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Here’s the abstract of the study, ‘A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health’. Here is the Scribd version including ghastly photos.
So much for 90-day studies.
From the CRIIGEN website (h/t Yves Smith):
“For the first time, the health impact of a GMO and a widely used pesticide have been comprehensively assessed * in a long term animal feeding trial of greater duration and with more detailed analyses than any previous studies, by environmental and food agencies, governments, industries or researchers institutes.
The two tested products are in very common use : (i) a transgenic maize made tolerant to Roundup, the characteristic shared by over 80% of food and animal feed GMOs, and (ii) Roundup itself, the most widely used herbicide on the planet. The regulatory approval process requires these products to be tested on rats as a surrogate for humans.
The new research took the form of a two year feeding trial on 200 rats, monitored for outcomes against more than 100 parameters. The doses were consistent with typical dietary/ environmental exposure (from 11% GMO in the diet, and 0.1 ppb in water).
The results, which are of serious concern, included increased and more rapid mortality, coupled with hormonal non linear and sex related effects. Females developed significant and numerous mammary tumours, pituitary and kidney problems. Males died mostly from severe hepatorenal chronic deficiencies. Professor Seralini’s team in the University of Caen is publishing this detailed study in one of the leading scientific international peer-reviewed journals of food toxicology, on line on Sept. 19, 2012.
The implications are extremely serious. They demonstrate the toxicity, both of a GMO with the most widely spread transgenic character and of the most widely used herbicide, even when ingested at extremely low levels, (corresponding to those found in surface or tap water). In addition, these results call into question the adequacy of the current regulatory process, used throughout the world by agencies involved in the assessment of health, food and chemicals, and industries seeking commercialisation of products.”
Rather than rewrite much of this since my time is limited, I’ll pluck bits others have plucked from the report.
“The peer-reviewed study, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Caen, found that rats fed on a diet containing NK603 Roundup resistant GM maize, or given water containing Roundup at levels permitted in drinking water, over a two-year period, died significantly earlier than rats fed on a standard diet.
Up to half the male rats and 70% of females died prematurely, compared with only 30% and 20% in the control group. Across both sexes the researchers found that rats fed Roundup in their water or NK603 developed two to three times more large tumours than the control group. By the beginning of the 24th month, 50-80% of females in all treated groups had developed large tumours, with up to three per animal.
By contrast, only 30% of the control group were affected. Scientists reported the tumours “were deleterious to health due to [their] very large size,” making it difficult for the rats to breathe, [and] causing problems with their digestion which resulted in haemorrhaging.”
“Significantly, the majority of tumours were detectable only after 18 months – meaning they could be discovered only in long-term feeding trials.
The study – led by molecular biologist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, a critic of GM technology, and published yesterday in US journal Food and Chemical Toxicology – said the GM corn and Roundup weedkiller ‘may cause hormonal disturbances in the same biochemical and physiological pathway’.
The Daily Mail’s Frankenstein Food Watch campaign has long highlighted problems with the lack of rigorous safety assessments for GM crops and food.”
“The research team concluded that NK603′s transgenic traits and the endocrine-disrupting effects of Roundup herbicide could explain the results. The study is the first of its kind to link enzymes overexpressed by transgenes to health problems, Séralini said.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals cause health problems and cancers by impacting hormonal glands in mammals and are especially dangerous to children. Pesticide and herbicide critics often fear that chemicals used to kill weeds and pests could potentially be endocrine disruptors in humans.
Monsanto’s NK603 and other varieties of corn are genetically engineered to tolerate Roundup herbicide, which contains the plant poison glyphosphate and other additives, so that farmers can spray whole fields of crops to kill weeds while sparing the genetically modified corn. Genetically engineered crops are also known as genetically modified organisms, or GMO’s.
France’s Jose Bove, vice-chairman of the European Parliament’s commission for agriculture and known as a fierce opponent of GM, called for an immediate suspension of all EU cultivation and import authorizations of GM crops. ‘This study finally shows we are right and that it is urgent to quickly review all GMO evaluation processes,’ he said in a statement. ‘National and European food security agencies must carry out new studies financed by public funding to guarantee healthy food for European consumers.’
This disturbing new information should put paid to Industry claims that ‘studies prove GMOs are safe’, but the industry hacks are already out in force, including the NYT already. There will be far more hit pieces condemning the study, and contributions to the Industry groups spending multiple millions to defeat the (as yet) popular California Proposition 37 demanding that labels informing shoppers if products contain GMOs.
Other studies have indicated dangers in other directions, but I’ll keep it simple today. ‘This is all making me ill; not surprised, but ill,’ said wendydavis.
But I would like to remind you that RoundUp Ready crops have already shown resistance to the product, which has had a few major consequences.
Farmers noting that weeds are popping in their fields often spray again, and the over-spray affects nearby wild plants and can make its way into water supplies. And given the developing resistance, Dow has created the product 2,4-D resistant crops for use with that new pesticide, which contains chemicals used in the defoliant Agent Orange, which I wrote about in March. It’s a ghastly roundup of tipping points in the war over Zombie Foods that we’re…arguably losing, and includes a section on the quick adaptation corn borers made to Bt Corn.
But fight we must, and we’ll hopefully find ways, through permaculture and organic growing, prayer, whatever…to reclaim healthy crops and seeds, and guard the tenets of Food Sovereignty closely.
There are probably a lot of places to contribute a few bucks; this is one at the Organic Consumers Association. If not, please ask your local grocery and natural food stores to carry foods with labels indicating they don’t contain GMOs, and talk to your friends in California. This is the battle that most matters. ‘As goes so California, so goes the nation’.
We can get it back, but we need to look to our most creative, loving, and visionary selves. The Great Awakening is coming.
“So come sit down
Will you talk with me now?
Let me see through your eyes
Where there is so much life
We are biding our time
For these myths to unwind
These changes we will confront
So peace be where
With every place that you had
Look to your soul
For these things that you know
For the trees that we see
Cannot forever breathe
With the changes they will confront
So hold nice and close
The ones that get to your soul
So that when it is cold
You wont feel so alone
Cos the roads that you take
May just crack and break
With the changes you will confront
With each gift that you share
You may heal and repair
With each choice that you make
You may help someone’s day…”
(and help heal the world..)
(cross-posted at kgblogz.com)
67 Comments
The Organic Consumers Association is a good place to donate for the cause, in particular to help get the CA proposition passed,
It’s not a ‘negative’ proposition, it doesn’t seek to ban or outlaw anything. On the contrary, it would require food labels to state that genetically modified organisms are included in the product.
It’s Monsanto that wants to ban and outlaw things that are essential to our health and our knowledge. They wanted to prevent retail food sources and sellers from stating that their products contain no GMO ingredients.
What I’ve been hearing is that if the CA initiative passes, and GMO labeling would be required in that state, food producers will realize it’s more efficient and effective to remove the GM traces (it’s usually only trace amounts in most products) in all its products wherever they’re sold.
Also, if it passes in CA, it’s likely to be taken up in other states, which would be another reason for food producers to eliminate the GMO’s — because it’s easier and cheaper than segregating their products for different regions and trying to make sure the labeling conforms.
(I donated $50 yesterday, which I can afford cuz I’m a vegetarian.) ;o)
I’d been considering all this again this morning and it just made me weep. If you think about the basic fact that the most basic material human needs are food, water, and shelter, they have all been so commodified, captured, financialized that it’s sincerely inhumane.
Thinks of what ‘nourishment’ really means in the best sense of the word. Not only the love and care that comes with conscious and sustainable farming and gardening, but the act of procuring the food, fixing it, sharing it…all by way of health, healing, growing, even leading to increased awareness and maybe a higher consciousness.
To be systematically robbed of those possibilities since the advent of Factory Farming and Big Ag, wiping out the post-Dust Bowl windrows in the plains, the poisoning of the aquifers by way of toxic pesticides and cheap petro-based fertilizers (crop ‘dope, not nutrient), the massive amounts of family farmers who had to give in to ever-greedy banks…
Well, and now all this, which is serious life-stealing stuff. And all in the trumped-up cause of ‘feeding the world’ or whatever. Thing is, it’s a lie, and the crops don’t do what the Industry claims.
How sad. The Plant Gardens Everywhere folks aren’t entirely realistic, but imagine how many kids in this country have never watched a seed grow, then mebbe eaten what grew…, much less actual *soil*. So, it’s a good idea.
Ooops; took to long. I’ll be back aitchD; need some rest.
Here in Marin County CA, we have one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the country. I wonder how much GMO product we consume here as compared to other parts of the country. I suspect it’s less than elswhere, but it’s an interesting question.
It’s about time we start asking whether it is worthwhile to produce more food but food that is less nutritious and cancinogenic than to move back into old farming methods. Is the Green Revolution a good thing? No snark or irony intended…I really wonder. I’d rather eat GMO food than starve, but why is that a choice for so many? Just sayin’
Thanks for putting this on myFDL Wendy. Although this kind of story probably won’t resonate in the corporate media channels like the bullshit Stanford “study,” it will in most people’s minds IF they hear about it.
I haven’t been around FDL a lot to comment lately, work is entering a crunch phase. When I do visit though, I look for your stuff. It’s always a jewel.
Rec’d
Scarey stuff, wendydavis!
Berman thinks that we have to get rid of capitalism (rapacious, profit centered, corporation personhood aggrandizing capitalism) in order to stop this death dealing GMO feed stock. Stopping Climate change means we grow our own food and stop buying fossil fuel created foods as well.
Thanks for reading through those report to get to the details.
Rachel Carson grew up in Springdale, PA, home to a huge coal-fire plant along the Allegheny River. The plant’s towering smokestack had alternating black and white bands, so it looked something like a perverse barber’s pole. It was quite a landmark, though, about as tall as the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, some 15 miles east. She went to college at Chatham College, a woman’s liberal arts college located in a park-like oasis that included homes where families named Mellon and Hillman lived. A few short miles farther east was the Frick estate, across the street from where Annie Dillard grew up.
I grew up next to the parks where Rachel Carson walked, where I walked and wandered along the streams in the hollows that were always dark under the masses of tree canopies. Maybe I saw her, an older but young woman. Maybe I also saw Annie — we’re the same age.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was responsible for our enlightened society’s banning of DDT. It gave the lay reader a lens through which the environment and its ecosystem could be seen more clearly and closer.
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek (1974) was like a modern woman’s version of Thoreau’s Walden from a century earlier.
Those books won the highest literary awards for their authors. But apparently their ability to raise awareness and alter consciousness was a threat to ‘progress’ and earning power, and by the end of the 1980′s they had been cast away and mocked, lumped together — by glib schmucks who had radio talk shows or newspaper columns — with ‘tree huggers’, ‘feminazis’, and ‘pseudo-intellectuals’.
Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet For A Small Planet (1971) didn’t win any awards, but whoever hasn’t read it is very much deprived of some of the most important knowledge there is.
Diet for a Small Planet, yes!
It’s not that simple. Many food producers use huge batches of already prepared “stuff” that they buy from suppliers. For instance, corn syrup in this country, especially high fructose corn syrup, is all Gm. It could some six months down the road before the suppliers would even have any non-Gm corn syrup to offer!
Silly, that’s the link I put above. I’m more of an omnivore, but it’s not the reason I can’t donate. ;o) Really, I hesitated to put a link in, not knowing how much of the $ gets to the fight. You must have some faith in Ronnie; I go to other sites, but who knows? These posts are by way of in-kind contributions, see?
And my stars; my shorthand ‘as goes California, tra la la…’ was intended to pass, lol. But I’ve read too, that the large food market there is positively able to be the springboard that changes the issue, at least gets it further along.
How do you unwind the spliced DNA strands? New job description?
May I echo all yr comments to Wendy. She does cover so many of the important stories.
Big happy rec. (Though it is an unhappy topic.)
So can we finally stop calling people conspiracy theorists if they challenge establishmentarian ‘conventional wisdom’ (groupthink)?
It is a good question, snapdragon, but as there are so many causal factors involved in any cancers, as there are environmental toxins, it would be hard to establish much more than a correlation.
It seems ever more clear that the green revolution and monoculture/pesticide/herbicide dependence is killing us, and the planet (soil, water), and the dependence on hydrocarbons has been part of the plan, imo.
Green sustainability is also a dodge, and if I have time I’ll go score a post about it. In my reading this morning, I did whiz by, not understanding the science) some techniques to do what I thought Borlaug had initially done: selective plant breeding. Wish now I’d paid more attention, but I was on a tear. It might even be in one of the links, but I have another ten on my word.doc.
Seriously, though, boatloads of people, most especially the Ingigenous, who took the great declarations to the alternate G20+1, all say going back to the old ways, organic, permaculture, rotated crops and cover crops…is the way to go. Here’s a page of youtubes to explore. Global Permaculture week started on the 17th.
I think Kary Mullis invented a process that might do that. He’s maybe the only acid-dropping hippie who won a Nobel in chemistry. ;o)
Welcome, hotdog, and it’s seriously great to see you. Hope ‘crunch time’ means something good; get in touch when you can, and meanwhile, love to you and your family.
*That* link to the Stanford study’s funding I did keep, but left out in the name of…something like simplicity. ;o)
It is, and putting the genie back in the bottle looks nigh onto impossible, save for the goofy-sounding, but mebbe possible suggestions I made. The Berman piece looks interesting, and I must say that the more of these things I delve into, it looks like reigning in capitalism at this point would be a tall order.
Working people, and people who see with the land as a Sacred Trust to be used with sustainable care and kindness, say *the Indigenous* again, see capitalism and Neoliberalism as the enemies to that. Workers see their labor being used without any fair compensation or fairness, and see cooperative ventures increasingly attractive. The global Occupy revolution sure opened the discussion here, eh? ;o)
Gotta take a break for a bit; I haven’t even cross-posted this at Home yet. Gettin’ old, slow, and in the way, I guess. ;o)
The NYT article you linked is a hoot. Like the reporter knows science. Right. Like the gossip about the studies comes from people who know science. Also right.
Two issues leaped out from between the lines. First is the IP (intellectual property) problem. Many economies (Europe, Asia, and others) refuse to import US GMO crap, like they refused to buy our mad cows a decade ago. Crop trading issues have stalled the Doha Round negotiations, and the (secret — oooo) TPP negotiations also hinge on IP issues including crops, pharmaceuticals, and digital stuff.
More important is the science and our inability to comprehend any of it. Everyone has to take someone else’s word for everything.
When Reagan’s bastids got Congress to defund the FDA and the USDA, while maintaining the rules for approval of food and drugs, it was left to ‘industry’ to manage all the R&D and conduct the required testing and studies.
We’ve learned the hard and sad way that many drugs and foodstuffs that were approved were subsequently pulled and banned. The science was biased in many of those instances. But even if the science isn’t biased, it’s almost impossible to conduct follow-up studies and tests for replication because only the industry can afford it.
Medical and Agricultural peer-reviewed journals publish what are essentially extended abstracts of the original studies and tests. Doctors and farmers read them, but they don’t have access to the original data, and even if they had access, they either don’t have the time to analyze it or the scientific training and tools.
So it’s eat shit or die. (That’s a fair paraphrase of what a former USDA regulator said.)
So kind of you, elisemattu. Re: the time lag necessary, usually there are built in timetables to enable industry changes, aren’t there? I really haven’t read Prop 57, but that would be my guess.
Only slightly off-topic, the Colorado marijuana legalization amendment provides for farming of industrial hemp, which excites the hell out of me. You likely know the history of Randolph Hearst, plastic, and Reefer Madness and all his yellow journalism to get MJ made illegal… ;o)
But Mr. wd and I were daydreamin’ yesterday about putting a few acres into hemp (not that we know how it’s even harvested, bailed, rolled, whatever). But that industry could be seriously healthy as sustainable in so many directions, if it were done right.
Can’t resist posting this relevant lolcat:
http://cheezburger.com/6599074048
Here’s more on Chassy and Trewavas; the bit about ‘Greenpeace Libel’ is kinda fun.
Great points that so much of this boils down to IP issues, not a way I traditionally think of things. Good you’re so in touch with Doha and the WTO, too, my friend. So many bring such good stuff to threads, eh? ;o)
What FDA? The one Obomba’s usin’ to fast track all the new meds that haven’t had adequate trials, or have results fudged?
‘Only the industry can afford it’ needs some major changing, doesn’t it?
Yikers!
Glad ya couldn’t resist, ysd. That’s sick!
;oP
funny, and also, true.
Okay, Stop It, lol!
“Since winning the Nobel Prize, Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for promoting ideas in areas in which he has no expertise.[5] He has promoted AIDS denialism, climate change denial, and his belief in astrology.”
Funniest Wiki entry I’ve read so far. ;o)
Uh…yes, Imka. My motto is: ‘Even a stopped conspiracy theorist right twice a week’. Er something. ;o)
me too.
Good article by Berman. But. The supposed Steinbeck quote:
Which, according to Wikiquotes, is likely an incorrect quote of:
“Temporarily embarrassed capitalist” is an entirely different thing, n’estce pas? Those so-called “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” are largely a useful fantasy, an American Dream, shall we say. Those embarrassed capitalists are more chagrined now and Morris may only be too proud of his prophecy.
What fury it must arouse!
It is us they dare plan
To return to the old slavery!
To arms, citizens…
Gosh, mafr.
Couldn’t decide between two of the many great Canadian musician/poets; so I’ll give you both of them. Enjoy.
Ah, day-dreaming. I’m listening to Aretha singin it in my mind — you don’t want a link for it. ;o)
And Dupont.
When you sew outfits for the scarecrows, make ‘em wear bankers suits and red neckties.
and also
“Today, the magazine Consumer Reports released a report on independent laboratory tests that found inorganic arsenic – a known carcinogen – in some 200 rice products purchased in grocery stores across the United States. The admitted point was to pressure the U.S. Food and Drug Administration into setting a safety standard for arsenic in the American food supply, something the FDA has been embarrassingly reluctant to do.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/arsenic-and-rice-yes-again/
Well, holy hell, HiDef. That’s loooong; only made it a third of the way thru before I slid the slidey bar down to check. ;o)
But that IS a whole new angle to consider. Like I said about Stopped Conspiracy Theorists above… ;o)
Scarecrows wearing banker clothes, check. Aretha??? I have looked everywhere for a copy of my first Aretha, record, ‘Aretha Arrives’. Sublime soul from the First Lady of Soul.
Dear God,
If I start believing in you, can I grow up to be Aretha?
wendydavis
Another doozie of a dam’ nashun by wendydavis. Rec’d
Ye ‘no, its gettin’ purty dam’ bad when a man can’t eat cornbread or drink his moonshine anymore. Whats the world comin to? ;^)
Its getting harder to find anything we do that capitalism can’t screw up.
“Sure, you first” (scroll down to “Final years and death”).
Notice the Mullis wiki doesn’t say anything about the astrology except that he believes in it, which isn’t what Mullis wrote. He said he noticed a correlation that was much greater than random chance could explain (after he conducted some double-blind but informal experiments). He said there’s enough to it that warrants serious study and compared it with the funding for sociology and psychology. Oh, he and I are the same signs. ;o)
I’d love to hear Mullis debate Richard Dawkins, the renowned astrology denier. Dawkins would win, of course, cuz his British accent is more persuasive than Mullis’s surferese.
Shit, hermit; it’s rainin’ capitalist flyin’ monkeys now; who’ll stop the rain? WE WILL, cuz it’s all that’s left, except…you know; the other thing.
We call out what’s wrong, then dream the fixes, yes? Meanwhile, drink yer moonshine, after all, somethin’s gonna kill ya. ;o)
There’s no explaining or accounting for Aretha’s sublime gifts and genius. Cigarette smoking never seemed to affect that voice. Maybe she avoided dairy products?
Thanks for bringin’ the whole quote, comrade dear. It seems to be a long-standing theme. I dunno, I hope this time the revolution will be pretty different, but then I do believe that the Great Awakening is just around the corner. A further caveat is: because I also *have to believe it*.
thanks a lot , beautiful tunes….and here’s something back, that you might already know, Karen Dalton, Summerville Colorado, 1970, Blues jumped the Rabbit,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oRJyffGdIY
Whooosh, mafr; how can I not be in love with Karen Dalton? She sent me on a blues journey. Thank you, thank you; but no, I’d never heard her until now. My stars.
‘Blues jumped the rabbit’ fits today’s, and yesterday’s Rabbit (W)Hole themes.
Blessed are we that there are so many hidden poet/musicians to console us, speak to our hearts.
Updated to say: Mr. wd just came upstairs, and said he’d thought it was me singing (I haven’t any vestige of falsetto, though), and when I mentioned her one (D or G?) string bein’ out of tune, he reckoned it was my new strings goin’ off, which furthered his belief. ;o)
Thank you again, darlin’.
Good on Consumer Reports, and good on Blum. Standard; what a novel concept. Remember the ever-diminishing ‘safe levels’ of RADS? (Is that the measurement I mean?)
Arsenic and Old Rice; Arsenic and Golden Rice (TM Monsanto, with added Vitamin A!)
yes, I know what you mean, she was an Indian from Oklahoma, who played with Dylan Bleeker and Mcdougall, she is much soul, sadness and feeling.
thanks again wendydavis, your writing style is really something good.
I meant to say, down by Bleeker and McDougal in New York City.
So yer one o’ those Jerry Douglas referred to when he was asked what it’s like playing with Alison Krauss: “You know that note only a dog can hear? Alison can hear it, and she lets you know.”
All seriousness aside, that Karen Dalton recording is old. The entire playing sounded off pitch, maybe a tad ‘slow’. There’s no telling of its provenance and its subsequent dupes, if the tape had stretched, or the recording(s) had wow and flutter.
Does yer RealPlayer have speed (pitch) controls?
You prolly know the provenance of Strawberry Fields Forever as well as John’s help inventing flanging some years before.
brimming over, mafr.
Never knew that Douglas quote; funny, though. Ah, mebbe so, but it’s hard to hear yer own guitar, which is why I kinda liked having a small monitor to listen to. ;o)
Nope, no adjustments on my RealPlayer. Dinnae understand the link info, really, but…I will say, that on Karen’s video, the stretch, if t’were one, actually added to the value of it somehow. (And no, I won’t give the ‘perfection is the enemy…tra la la’. ;o)
My favorite Strawberry Fields has gotta be Cyndi, though.
Thanks for mentioning how the FDA never got around to having a safety standard for ARSENIC.
This pretty much sums up the way US regulatory agencies work – they don’t. In fact, way back in late seventies, early eighties, the EPA was about to fire the young researcher whose studies had proven that little kids ingesting the lead in paint were destroying their IQ’s. Only the MacArthur Foundation gave this researcher one of their MacArthur Foundation awards, so The EPA had to cut up his pink slip and keep him at the agency!
Heart-felt and recommended.
Thanks Wendy,
I had taken my tiny farm land holding out of corn and GMO use four years ago. The surrounding large holdings are all using round-up ready crops. I am on the exact division of two watersheds that team up to supply all the drinking water for the county seat about 5 miles south of me. Attempting to go organic is almost out of the question as far as required setbacks from other farmers and drift and likely more difficult contentions with nearby super weeds.
Informal (non-judgmental) conversations with local farmers gets a nervous laugh and semi-apologetic tones of, “Oh that stuff isn’t so bad.” There are several elected county board supervisors (who are not traditional and historical farming community family members) with whom I am attempting to convince to get up the courage to introduce a county-wide ban on round-up and GMO crops.
There is a seemingly huge lack of imagination for any agricultural alternatives, brought on, I think, in part, by brain damage already affecting local populations. I’m only being a little facetious with that last statement,(as a child, every able-bodied 7-10 yr-old I knew was commandeered and out hand-picking arsenic sprayed cherries to get the crop in within two weeks) but aside from profit motive or the need to now pay rent to farm land that used to be in a small family holding, I am hard pressed to figure out anyone’s resistance to the idea. On a nearby literal island in the big lake small operators have begun producing certified organic grains for specialty beers and other distilled spirits. That those premium grain prices haven’t been incentives for more adaptation or more creativity is beyond me.
Carrying on though, grateful for the forum here to bounce my own thoughts out to others.
My guess is that yours is a not uncommon dilemma, nonquixote. Given the supervisors you’re trying to influence, you indicate that given they *aren’t* traditional farmers with a certain mindset, they’d be more likely to listen to science, even highly probative, but not absolutely conclusive in terms of ‘human exposure and ingestion’ over time. I admit I wasn’t able to translate the data on the Bt and other corn, so I left it alone, as others seemed to).
You might consider printing the eleven pages of the Scribd version of the report for educational purposes. Of course, given that mainstream media will, and have been, blasting back at the warnings, anyone can quote the NYT, for instance, with relish. ;o)
For the farmers around you, *if* as you say, they seem embarrassed, it may be partially because they know the GM crops and Roundup are toxic, but aren’t willing to change, or find that their yields improved enough that they don’t want to, no matter the risks.
But in so many cases all over the world, Monsanto’s claims just didn’t bear out past the first year or two, especially in cotton (the scandal of thousands of farmers killing themselves when their crops failed, and their debts were insurmountable). I’m trying to remember if the story is in the previous post I linked to above, but one county extension agency in…Kansas, Iowa, (?) was issuing alerts that as drought weakened Bt corn fell over, the roots were infested with…corn borers (argh).
My point being, that as info comes out, it helps, but isn’t necessarily going to make it through to adherents of the Roundup-Ready or even 2,4-d ready crops and chemicals. A harsh truth seems to be that facts can actually cause people who believe wrong things, to become more dedicated to keeping their wrong opinions. The main thing that seems to be able to jar a reset for folks like that is a slam right between the eyes, which, I’d think this data and the photos *might* provide.
(I just deleted a bit that I was wondering about the water issue, it was sincerely ungelled thinking; later if it gels, okay?) ;o)
Anyway, it’s cognitive dissonance that you’re seeing, at least among those who *can* still think a bit rationally.
This place and the people did begin dealing with the peculiar lead-arsenic orchard spray problem and resulting contaminated ground water in our highly singular agricultural micro-climate about 50 years ago, with the banning of the sale and use of those chemical products (and the institution of mechanical harvesting practices). I don’t know if there has been a recent follow up study on residual levels of toxicity and I have not even bothered to follow what choice chemicals are currently being utilized in the orchard mix presently. Something I suppose I should look into as I’ve pretty much chosen to stay here.
How you do it as far as continually putting these diaries together is a mystery, but I appreciate the reminders and the alerts and your work.
There is a study done in Mexico two groups of children, same in every way except one exposed to pesticides, and one not exposed.
“One of Dr. Guilletteâs findings stood out hauntingly above the others; the ability to draw a person (see figures below). This is a pediatrician’s method to measure a child’s development of perceptual and motor abilities. The foothills children at ages 4 and 5 could draw a complete person. Among the exposed children, most 4-year-olds just scribbled, and the 5-year-olds could draw a head and a line or a circle and a line. She also noted evidence that the valley children were getting sick more often
There were also differences in behavior. The foothill children were observed to be busy with group play, whereas the valley children were more apt to play alone.”
reproductions of the drawings, and more info
http://www.chemicalbodyburden.org/hb_cs_mexico.htm
Glad you told the arsenic history since it was about to be my next question. It helps the next educational experience, clearly.
I was wondering about state water contamination guidelines, and if they’re ever more stringent than federal guidelines, or if, indeed, there are *any* guidelines on glyphosphate. I got depressd early this morning poking around for federal guidelines on radiation exposure timelines, and saw that in 2010 the Public Employees Environmental (R-something) group were issuing alerts that the EPA was about to *raise* the exposure bar to levels that would be 1000 times higher in several areas (dunno enough to know even what to call the different things like cesium, radioactive iodine, etc.) But I couldn’t discover whether or not they did make the changes… (yes, prolly)
Anyhoo, I do wonder if having some coalition of people to ask for banning GMOs wouldn’t be more helpful, and that could work toward gathering data and educating the local power structure and farmers. Boulder county had a group that managed to get the supervisors to ban GM crops on the land the *county* owns. A small step, but a beginning.
It *would be* interesting to know what’s being used, and I reckon the county extension agent might know. Wow; a mechanical cherry picker. I never thought of one.
Um. As far as posting diaries, I happen to have the time since some injuries forced me into very early retirement, and the need to stay close to home. So…it’s something I can do that I enjoy and reckon can be helpful. Also, FDL kindly allows me (and others) to post here, thus allowing so many others to add their bits to posts, generally in aid of focusing on what IS, and often to moving to What’s Possible and Preferable.
Some brain injury caused me to start writing and researching a number of years ago, and after a bit of print stuff for our local free press, I gravitated toward blogging once we were finally able to get high speed internet. Lol, someone at my Home site not too long ago reminded people that my blogs early on at TPM were…kinda crappy. Prolly true. ;o)
But Mr. wd poked back into the house to say the bear that’s been visiting our hill this week left a large calling card not far from the house, so…I’m heading out to see it, and shoot a photo. (No, I won’t use bear scat for this year’s Christmas card…)
The bankers wanted the herbicide names kept secret? Oy.
I did have to google POPs, but thanks for bringing the term to my attention. Hard reading at both links, really.
Remember that the US dumped all its DDT on Mexico, then NAFTA allowed the produce laced with DDT…back in. Brilliant.
Some of the studies on glyphosphates, 2,4-D, have indicated endocrine system screwups, as did the French report, but I don’t really understand the science behind it. And commercial farming products are far stronger than the dilute stuff people use on their lawns.
It’s hard knowing that our government only pretends to want to keep us safe from toxins. There’s evidence that a large floating barge of waste from Daichi is floating toward the west coast, and that fish and seaweed are carrying radioactivity of some sort. Wonder what will happen to whistleblowing scientists who announce that?
I had been under the mistaken assumption that New Zealand had been smart enough not to be caught in the GM-Monsanto net – wrong! This from Hayden Donnell at the New Zealand Herald:
***
Green Party genetic engineering spokesman Steffan Browning said the GM maize [corn]used in the study had been approved for sale in New Zealand a decade ago.
It could be causing increased cancers and other health issues among New Zealanders, he said.
“There are now huge concerns over the safety of this corn. Eating this corn has now been proven to cause the growth of tumours, so why was it approved a decade ago without the necessary evidence that it was safe to eat?”
Mr Browning said 70 GM corns available in New Zealand were approved for sale on the back of a 90-day health trial.
The two year study had proved those trials were not long enough, he said…
***
Of course, the Herald did its best to disparage the study, saying not enough rats, not long enough study, the technicians didn’t button their labcoats…[sorry, I made that one up.]
Ninety day health trial? [those were my bolds, by the way].
Since GM was in its infancy I have weeded out corn syrup and corn products from my diet just by scrupulous label reading – and chucked stuff when I missed it. Not to say my strategy works in this environment, but every little bit helps, and it is possible to live without corn. Only get organic potatoes also, after reading Michael Pollan.
Very much recommended. And sad my native land is going down the tubes.
Santa Fe Community College has an ongoing biodiversity program that really raises my happiness hopes – ‘Living on the Edge’ is a great radio program with Zubi Wilson and David Bacon every Thursday night from the college that touts various activities such as permaculture, algie farms and the like. The important thing is to get the soil right. I’m working on it. The amazing thing we learn in our desert areas is that the seeds are still there, and the land can be restored. We can win this.
They’ll have it if we don’t eat what they’re schlepping. Boycott – it works.
Yes, mechanical harvesting, fabric stretched in a large sloped frame, gravity feeding to an attached conveyer is hydraulically wrapped around the trunk below the lowest branches. Another mechanical arm grabs the trunk and violently vibrates the tree. Twenty seconds, two quick shakes and move on down the row of trees.
We children at the time would be literally black with drying cherry juice stains, fingertips to cheeks and shoulders by 7:00 am, and it is easy to recall the whitish residue that easily rubbed off of the cherries with any and every touch of the fruit. We welcomed 9:00 am as we would start to dry off from being soaked in the morning dew as if we had just been swimming. But that was our county fair or new school clothes money and our introduction to work.
In and out today. Thanks for the conversation and further information and suggestions.
There is a regional USDA sponsored project not too terribly far away that is preserving and propagating a genetic seed bank of over 5000 varieties of potatoes, from around the world, in conjunction with state university facilities, students and personnel. I found out that they are using some commercially available pesticide controls (did not think at the time to inquire about herbicides in field preparations) and now I need to inquire about what is being used and what potential adverse affects this might have on the genetic pool or purity. This type of science is not my strong suit, to put it mildly, but I am not adverse to asking questions that might appear stupid.
Thanks for the reminder about Pollan.
If it’s any comfort, noquixote, my frail dairyfarming aunt was prescribed arsenic early on as medication for one of her chronic ailments – I remember her laughing about it and us kids suitably impressed. She died at the age of 98, all faculties present and accounted for. (Not that I would recommend it.)
“…The Plant Gardens Everywhere folks aren’t entirely realistic…”
Small caveat here, wendydavis, and I know we’ve had hurrible seasons due to global warming and all, but from metamars’ conversations on the Green Party, I linked earlier to a Cheri Honkala interview at counterpunch.org – wooh, too long an introduction, but this stuck with me:
“…When we marched from New Orleans all the way to Detroit for the US Social Forum in 2010 we were amazed that there was a community garden in every poor neighborhood that we passed through. More and more, that’s how people are feeding themselves…”
Whee, New Orleans to Detroit they marched – that’s some hike! But the point is, poor folks are getting the point.
And, people, start with greens – you can do them right now, chard and kale, in containers started outside before it freezes. They don’t take much sun. Got any old windows? Lean those against a wall that gets winter sun, plant behind that. And/or take the little tubs inside for the winter – that’s what I do. Mine do better from now till spring protected behind glass and inside than they do out in the garden here where it is hot and dry in summer. They won’t be giant (ugly) fronds, but just nice tender leafies to pick off and chop into an omelet – delicious!
(Personally I use canary fertilizings, works for me.)
Sounds like it might be a fine preservative, so to speak. :)
As we banned the arsenic sprays, exported the DDT, removed the lead from gasoline and paint, have tried to ban public cigarette smoking and a few other things, I view this agriculturally related health issue as a continuation of a process that will likely need continued attention like “clean” coal, fracking fluid, “safety,” and whatever new scheme which will certainly come down the pike for the “benefit,” of humanity.
Huh; one source I’d read said that the Kiwis *had* banned GMO crops. Guess not, but this will interest you (from a different site), as NZ is highlighted and a politician is smacked heartily.
I did love the ‘didn’t button their lab coats’. I haven’t checked, but I’ll be the Industry hacks are out in force this morning. By last night, the internet was on fire about the report, mainly in shocked horror.
I’ve been soooo disappointed that My.fdl denizen AmericanTerraFormer has vanished since…gads, last I saw him was during a disturbing exchange on my Depleted Uranium effects on Iraqi children. I’d been encouraging him to post on permaculture, which was at the center of his life on an island off the coast of either Washington or Oregon.
I do wonder if the ads that will blast CA voters will try to discredit the study? Maybe their polling would need to first show that enough voters have been made aware of it.
I meant that it’s not a realistic answer to seriously feeding ourselves, was all. Same with the Locavore movement: it skips right past areas that have less than 120-day growing seasons, for instance.
In the early 1990′s or late 1980′s C-SPAN showed a lecture that described and analyzed infant mortality and morbidity rates in the Southern California area, among the major ethnic groups including European, Hispanic, Asian, and African. (I watched it but I haven’t made a search for links to the C-SPAN program or to the studies referred to.)
The studies and results would be pre-GMO, and would also include populations of farm workers along with every socio-economic group from urban, suburban, and rural populations. The only group that were not included would be where no hospital or medical records were available.
Hispanic mothers had babies that survived the first year much more than any other group. Also their babies had higher weights at birth. I could be mistaken about my recollection for the highest mortality and lowest birth weight, yet I believe the European group was worst.
The presenter suggested that nutrition played a significant role, but he didn’t elaborate, and I doubt the mothers were interviewed about their eating regimens.
I’ll guess that the Hispanic mothers in large part tended to be poor relative to the other groups in the region, and their diets included mainly corn, beans, and rice (possibly grown in Mexico).
A decade earlier we learned that Nestle’s dry infant formula, which had not been approved for US or European consumption, being unfit for humans, was marketed to West African populations without instructing mothers how to make the water safe, though an intensive marketing campaign convinced them to prefer the formula to breast feeding. The contaminated and lethal water killed untold infants.
Hard to picture that a couple shakes (eep) would cause the cherries to fall, especially with the stems still on. Here they ripen at different times, and the unripe ones don’t pull off easily (but the birds get them all, as we can’t put nets over them).
Thanks for explaining it, though. You live on Lake Michigan, yes?
Fourth indigenous crop is squash (or a relative). Lot of nutrients the others lack, and peppers might be a fifth.
G’mornin’, Lazycakes. ;o)
Latest machine iterations don’t require as many people for the harvest. You might want to mute the music. Near Lake Michigan, yes.
Lol; when you said I might want to mute the music, I was kinda blasting Springstein’s Thunder Road, and did a double-take (as though I should turn my speakers down, meaning…you could hear the music). Okay, we can all agree I’m losing it; I swear I even have blogging dreams sometimes; kinda crossed the line, no? ;o)
Thanks for the video. I had tried finding images of the machines, but failed early, and bailed. It does look like it leaves the stem on the tree, which is great for their purposes, but the ones we get here from up the Western Slope a couple hundred miles still have stems…always. Wonder if that means they’re picked by hand.
Guess I could google it. ;o)
One of the little known things about RoundUp itself is that Monsanto lied through their pearly whites to get the EPA to allow it to be licensed. The stuff contained formaldehyde to begin with, but Monsanto said it was 41% glyphosate, 15% polyoxyethalineamine and the rest h20. This is significant- the state of California considers formaldehyde such a baddie that it would never let a product with large amounts of formaldehyde in it to be bought over the counter by the casual consumer (California’s Prop 65 lists formaldehyde as a high level problem. It is considered to be toxic and carcinogenic.)
Anyone with a background in organic chemistry should be able to consider this. Without an aldehyde, RoundUp’s glyphosate would be in cake form. I believe that over the last twenty years or so, Monsanto has swapped out the formaldehyde for a different aldehyde. But they still lie to the EPA about it!
I have seen some ads pro-Monsanto, anti-labeling on the internet. They show two platters of brightly colored, nutritious looking food. One is Gm; the other isn’t. The implication being that since these two plates of food look identical, they are identical.
The text accompanying the advertisement indicates that it’s really silly to make food more expensive by requiring labeling when there just ain’t any difference at all.
In a just and sane world, that study would have been newspaper headlines for six months. But alas, that study is noted only by the anti pesticide crowd, and now the anti Gm crowd.
So sad to think about how people are having their brains altered, by the insidious, ubiquitous pesticides. And now by the Gm foods.