, because prosperous donor countries are no longer supporting agriculture in Africa.
reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character†for the same governments.
Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.
It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.
reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.
Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.
reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?
Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.
In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.
reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?
Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.
reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.
Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.â€
So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.
I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.
reason: But there are functioning organic farms. If I decide to buy only organic food from Africa, what will I be buying?
Paarlberg: It wouldn’t be grown by small fair-trade-type poor farmers. It would be grown through a vertically integrated, probably European, company that would bring in the machinery, bring in the seeds, bring in the fertilizers, set up a production system that would more nearly resemble a colonial-era plantation than a small independent African farm.
reason: We’ve seen similar resistance to GMOs in India and Brazil, both of which now have legalized the use of genetically modified crops. What happened?
Paarlberg: Farmers were planting them illicitly before the final approval—that’s one reason they were forced into the approval. The technology worked so well that farmers were planting them on their own and you couldn’t criminalize all Brazilian soybean growers so you had to approve them. Similarly in India, Bt cotton spread on its own and performed so well that the government was eventually shamed into approving it.
reason: You aren’t just calling for people to get out of the way. You want increased aid for agricultural research. But why would any of this require aid? If it’s going to prove profitable, shouldn’t the incentive for private investment be there?
Paarlberg: The farmers who need the technology in Africa don’t have enough purchasing power to be of interest to private companies. Or they’re growing crops that aren’t a part of a commercial seed market that would interest private seed companies. The only way to reach them, really, is to consider the crops that they grow, for example tropical white maize or cassava. It’s a little bit like the orphan disease problem. It’s really something that has to be done as a public good by the public sector.
That’s how the green revolution proceeded in India in the 1960s. It was a wonderful success, and it wasn’t really driven by the private sector. It was driven by philanthropic foundations and public investment. Also you need not just seed improvement, but more rural farm-to-market roads, electrification, and things that really governments and only governments are incentivized and capable of doing.
There was a time, before scare stories about technology spread, when the concern was a much more legitimate one: that we’ve handed this technology over to private companies to develop, and they won’t have any incentive to get it to Africa. And to some extent that’s still a legitimate concern. There was never any fear that Brazilian farmers or Canadian farmers wouldn’t be able to get the technology, because they’re big commercial growers. The concern was originally that Africans would want the technology but wouldn’t be able to get it because they didn’t have the purchasing power or the investment climate that could attract private companies.
reason: The book is 200 pages of frustration. Are there any glimmers of hope ahead?
Paarlberg: Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the drought-tolerant maize project that I describe in chapter 5 of my book. I’m very pleased that the Gates Foundation has seen the opportunity that this new technology provides. It would be too bad if drought tolerant corn were being grown in Iowa in 2010 and not available to the farmer who really needed it in Africa.
Drought in Africa pushes small farmers back into poverty whenever it strikes. They have to sell off all their household possessions to buy the food their families need until the next season. It blocks the escape from poverty that they might otherwise achieve. Anything that puts a safety net under crop yields is going to protect small African farmers from that periodic decapitalization and let them start accumulating assets for a change.
Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.