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Note From the Editor
We've just teamed up with the folks at GMWatch.org to make our newsletter more in-depth and more frequent. This will be a great help to me personally, as I've been struggling to get to the writing while on my nearly non-stop 5 month travel schedule this year. My latest country was Vietnam, which is considering the commercialization of GM crops. They are still suffering from birth defects by Monsanto's Agent Orange poisoning. It would be a cruel fate for them to take on yet more suffering from Monsanto's GM crops and chemicals, as the first article in today's newsletter highlights.
Safe eating,
Jeffrey
Industry and regulators covered up Roundup/birth defect link for decades
The pesticide industry knew from its own studies (including one by Monsanto) as long ago as the 1980s—and EU regulators knew since the 1990s—that the best-selling herbicide Roundup causes birth defects. A new report by international scientists now exposes the 30-year cover-up, including efforts as recent as last year by the German government's consumer protection office to rebut a 2010 study showing Roundup causes birth defects in frogs and chickens at tiny doses. The study was prompted by reports of high rates of birth defects and cancers in areas of South America growing GM Roundup Ready soy, which is sprayed with high doses of the herbicide. Read a lengthy article on this in the Huffington Post, a summary in The Ecologist, or the full report "Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?" Monsanto responded to the report, but the report's authors pick apart the company's statements, showing how they are unsupported and unscientific.
USDA pilot program allows companies to do their own environmental assessments.
The FDA already allows biotech companies to decide if their own crops are safe—the companies conduct whatever studies they want. Now the USDA announced a two-year pilot plan to also allow the companies to write their own environmental assessment of a GM crop or pay contractors to do so. A close look at their track record, however, reveals how companies like Monsanto design their research to avoid finding problems. They've got bad science down to a science! Watch this new 2-minute video, Rigged Research, by Jeffrey Smith and Alex Bogusky, exposing the biotech industry's sleight-of-hand. Watch it now.
GM goats neither male nor female
The New Zealand government's GM animal research program has unintentionally produced a herd of goats that are neither girls nor boys, but transgender, or "goys" as the researchers dubbed them. The scientists now intend to induce these "females in sterile male bodies" to produce milk to see whether it contains the intended protein.
This is just the latest in unexpected and sometimes cruel outcomes of this program, which has also produced animals with disabilities including arthritis, respiratory distress, deformities, and ruptured ovaries. Read more.
This New Zealand program has come under fire for sloppy biosafety practices, with waste matter from animal carcasses being spread over fields. The program's researchers have also been accused of manipulating biosafety data. For example, after burying GM animals, they claimed that the soil showed no signs of gene transfer from the carcasses. But they had taken soil samples from the top of the pits, far from where the animals were buried.
GM farm project in South Africa ends in ruin for poor farmers
A GM soy and corn farming project in South Africa ended in disaster for poor farmers. They were introduced to packages of hybrid and GM seeds, and pesticides and fertilizers produced by private companies that were linked to the government-supported scheme. A study on the project raised concerns about: Animal feeding schemes with "alarming results," including damage to internal organs; problems with pests and herbicide-resistant weeds; GM-contaminated crops; loss of control over local food systems; and a deepening of poverty as farmers struggle to survive. Read more.
This is not the first time that South African farmers have suffered at the hands of the GM industry. The failed GM Bt cotton experiment in Makhatini Flats is documented here.
And in 2009 farmers suffered million dollar losses when Monsanto's GM corn failed.
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