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Ban ALL GMOs. GMOs are untested, unsafe and dangerous: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2049
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Interesting Bloomberg article yesterday entitled, Big Bucks at Stake. What is remarkable is what Bloomberg recommends in the article… But first some background. The United States FDA approves GMO foods and feeds without any safety testing of significance. Early on in the process of releasing GMOs, the company which owns the patented gene provides the FDA with whatever edited data it chooses to show that the organism in is “safe”, no matter how weak, contrived or meaningless that data is.
No further safety testing is carried out by the FDA, nor are further safety data reviewed, IF they exist.
But, in the largest involuntary human experiment ever conducted, with zero informed consent possible, the world’s food, as it comes through the US food system, its seed system and its feed system, is contaminated with unlabeled, un-traceable GMOs. Any long term (or, for that matter, short term) effects will never be known because who is eating what GMO gene, promoter virus or bacterial marker sequence is totally unknowable. This is the effect of FDA refusing to require “truthful and not misleading” GMO labeling. In deed, the agency, in a true display of the arrogance of power, believes it has authority to censor even “GMO Free” labels!
At the forthcoming Codex Alimentarius Committee on Food Labeling (May 3-7, Quebec City, Canada), the US will, once again, use it might, military and economic power, to try to prevent GMO labeling anywhere in the world.
The article below neatly sums up many of the dangers we are facing if we allow GMO crops and animals, foods and feeds, to exist in our world. Because their DNA is unstable and contagious, there is, in fact, no long-term co-existence possible between non genetically modified plants, animals, insects and, indeed, people, and the modified ones. Does any company have the right to modify the genetic make up of the planet for profit and control? The Biotech industry, of which Monsanto is a particularly horrifying example (but whose horrors are shared by Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta, Pioneer, DuPont, Pfizer and a host of others) believe that they have bought that right by patenting genes. The science upon which these patents rest is totally inaccurate and invalid. None the less, the practice will continue unless, and until, nations and individuals take the science seriously and ban or boycott anything which contains GMO or has been fed GMO, is made with, by or trough GMO technology or profits the companies which own these patents.
But to voluntarily boycott these “Franken Foods” we need to know what products contain GMOs and what products are GMO Free. We pledge to do our due diligence best effort to recommend only GMO free products to help support the work of the Foundation.
There is little time left for those of us who believe that genes cannot be patented (since they are not “new and useful” inventions, but rather simply recombinations of existing DNA data, available in nature and free for anyone to discover) and that the biosphere itself must not be contaminated.
Through Big BioTech’s enormous marketing propaganda campaigns, which include providing large funding (through fees and grants) to industry, government and university scientists alike, tainting them all with unresolved conflicts of interest, it is very difficult to find unbiased information and Codex Alimentarius, of course, contributes to this condition by continually permitting ever-growing encroachments by industrial toxins and the like into the food chain.
Click this the link below to join global voices for a total ban on all Genetically Modified Organisms. Please take this action once for each member of your family and pass it along to every person you know, urging them to do the same.
Action Item: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2049
And please remember that the Natural Solutions Foundation depends on your tax deductible donations to continue our vital work for Health Freedom. Click below to set up a recurring tax deductible donation: Once your health freedom is gone, there will be no way to buy it back. Now is the time to share resources to keep health freedom free.
Donate here: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189
There is a great deal that you, as an individual, can do about this direct threat to your health and future, and the future of your children. The first thing you can do is voice your rejection of contaminated foods and corrupt policies which permit and promote them.
If you are not already a member (or if you’ve not been receiving a regular weekly email from us, suggesting that your email provider may be blocking us) please join our Natural Solutions Foundation’s Health Freedom Action eAlert.
Sign up on our Home Page: www.HealthFreedomUSA.org or www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org).
The second action you can take is with your wallet: Make sure that you do not support GMO goods or companies that make it.
The third action, equally as critical as the previous two, is to disseminate this information. Contact Kathy Greene, our Volunteer Coordinator, at Kathy.Greene@usa.net and ask her for an Organizer’s Handbook, filed with helpful information about getting the word out to people who need to hear it.
Thanks for your activism. No one on the planet deserves to have their world contaminated and degraded for greed, by a hand full of ruthless death merchants.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
The Dr. Rima Network
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Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
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Big Bucks at Stake
April 24, 2010 Bloomberg reports:
“At stake are the costs to farmers who produce $80.3 billion a year in corn and soybeans, used in products ranging from Coca-Cola to cattle feed to ethanol. “Monsanto has become such a dominant player in the seed business that producers have real concerns that the price they pay for seed is going to be anywhere near reasonable,” said John Crabtree, a spokesman for the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, Nebraska, a nonprofit group that provides services to farm communities. “The fear is that the sky’s the limit.”
These fears are not unfounded when you consider that prices on everything from the seed to the obligatory fertilizers and pesticides that are required to make the GM seeds “grow properly” have skyrocketed.
According to a report by Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center in Boulder, Colorado, the influx of genetically modified seed has steadily ratchet prices upward. Seed used to be fairly inexpensive, in large part due to the practice of planting seed collected and saved from the previous year. With GE seeds, this ancient farming practice is no longer employed and farmers must buy new seed each year.
The 2009 Organic Center report, titled The Magnitude and Impacts of the Biotech and Organic Seed Price Premium, states that farmers who purchase Monsanto’s Roundup Ready 2 soybeans in 2010 will pay 42 percent more per bag than they paid just last year.
This is in stark contrast to the overall rise in soybean seed prices over the last 25 years, which was 63 percent. Between the years of 1975 and 1997, soybean farmers spent four to eight percent of their farm income on seeds. Last year, those who planted GE soybeans spent 16.4 percent of their income on seeds.
The story is the same for GM corn growers, who will pay just over twice the amount for the latest eight-trait “SmartStax” corn seed, compared to those planting conventional seeds. And GE cotton seed now cost nearly 6 times more than conventional. The report shows that the GE seed price premiums FAR exceed the organic seed price premium, across the board, for various crops. This should be an eye opener for anyone who still believes genetically engineered crops are the way to inexpensively feed the world… [Emphasis added – REL]
The only one who is truly benefiting, it seems, is Monsanto, who ended their fiscal year in 2009 with revenue of $11.7 billion. Over $7 billion of that came from sales and licensing of seeds and seed genes. [Emphasis added – REL]
So, is growing GM crops REALLY in the best financial interest of most farmers? Or are they simply being hoodwinked by fancy marketing that promises increased yield and reduced pestilence? Benbrook asks the same question, and has called for further studies to evaluate whether or not GM crop yields warrant the disproportionate difference in price. If previous studies are any indication, I believe the answer is no.
GM Crops Yield Unimpressive Results
In reality, GM crops create previously unimaginable profits for sub-par performance when compared to conventional or organic crops. And when you review the potential danger these crops pose to human and environmental health, the list is so disturbing you could easily say we’re all paying for poison when we buy GM food products. [Emphasis added – REL]
After 30 years of GMO experimentation, the data to shows [All emphasis added below – REL]:
* No increase in yields; on the contrary GM soya has decreased yields by up to 20 percent compared with non-GM soya. Up to 100 percent failures of Bt cotton have been recorded in India. And studies >by scientists from the USDA and the University of Georgia in 2008 found that growing GM cotton in the U.S. can result in a drop in income by up to 40 percent.
* No reduction in pesticides use; on the contrary, USDA data shows that GM crops have increased pesticide use by 50 million pounds from 1996 to 2003 in the U.S., and the use of glyphosate [Most frequently marketed as Monsanto’s dangerous herbicide, Roundup (c) – REL] went up more than 15-fold between 1994 and 2005, along with increases in other herbicides to cope with rising glyphosate resistant superweeds.
* Roundup (C) herbicide is lethal to frogs and toxic to human placental and embryonic cells. Roundup is used in more than 80 percent of all GM crops planted in the world.
* GM crops harm wildlife, as revealed by UK and U.S. studies
* Bt resistant pests and Roundup tolerant superweeds render the two major GM crop traits useless. The evolution of Bt resistant boll-worms worldwide have been confirmed and documented.
* Vast areas of forests, pampas and cerrados have been lost to GM soya in Latin America.
* Epidemic of suicides in the cotton belt of India. According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, more than 182,900 Indian farmers took their own lives between 1997 and 2007 as a result of failed GM crops. It estimates 46 Indian farmers commit suicide every day.
* Transgene contamination is completely unavoidable, as science has recently revealed that the genome (whether plant, animal or human) is NOT constant and static, which is the scientific base for genetic engineering of plants and animals. Instead, geneticists have discovered that the genome is remarkably dynamic and changeable, and constantly ‘conversing’ and adapting to the environment. This interaction determines which genes are turned on, when, where, by what and how much, and for how long. They’ve also found that the genetic material itself has the ability to be changed according to experience, passing it on to subsequent generations.
* GM food and feed linked to deaths and sicknesses both in the fields in India and in lab tests around the world.
How Can YOU Stop Monsanto from Ruling, and Ruining, the Food Supply?
Allowing Monsanto to monopolize the market could have lethal consequences for all of us. Because not only is Monsanto doing what it can to eliminate competition from other agricultural biotech products, their end game is to do away with conventional seeds, period. As I’ve discussed in many previous articles, this is a threat to human civilization and would spell disaster for the entire planet. Fortunately, you don’t have to be directly involved in the legal or political end of the battle.
You, as an ordinary citizen, still have the power to make perhaps an even GREATER difference in how business will pan out for Monsanto – by steering the market demand toward non-GMO crops and foods. Every time you choose to buy a non-GMO product over a product that contains GM ingredients, you are making a dent in the empire that is Monsanto.
While you’re waiting for the leaders of the world to catch up, take advantage of local sources of organic foods as often as you can. You can also avoid GM foods by:
* Reducing or Eliminating Processed Foods. Some 75 percent of processed foods contain GM ingredients. Use the Non-GMO Shopping Guide, available for free at www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com.
* Read produce and food labels. When looking at a product label, if any ingredients such as corn flour and meal, dextrin, starch, soy sauce, margarine, and tofu (to name a few) are listed, there’s a good chance it has come from GM corn or soy,unless it bears the USDA organic seal.
* Buy organic produce. Buying organic is currently the best way to ensure that your food has not been genetically modified.
Note: All Emphasis Added – REL
Think GMOs don’t impact you because you grow 100% of your own food in a closed environment greenhouse to control all pollination? Think again. If you live in the US, your world is being reshaped in the image of Monsanto. If you don’t like that image, get your head out of the sand in your greenhouse and get busy defending both the American value system and your food, along with your society, from this malign influence.
And, if you tend to think that the Federal Government won’t let this happen, recall that Secretary of Agriculture Vilsek is a Monsanto man.
This kind of atrocity is just fine with the GMO-friendly Federal Government which clearly cannot be trusted to regulate our food. It is imperative to divest the FDA and USDA of their food regulatory responsibilities and get food regulation back into the hands of those of us who eat the food, at the State level. Click here, http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/112/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26405, to tell Congress to get the Federal Government out of our pantries and off our dinner plates before these agencies do even more harm.
So get involved now.
Sign up for the Natural Solutions Foundation Health Freedom Action eAlerts, http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=187, and ride the Freedom Mouse hard.
And remember these battles against Big Pharma and Big Biotech cost money. Make your tax deductible donation to the Natural Solutions Foundation by clicking here,http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189 . Do it now. Time is short and the enemy is large.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
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Monsanto Investigator in Illinois Laughs They Are Doing ‘Rural Cleansing’
by Linn Cohen-Cole
www.opednews.com
As of last night, a US marshal, 2 state police and a county police are all over Mr. Hixon’s area, serving notices to farmers that they are being sued by Monsanto. They arrive in pairs, with two cars parked a quarter mile and half mile down the road. They’ve served 3 so far and said “a bunch more are coming.” No telling how many will be served since Hixon has between 200-400 farmers he cleans seeds for and these farmers have been repeatedly threatened by Monsanto thugs for the last two months, getting “visits,” letters, and calls daily.
Farmers report that a Monsanto investigator laughed that they were doing “rural cleansing.”
Steve Hixon is a seed cleaner in southern Illinois. He has equipment that takes the plant materials and “cleans” it so that the seeds are separated out and can be given back to farmers to save for the next season. It’s a mechanized step up from farmers hand picking seeds off their own plants, which, with hundreds of acres – or even 10 – would not be easy to do.
Mr. Hixon has the non-distinction of being attacked by Monsanto. He is far from alone. Monsanto has been picking off seed cleaners across the Midwest, having already done its thuggish thing in Pilot Grove, Missouri, and in Indiana, attacking Maurice Parr, destroying business for all of them.
Mr. Parr reports that when he was sued, the first think out of the judge said was how “honored to have a fine company like Monsanto in my courtroom.”
“Shortly after someone broke into Mr. Hixon’s office and he found his account book on his truck seat where he would never have left it, evey one of his remotely located and very scattered customers had three men (described as goons with “no necks”) arrived at each farm, going out onto it without permission … Mr. Hixon and state police who were called in, believe a GPS tracking device may have been put on Mr. Hixon’s equipment.” Click here.
In 2002, when Mr. Hixon was at the state legislature for a meeting, he said he told a Monsanto representative there, “If you guys wnt to tak over the seed industry so bad, you ought to buy guys like me out.” The Monsanto agent is supposed to have responded “We’d rather put you out of business, it’s more fun that way.”
Mr. Hixon says that when he is cleaning seeds, he is pouring $13,000 a hour into the local economy, which right now is being hit. A fence company has gone out of business and other businesses are in trouble. And in using seeds that have been cleaned, those seeds have carbon footprint, by Mr. Hixon’s figures, less than a fraction of 1% of that of GMO seeds delivered over 1000s of miles at 5 miles a gallon that semis require to run.
But Monsanto’s GM-soy and other seeds have a much heavier carbon footprint that the absurd transport of seed across the country by semis. Petroleum-based pesticides are the essence of genetic engineering, and Monsanto has a poorly known history of their relation to warfare.
“Huge excesses of nitrogenous compounds that accumulated during World War I provided the basis for the beginnings of the mass production of synthetic nitrate fertilizers. DuPont — now the sole owner of the world’s largest seed company, Pioneer HiBred — was the largest manufacturer of gunpowder in the United States during the early 19th century and the first World War. Monsanto increased its profits 100 fold during the World War, from $80,000 to well over $9 million per year, supplying the chemical precursors for high explosives such as TNT.
“In the 1930s, chemists working for the German company Bayer discovered the highly poisonous properties of organophosphate compounds. …. As all of German industry became absorbed into the growing Nazi war machine, Bayer’s organophosphate compounds were developed simultaneously as agricultural pesticides and as nerve gases for military use. These included such notorious chemical warfare agents as sarin, soman and tabun gases, all of which are still manufactured today. …
“In the 1930s, scientists at the Swiss J. R. Geigy Company were searching for new compounds to disinfect seeds and prevent moths from feeding on wool. … These researchers’ key discovery was that DDT … could accomplish both of their desired ends and more. … DDT was seen as the “atom bomb of insecticides,” capable of permanently eliminating various pest species.
“After World War II, DDT became the most widely applied chemical in human history …. The widespread use of DDT — for both agricultural and household uses — led to a dramatic shift in the chemical industry’s approach to pest control … was in many ways a direct outgrowth of its wartime origins. …
“During the 1960s, Monsanto was a leading manufacturer of the herbicide ‘Agent Orange,’ which was used by U.S. military forces to obliterate the dense jungles of Vietnam. Today Monsanto’s Roundup-family herbicides play a central role in the U.S. “drug war” via its widespread use to eradicate coca and poppy plants in Colombia and other countries….”
The shift to genetically engineered food seems a welcome change from such a history. But it appears there has been no change, only a more thorough and disguises means of ensuring its sales.
“Of all of Monsanto, DuPont and Dow’s agricultural products, genetically engineered food crops might appear to be the least tainted with immediate wartime origins. But this technology emerged from a period when the future of chemical agriculture appeared very much in doubt. With the rapid expansion of the agrochemical industry during the post-World War II era, these companies and their European counterparts had established a profound degree of control over agricultural practices. But as public pressure and the weight of scientific evidence curtailed the use of DDT and many other chlorinated pesticides in the 1970s, executives and corporate scientists saw the potential for limitless advances — and ever-expanding marketing potential — in the incorporation of technological advances into the genetics of seeds. During the 1990s, Monsanto alone spent nearly $8 billion acquiring leading commercial seed suppliers in the United States and internationally; DuPont and others quickly followed suit, leading to today’s widespread proliferation of genetically engineered food crops.” Click here.
Today, in Illinois, our federal agents and police, working on behalf of Monsanto, are terrorizing … whom? Drug dealers? Financiers who have stolen this country blind? The people who took us to war based on lies and have profited while thousands of American and 100s of thousands of Iraqi have died? No. Our tax dollars are being used to turn our marshals and police into Monsanto agents to terrorize our disappearing farmers.
Terror is palpable in rural America. It defines American farming communities now.
Monsanto, with its history of warfare and creating chemicals to “cleanse” both enemies and agricultural pests of any area desired, appears to bring this power and method of thinking to all it touches.
“Rural cleansing” is its stated goal, and our farmers the pests to be eliminated.
Where is the Illinois ACLU? Where is Amnesty?
Think about it for a moment: unlabeled GMOs with medical consequences, including, as in this case, sterility, constitutes the force feeding of industrial toxins to a global population. You might call it forced drugging, and you would be right.
One would tend to assume that food sold to consumers would not have intended or unintended medical consequences like birth defects, cancer, auto immune diseases, infertility or sterility. One would be wrong. Since FDA and USDA do not conduct, or examine, safety studies except once very early on in the approval process when they review preliminary safety testing provided by the corporation developing the product (!), these “foods” (Frankenfoods, really) are launched into the market place with neither safety testing nor review of safety testing by our supposed “watchdog” agencies.
Natural Solutions Foundation believes in your health freedom. Apparently, the FDA and USDA do not. If they did, they would not permit dangerous, untested and unlabeled (that is, forbidden to be labeled!) GMO “food” to be sold in the US as “food” (for people) and “feed” (for animals who are, ultimately, eaten by people). You see, we believe that your right to safe, unadulterated foods and it also includes your right to have children if you want to, and grandchildren, too.
Seven months ago we noted that a little-known genetic bioengineering firm in California, Epicyte, announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile in 2001. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. It was astonishing to learn that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.
Every independent scientific review of safety of which I am aware documents the serious, potentially lethal, and now, sterility-inducing impact of these “foods”. One has to wonder whether the Epicyte human sterility gene is part of the NK 603xMon810 genome now since its impact is sterility.
Whether it is or not, what is clear is that the consumption of the unlabeled “foods” or their by products and derivatives poses as great a threat to humanity as the ever-promised Avian Flu Pandemic. Eat them at your own risk. And get involved to pressure your Congressional members to become co-sponsors of, and strongly support, the 2 excellent bills before Congress now which would require safety testing and labeling of all GMO foods. Click here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25920) to send you strong message to Congress for your food rights.
Genetically Modified “foods” do not have names. They have numbers
Real food has names, usually less than 3 syllables. GMO “foods” and “feeds” hide behind initials and numbers like the biochemicals they are: e.g., NK 603 and Mon810. Those are genetically engineered corn types permitted for human and animal food in the US and the EU and elsewhere in the world. Neither corn (or “maize” as it is also called) has EVER been properly tested for safety by an independent governmental agency. No safety review of independent, non-industry studies has ever been done by a government agency anywhere in the world. Independent studies have never been commissioned by any government agency before these foods were approved, strictly on the basis of corporate assurances that these “foods” were safe in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
The reality is that when independent studies are conducted on these “foods”, they are neither safe nor benign.
The FDA thinks it is perfectly fine to take those rights, and your posterity, away from you without your knowledge or consent. By allowing genetically modified (GMO) “foods” which are known to reduce fertility in animals (we are, reproductively speaking, biologically similar to the animals being tested) and forbidding labeling of GMO foods or ingredients, the FDA says that foods like NK603 and Mon810 are acceptable to them. Is the truth that this is part of a long-stanidng, wide-ranging depopulation program using multiple ways to eliminate your ability to reproduce?
Who cares? You do, and so do we.
Thanks for your continuing support. Without it, the Natural Solutions Foundation could not continue its important work.
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Dr. Rima
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Genetically-engineered food: potential threat to fertility
Study shows that genetically engineered maize affects reproductive health in mice
Vienna, Austria, 11 November 2008 – A study published today by the Austrian government identified serious health threats of genetically engineered (GE) crops. In one of the very few long-term feeding studies ever conducted with GE crops, the fertility of mice fed with GE maize was found to be severely impaired, with fewer offspring being produced than by mice fed on natural crops. Considering the severity of the potential threat to human health and reproduction, Greenpeace is demanding a recall of all GE food and crops from the market, worldwide. Of course, that would mean changing the happy approval of Codex of all “foods” genetically modified and all GMO “feeds” as well. We’ll need your strong support to build the coalition to mass the muscle to reopen those issues. It can be done, of course, but we need your help.
Your only protection on your table and in your cupboards right now, of course, is to eat, grow and source organic food. Only organic food. Too expensive? What is your health worth and, if you are of child bearing age, the ability to have children or have your children have children? A few dollars more in food per week? Probably. If you can’t afford the expense, start doing intensive gardening in a corner of your apartment, on your patio or in a small corner of your garden. Foot Square Gardening references abound on the internet, at your library and in your book store. Take a look. Even in the winter it’s pretty simple to do indoors. Don’t delay, though. The damage from these Frankenfoods is cumulative.
The study, sponsored by the Austrian Ministries for Agriculture and Health, was presented today at a scientific seminar in Vienna, Austria. Prof. Dr. Jürgen Zentek, Professor for Veterinary Medicine at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study, summarised the findings: Mice fed with GE maize had less offspring in the third and fourth generations, and these difference were statistically significant. Mice fed with non-GE maize reproduced more efficiently. This effect can be attributed to the differences in the food source.
“GE food appears to be acting as a birth control agent, potentially leading to infertility – if this is not reason enough to close down the whole biotech industry once and for all, I am not sure what kind of disaster we are waiting for,†said Dr. Jan van Aken, GE expert at Greenpeace International. “Playing genetic roulette with our food crops is like playing Russian roulette with consumers and public healthâ€.
The Austrian scientists performed several long-term feeding trials with laboratory mice over a course of 20 weeks. One of the studies was a so-called reproductive assessment by continuous breeding (RACB) trial, in which the same parent generation gave birth to several litters of baby mice. The parents were fed either with a diet containing 33% of a GE maize variety (NK 603 x MON 810), or a closely related non-GE variety. A decrease in litter size and weight was found to be statistically significant in the third and fourth litters in the GE-fed mice compared to the control group.
Owned by Monsanto, the GE maize variety tested in this study is tolerant to a herbicide and resistant to certain insect pests. It has been approved for planting and food use in a variety of countries, including the US, Argentina, Japan, Philippines and South Africa. In Mexico and the European Union(1), it is approved for food and feed use.
“This study is yet another example that the food and feed safety of GE crops and food cannot be guaranteed. The reproductive toxicity of this GE maize was a totally unexpected result, but regulators around the world had considered this GE maize variety as safe as non-GE varieties – a potentially devastating error,†said Dr. van Aken.
Contacts:
Dr. Jan van Aken, Greenpeace International agriculture expert, +49 151 1805 3415
Dr. Janet Cotter, Greenpeace International Science Unit, +44 7812 174783
Notes to Editors:
(1) In 2005, the European Food Safety Agency EFSA gave a green light for this variety. Without conducting any independent studies and just relying on Monsanto’s data, EFSA wrote it “considers it unlikely that NK603 x MON810 maize will have any adverse effect on human and animal healthâ€. This exemplifies how flawed and ill-designed the European risk assessment for GE crops is.
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.
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