gmonsnto

GMOnsanto815.txt

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/new-monsanto-spray-kills-bugs-by-messing-with-their-genes/

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lost 6/17?  innis?

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http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2015/06/monsantos-latest-bid-could-test-its-lobbying-might

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http://ecowatch.com/2015/03/26/monsanto-demands-who-retract-report/

...

This week, Monsanto is demanding the WHO retract the report, essentially repudiating years of research by multiple scientists. Monsanto is claiming the report was biased and that glyphosate products like Roundup are safe when the directions are followed. The company says that the WHO report contradicts regulatory findings, which can, of course, be influenced by politics and lobbying. So far, WHO has not responded.

“We question the quality of the assessment,” Philip Miller, Monsanto vice president of global regulatory affairs, told Reuters. “The WHO has something to explain.”

Miller claimed that the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was provided by Monsanto with information on glyphosate’s safety, and that it ignored Monsanto’s input.

That response indicates a level of panic on Monsanto’s part because the report could hit it where it hurts—its profits. Its Roundup, formulated to be used on GMO or “Roundup Ready” crops engineered to be resistant to it, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. Originally introduced in the early ’70s to control weeds, it took off when the planting of GMO crops skyrocketed in the last 15 years. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that glyphosate use in the U.S. increased from about 20 million pounds in 1992 to 110 million pounds in 2002 to more than 280 million pounds in 2012.

:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;display:block;max-width:650px;max-height:399px"):}:The use of glyphosate weed killers has exploded since the introduction of GMOs engineered to be resistant to it. Image credit: USGS

What Monsanto is demanding is the equivalent of declaring a person innocent because there is insufficient evidence to prove his guilt. The WHO report did not claim definitely the glyphosate causes cancer, but rather that multiple scientific studies have suggested a link.

“For the herbicide glyphosate, there was limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” the study said. “The evidence in humans is from studies of exposures, mostly agricultural, in the U.S., Canada and Sweden published since 2001. In addition, there is convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals. Glyphosate also caused DNA and chromosomal damage in human cells. One study in community residents reported increases in blood markers of chromosomal damage after glyphosate formulations were sprayed nearby.”

It points out that “limited” does not mean “nonexistent” as Monsanto wants it to declare. When a substance is categorized as “probably” carcinogenic to humans, it says “there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals. Limited evidence means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations could not be ruled out. This category is also used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and strong data on how the agent causes cancer.”

And, as the Reuters article points out, Monsanto says such studies are invalid, but critics say they merit attention. According to Dave Schubert, head of the cellular neurobiology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, “There are a number of independent, published manuscripts that clearly indicate that glyphosate … can promote cancer and tumor growth. It should be banned.”

Several leading public interest organizations agree with Schubert and today urged the Obama administration to “weigh heavily” the WHO’s recent conclusion that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen.” The groups believes that “As a result of WHO’s rigorous and independent review, the link between glyphosate and cancer has now been greatly strengthened.”

In a letter to Gina McCarthy, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, JLI, Consumers Union, Center for Food Safety, Environmental Working Group and Natural Resources Defense Council, among others, called the WHO announcement “extremely timely, as EPA is preparing to issue its preliminary risk assessment of the widely used herbicide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.”

“Consumers deserve to know which foods are made with GMOs considering it’s their dollars that are largely driving the use of this dangerous herbicide,” said Gary Hirshberg, the chairman of the board for the Just Label It campaign. “This new evidence that the main pesticide used on GMO crops is a ‘probable human carcinogen’ is even more reason consumers should have the right to know what’s in their food.”

One proponent of the “glyphosate is absolutely safe” narrative is former environmentalist/current environmental contrarian/sometime Monsanto consultant Dr. Patrick Moore, who was interviewed by filmmaker Paul Moreira for a French TV documentary. He not only insisted “[Roundup] is not dangerous to humans, he also said “You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.” But when Moreira said, “You want to drink some? We have some here,” Moore responded “I’d be happy to … not really, but I know it would’t hurt me,” and walked off the set when Moreira repeated his offer, calling the him an “idiot.”

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Roundup is a highly effective weed-killer that can be used during home garden maintenance, or on a massive soybean field to boost productivity. It's also been called a probable carcinogen. But according to Dr. Patrick Moore, that may not be true because "you can drink a whole quart" of the herbicide "and it won't hurt you."

Moore, an independent scientist not associated with Monsanto, recently joined French cable channel Canal+ as part of an upcoming news documentary. He advocated for the safety of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, after a recent report said the widely used chemical "probably" causes cancer.

The label, bestowed by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, is the second highest risk level for possible cancer-causing agents. The "probable" category can be a bit contentious and asserts that some scientists disagree with the notion a substance causes cancer -- other agents on the WHO's list include sunshine, alcohol and wood dust.

Monsanto has fiercely tried to discredit the assessment. The company has demanded WHO retract the report, saying a growing body of scientific evidence has found glyphosate is safe when used as labeled.

Moore apparently agrees. He went so far to say that humans could even drink the chemical and be absolutely fine, and that people actually try to commit suicide with Roundup, but routinely fail due to its harmlessness.

In the middle of the interview above, a Canal+ journalist offers to go backstage to get his guest a glass of glyphosate to drink on-air, but Moore refuses and then storms off stage.

Patrick Moore: You can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you.

Canal+: You want to drink some, we have some here.

PM: I'd be happy to actually. Not really, but, I know it wouldn't hurt me.

Canal+: If you say so, I have some.

PM: No, no. I'm not stupid. People try to commit suicide with it and fail regularly.

Canal+: No, no. Let's tell the truth.

PM: It's not dangerous to humans. No, it's not.

Canal+: So are you ready to drink a glass of glyphosate?

PM: No, I'm not an idiot.

Despite some reports that say Moore is a lobbyist, Monsanto told The Huffington Post in an emailed statement that he is not and has never been a paid lobbyist or employee of the company.

"Knowledgeable scientists, consumers and our farmer customers may be familiar with and confident in the safety of glyphosate, but their statements don’t make them lobbyists for our company," a spokesperson said. "Dr. Patrick Moore is one of those individuals. He agrees with the science that supports the safety of glyphosate, and is an advocate for technology and innovation. But Dr. Patrick Moore is not and never has been a paid lobbyist for Monsanto."

Moore did not immediately respond to HuffPost's request for comment.

MORE:

RoundupDr Patrick MoorePatrick MooreMonsanto RoundupMonsantoDrink RoundupGlyphosateDrink GlyphosatePatrick Moore GlyphosatePatrick Moore Roundup

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You may have heard that popular scientist Bill Nye has mysteriously revised his outlook on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Several years ago, the children’s show host advocated for the labeling of genetically modified foods, citing concerns about what GMOs could do to ecosystems. But now his position on the controversial technology has flipped. This development is the latest in a trend spearheaded by agribusiness giants to discredit the GMO labeling movement, and it’s especially hard to disassociate his reversal from this PR blitz since it coincided with Nye’s recent trip to Monsanto’s headquarters.

We’ll never know what actually went down during Nye’s visit, as Tom Philpott at *Mother Jones* notes, but we do know that Monsanto has poured millions of dollars into public relation efforts to sell the public on GMOs. Because that’s what you do when you are a corporation with deep coffers and a product that the public is wisely skeptical of.

Does this mean that it’s game over for the GMO labeling movement or that we should trust Monsanto’s word? Of course not. In fact, it means we should be more suspicious than ever.

Companies like Monsanto hope that casting doubt on the GMO labeling debate will cause us to get caught up in the proverbial weeds of the issue. So let’s get something straight: the debate over GMOs isn’t just about GMOs. It’s about the current and future state of our food system—who grows and sells our food, how it’s marketed, and what technologies were used to produce it. By selling seeds to farmers, peddling pesticides, forming corporate monopolies and funding academic research on GMOs, agribusiness giants like Monsanto have one goal in mind: controlling the food system. The millions of people calling for labeling of GMO foods have a problem with that. Furthermore, it is disappointing to see such beloved science advocates as Bill Nye and being captured by the industry.

As I outlined in my book *Foodopoly*, Monsanto’s roots in the biotech game date back decades, and they have a long history of subverting public policy. In effect, the company used its relationship with the Reagan Administration to create a weak regulatory process that would help the company bring its products to market quickly and smoothly. A 1985 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling that allowed for plants to be patented further entrenched Monsanto’s power in this area. Since 1999, the fifty largest agricultural and food patent-holding companies and two of the largest biotech and agrochemical trade associations have spent more thanUS$572 million in campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, much of it to create a favorable political context to allow GMOs to proliferate.

Just because the industry has launched a charm offensive in the media when it comes to GMOs doesn’t change the basic facts: GMOs are largely untested, and their long-term effects on our health and our planet are still unknown; they promote the use of dangerous chemicals, and they pose a significant threat to organic agriculture. What’s more, consumers should absolutely get to decide whether the food they are buying carries these unknown risks or supports this system; GMO foods must be labeled.

Corporations and their hired guns love confusing people about the science behind their questionable products to help shape favorable public opinion (in the case of GMOs, asserting there is scientific consensus where none actually exists). But we aren’t buying their spin, nor should you.

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Should McDonald’s & Monsanto Have the Same Rights as People? A Debate on Corporate Personhood

Five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United v. FEC decision striking down the prohibition on corporate expenditures in federal elections. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, with the same right to influence politics as voters. Meanwhile, many corporations including McDonald’s,Monsanto and Peabody Energy have cited the principle of corporate constitutional rights in recent efforts to fight back against new laws. McDonald’s and other franchises are suing the city of Seattle over its new $15-an-hour minimum wage law, arguing it violates its corporate personhood rights. They are basing their case on the 14th Amendment, a constitutional provision written to protect newly freed slaves after the Civil War and ensure equal rights for all people. Monsanto is challenging Vermont’s recently passed GMO-labeling law under the First Amendment, claiming that it forces them to "speak" against their will. We host a debate on the movement to draft a constitutional amendment to overturn the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights with two guests: Ron Fein, legal director at Free Speech for People, and Kent Greenfield,professor of law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/13/should_mcdonalds_monsanto_have_the_same

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/24/colorado-proposition-105-gmo_n_6038812.html

 — Farms and fields dominate Colorado ads opposing a ballot measure to require labels on some foods that have been genetically modified, with farmers telling voters the labels will damage their businesses.

But farmers and agriculture groups are just bit players in the $11 million campaign to defeat Proposition 105. The real money is coming from biotechnology giant Monsanto Co., which has given more than $4.7 million, and food giants like Pepsico and Coca-Cola, which sent a combined $1.9 million to fighting the proposal.

Hormel Foods, Kraft Foods, Kellogg Co. and The Hershey Co. are also outspending farm groups to fight the proposal. Food companies are pouring big money into fighting a similar ballot measure in Oregon, too.

Colorado and Oregon are battlegrounds in a national war over genetically modified organisms, or organisms that have been altered at the molecular or cellular level. So-called GMOs now make up almost the entirety of many staple crops, such as corn and soybeans, which are used in many items on grocery-store shelves.

"We're not saying GMOs are bad. We're saying we want them to be labeled," said Tammi DeVille Merrell, campaign manager for Right To Know Colorado, which has raised less than $500,000 and has no TV or radio ads to promote its campaign.

Short on funds, the campaign is relying on big-name endorsers to take their side.

Chipotle, along with Ben & Jerry's ice cream company, has backed GMO labeling. Former Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich has planned a visit to Colorado next week to talk up the measure.

Labeling opponents in Colorado feel confident they'll be able to defeat the proposal. They've spent just about $3 million on television ads, according to campaign finance data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity.

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CORE and Monsanto

In 2005, CORE ran a pro-genetically modified foods campaign. According to an archived version of CORE's website the pro-GM food campaign was sponsored by ag-food and pesticide giant Monsanto. You can click here to see a screen capture of the CORE site in 2005 where Monsanto is listed as "CORE's corporate partner in the quest for bio-tech information."

According to the Wikipedia entry, Monsanto is by far the leading producer of genetically engineered (GE) seed, holding 70%–100% market share for various crops.

In January 2005, Monsanto's Chairman and CEO, Hugh Grant, chaired CORE's celebratory reception in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. A screen shot of the Monsanto photo is archived here.

Also, in January 2005, CORE organized what it called the "UN World Conference on Biotechnology." The closing address for the conference was made by Gerald Steiner, Monsanto's Executive Vice President.

Roy Innis has penned articles promoting the use of DDT in Africa as a means of saving lives. CORE also opened an office in Uganda andorganized pro-DDT rallies.

In 2004, CORE held an awards ceremony at a World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, where they announced Greenpeace as a recipient of their "Green Power-Black Death" award. At the ceremony Niger Innis stated: “And the winner is--Greenpeace! For leading million-dollar campaigns against energy, pesticides, biotechnology, trade, and economic development that could improve or save millions of lives."

Monsanto's Fake Parade Hits New York

on 17 January 2005.

1.The Fake Parade hits New York

2.The (original) Fake Parade

1.The Fake Parade hits New York

by Jonathan Matthews

Just over 2 years ago I wrote an article called The Fake Parade which was all about how Monsanto and their associates were trying to hide the company's "soapbox behind a black man's face".

The article noted, amongst other things, how in late 1999 the New York Times reported that a street protest against genetic engineering outside an FDA public hearing in Washington DC was disrupted by a group of African-Americans carrying placards such as "Biotech saves children's lives" and "Biotech equals jobs." The Times learned that Monsanto's PR company, Burson-Marsteller, had paid a Baptist Church from a poor neighborhood to bus in these "demonstrators" as part of a wider campaign "to get groups of church members, union workers and the elderly to speak in favor of genetically engineered foods."

Now Monsanto has gone one better and has signed up its very own black advocacy group. If you don't believe me, visit the home page of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and beside images of freedom riders and civil rights activists murdered by the KKK, you'll see the Monsanto logo under the legend CORE's "corporate partner".

http://www.core-online.org

Tonight (17th) Monsanto's Chairman and CEO, Hugh Grant is chairing CORE's celebratory reception in honour of the Martin Luther King National Holiday.

http://www.core-online.org/events/current_mlk.htm

Tomorrow (18th) at CORE's "UN World Conference on Biotechnology" Monsanto's Executive Vice President will make the closing address.

http://www.core-online.org/events/biotech%20seminar.htm

The contributors to the conference, apart from Monsanto, are a mix of rabidly pro-GM scientists and rightwing lobbyists, like Paul Driessen CORE's Senior Policy Advisor, who is part of the Wise Use-founding Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. The aim of Wise Use was to counter the environmental movement with a broad-ranging coalition of interest groups, including industry-funded front groups and 'grassroots groups', often organised by PR consultants on behalf of corporations or trade associations.

http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=248

Julian Morris who is among the contributors to CORE's "UN World Conference on Biotechnology" also features in The Fake Parade. Originally billed as being present was Chengal Reddy who also played a key role in The Fake Parade (see below). His Indian Farmers Federation will be represented.

Someone else who is part of the "UN World Conference" is CORE's Niger Innis. Innis is a protege of black broadcaster Armstrong Williams.Innis stands in for Williams on the TV show America's Black Forum whenever Williams is otherwise engaged.

Williams was recently revealed as having pocketed $240,000 in federal taxpayer money for PR promotion of Bush's educational policy. The journalists who started America's Black Forum , and who now disown it, describe Williams as "the premiere Black political whore in America".

http://www.blackcommentator.com/20_commentary_1.html

http://www.suntimes.com/output/mitchell/cst-nws-mitch16.html

Tomorrow the stand-in and protege of America's "premiere Black political whore" will be standing alongside the Executive Vice President of CORE's "corporate partner" when he rounds up a day spent considering the remarkable contribution that GM can make to helping the world's poor and the evil people who selfishly try and obstruct its global adoption.

http://www.core-online.org/events/biotech%20seminar.htm

THE FAKE PARADE

Under the banner of populist protest, multinational corporations manufacture the poor

By Jonathan Matthews

http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=254

Environment, 3 December 2002

"Carrying his placard the man in front of me was clearly one of the poorest of the poor. His shoes were not only threadbare, they were tattered, merely rags barely being held together."

So begins a graphic description of a demonstration that took place at theEarth Summit in Johannesburg. The protesters were "mainly poor, virtually all black, and mostly women... street traders and farmers" with an unpalatable message. As an article in a South African periodical put it, "Surely this must have been the environmentalists”š worst nightmare. Real poor people marching in the streets and demanding development while opposing the eco-agenda of the Green Left."

And seldom can the views of the poor, in this case a few hundred demonstrators, have been paid so much attention. Articles highlighting the Johannesburg march popped up the world over, in Africa, North America, India, Australia and Israel. In Britain even The Times ran a commentary, under the heading, "I do not need white NGOs to speak for me".

With the summit's passing, the Johannesburg march, far from fading from view, has taken on a still deeper significance. In the November issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, Val Giddings, the President of the Biotech Industry Organization (BIO), argues that the event marked "something new, something very big" that will make us "look back on Johannesburg as something of a watershed event - a turning point." What made the march so pivotal, he said, was that for the very first time, "real, live, developing-world farmers" were "speaking for themselves" and challenging the "empty arguments of the self-appointed individuals who have professed to speak on their behalf."

To help give them a voice, Giddings singles out the statement of one of the marchers,Chengal Reddy, leader of the Indian Farmers Federation. "Traditional organic farming...," Reddy says, "led to mass starvation in India for centuries... Indian farmers need access to new technologies and especially to biotechnologies."

Giddings also notes that the farmers expressed their contempt for the "empty arguments" of many of the Earth Summiteers by honoring them with a "Bullshit Award" made from two varnished piles of cow dung. The award was given, in particular, to the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, for her role in "advancing policies that perpetuate poverty and hunger"

A powerful rebuke, no doubt. But if anyone deserves the cow dung, it is the President of BIO, for almost every element of the spectacle he describes has been carefully contrived and orchestrated. Take, for instance, Chengal Reddy, the "farmer" that Giddings quotes. Reddy is not a poor farmer, nor even the representative of poor farmers. Indeed, there is precious little to suggest he is even well-disposed towards the poor. The "Indian Farmers Federation" that he leads is a lobby of big commercial farmers in Andhra Pradesh.On occasion Reddy has admitted to knowing very little about farming, having never farmed in his life. He is, in reality, a politician and businessman whose family are a prominent right-wing political force in Andhra Pradesh - his father having coined the saying, "There is only one thing Dalits (members of the untouchable caste) are good for, and that is being kicked".

If it seems open to doubt that Reddy was in Johannesburg to help the poor speak for themselves, the identity of the march”šs organizers is also not a source of confidence. Although the Times”š headline said "I do not need white NGOs to speak for me", the media contact on the organizers' press release was "Kendra Okonski", the daughter of a US lumber industrialist who has worked for various right wing anti-regulatory NGOs - all funded and directed, needless to say, by "whites". These include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based "think tank" whose multi-million dollar budget comes from major US corporations, among them BIO member Dow Chemicals. Okonski also runs the website Counterprotest.net, where her specialty is helping right wing lobbyists take to the streets in mimicry of popular protesters.

Given this, it hardly needs saying that Giddings' "Bullshit Award" was far from, as he suggests, the imaginative riposte of impoverished farmers to India's most celebrated environmentalist. It was, in fact, the creation of another right-wing pressure group "the Liberty Institute" based in New Delhi and well known for its fervent support of deregulation, GM crops and Big Tobacco.

The Liberty Institute is part of the same network that organized the rally: the deceptively-named "Sustainable Development Network." In London, the SDN shares offices, along with many of its key personnelËœincluding OkonskiËœwith the International Policy Network, a group whose Washington address just happens to be that of the CEI. The SDN is run by Julian Morris, its ubiquitous director, who also claims the title of Environment and Technology Programme Director for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that has advocated, amongst other interesting ideas, that African countries be sold off to multinational corporations in the interests of "good government".

The involvement of the likes of Morris, Okonski and Reddy doesn't mean, of course, that no "real poor people," were involved in the Johannesburg march. There were indeed poor people there. James MacKinnon, who reported on the summit for the North American magazine Adbusters, witnessed the march first hand and told of seeing many impoverished street traders, who seemed genuinely aggrieved with the authorities for denying them their usual trading places in the streets around the summit. The flier distributed by the march organizers to recruit these people played on this grievance, and presented the march as a chance to demand, "Freedom to trade". The flier made no mention of "biotechnology" or "development", nor any other issue on the "eco-agenda of the Green Left".

For all that, there were some real farmers present as well. Mackinnon says he spotted some wearing anti-environmentalist t-shirts, with slogans like "Stop Global Whining." This aroused his curiousity, since small-scale African farmers are not normally to be found among those jeering the "bogus science" of climate change. Yet here they were, with slogans on placards and T-shirts: "Save the Planet from Sustainable Development", "Say No To Eco-Imperialism", "Greens: Stop Hurting the Poor" and "Biotechnology for Africa". On approaching the protesters, however, Mackinnon discovered that all of the props had been made available to the marchers by the organizers. When he tried to converse with some of the farmers about their pro-GM T-shirts, "They smiled shyly; none of them could speak or read English."

Another irresistible question is how impoverished farmers - according to Giddings, there were farmers on the march from five different countries - afforded the journey to Johannesburg from lands as far away as the Philippines and India. Here, too, there is reason for suspicion. In late 1999 the New York Times reported that a street protest against genetic engineering outside an FDA public hearing in Washington DC was disrupted by a group of African-Americans carrying placards such as "Biotech saves children's lives" and "Biotech equals jobs." The Times learned that Monsanto's PR company, Burson-Marsteller, had paid a Baptist Church from a poor neighborhood to bus in these "demonstrators" as part of a wider campaign "to get groups of church members, union workers and the elderly to speak in favor of genetically engineered foods."

The industry”šs fingerprints are all over Johannesburg as well. Chengal Reddy, the "farmer" that the President of BIO singled out as an example of farmers from the poorer world "speaking for themselves", has for at least a decade featured prominently inMonsanto'spromotional work in India. Other groups represented on the march, including AfricaBio, have also been closely aligned with Monsanto's lobbying for its products. Reddy is known to have been brought to Johannesburg by AfricaBio.

And here lies the real key to the President of BIO's account of the march, and specifically to the attack on Vandana Shiva. Monsanto and BIO want to project an image of GM crop acceptance with a Southern face. That's why Monsanto's Internet homepage used to be adorned with the faces of smiling Asian children. So when an Indian critic of the biotech industry gets featured, as Shiva was recently, on the cover of Time magazine as an environmental hero, the brand is under attack, and has to be protected.

The counterattack takes place via a contrarian lens, one that projects the attackers' vices onto their target. Thus the problem becomes not Monsanto using questionable tactics to push its products onto a wary South, but malevolent agents of the rich world obstructing Monsanto's acceptance in a welcoming Third World. For this reason the press release for the "Bullshit Award" accuses Shiva, amongst other things, of being "a mouthpiece of western eco-imperialism". The media contact for this symbolic rejection of neocolonialism? The American, Kendra Okonski. The mouthpiece denouncing an Indian environmentalist as an agent of the West is a Western mouthpiece.

The careful framing of the messages and the actors in the rally in Johannesburg provides but one particularly gaudy spectacle in a continuing fake parade. In particular, the Internet provides a perfect medium for such showcases, where the gap between the virtual and the real is easily erased.

Take the South-facing website Foodsecurity.net, which promotes itself as "the web's most complete source of news and information about global food security concerns and sustainable agricultural practices". Foodsecurity.net claims to be "an independent, non-profit coalition of people throughout the world". Despite its global reach, however, Foodsecurity.net's only named staff member is its "African Director", Dr. Michael Mbwille, a Tanzanian doctor who's forever penning articles defending Monsanto and attacking the likes of Greenpeace.

The news and information at Foodsecurity.net is largely pro-GM articles, often vituperative in content and boasting headlines like "The Villainous Vandana Shiva" or "Altered Crops Called Boon for Poor". When one penetrates beyond the news pages, the content is very limited. A single message graces the messageboard posted by an myoung@bivwood.com - the domain name ofThe Bivings Group, an internet PR company that numbers Monsanto among its clients. There's also an event posting from an Andura Smetacek, recently identified in an article in The Guardian as an e-mail front used by Monsanto to run a campaign of character assassination against its scientific and environmental critics.

The site is registered to a Graydon Forrer, currently the managing director of Life Sciences Strategies, a company that specializes in "communications programmes" for the bio-science industries. A piece of information that is not usually disclosed in Graydon Forrer”šs self-presentation is that he was previously Monsanto”šs director of executive communications. Indeed, he seems to have been working for the company in 1999 - the same year the site of this "independent, non-profit coalition of people throughout the world" was first registered. Foodsecurity”šs "African Director", Dr. Mbwille, is not, incidentally, in Africa at the moment. He is enjoying a sabbatical observing medical practice in St. Louis, MissouriËœthe home town, as it happens, of the Monsanto Corporation.

Foodsecurity.net forms but one of a whole series of websites with undisclosed links to biotech industry lobbyists or PR companies, as our previous research has demonstrated. But despite the virtual circus oscillating about him, if the President of BIO were really interested in hearing poor "live, developing-world farmers... speaking for themselves", he need look no further than Chengal Reddy's home state of Andhra Pradesh. Here small-scale farmers and landless laborers were consulted as part of a meticulously conducted "citizens' jury" on World Bank-backed proposals to industrialize local agriculture and introduce GM crops. Having heard all sides of the argument, including as it happens the views of Chengal Reddy, the jury unanimously rejected these proposals, which are likely to force more than 100,000 people off the land. Similar citizens' juries on GM crops in Brazil and in the Indian state of Karnataka have come to similar conclusions - something that the President of BIO is almost certainly aware of.

But rainchecks on the real views of the poor count for little in a world where "something new, something very big" and "a turning point" in the global march towards our corporate future, turns out to be Monsanto's soapbox behind a black man's face.

...

For further information about citizens”š juries on GM food and farming in the Global South see:

the report on Food and Farming Futures for Andhra Pradesh,

http://www.iied.org/pdf/Prajateerpu.pdf,

the press article, "The Locals Know What Aid They Need",

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=276687,

and the website of the development charity, ActionAid,

http://www.actionaid.org/ourpriorities/foodrights/gmtechnology/gmtechnology.shtml

For more information about Monsanto's cyberwar against its critics:

http://ngin.tripod.com/deceit_index.html

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8/14 Jeff Ritterman, M.D., Truthout | Op-Ed

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}:(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)}:

Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, with glyphosate as the primary ingredient, has recently been linked to a fatal kidney disease epidemic ravaging parts of Central America, India and Sri Lanka. A leading theory hypothesizes that complexes of glyphosate and heavy metals poison the kidney tubules. El Salvador and Sri Lanka have adopted the precautionary principle and taken action to ban the herbicide. In the United States, glyphosate is coming up for review by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in late 2014. Monsanto claims a low risk to human health, but the research is showing something very different. Will these health concerns be enough for the EPA to put restrictions on the herbicide – or to ban it altogether?

Monsanto’s Claims of Safety

Thus far, Monsanto has been successful in portraying Roundup as a safe and effective herbicide. The Monsanto website claims:

Glyphosate binds tightly to most types of soil so it is not available for uptake by roots of nearby plants. It works by disrupting a plant enzyme involved in the production of amino acids that are essential to plant growth. The enzyme, EPSP synthase, is not present in humans or animals, contributing to the low risk to human health from the use of glyphosate according to label directions.

Public Kept in the Dark

Contrary to the company’s claims of safety, a virtual avalanche of scientific studies on animals, including some funded by Monsanto itself, show alarming incidences of fetal deaths and birth defects. The record also shows that Monsanto has known since the 1980s that glyphosate in high doses causes malformations in experimental animals. Since 1993, the company has been aware that even middle and low doses can cause these malformations. These malformations include absent kidneys and lungs, enlarged hearts, extra ribs, and missing and abnormally formed bones of the limbs, ribs, sternum, spine and skull.

These startling revelations can be found in the report *Roundup and Birth Defects: Is the Public Being Kept in the Dark?* The document is authored by eight experts from the fields of molecular genetics, agro-ecology, toxico-pathology, scientific ethics, ecological agriculture, plant genetics, public health and cell biology. This report, written primarily for a European readership, is highly critical of the biotech industry and of the European Union’s failure to evaluate glyphosate based on the science rather than on political concerns. It calls for an immediate withdrawal of Roundup and glyphosate from the European Union until a thorough scientific evaluation is done on the herbicide. From the report:

The public has been kept in the dark by industry and regulators about the ability of glyphosate and Roundup to cause malformations. In addition, the work of independent scientists who have drawn attention to the herbicide’s teratogenic effects has been ignored, denigrated or dismissed. These actions on the part of industry and regulators have endangered public health. (Authors note: Ateratogen is any agent that can disturb the development of an embryo or a fetus. The term stems from the Greek teras, meaning monster).

Monsanto’s Safety Claim Misleads

How is it possible that there are so many adverse health impacts in the test animals, if, as Monsanto claims, “the enzyme, EPSP synthase, is not present in humans or animals”?

The reason is simple. Roundup attacks other enzyme systems, which are indeed present in the animal kingdom.

We owe this knowledge to a group of scientists from Argentina who became concerned about human birth defects in areas of their country where Roundup was being sprayed from airplanes as part of genetically modified (GM) soy production. They decided to do laboratory research to explore whether Roundup would produce similar developmental abnormalities in test animals. Experimenting with frog and chicken embryos, they found that those embryos exposed to the herbicide developed significant malformations, including neural defects and craniofacial malformations similar to the birth defects seen in humans.

Not only did this group of scientists demonstrate that Roundup causes birth defects in the animals tested, but they also were able to demonstrate how Roundup caused the fetal abnormalities. The herbicide increased the activity of the Vitamin A (retinoic acid) “signaling pathway.” It’s called a signaling pathway because it turns genes on and off. Roundup causes an abnormal increase in activity of this pathway, which turns off certain genes. Unfortunately, those very genes are needed for normal embryological development. When the Roundup turns off those genes, birth defects result.

This signaling pathway is shared by virtually all vertebrates, including amphibians, birds and mammals. Thus, it seems quite likely that the birth defects seen in frogs, chickens, rats, rabbits and humans all occur because Roundup attacks this pathway. It also seems likely that if we continue to allow glyphosate to accumulate in the environment, we can expect vertebrates of many types to suffer increasing rates of birth defects. This, of course, includes humans.

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Roundup and Birth Defects: the Story From Latin America

The Argentinian researchers were motivated by humanitarian concerns. They were aware of the many worrisome reports of increases in birth defects in Argentina and in other parts of Latin America attributed to aerial glyphosate spraying.

A frightening example is a study of birth defects in Argentina, which found that Cordoba, an area of intensive planting of GM soy and heavy glyphosate use, had a higher incidence of spina bifida (spinal cord protrusion in the lower back), microtia (abnormal ear), cleft lip and palate, polycystic kidney, postaxial polydactyly (extra fingers or toes) and Down’s Syndrome than other regions. Many of these defects are of the type associated with disturbances in the Vitamin A signaling system.

Chaco, Argentina is also a region of intensive GM soy production and heavy glyphosate use. In the last decade, coincident with expansion of GM soy production, birth defects have increased threefold and cancer rates have increased fourfold. A court in the adjacent province of Santa Fe, a major GM soy-producing region, banned the spraying of glyphosate and other agrochemicals in populated areas because of concerns about “severe damageto the environment and to the health and quality of life of the residents.”

Itapua, Paraguay is another GM soy dominated area. Here, residents have suffered a similar fate. Women exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy have a high incidence of fetal deformities similar to those seen in Argentina. These deformities, once again, can be explained by glyphosate’s ability to interfere with the Vitamin A signaling pathway.

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Rounding Up the Science

Glyphosate has been conclusively proven to cause birth defects in frogs, chickens, rats, rabbits, and also in humans. Monsanto’s claim that Roundup is safe because it kills weeds by attacking one specific enzyme system not found in animals is misleading. Monsanto has a very large investment in maintaining this illusion. Half ofMonsanto’s revenue comes from the sale of Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.

Roundup attacks vital enzyme systems found in animals, including in humans. It is now clear that interference by Roundup with one of these enzyme systems, the Vitamin A signaling system, can result in severe birth defects. This system is shared by most vertebrates, making Roundup capable of inducing devastating birth defects in a wide variety of amphibians, birds and mammals, and possibly reptiles and fish as well. Allowing glyphosate to continue to build up in the environment will likely cause increased rates of birth defects in all vertebrates exposed, including humans. Exposure, of course, includes the digestion of exposed plants and animals.

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Policy Recommendation

The science is clear. There is only one rational response. No family should have to tolerate the risk of significant birth defects – in the United States, or in any part of the world. Roundup and other glyphosate formulations should be banned. Thus far, the voices of public health advocates in this country have been drowned out by those promoting biotechnology and its profits, regardless of the health consequences. We can’t let this continue. Our health, the health of our children and the health of our environment must come first. It is the responsibility of our governmental institutions to protect humanity, not corporate profit.

It’s long past time for us to heed Rachel Carson’s warning from Silent Spring:

http://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-06-monsanto-cash-helped-fund-bill-to-stifle-whistleblowers-in-iowa/

Monsanto cash helped fund bill to stifle whistleblowers in Iowa

By Tom Laskawy

.Speaking of Monsanto, it turns out they are playing a role in Iowa’s proposed anti-whistleblower bill — a bill focused primarily on agriculture. Should the bill pass, it will become illegal to produce undercover videos at various types of agricultural facilities (as well as to get a job at a facility with the express intent of producing a video). Sarah Damian of the Government Accountability Project, a “whistleblower advocacy organization,” observes over at the Food Integrity Campaign’s blogthat Monsanto has been throwing lobbying dollars behind Iowa’s effort to draw a steel curtain around food production. And not without reason:

… Monsanto has more facilities in Iowa than in any other state in the country, with more than 25 offices. The company is heavily invested in the bill’s outcome because “crop operations” are also covered, which would apply to Monsanto’s seed houses, pesticide manufacturing plants and research facilities throughout Iowa. The biotech and crop chemical giant wouldn’t want any undercover videos produced on its clock, apparently.

That’s a bit ironic, however, given the fact that Monsanto investigators are notorious for trespassing on farmers’ property and going to extreme measures to produce evidence of seed patent infringement, including posing as land mappers or even joining a local Alcohol Anonymous group to gain the farmers’ trust and gain video access to their fields. Talk about undercover.

And don’t think that Monsanto hasn’t planned ahead. According to Damian, there are provisions in the bill that would allow Monsanto to continue snooping around farmers’ fields in its ongoing search for so-called “seed thieves” aka “patent infringers.”

Despite occasional setbacks and even uncertainty in the marketplace, let it not be said that Monsanto has lost its taste for playing the heavy.

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:{Brazil Farmers Say GMO Corn No Longer Resistant to Bugs:(style="outline:none"):}:

Earlier this year, a similar problem arose in the U.S., when scientists confirmed that corn-destroying rootworms...

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extensive site on flacks http://www.gmwatch.eu/myth-makers-l#Liberty_Institute

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/food-oversight-curbs-spending-bill-outrage-article-1.1298967  monstanto prot act

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The Ecologist [1] / By Oliver Tickell [2]

Major Study: Monsanto GMO Corn Can Cause Damage to Liver and Kidneys, and Severe Hormonal Disruption

July 9, 2014 |

A scientific study that identified serious health impacts on rats fed on 'Roundup ready' GMO maize has been republished following its controversial retraction under strong commercial pressure. Now regulators must respond and review GMO and agro-chemical licenses, and licensing procedures.

A highly controversial paper by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini and colleagues has been republished after a stringent peer review process.

The chronic toxicity study [3] examines the health impacts on rats of eating  a commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize, Monsanto's NK603 glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup.

The original study, published in Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) in September 2012, found severe liver and kidney damage and hormonal disturbances in rats fed the GM maize and low levels of Roundup that are below those permitted in drinking water in the EU.

However it was retracted by the editor-in-chief of the Journal in November 2013 after a sustained campaign [4] of criticism and defamation by pro-GMO scientists.

Toxic effects were found from the GM maize tested alone, as well as from Roundup tested alone and together with the maize. Additional unexpected findings were higher rates of large tumours and mortality in most treatment groups.

Criticisms addressed in the new version

Now the study has been republished [5] by Environmental Sciences Europe. The republished version contains extra material addressing criticisms of the original publication.

The raw data underlying the study's findings are also published - unlike the raw data for the industry studies that underlie regulatory approvals of Roundup, which are kept secret. However, the new paper presents the same results as before and the conclusions are unchanged.

The republication restores the study to the peer-reviewed literature so that it can be consulted and built upon by other scientists.

The republished study is accompanied by a separate commentary by Prof Séralini's team [6] (also published on The Ecologist [7]) describing the lobbying efforts of GMO crop supporters to force the editor of FCT to retract the original publication.

The authors explain that the retraction was "a historic example of conflicts of interest in the scientific assessments of products commercialized worldwide."

"We also show that the decision to retract cannot be rationalized on any discernible scientific or ethical grounds. Censorship of research into health risks undermines the value and the credibility of science; thus, we republish our paper."

Paper subjected to extraordinary scrutiny and peer review

Claire Robinson, editor of GMOSeralini.org [8], commented: "This study has now successfully passed no less than three rounds of rigorous peer review."

First the paper was peer reviewed for its initial publication in Food and Chemical Toxicology, and according to the authors [9] it passed with only minor revisions.

The second review involved a non-transparent examination of Prof Séralini's raw data by a secret panel of unnamed persons organized by the editor-in-chief of FCT, A. Wallace Hayes, in response to criticisms of the study by pro-GMO scientists.

In a letter to Prof Séralini, Hayes admitted [10] that the anonymous reviewers found nothing incorrect about the results, but argued that the tumour and mortality observations in the paper were "inconclusive", and this justified his decision to retract the study:

"A more in-depth look at the raw data revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding the role of either NK603 or glyphosate in regards to overall mortality or tumor incidence. Given the known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat, normal variability cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups."

"The rationale given for the retraction was widely criticized by scientists [11] as an act of censorship and a bow to the interests of the GMO industry", says Robinson.

"Some scientists pointed out that numerous published scientific papers contain inconclusive findings, including Monsanto's own short (90-day) study on the same GM maize, and have not been retracted. The retraction was even condemned by a former member [12] of the editorial board of FCT."

Now the study has passed a third peer review arranged by the journal that is republishing the study, Environmental Sciences Europe.[JE denies?]

Let the critics carry out their own studies

Dr Michael Antoniou, a molecular geneticist based in London, commented, "Few studies would survive such intensive scrutiny by fellow scientists.

"The republication of the study after three expert reviews is a testament to its rigour, as well as to the integrity of the researchers. If anyone still doubts the quality of this study, they should simply read the republished paper. The science speaks for itself.

"If even then they refuse to accept the results, they should launch their own research study on these two toxic products that have now been in the human food and animal feed chain for many years."

Dr Jack A Heinemann, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, University of Canterbury New Zealand, said: "I applaud Environmental Sciences Europe for submitting the work to yet another round of rigorous blind peer review and then bravely standing by the process and the recommendations of its reviewers, especially after witnessing the events surrounding the first publication.

"This study has arguably prevailed through the most comprehensive and independent review process to which any scientific study on GMOs has ever been subjected."

'Significant biochemical disturbances and physiological failures'

The study examines the health effects on rats of eating Roundup-tolerant NK603 genetically modified (GM) maize (from 11% in the diet), cultivated with or without Roundup application, and Roundup alone (from 0.1 ppb of the full pesticide containing glyphosate and adjuvants) in drinking water. It found:

• "Biochemical analyses confirmed very significant chronic kidney deficiencies, for all treatments and both sexes; 76% of the altered parameters were kidney-related.
• "In treated males, liver congestions and necrosis were 2.5 to 5.5 times higher. Marked and severe nephropathies were also generally 1.3 to 2.3 times greater.
• "In females, all treatment groups showed a two- to threefold increase in mortality, and deaths were earlier.
• "This difference was also evident in three male groups fed with GM maize.
• "All results were hormone- and sex-dependent, and the pathological profiles were comparable.
• "Females developed large mammary tumors more frequently and before controls;
• "the pituitary was the second most disabled organ;
• "the sex hormonal balance was modified by consumption of GM maize and Roundup treatments.
• "Males presented up to four times more large palpable tumors starting 600 days earlier than in the control group, in which only one tumor was noted.
• "These results may be explained by not only the non-linear endocrine-disrupting effects of Roundup but also by the overexpression of the EPSPS transgene or other mutational effects in the GM maize and their metabolic consequences.
• "Our findings imply that long-term (2 year) feeding trials need to be conducted to thoroughly evaluate the safety of GM foods and pesticides in their full commercial formulations."

The paper concludes: "Taken together, the significant biochemical disturbances and physiological failures documented in this work reveal the pathological effects of these GMO and R treatments in both sexes, with different amplitudes.

"They also show that the conclusion of the Monsanto authors [13] that the initial indications of organ toxicity found in their 90-day experiment were not 'biologically meaningful' is not justifiable.

"We propose that agricultural edible GMOs and complete pesticide formulations must be evaluated thoroughly in long-term studies to measure their potential toxic effects."

Regulators must take these results seriously

Dr Heinemann commented: "The work provides important new knowledge that must be taken into account by the community that evaluates and reports upon the risks of genetically modified organisms, indeed upon all sources of pesticide in our food and feed chains."

According to Patrick Holden, Chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust [14] (SFT) the study highlights the inadequacy of current safety testing:

"The most obvious deficiency relates to the fact that the current approval process is based on animal feeding trials of only 90 days, a totally inadequate duration when one considers that chronic diseases in animals and humans do not usually manifest until mid-life."

A second deficiency, he added, relates to the newly emerging science of epigenetics - which demonstrates that endocrine systems can be seriously disrupted by the presence of chemical residues at concentrations as low as a few parts per billion.

"This turns on its head the logic of an approval process based on MRL (maximum residue levels), since it is becoming increasingly apparent that these chemicals have patterns of non-linear response."

An 'urgent review' of pesticide licensing is needed

Given these concerns, said Holden, "there is a strong case for an urgent review of the regulatory process for licensing both the herbicide Roundup and the neonicotinoid class of insecticides. A fundamental review of the entire process for licensing agricultural chemicals is required to ensure that in future the public interest is better served."

Professor Pete Myers, Chief Executive of Environmental Health Sciences and scientific advisor to the SFT points out that only "the tiniest fraction of agricultural chemicals" have been studied for health effects by independent scientists:

"Over the last two-decades there has been a revolution in environmental health sciences that suggests the proportion of diseases attributable to chemical exposures is far bigger and more significant than previously understood.

"The tools we have available to us to say what is safe and not safe are deeply flawed. They are not based on two decades of development in the fields of endocrine disruption and epigenetics, but instead on tests developed in the 1950s.

"They do not reflect the complexity of mixtures, or the way in which chemicals interact."

See more stories tagged with:

gmo [16],

maize [17]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/food/major-study-demonstrates-monsanto-gmo-corn-product-can-cause-damage-liver-and-kidneys-and

Links:

[1] http://www.theecologist.org/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/oliver-tickell

[3] http://sustainablepulse.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=96b2dcb7821c7b93f09376626&id=f44b24ebe5&e=e92fbf61bb

[4] http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/science/item/164-smelling-a-corporate-rat

[5] http://www.enveurope.com/content/26/1/14

[6] http://www.enveurope.com/content/26/1/13

[7] http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2452325/biosafety_and_the_seralini_affair_scientific_and_regulatory_reform_are_essential.html

[8] http://www.GMOSeralini.org/

[9] http://retractionwatch.com/2014/01/16/journal-editor-defends-retraction-of-gmo-rats-study-while-authors-reveal-some-of-papers-history/

[10] http://www.gmwatch.org/files/Letter_AWHayes_GES.pdf

[11] http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/jan/08/science-food-health/

[12] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691514000039

[13] http://www.enveurope.com/pubmed/15110110

[14] http://www.sustainablefoodtrust.org/

[15] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Major Study: Monsanto GMO Corn Can Cause Damage to Liver and Kidneys, and Severe Hormonal Disruption

[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gmo

[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/maize

[18] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/science/item/164-smelling-a-corporate-rat

Tuesday, 11 December 2012 21:17

Smelling a corporate rat

By Jonathan Matthews

new study suggesting a Monsanto GM maize and the company's Roundup herbicide may pose serious health risks has been widely attacked, not just by scientists and commentators but also by scientific bodies and regulators. Here, Jonathan Matthews of GMWatch looks at the role of industry-linked scientists and lobbyists in a campaign aimed at getting the paper retracted. You can alsodownload this article as a PDF. 

At the end of November Reuters ran the headline Science Journal Urged to Retract Monsanto GM Study and New Scientist also reported the growing pressure for retraction. These articles marked the latest stage in a campaign that kicked off the moment the study was published in mid-September, when researchers led by Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini at the University of Caen in France announced their findings of serious health problems in rats that had been fed a Monsanto maize genetically engineered to be resistant to the company's herbicide Roundup, as well as in rats just fed low doses of the herbicide itself. In both cases the rats fed with the GM maize and/or minute amounts of the herbicide in water were several times more likely to develop lethal tumours and suffer severe liver and kidney damage when compared to the controls.

Science Media Centre spearheads the attack

Although the publication of the results of the long-term feeding trial in Food and Chemical Toxicology made front page news in France, it got a very different reception in the English-speaking world. This was thanks to the rapid rebuttal efforts of the London-based Science Media Centre (SMC), which almost as soon as the study was published began spoon-feeding journalists with ready-made quotes from scientists savaging the study.

The SMC's director Fiona Fox was subsequently reported as saying that she took pride in the fact that the SMC's "emphatic thumbs down had largely been acknowledged throughout UK newsrooms: apart from the Mail, only the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times covered the story in their print editions – and both used quotes supplied by the Science Media Centre.” She added that several television news programmes had also rejected the story after reading the quotes

The SMC's quotes were pumped out internationally via its clones, like the Australian Science Media Centre, with like-minded local experts layered on the top. The quotes were also circulated to the media by Monsanto and other GM lobby groups. As a result, the quotes ended up in a lot of media coverage worldwide. One even popped up in the New York Times along with the scathing comments of Bruce M. Chassy, professor emeritus of food science at the University of Illinois. 

Retraction campaign kicks in

Another key player in whipping up hostility to the paper was the American business magazine Forbes. In the ten days following the study's release, Forbes published no less than six separate attack pieces targeting not just the research but also the researchers. The first two pieces drew extensively on the quotes from the Science Media Centre and ran with them, but the Forbes piece that grabbed the most attention, particularly on social media, was one that kicked off with a headline that labelled the paper a fraud. The article went on to accuse Prof. Seralini not just of "gross scientific misconduct" but also of having "a long and sordid history" of "activism". The article concluded by bluntly telling the editors of Food and Chemical Toxicology that the only "honorable course of action for the journal would be to retract the paper immediately".

The retraction campaign was by then well under way. An :{online petition:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:was up and running, demanding in the name of "the scientific community" that Seralini hand over all his raw data. The petition was aggressively promoted via social media, often with the implication that the researchers had something to hide. The assertion that the study was "fraudulent" obviously played well into this campaign, which culminated in the Reuters and New Scientist pieces reporting the retraction calls. Both these articles reported on the petition, as well as containing lacerating comments from two UK scientists – comments once again provided by the Science Media Centre.

One of the published comments – from Prof. Maurice Moloney – said it was "appalling" that such a study should ever have been published in a respected journal. And a researcher from the UK's John Innes Centre demanded to know whether it was not "time for Food and Chemical Toxicology to retract the manuscript?" The only other scientist quoted claimed the publication of the paper was more than just "a dangerous case of failure of the peer-review system." It represented a threat to not just the credibility of the journal but "the scientific method overall". This apocalyptic claim was backed up by the news that hundreds of outraged scientists had signed the online petition.

Who's behind the retraction petition?

Writing in The Guardianat the end of September, John Vidal described the attacks already raining down on Seralini and his team as "a triumph for the scientific and corporate establishment which has used similar tactics to crush other scientists". These included, Vidal said, "Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Institute in Scotland, who was sacked after his research suggested GM potatoes damaged the stomach lining and immune system of rats, and David Quist and Ignacio Chapela", who studied the flow of genes from illegally planted GM maize to Mexican indigenous maize.

The vociferous attacks on Quist and Chapela resulted in the apparent retraction of their paper by the journal Nature,even thoughsuch a move was not supported by the majority of its reviewersand subsequent research confirmed the paper’s main finding. But, as the French journalist Benjamin Sourice has pointed out, the simplest way to definitively discredit a study and nullify its impact is to pressurise the journal that published it to retract it from its list of publications.

In the case of Quist and Chapela, an investigation that I undertook with the journalist and author Andy Rowell of Spinwatch revealed how the campaign of retraction had been carefully orchestrated from the start by Monsanto's PR people.It used proxies to whip up feeling against the lead author by branding Dr Chapela an "activist" rather than a scientist and by maintaining his findings were bogus and arrived at through collusion with environmental NGOs. Our research, which was widely reported in both print and broadcast media, suggested that at the heart of that retraction campaign sat Monsanto's former chief internet strategist and director of corporate communications. Jay Byrne had gone on to found his own internet PR company v-Fluence, based like Monsanto in the corporation's home town of St Louis. 

Although Byrne appeared to be the campaign's chief architect, its principal conduit was the lobby group AgBioWorld, overseen by the GM scientist CS Prakash.  The "ipetition"on Seralini contains no information as to who sponsored it, but its first signatory is CS Prakash. Prakash also seems to have set up an earlier more primitive version of the petition, which clearly identifies him as its sponsor.

Some time after GMWatch flagged upthe likely role of Prakash and AgBioWorld in the ipetition, the organisation acknowledged its authorship in a press releasewhich asserted that "the petitioning scientists are calling on the publishing journal editors to retract the Seralini study" if he failed to give in to their demand that he hand over all his data.

The AgBioWorld press release contained a quote by Bruce Chassy, who was also the first signatory of the earlier Seralini petition. Chassy was alsothe co-author of the Forbes pieceaccusing Seralini of fraud.

The article's other author was Henry Miller, a darling of the rightwing press who operates out of the Hoover Institution, among other industry backed lobby groups. Miller, like Chassy, has long been associated with Prakash's AgBioWorld. Miller recently co-authoredanother vitriolic piece on GM for Forbes, denouncing the "fear profiteers" of the anti-GM "protest industry". Miller's co-author on that occasion was none other than former Monsanto PR boss Jay Byrne of v-Fluence. Tellingly, Michael Pollan, the renowned New York Times food writer and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, described the piece by Byrne and Miller as a breathtaking example of "the Big Lie".

Byrne hasn't published any media pieces on Seralini. But it is apparent from Byrne's Twitter account that he was almost solely preoccupied with discrediting the Seralini study from the day of its publication for about the next month. Byrne describes himself on Twitter as v-Fluence CEO and  as "Contributing author, Let Them Eat Precaution", a book on GM edited by Jon Entine. Entine, as it happens, is the author of probably more articles to date attacking Seralini than any other commentator.

Agribiz apologist

Entine's book emerged out of an American Enterprise Instituteconference overseen by Entine at which Byrne was an invited speaker. And Byrne's v-Fluence turns up again in company with Entine at another AEI conference he oversaw – this one attacking corporate social responsibility (CSR). According to Business Ethics: "A second AEI conference featured AEI fellow Jon Entine – a long-time critic of SRI [socially responsible investing] – and Sarah Fuhrmann of v-Fluence Interactive Public Relations. Several v-Fluence employees are ex-public affairs staffers for Monsanto – where they honed skills fighting CSR initiatives that targeted genetically modified foods."

Entine hasn't just worked with Byrne and v-Fluence, but has also done paid work for Byrne's company. In a piece about Entine by the food and farming commentator Tom Philpott, The Making of an Agribusiness Apologist, Entine denies being a hired gun for Syngenta in his work defending pesticides and downplays the fact that his company (ESG MediaMetrics) lists Monsanto as a client. This is how he explains it: "Nine years ago, I did a $2000 research project for v-Fluence, a social media company formed by former Monsanto executives. That's the entirety of my Monsanto relationship." Presumably Entine lists Monsanto and not Jay Byrne's firm as his company's paymasterbecause he recognises that what he does for v-Fluence he's really doing for Monsanto.

Entine's first attack on Seralini came out on Forbes within 24 hours of the paper's publication. His second piecea few days later contained further attacks, not just on Seralini, whom he accused of steadfastly refusing to share his raw data, but on almost anyone who attempted to defend the study.  Entine also published a third more recent article which focuses particularly on letters to Food and Chemical Toxicology requesting Seralini's paper be retracted. In this he notes, "More than two dozen scientists from around the world co-signed a stinging rebuke of the Seralini study, concluding: 'We appeal to you to subject the paper to rigorous re-review by appropriate experts and promptly retract it if it fails to meet widely held scientific standards of design and analysis, as we believe it fails to do.'"

The letterEntine is referring to was signed by, among others, CS Prakash, Henry Miller and Bruce Chassy. Several of the other signatories also have connections to AgBioWorld. Entine's book on GM, incidentally, also has contributions from CS Prakash and his AgBioWorld co-founder, Greg Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Cancer-prone rat

Another signatory of this joint letter to Food and Chemical Toxicology is Prof. Anthony Trewavas. Trewavas was also one of the experts quoted by the SMCin their media releasethat had such an impact on the reporting of the Seralini study.

In his SMC comments, which ended up being quoted in well over 20 different publicationsworldwide, Trewavas accuses the researchers of using a cancer-prone rat and claims: "[A] line [of rats] which is very susceptible to tumours can easily bias any result." This line of argument was also developed for the SMC by another expert, Maurice Moloney who says Sprague-Dawley rats frequently develop mammary tumours

It is this cancer-prone rat claim, which Trewavas and Moloney first set running, that more than any other underpins the Chassy-Miller allegation of fraud. The suggestion is that the study was deliberately designed to generate tumours, i.e. that Seralini and his team intentionally chose the Sprague-Dawley rat for their research in order to produce exactly the result they wanted - cancer!

But although variants on this claim have been widely reported, there are a number of problems with it. Not only is this line of rats the same one that Monsanto used for the study that underlies the regulatory approval of this GM maize (NK603), but Sprague-Dawley rats have also been used repeatedly in toxicology and carcinogenesis trials, including long-term ones. They were even used in industry’s own two-year research studies submitted to regulators to support the regulatory approval of glyphosate – the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, one of the two substances that Seralini's team were researching.

And the fact that this strain of rat has a 30%-plus tendency to “spontaneous” cancers across its lifetime actually means it a good model for humans, who have a similar susceptibility to the disease. What's more, even allowing for the Sprague-Dawley rats having a tendency to spontaneous tumours, Seralini's team found the rats fed on either the GM maize or the herbicide suffered an increase in the number of tumours and they had an earlier onset when compared to those in the control group. The researchers also took account of the spontaneous tumour issue by comparing their results to the rates of similar types of tumour in other published studies using the same strain of rat.

This is not say that the Seralini study does not have its shortcomings. It's true that the study had fewer rats than are recommended for cancer studies, but Seralini did not set out to look for tumours. His study was a chronic toxicity one that unexpectedly found striking evidence of increased tumours in the treated rats. Given this finding, the onus should now be on Monsanto to fund a full-scale carcinogenicity study using larger groups of rats to prove that its products are safe – something it has so far failed to do.

Angelika Hilbeck of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) describes the "wrong rat" argument first put forward by Trewavas and Moloney as "absurd". Hilbeck says, "Seralini chose the same strain of rat as Monsanto. Do we really think that a substance should be tested on an animal that is not sensitive to it? With these defamations they wanted to distract us from the fact that Seralini used the same methodology as Monsanto. Because if you take Seralini seriously as a researcher, you have to take seriously his study and the comparison with Monsanto's study. That would put into question Monsanto's study and hence the approval of GM maize."

Double standards used to condemn studies showing risk

In fact, many of the charges that have been made against the Seralini study could be levelled against the studies that have been used to approve GM crops, which are less detailed than Seralini's and typically shorter-term. This is why a report by the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER) concluded that a careful comparison of the Seralini rat feeding trial with Monsanto trials shows that if the Seralini experiments are considered insufficient to demonstrate harm, then those carried out by Monsanto cannot prove safety. This is because, whatever its limitations, Seralini's study was conducted to generally higher scientific standards than the studies underlying GM food approvals.

ENSSER highlights the double standards whereby studies on GM crops like Seralini's that show adverse effects are subjected to obsessive yet often poorly justified criticism of their experimental and statistical methods, while those like Monsanto's that claim safety are taken at face value. In this way risk is assessed in an asymmetrical fashion so that the burden of proof is not on the biotech industry to provide adequate evidence of the safety of its products, but is on public researchers like Seralini to prove harm beyond any doubt.Other experts have echoed the charge of double standards, including around 140 French scientists who, in a public statement published in Le Monde, declared that it was contrary to scientific ethics to damn an experimental protocol when it gave results that were not wanted, while accepting it when it gave results that were.

These double standards can also be seen in the ipetition demanding that Seralini hand over all of his raw data to his critics. Those championing the petition have no history of demanding from Monsanto full public disclosure of all the raw data underlying its studies supporting safety (the industry studies on glyphosate, for example, are kept secret under 'commercial confidentiality' agreements between industry and regulators). This is why Seralini has said he will undertake full disclosure when the same level of disclosure takes place for all the studies underlying GM food approvals, so that like can be compared with like.

Public science and private interests

One of the early UK signatories of the ipetition, as well as a co-signatory, like Prof. Trewavas, of the letter to Food and Chemical Toxicology from Prakash, Chassy and Miller, is Prof. Chris Leaver. Leaver, like Trewavas,  is a GM scientist. He is also a former advisor to the Science Media Centre and a former consultant to the GM/agrochemical giant Syngenta. Since 1984 Prof. Leaver has also beenon the Governing Councilof the UK's leading public plant biotechinstitute, the John Innes Centre – something else he has in common with Prof. Trewavas, who was also for several years on the JIC's Governing Council.

The JIC has been a key player in the criticism of Seralini. This is apparent as soon as you look at the SMC's three media releases on the study. The first quoted eight experts including a senior scientist at the JIC and a former member of its Governing Council (Trewavas). The secondquoted just one expert, Cathie Martin of the JIC. The thirdquoted five experts, of which three, including Cathie Martin, were from the JIC.

What makes this predominance particularly revealing is that the scientists in question are not experts on toxicology or animal studies. Their expertise is in plant genetics and GM. What's more, the JIC and its Sainsbury Laboratory have had tens of millions of pounds in investment from GM giants like Syngenta. In fact, they are so dependent on the public acceptance of GM that a previous acting director of the JICconfided to his local paperthat any major slowdown or halt in the development of GM crops "would be very, very serious for us".

These vested interests are personal as well as institutional. Cathie Martin, for instance, says in her JIC profile, "I am inventor on seven patents and I recently co-founded a spin-out company (Norfolk Plant Sciences) with Professor Jonathan Jones FRS, to bring the benefits of plant biotechnology to Europe and the US." Jones, who is quoted along with Martin in one of the SMC releases, co-founded another biotech firm, Mendel Biotechnology, which has Monsanto as its "most important customer and collaborator".

The failure of Jones, who is also an advisor to Mendel Biotechnology, to be more explicit about his industry links, has generated controversy.  Yet journalists are given no indication of these kind of conflicts of interest by the SMC's releases, as the journalist Joanna Blythman has noted: "The SMC introduced these experts to the media solely by listing the universities and public institutions that employ them, failing to give the full flavour of their interests." And the problem goes much wider than the JIC, as Blythman notes with regard to the experts quoted in the SMC's first media release: "seven out of eight are either evangelical advocates of GM food, or have received funding from, or worked with, prominent biotech corporations."

Take, for instance, the very first expert quoted by the SMC, Prof. Maurice Moloney. This year, the SMC has featured Moloney in no fewer than four different media releases on GM. They typically identify him only as "Institute Director and Chief Executive, Rothamsted Research", which is an independent charitable agricultural research centre. What journalists aren't told is that Moloney is so enamoured of GM that he drives around in a Porsche with a GMO number plate, and has a CV to match. He is the inventor on more than 300 patents and his GM research underpins one of Monsanto's main GM crops. He has also founded his own GM company in which the GM giant Dow AgroScience was an investor. The fact that Prof. Moloney's career and business interests have long been centered around GM is not something the SMC seems to think journalists need to know.

Letters to journal fail to disclose conflicts of interest

This pattern of significant but undisclosed conflicts of interest is relevant to not only the majority of the SMC's experts but also to many of Seralini's other critics, including those responsible for the twenty or so letters published by Food and Chemical Toxicology in response to Seralini's paper. Some of the letter writers are, in fact, exactly the same people that the SMC quotes. They are also often to be found amongstthe earliest signatories of the AgBioWorld ipetition. Maurice Moloney, for example, not only turns up twice in the SMC's media rebuttals of Seralini, but comes in at no. 11 on the list of ipetition signatories, and he wrote a letter to the journal.

Another letter writer demanding retraction is Prof. Mark Tester. Like Moloney and the JIC, Tester is a firm favourite with the SMC, featuring in three of this year's SMC's media releasesand in many more over the years. He was already a favoured expert a decade ago when the SMC wasaccused of orchestrating a spin campaign to discredit a BBC drama on GM crops. The University of Adelaide staff directory broadens out Prof. Tester's academic profile in a way the SMC never has: "His commercial acumen is clear from his establishment of private companies and successful interactions with multinational companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Pioneer-DuPont."

Many other letter writers also have undisclosed industry links. Take, for instance, Martina Newell-McGloughlin. She identifies herselfas the director of the International Biotechnology Program at the University of California/Davis, but fails to mention that the Program is funded by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont and Bayer. Another letter writer and a colleague at UC Davis, Kent Bradford, has consulted for Monsanto. Lucia de Souzawrote to the journalwith Leila Macedo Oda on behalf of ANBio – the Brazilian Biosafety Association, without mentioning that ANBio's funders include Monsanto, Bayer, and DuPont.

Then there are the letter writers who fail to mention their previous employers, like Andrew Cockburn, Monsanto's former director of scientific affairs (Europe and Africa); L. Val Giddings, former Vice President of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation; and Sivramiah (Shanthu) Shantharam, former Syngenta man and until recently head of the biotech industry's main lobby group in India.

Even letter writers who at first glance seem like they must be entirely independent of the biotech industry can turn out to have links. Take, for instance, Erio Barale-Thomas, one of the few toxicologists to criticize the Seralini paper in the journal. Barale-Thomas, who says he writes on behalf of the Administrative Council of the French Society of Toxicological Pathology, takes Seralini to task for his failure to declare a conflict of interest in his paper, namely that Seralini is president of CRIIGEN, an independent research group with concerns about GM, which contributed funding to the research. Yet CRIIGEN's contribution to funding the study was declared in the paper, while Barale-Thomas does not disclose in his letter his own biotech interests. He is not only principal scientist at Janssen Biotech, but immediately prior to that he worked for the GM crop and agrochemical giant Bayer CropScience (1998-2003).

Another French scientist among the letter writers is Prof. Marc Fellous, whose declared connections are academic posts in the sphere of human genetics. What he doesn't mention is that he heads up the French Association of Plant Biotechnology, which lobbies for GM crops and has been so aggressive in its attacks on Seralini that last year he successfully sued Fellous for defamation.

Science or ideology?

Another letter writer is the pathologist Sir Colin Berry. Like Trewavas, Berry is an advisor to the Scientific Alliance, an organization which campaigns on environmental issues, particularly climate change, energy policy and agriculture. It is pro-GM, pro-nuclear and sceptical about climate change. Its director, Martin Livermore, runs an agri-food PR consultancy, prior to which he did PR for the GM giant DuPont. The Alliance was established by the lobby firm Foresight Communication with money from right-wing business interests.

Trewavas is one of only a couple of scientists who not only signed onto the Prakash, Chassy, Miller letter but also sent their own letter of complaint to the journal. Trewavas concludes it like this: "this paper and this journal have dealt the value of evidence-based knowledge a serious blow and it can only be rectified if the paper is withdrawn by the authors with an apology for misleading the public and the scientific community alike… Ideology and politics must be kept out of scientific study or we all suffer."

It is revealing that critics like Berry and Trewavas claim to champion an evidence-based approach while operating out of lobby groups that attack the scientific consensus on issues like climate change. Berry, incidentally, is also a shareholder in the company that owns the aggressively libertarian online magazine Spiked, which also promotes climate scepticism.Fiona Fox, the director of the Science Media Centre, was a long-time affiliate of the anti-environmental LM network that are behind Spiked.

The network around AgBioWorld also contains people with similar attitudes on environmental issues. These include Henry Miller, who co-wrote the article accusing Seralini of fraud, and AgBioWorld's co-founder Greg Conko of the Exxon-fundedCompetitive Enterprise Institute, which specializes in denialist "straight talk on global warming."

Given this, it is ironic that AgBioWorld's Seralini petition was set up in the name of "the scientific community." Similarly, Maurice Moloney says in his letterto Food and Chemical Toxicology that he thinks he can speak "for the vast majority of the biological sciences community." But as we have seen, Moloney and many of the other letter writers link to a narrow and heavily commercialised sector of the biological sciences, albeit one with powerful backers. And some in this community have links to extremist lobby groups more concerned with ideology than evidence.

Peeling the GM onion

Identifying the real forces behind the front-men and carefully selected experts of "the scientific community" can be like peeling back the layers of an onion. Take Anthony Trewavas, the scientist who first helped get the cancer-prone rat claim into circulation. In 2001 Prof. Trewavas was named in the High Court in London as the source of a letter published in a Scottish newspaper that made libelous claims against GM critics (Greenpeace wins damages over professor's "unfounded" allegations). Trewavas subsequently denied being the author of the libel letter published under his name, though he did admit circulating the material, which he said he had got from AgBioWorld. He said it had been written by a "lady in London" but "she" later turned out to bea front for the same Monsanto PR people who covertly directed the campaign that resulted in Nature's apparent retraction of Chapela's GM maize paper.

Trewavas, a long-time associate of Prakash and AgBioWorld, also played a notable role in that campaign. In that case, Trewavas encouraged people to demand Chapela be fired by the University of California, Berkeley, unless he handed over his maize samples for checking: "We should be asking Berkeley to request Chapela to release his samples so that they at least can be checked... Refusal to do so should then be used to request Berkeley to relinquish Chapella's [sic] position." Such calls to arms against Chapela were mostly posted on the AgBioWorld listserv. This use of the listserv eventually enabled Monsanto's covert orchestration of the campaign to be exposed.

The attack dog in the night-time

Interestingly, as the attacks on Prof. Seralini and his paper spread across both mainstream and social media, AgBioWorld's listserv went missing. In the two months following the publication of Seralini's paper, not a single bulletin went out on the listserv that played such a pivotal role in achieving retraction of the Mexican maize paper.

AgBioWorld's sudden silence calls to mind a famous exchange in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes:

Detective: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Detective: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

With Seralini, it's the curious silence of Monsanto's attack dog that suggests that this time the covert PR war is being conducted by other means.

If the silence of AgBioWorld's listserv is suggestive, so too is the attempt to silenceGMWatch. Within days of the publication of the Seralini paper, our website came under major DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. The contours of the attacks followed the peaks of the controversy, with the two biggest and most debilitating attacks coinciding with days on which the major rebuttals of Seralini's paper were published. The GMWatch website had by then become a clearing house for rapid responses in English to the attacks on Seralini. We have no proof as to who was behind the attacks – that's hard to establish with DDOS. But oddly enough, an article in the Guardian about the retraction campaign against Quist and Chapela noted, "Just before the [Mexican maize] paper in Nature was publicly challenged, the server hosting the accounts used by its authors was disabled by a particularly effective attack which crippled their capacity to fight back."

More than a decade later history seems to be repeating itself in the covert war over GM crops.

Jonathan Matthews is the founder and director of GMWatch and has written numerous articles on the politics and spin around GM crops. He's a contributing author toThinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy,eds Dinan and Miller (Pluto Press). Additional research: Claire Robinson, co-editor, GMWatch.

*Spinwatch plans to publish a separate piece looking at some of the study's European critics, including science academies and the European Food Safety Authority.

OPINION6/24/2014 @ 10:24AM 4,749 views

Profile of Gilles-Éric Séralini, Author Of Republished Retracted GMO Corn Rat Study

[note: this is clone (shorter) of JLP site: ]

Gilles-Éric Séralini has republished his retracted study of herbicide resistant GMO maize and glyphosate in an obscure European open source journal. The Genetic Literacy Project’s Jon Entine offers a detailed factual profile of the embattled French molecular biologist (along with a compilation of reactions from scientists from around the world).

Gilles-Éric Séralini (born August 23, 1960 in Annaba, Algeria, then known as Bône) is a French scientist who has been a professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen since 1991. He is best known for publishing research concluding that genetically modified food is unsafe for human consumption. He is president and chairman of the board of CRIIGEN (Committee of Independent Research and Information. He has published multiple studies alleging health risks associated with plant biotechnology which have been called flawed and biased by various regulatory and academic groups.

Séralini Career

Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Caen, Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, I.B.F.A., Esplanade de la Paix, 14032 Caen Cedex, France email: gilles-eric.seralini arobase unicaen.fr Séralini studied in Nice and became a Doctor in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Montpellier in 1987. He left then for North America to carry out fundamental research for four years, at the University of Western Ontario and Laval University Medical Center, doing research on corticosteroid-binding globulin. Qualified to supervise research, he passed, at the age of 30, the French national competitive exam for University Professors.

Séralini chose to focus on the interface of cancer research and endocrinology at the University of Caen, where he was appointed professor in June 1991, a position he has held ever since. He wrote about 100 scientific articles and conference papers for international specialist symposiums, and a number of lectures with a nation-wide impact, he assumes several roles in the Commissions of the University of Caen, where he leads a research team associated to CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and INRA.”

Research at CRIIGEN (Committee of Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering

Under the auspices of CRIIGEN, Séralini has published multiple studies claiming health risks associated with GMOs and the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup on human cells and the enzyme aromatase in vitro, as well as rat testicular cells. His in vitro research has concluded that Roundup (the formulation with adjuvants, not just glyphosate) is toxic to cells in a dish, as well as that it is an endocrine disruptor. In 2013, the Séralini lab published a study in the Journal of Applied Toxicology that examined the effects of Cry1ab and Cry1ac insecticidal Bt toxins, as well as their effects in conjunction with Roundup, on HEK cells

In his most controversial research, in 2012, Séralini et al published a study in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (Volume 50, Issue 11, November 2012, pages 4221-4231) titled “Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize”. Here is the original abstract of the *Food and Chemical Toxicology* paper.

This study informed the banning of genetically modified foods by the Kenyan government in November 2012[2]. On November 28, 2013, however, the journal[3] retracted the article due to strong criticism from the scientific community about the way the study was conducted. The editor, A. Wallace Hayes, wrote that he retracted the  paper because it was “inconclusive,” claiming that this was consistent with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, although others disagreed.

note: cite 3 says nothing about retraction: :{RE: :(style="color:#333333;"):}:[Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize

Food and Chemical Toxicology, Volume 50, Issue 11, November 2012, Pages 4221-4231

Gilles-Eric Séralini, Emilie Clair, Robin Mesnage, Steeve Gress, Nicolas Defarge, Manuela Malatesta, Didier Hennequin, Joël Spiroux de Vendômois

Since the publication of the above paper by Séralini et al., the Editors and the Publisher of Food and Chemical Toxicologyhave received many questions from members of the Scientific community.

In the light of these comments, the Editors and Publisher wish to make clear that the normal thorough peer review process was applied to the Seralini et al. paper. The paper was published after being objectively and anonymously peer reviewed, with a series of revisions made by the authors and the corrected paper then accepted by the Editor.

Post-publication members of the scientific community have challenged the paper, citing serious concerns about the study design, data presentation and related issues.

In responding to these criticisms, the Editors have encouraged those people with concerns to write formally to the Editor-in-Chief, so that that their views can be publicly aired. These letters and a response from Seralini et al. will shortly be published in the Journal.

Separately, the Editors and the Publisher, Elsevier, will be considering these criticisms. We are continually reviewing our peer review processes to ensure that the journal accepts the right papers with the appropriate levels of rigor and attention to detail. If we conclude that changes need to be made to the peer review process, that will be communicated openly to readers of the journal.

Food and Chemical Toxicologydeals with issues that are often controversial and where there are strong views held both within and beyond science. Preserving editorial independence and a robust peer review system in this process is obviously crucial. Here as elsewhere, Elsevier, as publisher of Food and Chemical Toxicology, both helps to facilitate the peer review process and upholds the principle of independent editorial decision making.  ]

"inconclusive:  http:/**/retractionwatch.**com/2013/11/28/controversial-seralini-gmo-rats-paper-to-be-retracted/ ...Unequivocally, the Editor-in-Chief found no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data. However, there is legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected....

On June 24, 2014, the retracted study, in expanded form, this time including the data, was republished with the tile “Republished study: long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize” in an obscure open source journal, *Environmental Sciences Europe*—where Seralini has published before. The journal, part of SpringerOpen, is too young to have an official Impact Factor (IF). Using the same calculation, however, the journal would have an IF of .55. That would place it about 190th out of the 210 journals in the “environmental sciences” category at Thomson Scientific. (For comparison, Food and Chemical Toxicology has an IF of just above 3, and a ranking of 27th.)

This study is almost identical to the prior study, with some minor but important differences. Séralini claimed in a press release that the republished study was peer reviewed [it was previously?] but that is not accurate, according to the publishing journal’s editor made to Nature magazine.[kai?] “We were Springer Publishing’s first open access journal on the environment, and are a platform for discussion on science and regulation at a European and regional level.” [note no cite] ESEUconducted no scientific peer review, said editor Henner Hollert, “because this had already been conducted by Food and Chemical Toxicology, and had concluded there had been no fraud nor misrepresentation.” The role of the three reviewers hired by ESEU was to check that there had been no change in the scientific content of the paper, Hollert added.

As before, the study claimed that rats fed a diet containing NK603—a seed variety made tolerant to the spraying of glyphosate (Monsanto’s  Roundup herbicide)—died earlier than those on a standard diet. The Séralini team reported that 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group. The number of rats used in the study was too small to draw statistically meaningful conclusions. The study team also selected a breed of rat to use in the experiments in which 80 percent routinely develop cancers, further obscuring the results. Some of the rats fed GM corn outlived the control group, further confusing the picture. The newly-released study, as the first version, did not include any pictures of the control rats. Critical scientists say that is most likely because the type of rat used is tumor prone and would almost certainly show numerous tumors after two years of life; including pictures of control rats with tumors would further undermine Séralini’s claims that the cancer was caused by the corn or glyphosate.

In 2014, Séralini et al. published a study in BioMed Research International claiming that pesticides were more toxic than regulatory bodies had previously thought. The study prompted Ralf Reski, one of the editors of the journal in which it was published, to resign. Reski said, “I do not want to be connected to a journal that provides [Séralini] a forum for such kind of agitation.”[http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/02/pesticide-study-sparks-backlash

53% pvt $: https://www.plant-biotech.net/members/CV_Reski_BE_2014.pdf

kai K is glp author? http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/author/kai-kupferschmidt/

SCIENCEINSIDER

Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy

Pesticide Study Sparks Backlash http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/02/pesticide-study-sparks-backlash  only www ref to ralf?]

Séralini Affair

What became known as the Séralini Affair began in September 2012, and involved the publication of an experiment conducted by a group led by Séralini involving the feeding of of Monsanto’s Round-Up-resistant NK603 maize (called corn in North America) and the herbicide Round-Up to rats, over the rats’ two-year lifespan.

Séralini had required that journalists, in order to receive a copy of the paper prior to the press conference, sign a confidentiality agreement prohibiting them from contacting other researchers for comment before the press conference. During the press conference, Séralini also announced he was releasing a book and a documentary film on the research. The press conference received extensive coverage in the media.

In the paper and in the press conference, Séralini claimed that the results showed that Round-Up-resistant maize and Round-Up are toxic. The abstract indicates: “The health effects of a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize (from 11% in the diet), cultivated with or without Roundup, and Round-Up alone (from 0.1 ppb in water), were studied 2 years in rats. In females, all treated groups died 2–3 times more than controls, and more rapidly. This difference was visible in 3 male groups fed GMOs. All results were hormone and sex dependent, and the pathological profiles were comparable.” The study used 200 Sprague-Dawley rats, 100 male and 100 female, and divided them into twenty groups with 10 rats each; ten experimental conditions were tested on male rats and separately on female rats for two years.

Other long-term studies, which were publicly funded, have uncovered no health issues. The Japanese Department of Environmental Health and Toxicology released a 52-week feeding study of GM soybeans in 2007, finding “no apparent adverse effect in rats.” In 2012, a team of scientists at the University of Nottingham School of Biosciences released a review of 12 long-term studies (up to two years) and 12 multi-generational studies (up to 5 generations) of GM foods in the same journal that published the Seralini paper, concluding there is no evidence of health hazards.”

The release of the book and movie in conjunction with the scientific paper, and the requirement that journalists sign a confidentiality agreement, were also criticized and negatively peer reviewed.

Scientific evaluation

As summarized on Wikipedia, the study was widely criticized. The London-based Science Media Centre, which assists reporters when major science news breaks, posted an entire page of criticisms,Scientists claimed that Séralini’s conclusions were impossible to justify given the experimental design – the small sample size together with the length of the study together with the known high incidence of tumors in the species of rats used.

The paper was also challenged by numerous food standards agencies. Many claimed that the conclusions were impossible to justify given the statistical power of the study. Sprague-Dawley rats have a lifespan of about two years and have a high tendency to get cancer over their lifespan (one study found that over eighty percent of males and over seventy percent of females got cancer under normal conditions). The Séralini experiment lasted the normal lifespan of these rats, and the longer the experiment went, the more statistical “noise” there was – the more rats get cancer naturally, regardless of what was done to them. For the experiment to have adequate statistical power, all the groups – control groups and test groups – would have to number at least 65 rats per group in order to sort out any experimentally caused cancers from cancers that would occur normally – but the Séralini study had only ten per group.

OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) guidelines recommends 20 rats for chemical-toxicity studies, and 50 rats for carcinogenicity studies. In addition, if the survival of the rats is less than 50% at 104 weeks (which is likely given the Sprague-Dawley rats used in the study) the recommended number of rats is 65.

Dr. Francis Nang’ayo of the African Agricultural and Technology Foundation[4] criticized the study for having used rats that were susceptible to cancer. “In science, the sample size for a study of such a magnitude should be at least 50 yet Seralini used only ten rats which to me greatly compromise the findings,” added Mr. Nang’ayo.

King’s College London Professor Tom Sanders wrote that since Sprague-Dawley rats are susceptible to mammary tumors when food intake is not restricted, data should have been provided about how much food the rats were fed (as well as the presence of fungus in the feed, another confounder). Sanders also wrote of this study, “The statistical methods are unconven

--

Sanders also wrote of this study, “The statistical methods are unconventional … and it would appear the authors have gone on a statistical fishing trip.”

The Washington Post quoted food activist and GMO critic Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University: “‘[I] can’t figure it out yet….It’s weirdly complicated and unclear on key issues: what the controls were fed, relative rates of tumors, why no dose relationship, what the mechanism might be. I can’t think of a biological reason why GMO corn should do this…..So even though I strongly support labeling, I’m skeptical of this study.’” University of Calgary Professor Maurice Moloney, among others, wondered why there were so many pictures in the study, and in sympathetic news reports about it, of treated rats with horrific tumors, but no pictures of the rats in the control group.

Many national food safety and regulatory agencies reviewed the paper and condemned it. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment VP Reiner Wittkowski said in a statement, “The study shows both shortcomings in study design and in the presentation of the collected data. This means that the conclusions drawn by the authors are not supported by the available data.”

A joint report by three Canadian regulatory agencies also “identified significant shortcomings in the study design, implementation and reporting.” Similar conclusions were reached by the French HCB and the National Agency for Food Safety, the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, the Technical University of Denmark, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the Brazilian National Technical Commission on Biosafety, and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The conclusions of the EFSA evaluation were:

The study as reported by Séralini et al. was found to be inadequately designed, analysed and reported…The study as described by Séralini et al. does not allow giving weight to their results and conclusions as published. Conclusions cannot be drawn on the difference in tumour incidence between treatment groups on the basis of the design, the analysis and the results as reported. Taking into consideration Member States’ assessments and the authors’ answer to critics, EFSA finds that the study as reported by Séralini et al. is of insufficient scientific quality for safety assessments.

The European Federation of Biotechnology lobby, which counts Monsanto and other GM firms among its members, called for the paper to be retracted, calling its publication a “dangerous failure of the peer-review system.”

Six French national academies (of Agriculture, Medecine, Pharmacy, Science, Technology and Veterinarians) issued a joint statement – “an extremely rare event in French science”– condemning the study and the journal that published it. The joint statement dismissed the study as ‘a scientific non-event’. The Food and Chemical Toxicology journal, an Elsevier imprint, has a full peer review process, and at least three scientists were needed to endorse the Seralini article prior to publication. The journal in question published a statement in their November 2012 issue, that “the Editors have encouraged those people with concerns to write formally to the Editor-in-Chief, so that their views can be publicly aired.”

In March 2013, the same journal that published the Seralini study, published a letter from Erio Barale-Thomas, Principal Scientist of Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development and the President of the Conseil d’Administration of The Société Française de Pathologie Toxicologique (SFPT, French Society of Toxicologic Pathology. SFPT is “a non governmental/non profit organization formed by veterinarians, physicians, pharmacists and biologists specialized in veterinary and toxicologic pathology. The letter criticized the Seralini study on several fronts, and concluded: “However, given this study presents serious deficiencies in the protocol, the procedures and the interpretation of the results, the SFPT cannot support any of the scientific claims drawn by the authors, and any relevance for human risk assessment. This letter presents the consensus scientific opinion of the Conseil d’Administration of the SFPT.”

As a result of the publication of the Séralini paper, the Belgian Federal Minister of Public Health asked the Belgian Biosafety Advisory Council (BBAC) to evaluate the paper. The BBAC was asked to “inform the Minister whether this paper (i) contains new scientific information with regard to risks for human health of GM maize NK603 and (ii) whether this information triggers a revision of the current authorisation for commercialisation for food and feed use of this GM maize in the European Union (EU). Responding to the two point mandate, the BBAC committee, whose members are drawn from the Belgian biotech Professoriat, pointed out that “the long duration of this study is a positive aspect since most of the toxicity studies on GMOs are performed on shorter periods,” and concluded:

“Given the shortcomings identified by the experts regarding the experimental design, the statistical analysis, the interpretation of the results, the redaction of the article and the presentation of the results, the Biosafety Advisory Council concludes that this study does not contain new scientifically relevant elements that may lead to reconsider immediately the current authorisation for food and feed use of GM maize NK603. Considering the issues raised by the study (i.e. long term assessment), the Biosafety Advisory Council proposes EFSA urgently to study in depth the relevance of the actual guidelines and procedures. It can find inspiration in the GRACE project to find useful information and new concerted ideas.”

Support for Séralini paper

According to Wikipedia, Séralini defended the study design, the interpretation of the results, and manner and content of the publication. Support for the study came from ENSSER (European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility), of which CRIIGEN, the institute that Seralini founded and that funded the study, is a member. A study funded by and conducted in consultation with ENSSER also found that EFSA applied double standards. An open letter in support of Seralini’s article, signed by about 300 scientists, doctors, scholars and activists, was published in Independent Science News, a project of the Bioscience Resource Project, both of which oppose GM crops.

The German research group Testbiotech, which opposes GMOs and which believes that regulators have been captured by the biotech industry, posted a report critical of the EFSA’s reaction to the study as not applying the same standards to studies submitted by industry as it did to Seralini’s study.

A statement opposing the controversy, and especially the attacks on Seralini, was published in the newspaper Le Monde and was signed by 140 French scientists; the letter said: “We are deeply shocked by the image of our community that this controversy gives citizens. Many of the threats to our planet have been revealed by scientists isolated and confirmed by many studies coming from the scientific community. In this case, it would be more efficient to implement research on the health and environmental risks of GMOs and pesticides, improve toxicological protocols used for placing on the market and finance a variety of researchers in this domain….”

Reaction in the media

The press conference led to wide coverage in the media, which “energized opponents of GM food, especially in Europe”. Le Nouvel Observateurcovered the press conference in a story called, “Yes, GMOs are poisons!”.

As Jon Entine put it in Forbes, “Seralini’s research is anomalous. Previous peer-reviewed rat feeding studies using the same products (NK603 and Roundup) have not found a

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Jon Entine put it in Forbes, “Seralini’s research is anomalous. Previous peer-reviewed rat feeding studies using the same products (NK603 and Roundup) have not found any negative food safety impacts.

Andrew Revkin dubbed it another instance of “single-study syndrome”, and contended that the study was in support of an “agenda”.

Henry I. Miller, writing for Forbes, said of the study that “the investigators have refused to release all the data from the experiment, which constitutes scientific misconduct.” Séralini responded by saying, “…that he won’t make any data available to the EFSA and the BfR until the EFSA makes public all the data under-pinning its 2003 approval of NK603 maize for human consumption and animal feed.”

The Guardian’s Environmental Blog stated that the study linking GM maize to cancer “must be taken seriously by regulators” and that although it “attracted a torrent of abuse”, “it cannot be swept under the carpet”. It noted that CRIIGEN funded the research although it did not report the source of the funds from organic interests and Greenpeace, which are vocal in opposition to genetic modification, and reported Séralini’s response: namely, that studies in support of GM food are usually funded by “corporates or by pro-biotech institutions”.

GMO-Seralini

The Seralini research claims are officially promoted via a website run and managed by U.K. organic exporter, Sustainable Pulse publisher and anti-GMO activist Henry Rowlands.[5]

Advocacy

Funding

Séralini’s research campaign (reported to be more than 5 million Euros was funded in part with more than 3.2 million Euros by French organic food giants Auchan and Carrefour.[6] A million euros were also donated by the the Fondation pour le progrès de l’homme (FPH – Foundation for the Progress of Humankind), a foundation with a reputation for generosity towards an assortment of anti-GMO groups. Séralini’s work is also funded by the activist group Greenpeace.

Publicity for the release of his GMO rat feeding study claims was coordinated by the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) lead by former UK organic industry Soil Association executive director Patrick Holden. A PR agency called Greenhouse PR managed the events, with media releases, sample tweets etc. and a press release telling media that “for pictures of the rats contact Greenhouse PR” (this page has since been removed from the Sustainable Food Trust website). Greenhouse PR also helped Sustainable Food Trust leverage Patrick Holden’s close relationship with the Prince of Wales to try to secure positive media coverage for Séralini’s controversial GMO corn study. Its website says: “Greenhouse helped organise a series of events hosted by Patrick Holden at Highgrove Farm, home of the Prince of Wales. Events were attended by leading industry opinion formers and key media and included off-the-record debates on issues related to the future of food and farming, followed by a guided tour of the farm.

To raise awareness of GM on behalf of the SFT, Greenhouse also launched peer-reviewed scientific research into the impact of GM feed on the health of rats, accompanied by an educational website calling for more regulation and research.”[7]  Former SFT staffer Henry Rowlands, now an organic marketing exporter and publisher, hosts and maintains the GMO-Seralini official websites. Seralini is linked to a company called Sevene Pharma, where he is a consultant. The company sells homeopathic remedies. He is also reportedly linked to the ‘Invitation to Life’ cult.

Books

• Séralini, Gilles-Éric (2004). *Ces OGM Qui Changent Le Monde*. Flammarion Publishing. ISBN 2080800620.
• Séralini, Gilles-Éric (2006). *Après Nous le Déluge?*. Flammarion

Criticisms

Seralini’s claims and tactics have been heavily criticized by the regulatory, academic and science watchdog communities. Examples include:

• CRIIGEN evaluation, by David Tribe, GMO Pundit, December 2012.

• Genetically modified corn and cancer – what does the evidence really say?, by Ashley Ng, The Converation, September 2012.

• 700 Researchers Call On Gilles-Eric Seralini To Release GMO Test Data, Science 2.0, October 2012.

• Being Gilles-Eric Seralini: Inside the mind of the anti-GM movement – See more at: http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/06/10/being-gilles-eric-seralini-inside-the-mind-of-the-anti-gm-movement/#sthash.RVnii37e.dpuf, by Jon Entine, Genetic Literacy, June 2013.

• Scientists smell a rat in fraudulent study, by Bruce Chassy & Henry Miller, Forbes Magazine, September 2012.

• Anti-GM corn study reconsidered: Seralini finally responds to torrent of criticism, AEI, November 2012.

• Seralini paper influence Kenya ban of GMO imports, by Emily Willingham, Forbes Magazine, December 2012.

• Seralini GMO rats & Cancer, Tech ‘N You, 2013.

• Why I think the Seralini GM feeding trial is bogus, by Andrew Kniss, Control Freaks, September 2012.

• Anti-GMO Scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini, Activist Jeffrey Smith Withdraw from Food Biotech Debate, by Jon Entine, Forbes Magazine, May 2013

• Seralini anti-Monsanto study was so poorly conducted it harms the anti-GMO movement, The Daily Paul, September 2012.

• The Seralini Rule, Skeptico, June 2013. Excerpt: “I have a new rule for debating anti-GMO people: If you favorably cite the 2012 Séralini rats fed on Roundup ready maize study, you just lost the argument…”

• March Against Monsanto, The Progressive Contrarian, May 2013. Excerpt: “I mentioned Seralini and Smith were frauds who refuse to publicly debate scientists who want to challenge them…”

• Science says GMOs are safe, Skeptical Raptor, June 2013. Excerpt: “But be forewarned, if it is junk science, I will call it junk science, like Gilles-Eric Séralini et al.’s paper about GMO corn causing cancer. Except it was poorly designed, utilized bad statistics, and really provided no evidence whatsoever for anything except that Séralini is an incompetent scientist…”

• Was Seralini GMO study designed to generate negative outcome, Storify, October 2012.

References

• 1   Gilles Eric Séralini – President of the Scientific Board – Molecular Biology Professor, by HH, CRIIGEN website, November 12, 2008.
• 2   http://gantdaily.com/2013/11/27/is-africa-ready-for-genetically-modified-foods/
• 3   http://www.journals.elsevier.com/food-and-chemical-toxicology/news/journal-statement/
• 4   http://mobile.nation.co.ke/business/Study-on-GMOs-withdrawn/-/1950106/2093496/-/format/xhtml/-/lt3pkm/-/index.html
• 5   http://gmoseralini.org/en/
• 6   http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2012/09/auchan-and-carrefour-financed-criigen.html
• 7   http://greenhousepr.co.uk/clients/about/sustainable-food-trust/

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/04/02/exposing-the-anti-gmo-legal-machine-the-real-story-behind-the-so-called-monsanto-protection-act/

OPINION 4/02/2013 @ 5:55PM 30,068 views

Exposing the Anti-GMO Legal Machine: The Real Story Behind the So-Called Monsanto Protection Act

Over the past week, we’ve seen a tsunami of stories about the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” more accurately known as Section 735 of HR 933. The Genetic Literacy Project’s  Jon Entine reports the story behind the story.

It’s a small provision attached to a massive agricultural spending bill signed into law by President Obama last week. According to agricultural biotechnology detractors, Section 735 is the “most dangerous food act ever” 

[[http://www.thedailysheeple.com/obama-betrays-americans-again-with-the-monsanto-protection-act_032013

Contributed by Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper.

Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor who lives in a small village in the Pacific Northwestern area of the United States.  She is the author of The Pantry Primer: How to Build a One Year Food Supply in Three Months. On her website, The Organic Prepper, Daisy writes about healthy prepping, homesteading adventures, and the pursuit of liberty and food freedom.  Daisy is a co-founder of the website Nutritional Anarchy, which focuses on resistance through food self-sufficiency. Daisy’s articles are widely republished throughout alternative media. You can follow her on Facebook, Pinterest,  and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

- See more at: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/obama-betrays-americans-again-with-the-monsanto-protection-act_032013#sthash.Va7129IS.dpuf]]

and a “terrifying piece of policy”. 

http://www.ibtimes.com/monsanto-protection-act-5-terrifying-things-know-about-hr-933-provision-1156079

Why? Because, they claim, among other things, it purportedly allows biotech companies to sell seeds that can cause serious consumer health problems. Here is how Gawker frames it:

Section 735 effectively shields large biotech companies, like Monsanto, from the federal courts in case something is found to be harmful in their genetically-modified seeds. Because of Section 735, federal courts would be powerless to stop Monsanto from selling their product.

Just as “shocking,” activists claim, the provision was secretly written by Monsanto, stealthily inserted into the bill in the dead of night by its Congressional backroom lackeys and then placed on the desk of President Barack Obama, who is so in hock to biotech special interests that he sold out the public and signed the bill, rider intact, therefore undermining American democracy. No kidding. That’s the way even mainstream bloggers and news outlets discuss this legislation. “Monsanto teams up with Congress to shred the Constitution,” shrieked one Huffington Post headline. Hundreds of thousands of angry anti-GMO protestors have signed online petitions expressing their outrage.

Let’s separate the facts from the fury.

The “stealth” claim is just plain wrong. This provision was drafted last year and has been in printed versions of the bill that have been circulating widely in Washington for more than nine months; no one, let alone hyper-vigilant anti-GMO campaigners, were caught by surprise. For example, late last fall, Stonyfield Farm, a division of Dannon that makes organic diary products and is actively engaged in a range of anti-technology agricultural campaigns, ran a blog post demonizing the provision that its opponents now claim was written in the dead of night and slipped into the measure.

Even if the courts find that a (genetically engineered) crop shouldn’t be planted until more research is done about its safety, no one could stop that crop from being planted, even temporarily. This provision clearly tells us that Congress thinks public health and safety should take a back seat to the expansion of GE crops.

The Stonyfield blog post raises the second gross mischaracterization now making the rounds of anti-GMO websites and many mainstream news outlets: allegations that the provision would benefit the biotech industry at the expense of consumer safety. For example, Russia Today news claims the rider “would strip federal courts of the authority to immediately halt the planting and sale of genetically modified (GMO) seed crop regardless of any consumer health concerns.”

This characterization is hokum. What does the biotech rider actually state and what is it designed to address?

To date, no court has ever held that a biotechnology crop presents a risk to health, safety or the environment. But make no mistake: it’s not because the courts or the government approval process is lax. Just the opposite. Getting approval for any transgenic crop or food is like running a torturous gauntlet,  both arduous and bureaucratic. Companies are required to provide years of internal and independent data, which are carefully reviewed by various government agencies.

Beyond that, the USDA cannot approve a new seed variety until it conducts an Environmental Assessment. This is the point where the process gets even messier—and where anti-biotech activists and lawyers do their best to gum up the works in hopes of generating a critical mass of negative public opinion.

By law, the EA must consider any and all factors relating to the “human environment,” which is very ambiguously defined, leaving all kinds of legal openings for hostile groups to target. If an anti-science group such as the Center for Food Safety or the Institute of Responsible Technology or the Union of Concerned Scientists challenges the EA for not considering one issue or another, the assessment can be deemed insufficient and a new one must be ordered.

In fact, this has happened twice in recent years, with alfalfa and sugar beets. Alfalfa hay, a nutritious, easily digestible livestock feed and $8 billion a year business, is the country’s fourth-most-valuable crop. Monsanto makes GM alfalfa seeds, as part of the company’s Roundup Ready line. They are genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, an herbicide that is commercially known as Roundup. When farmers use Roundup, which is considered a mild herbicide, instead of other harsher chemicals to kill weeds, they actually cut down on overall toxic chemical use.

After an exhaustive review, the USDA gave Roundup Ready Alfalfa the green light in 2005. But the Center for Food Safety contended that the government hadn’t adequately evaluated the potential environmental consequences, although the agency believed it had. In 2007, in Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, a federal court agreed with CFS, prohibiting Monsanto from selling Roundup Ready Alfalfa pending yet another assessment.

This was incredibly disruptive to thousands of farmers who had planted alfalfa, which is a perennial crop so does not have to be reseeded each year. The legal status of a field of GM alfalfa planted legally after the USDA had deregulated GE alfalfa was suddenly changed under the court ruling. Farmers were being told that they had to follow a new set of rules in handling their crop. For more than four years, they didn’t know if the technology was going to be available for their use. The confusion and patchwork of conflicting regulations, court decisions and labeling requirements dealt a sizable economic blow to one of the country’s most important export crops. The ongoing chaos was exactly the kind of commercial uncertainty that anti-GMO forces were hoping to manufacture.

The alfalfa case standoff eventually made it to the Supreme Court. The evidence in support of the safety and public benefits of GM alfalfa was so strong that in 2009, the Obama Administration had Solicitor General Elena Kagan file a brief on the biotechnology company’s behalf, even though the government was not a defendant in the appeal. To no scientist’s surprise, in June 2010 SCOTUS overturned the lower court’s injunction that had prohibited Monsanto from selling pesticide-resistant alfalfa seeds.

“An injunction is a drastic and extraordinary remedy, which should not be granted as a matter of course,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the 7-1 majority, concluding that the US District Court in San Francisco had “abused its discretion.”

The temporary injunction, by then determined to be abusive, proved a financial disaster for the farm industry and many individual farmers who hadsuspended planting alfalfa pending a final resolution. The almost identical disaster scenario has played out over sugar beets. 95% of which is from GE seeds. In 2010, the Center for Food Safety and some organic farmers who stood to gain by attacking conventional and GM crops convinced a court on procedural grounds—there was no finding of environmental or health dangers—to void the five-year-old approval of transgenic sugar beet seeds. Despite no evidence of any potential harm, that November, a federal judge ordered the GE sugar beet seedlings—all but 5% of the nation’s crop— pulled from the ground, as required by law. If that decision had stood, it could have destroyed as much as half of America’s granulated sugar production on purely technical grounds. The saga only ended in July of last year when the USDA ruled once and for all to allow unrestricted planting of Monsanto’s GMO sugar beets.

It was a victory for science, but the professional “antis” considered it a victory as well. After all, they had caused billions of dollars in unrecoverable damage to the American farm economy and rattled the cages at the corporations they considered “evil”. That’s certainly something to crow about.

The rider was specifically designed to prevent such egregious abuse of the court system and regulatory process. The legislation does not, as critics allege, allow farmers or Monsanto to sell seeds proven to be harmful. Rather, it provides legal consistency so farmers and businesses do not get yanked one way or the other based on the temporary findings of competing court systems as activist challenges make their way up the legal food chain. Going forward, the provision will protect farmers who buy GM seeds and plant them under the belief that it is legal to do because the seeds have been subjected to extensive USDA scrutiny and approval.

The so-called Monsanto Protection Act has nothing to do with consumer safety or limiting biotech’s liability for making “dangerous” products, as even mainstream news outlets, like *Salon*, have claimed. That’s just bad reporting. In the two cases heralded by campaigners—alflafa and sugar beets—only technical concerns about the evaluation process were raised; consumer safety and the environment was never the issue.

No product is exempt from the law when health or environmental problems are identified. If the USDA or a court determines that a biotech seed or crop or food does not pass environmental or health muster, it will be pulled from the market and banned.  But until that happens, because of this provision—let’s call it the Food and Farmer Safety and Health Protection Act—USDA safety determinations cannot be arbitrarily overturned by rogue courts responding to anti-science activists—what appears to have happened in the alfalfa case, until the Supreme’s intervened with its overwhelming 7-1 decision.

The howling over the so-called Monsanto provision is all show and little substance. It’s goal was to protect farmers against rogue anti-technology campaigners. Congress and the Obama Administration knew exactly what they were doing–and they did the right thing. Anti-GMO campaigners are clearly positioning themselves for another offensive against a new wave of GM crops and foods, with new pesticide tolerant grain varieties and a host of nutritionally enhanced grains, such as Golden Rice and drought resistant wheat, in their crosshairs. Yes, we should all be concerned.

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OPINION 5/29/2013 @ 1:38PM 9,213 views

Anti-GMO Scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini, Activist Jeffrey Smith Withdraw from Food Biotech Debate

As the Genetic Literacy Project reports, over the weekend, the cartoonish ‘March Against Monsanto’ played out in many cities across the United States and the world, invariably to small crowds—although the organizers and anti-biotech NGOs did their best to claim inflated numbers in an attempt to garner headlines.

One of the biggest disappointments for organizers was in foodie central,

Denver, where an estimatedtwo hundred people (organizers had predicted 5,000) turned out to hear anti biotech author and activist Jeffrey Smith rail against Monsanto.

That’s the same Jeffrey Smith who earlier last week withdrew from the planned “Great Biotechnology” debate scheduled for June 4 at the CATO Institutein Washington, DC. The event was shaping up to be a genuine first—a civil discussion between pro-science advocates sympathetic to the role of biotechnology in food and farming and dedicated opponents who believe transgenic foods are a violation of nature and harmful to humans and animals.

Smith, if you’re not familiar with him, founded an organization known as the Institute for Responsible Technology. He’s written two anti-biotech self-published books and produced a documentary narrated by the wife of Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose show he has appeared on numerous times to rail against Monsanto and crop biotechnology.

Oz often characterizes Smith as a “scientist.” However his employment history reflects no formal training in any aspect of science, let alone biotechnology. Keith Kloor, who writes a respected blog for Discover, refers to him as a prototypical purveyor of pseudo-science. “He is the equivalent of an anti-vaccine leader, someone who is quite successful in spreading fear and false information,” Kloor writes.

As Kloor notes, Smith’s Wikipedia bio seems a fair representation of his cult following and importance among anti-GM campaigners:

Jeffrey Smith, flying yogic instructor

A variety of American organic food companies see Smith “as a champion for their interests”, and Smith’s supporters describe him as “arguably the world’s foremost expert on the topic of genetically modified foods”. Michael Specter, writing in *The New Yorker*, reported that Smith was presented as a “scientist” on *The Dr. Oz Show* although he lacks any scientific experience or relevant qualifications. Bruce Chassy, a molecular biologist and food scientist, wrote to the show arguing that Smith’s “only professional experience prior to taking up his crusade against biotechnology is as a ballroom-dance teacher, yogic flying instructor, and political candidate for the Maharishi cult’s natural-law party.” The director of the Organic Consumers Association says Smith is “respected as a public educator on GMOs” while “supporters of biotechnology” have described him as “misinformed and misleading” and as “an activist with no scientific or medical background” who is known for his “near-hysterical criticism of biotech foods.”[note no cites]

Organizing opposites

When I was putting together this panel, I had originally sought out the Center for Food Safety and the Union of Concerned Scientists to participate, but they declined. In controversies, you don’t get to choose your opposition; the public does that for you. So I turned to Smith to represent the “other side.” For whatever reason, Smith has become wildly popular among the antis, and his books—however dubiously written and sourced—are cited as canon by rank and file protestors.

Despite his questionable reputation among serious scientists (he is often referred to in conversations with top geneticists as a ‘scam artist’) over the course of the months planning this event we talked many times. I found Smith to be engaging, witty, and in his own way very smart. I too wondered if he was a huckster, cashing in on his new celebrity; I can say, honestly, I found him nothing if not sincere. At every step along the process, he demonstrated integrity. I believe his understanding of science, risk and genetics are frighteningly thin, but I don’t believe the misinformation he is spouting is entirely calculated. I like him to this day, and hope at some point we can re-engage in a civil and open discussion.

Smith and I are communicators, although of two very different kinds. As we were planning the event, we agreed it would be best to bring scientists into the mix. He opted to recruit French professor Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen, whose paper released last fall claiming that rats fed Monsanto’s genetically modified corn developed multiple cancerous tumors turned him into a global celebrity among anti-biotech campaigners. The anomalous study was savaged by mainstream scientists and rejected by every major independent research organization in the world that reviewed it[not named] . It was rife with methodological problems and obvious ideological biases.  Nonetheless it has become a poster child for “GMOs will kill you” and Monsanto conspiracy theorists. Seralini, who agreed to join us via Skype, was the best the anti-biotech campaigners had to offer.

To counter Seralini, I originally recruited Anastasia Bodnar, a biotechnologist with a degree in sustainable agriculture who previously was a President’s Management Fellow and worked at the National Institutes of Health. Most notably she is co-director of the non-profit Biology Fortified a site popular among young sustainability focused scientists, geneticists and food experts.

However, because of a work conflict, she had to pull out. On short notice, I recruited a more than capable replacement in Kevin Folta, Interim Chair of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. He’s published two seminal texts on genomics and dozens of articles, and actively engages biotech issues in public. Like Bodnar, he is one of an emerging group of post-ideological scientists who understand the constructive potential of biotechnology.

Smith pulls out; Seralini follows

The debate began to unravel just two weeks before the scheduled event. Smith objected to the unexpected substitution of Folta, who is an active online presence, engaging and debating campaigners and carefully laying out counter, science-based arguments. Smith immediately balked at the substitution. According to Smith, Folta had “crossed the line” in some criticisms of him, although he didn’t provide any examples. His nerves clearly jangled, Smith ultimately decided he was not comfortable with Folta, and said he would not debate. He then said he had too many commitments, and could not prepare for the event even if he had wanted to. He then promptly flew off to Denver to address a relative handful of fellow anti-Monsanto conspiracy theory protesters missing out on the opportunity to talk with tens of thousands of people through this Internet streamed debate.

Seralini’s withdraw was equally messy. After Smith’s decision, he suddenly decided that my previously published criticisms of his studies were “libelous” and that he would never be involved in a debate with me. In fact, I had posted a number of articles inForbesabout the Seralini Affair seven months ago; he was well aware of those, as he had reference them in communications in the weeks prior to his pullout.

Why the sudden turnaround? Seralini sent a torrent of bizarre notes, saying he would not debate Folta because he was not a toxicologist and only a toxicologist would fairly review his work. Folta, of course, is a prominent plant geneticist who reviews and edits scholarly work across disciplines.   The Great Debate was never going to focus entirely on Seralini’s controversial study; it was about the future of food and the farm. But the hubristic French scientist apparently had been expecting to turn the debate into the Eric Seralini Show; when he finally realized he’d have to debate science—and the broad issues of biotechnology and world food security—he panicked and withdrew.

It’s only a guess, but I believe Folta scared the bejeebers out of him. Folta is a dogged defender of science, with a nuanced understanding of the benefits and the challenges that accompany this powerful but complicated technology. He’s not afraid to go on the web or into public hornet’s nests to make the case for science.

Folta and I, with CATO’s support, are committed to going on with the public event. We will present both sides of the issue—in fact we will go out of our way, for the sake of a vigorous public discussion, to “make the case against biotech crops.” This is a debate worth having. We may yet also add a third presentert. Stay tuned for updates Please do check out the event on Tuesday, June 4, 2:00-4:00 pm Eastern Time. It will be streamed live on CATO’s site as well as on the Genetic Literacy Project.

More on genetics and science literacy**at the Genetic Literacy Project**

**Follow Jon on Twitter**

***Jon Entine***, executive director of the***Genetic Literacy Project***, is a senior fellow at the***Center for Health & Risk Communication***and***STATS***(Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.

gmomonstanto tag 6/14

(fail?)

GMO but also overflow from monsanato

seralini fixed?

http://www.alternet.org/food/major-study-demonstrates-monsanto-gmo-corn-product-can-cause-damage-liver-and-kidneys-and

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crypto

Concerned about the bees and the butterflies? Interested in celebrating National Pollinator Week? It’s happening next week, June 16-22.

And it’s brought to you, in part, by none other than Monsanto and Bayer.

In 2007, the U.S. Senate designated a week in June as National Pollinator Week. Every year, the Secretary of Agriculture signs a National Pollinator Week proclamation. As the public has grown increasingly concerned about the link between toxic chemicals and the die-off of bees and monarch butterflies, National Pollinator Week has evolved into the Pollinator Partnership. The Pollinator Partnership is a nonprofit that describes itself as “the largest organization in the world dedicated exclusively to the protection and promotion of pollinators and their ecosystems.”

Who supports (i.e. funds) the Pollinator Partnership? Among others, Bayer and Monsanto—the very companies that are killing pollinators with insecticides and genetically engineered crops.

It’s all part of a well-documented, well-funded (and shameless) public relations campaign by the pesticide industry to give the appearance of “caring” about the die-off of bees and butterflies, while diverting attention from the cause of those die-offs—highly profitable products made by Monsanto and Bayer.

Let’s take back National Pollinators Week. By spreading the truth about the connections between Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops, Bayer’s neonicotinoid insecticides andColony Collapse Disorder.

In honor of Pollinator Week, share this article. And make plans to join a pollinators celebration that hasn’t been taken over by the agrichemical and biotech companies: Bee Against Monsanto’s Global Swarm to Save the Bees on Aug. 16.

Three ways Monsanto and Bayer are killing the bees:

1. Monsanto’s genetically engineered, herbicide-tolerant “Roundup Ready” crops

In 2000, scientists discovered that genetically engineered traits in pollen can be transferred to bees though their digestive systems.

Researcher Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a leading German zoologist, released bees in a field of canola that had been genetically engineered to tolerate Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. He then fed the canola pollen to younger bees and observed that the bacteria in the guts of the young bees took on the traits of the canola’s modified genes.

Kaatz’s research predated Colony Collapse Disorder. That term, for the disappearance of bees from the hive, wasn’t coined by scientists until 2006.

With the mass death of bees yet to come, the discussion of Kaatz’s findings focused less on how Monsanto’s genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant “Roundup Ready” crops could harm bees, and more on his research’s suggestion that all types of bacteria could be contaminated by engineered genes, including those that live inside the human digestive system. Scientists warned that this would impact the bacteria’s vital role in helping the human body fight disease and aid digestion. Even worse, if the antibiotic-resistant gene used in genetically engineered crops crossed over to bacteria, it would cause human infections to become resistant to antibiotics.

The warnings were prescient. Kaatz’s work foreshadowed the correlation between the increase of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops in the human diet, and the rise of gastrointestinal disorders, immune diseases and antibiotic resistant infections.

Inadvertently, he also predicted how the increased use of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops would spur Colony Collapse Disorder in bees.

When Colony Collapse Disorder hit in 2006, others picked up where Kaatz left off.

In 2010, Terrence N. Ingram, a commercial beekeeper for 55 years, published an article in 2010 in Mother Earth News that detailed the struggles he’d had since his neighbors started spraying Roundup on their genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant soy in 1996. He went from producing 15 tons of honey a year down to four.

“The bees never had a chance,” he wrote, “and all of the hives were dead before winter.”

In 2012, his bees disappeared while he was out of town. This time it wasn’t the neighbor’s herbicide sprays, it was the Illinois Department of Agriculture (IDA). Under the pretense that Ingram’s hives were infected with foulbrood, the agency destroyed them to prevent the spread of the disease.

Ingram believed IDA’s action had more to do with his 15 years of research into the effect of Roundup on honeybees. His suspicions were fueled by the fact that IDA’s theft included the hive of a queen bee that may have had a genetic resistance to Roundup.

“Knowing that Monsanto and the Department of Agriculture are in bed together, one has to wonder if Monsanto was behind the theft to ruin my research that may prove Roundup was, and is, killing honeybees,” Ingram told local Prairie Advocate reporter Tom Kocal.

Ingram hasn’t been able to get his bees back. But his hunch that Roundup was killing his bees is gathering support.

The suspicions voiced in Ingram’s 2010 Mother Earth News article were backed up with scientific evidence in 2013, when plant pathologist Dr. Don Huber published a paper written for the Center for Honeybee Research that names glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, as a possible cause of Colony Collapse Disorder.

According to Huber, “The exposure, physiological damage, and biological impact of glyphosate are consistent with all of the known conditions related to CCD. Of all of the potential individual factors implicated in CCD, glyphosate is the only compound extensively used worldwide where CCD occurs that impacts all of them.”

2. Monsanto’s insecticide-producing, genetically engineered “Bt” Crops

In research from 2001-2004, Hans-Hinrich Kaatz conducted another investigation into the impact of Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops on honeybees. This time, he looked at “Bt crops” that have been genetically engineered to produce insecticide.

Kaatz found that genetically engineered Bt toxin didn’t kill healthy honeybees.

But as it turned out, not all the bees in his study were healthy. Just by chance, some of the bees were simultaneously exposed to a parasite along with the engineered toxin. In that group, there was a “significantly stronger decline in the number of bees.” According to Kaatz, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have “altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry.”

Because of the harmful effect that the pollen of Bt crops could have on bees, in 2012, Poland’s Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki imposed a complete ban on growing MON810 corn, a Bt crop that is the only genetically engineered crop grown in the EU.

3. Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds treated with Bayer’s insecticides

Looking at the science, it’s hard not to wonder if Monsanto isn’t killing bees intentionally. Especially when the company buys out a bee research firm and proposes use genetic engineering to address Colony Collapse Disorder. [Monsanto has announced it will purchase Beeologics, a biological research firm. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Beeologics develops biological products to control pests and diseases. Among its current projects is one focused on protecting bee health. Monsanto will use Beeologic’s expertise to expand its use of biologicals in agriculture, an area that is expected to continue to grow.  

Monsanto, which has expertise in managing a technology pipeline, will support the Beeologics team and its Technology Advisory Board in advancing its pipeline.]

[blog:

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Monsanto Genetically Engineering Bees

After being blamed by massive amounts of bee keepers for the Honey Bee collapse, Monsanto purchased the largest bee research firm called Beeologics back in September of 2011.

Their website says:

"Beeologics LLC is an international firm dedicated to restoring bee health and protecting the future of insect pollination. While its primary goal is to control the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) infection crises, Beeologics' mission is to become the guardian of bee health worldwide. Through continuous research, scientific innovation, and a focus on applicable solutions, Beeologics is developing a line of RNAi-based products to specifically address the long-term well being of the bees. "

In case you don't know RNAi-based products are a mechanism meant to block gene expression. RNAi-based products are genetically engineered products that Monsanto is now planning to use on the honey bees! The same bees who's health, (many beekeepers believe) has already been compromised by Monsanto's genetically engineered plants that produce pesticides. Their answer to this problem should be to stop making GM food, but instead it is to make more genetically engineered products that they will unleash on our planet without research to show any of them are safe.

RNAi (ribonucleic acid interference) is a process within living cells that moderates the activity of genes. It has been known by other names, including co-suppression, post transcriptional gene silencing and quelling.They all described the RNAi phenomenon. RNAs (ribonucleic acid) are the direct products of genes, and these small RNAs can bind to other specific messanger RNA (mRNA) molecules and either increase or decrease their activity, for example by preventing an mRNA from producing a protein. RNA interference has an important role in defending cells against parasitic genes - viruses and transposons,  but also in directing development as well as gene expression in general.

Monsanto In Route to Control Seeds & Pollination

Monsanto is already on its way to owning most of the seeds on the planet. They are replacing the natural spirit made food with Monsanto made frankenfood. They now also want to own the means of pollinating the food. Their frankenfoods that produce pesticides are believed by beekeepers to be killing the honey bees. Monsanto's solution to the colony collapse disorder is to replace God's honeybees with Monsanto's genetically modified bees that are resistant to all the pesticide producing food they make.

Just as their GM seed has trespassed onto organic/conventional farmers fields by pollinators bringing pollen from one field to another, these frankenbees will also get out into the world and end up contaminating the native bees. When this happens Monsanto will probably sue any bee keeper who has bees that show similar genetics to their patented bees. Beekeepers could be forced to buy Monsanto bees when all bees are contaminated and changed into frankenbees.

Then there is you and I. Are we destined to be frankenpeople? Are we already contaminated? I eat only organic food in hope to not be contaminated by their products. We all need to do this to stop them. Do not buy anything but organic food or at least buy local from farmers you know who do no not sell genetically modified food. Do not buy non-organic corn, soybeans, cotton, canola and sugar beets - this means sugar as they are almost all GMO. Read labels. It is my opinion that the problems with human fertility, increased gastrointestinal problems and many other human diseases that have increased in the recent past may be linked to genetically engineered food. The research with animals certainly supports it. If nothing else, don't you wonder why so many more people have food allergies nowadays?

We must talk to our representatives and tell them we want labeling of GM food immediately if not outright banning of it until it has more research. So far the research is frightening. Since it is so hard to work on a federal level, get your state or even your local county to ban the growing of GM food in the county. If Monsanto claims they will sue your state or county for banning them (as they have been doing), tell your officials you will stand behind them. Don't let your officials be bullied by Monsanto.

Why do 40 other countries ban GM food outright or have laws regulating GM food when the United States won't even label it? It is up to us as citizens to get this changed.

Without the labeling, the only way for you to be safe is to eat organic food you grow or you get from reputable farmers/groceries. Additionally, this way you make sure you are not funding the further expansion of Monsanto, Bayer or Syngeta.(All part of the GM food chain.)

For more information on the research go to Jeffrey Smith's site here.

It’s bad enough that Monsanto produces genetically engineered crops that screw with honeybees’ gastrointestinal health, making them more susceptible to disease. But here’s the kicker: Monsanto also treats its genetically engineered seeds with a class of systemic insecticides that’s straight-up toxic to bees.

Insecticides known as neonicotinoids, or “neonics” for short, are the smoking gun of Colony Collapse Disorder. Bee colonies began disappearing in the U.S. one year after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allowed these new insecticides on the market in 2004-2005.

A pile of studies implicate neonics in bee die-offs. Neonics are nerve poisons that disorient bees so they can’t make it back to the hive. They also trigger immune system failure, causing the bees to fall prey to opportunistic infections. Last year, the EU imposed a two-year ban on all neonics.

Monsanto routinely treats its seeds with neonics. Unlike insecticide sprays, neonic seed treatments cause the insecticide to spread through every cell of the plant as it grows. The insecticide is present and active in the plant’s pollen and nectar.

Take something that’s toxic to bees, get it to grow in plants’ pollen and nectar, and you’ve got a bee-killing machine.

Monsanto has a partner in this crime. It’s Bayer, the main manufacturer of neonic insecticides, as well as Syngenta, who together with Bayer controls the neonic market. They’re partners in Pollinator.org, part of their massive public relations disinformation campaign to distract the public and policymakers from thinking that pesticides might have something to do with bee death and destruction.

We can’t let these companies control what the American public knows about Colony Collapse Disorder. Celebrate National Pollinator Week by exposing their crime and the cover-up. Share this article and make plans to join the Global Swarm to Save the Bees on Aug. 16.

Alexis Baden-Mayer is political director of the Organic Consumers Association. Ronnie Cummins is national director of the Organic Consumers Association.

http://ecowatch.com/2014/06/12/bee-killers-sponsor-national-pollinator-week-3-ways-they-kill/

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ORE sellout

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ORE sellout

http://www.prwatch.org/node/12486

Even though the state of Oregon enacted a law to override the ability of localities to regulate their own food systems, local ballot measures to ban GMO crops passed overwhelmingly in Jackson and Josephine Counties on May 20, according to news reports. "We fought the most powerful and influential chemical companies in the world and we won," Elise Higley, a local farmer with the anti-GMO group Our Family Farms Coalition, toldThe Oregonian.The Progressivemagazine tells the backstory below and reveals that the preemption measure shares language with an ALEC model bill.

When the headline said that Oregon’s Democratic governor, John Kitzhaber, had signed into law a corporate-backed bill overriding local counties’ ability to regulate their own food systems, Lisa Arkin was shocked.

“I can viscerally remember the day I looked at the headline,” she says. “It was such a deep feeling of disgust and disbelief. I couldn’t believe that any amount of money from outside corporations could convince our elected leaders in Oregon to abandon the democratic process in that way.”

Arkin is the executive director of a small nonprofit organization called Beyond Toxics that works to protect human health and the environment in Oregon by reducing the use of toxic herbicides and pesticides on farms, in forests, and along roadsides.

Arkin’s group sees every day the effects of herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup® glyphosate. Most genetically modified crops (GMOs) in the United States are engineered to withstand especially heavy application of this herbicide.

Arkin is the executive director of a small nonprofit organization called Beyond Toxics that works to protect human health and the environment in Oregon by reducing the use of toxic herbicides and pesticides on farms, in forests, and along roadsides.

Arkin’s group sees every day the effects of herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup® glyphosate. Most genetically modified crops (GMOs) in the United States are engineered to withstand especially heavy application of this herbicide.

In a special session called for late September and early October 2013 to address Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System and education funding, legislators jammed through a bill that preempts Oregon counties from regulating their own agriculture and seeds.

The law, which Arkin and other critics call the “Monsanto Protection Act,” is eerily similar to a piece of “model” legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The new law and ALEC’s bill, entitled “Preemption of Local Agricultural Laws Act,” both contain this crucial passage: “A local government may not enact or enforce a . . . measure, including but not limited to an ordinance, regulation, control area or quarantine, to inhibit or prevent the production or use of agricultural seed, flower seed . . . or vegetable seed or products of agricultural seed, flower seed . . . or vegetable seed.”

The effort to block local democratic control of food issues in Oregon began after family farmers and sustainable food advocates in Jackson County gathered enough signatures in January 2013 to put a local GMO ban on the ballot in the spring of 2014.

“Our main goal is to protect family farmers and keep local family farmers sustainable in the Rogue Valley,” says Elise Higley, a Jackson County farmer and director of Our Family Farms Coalition. “Having the counties decide on our own is imperative because in every county the layout of the land is so different.”

“All of a sudden, there was tremendous activity in Salem,” says Oregon state Representative Peter Buckley (D-Ashland). Lobbying groups for agricultural interests, he added, “became very active. They immediately put a statewide preemption bill onto the legislative agenda.”

The “Monsanto Protection Act” was first introduced in February 2013 by state Senator Bill Hansell (R-Athena), along with a bipartisan group of legislators: state Senators Jeff Kruse (R-Roseburg), Arnie Roblan (D-Coos Bay), Herman Baertschiger (R-Grants Pass), and Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose). Johnson later voted against the bill after protest from her constituents, saying she had “rarely heard from as many constituents as we did on this issue.”

John DiLorenzo is a lobbyist for the pesticide and GMO industry trade group Oregonians for Food and Shelter, which has ties to global giants like Monsanto and Syngenta. He reportedly took credit for having drafted the bill. He testified in support of it before the Senate Committee on Rural Communities and Economic Development in March 2013, recommending it as an extension of another ALEC bill: the “Right to Farm Act,” adopted in Oregon as the “Right to Farm and Forest Act.” The bill passed the Senate in May 2013, but stalled in the House before the end of the session in July.

Family farmers, consumers, and environmentalists thought they had put this one behind them. “There was this sense of victory when the bill ultimately died in the regular session,” says Ivan Maluski of Friends of Family Farmers, a local advocacy group that spearheaded opposition to the bill. “It was a big surprise when it came up out of the blue as part of a negotiated package of five bills in the special session in early October.”

At the time of ALEC’s fortieth Anniversary Annual Meeting in Chicago in August 2013, Oregon state Representative Sal Esquivel (R-Medford) and Jeff Case, senior director of government affairs at CropLife America, a national pesticide and GMO industry trade group, were the co-chairs of the Agriculture Subcommittee of ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force. Case said he “couldn’t remember” who sponsored it, but it was “probably” one of the Oregon legislators.

The “Preemption of Local Agricultural Laws Act” became an official ALEC “model” bill to be taken to other states.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, state politicians were gearing up for a special session called by Governor Kitzhaber in order to come to a “grand bargain” on state pensions and education funding.

But a week before the official start of the session, Republican legislators seized on it as a way to do Monsanto a favor. Governor Kitzhaber acknowledged to The Oregonian that the GMO preemption bill had “nothing to do with the purposes for which I originally called the session” and that there was no “rational reason for it to be in” the bill package. But he added: “Apparently, the Republicans needed it to get enough votes.” He said he supported it because “it was the reality of the negotiating process."

Ivan Maluski of Friends of Family Farmers told The Oregonian that “the bill takes away the rights of local communities to set local food and agriculture policies. . . . This bill obviously came up as part of a backroom deal to move the larger package forward. That sort of political trading really isn’t the Oregon way. The governor and legislative leaders should be embarrassed.”

State Representative Buckley was surprised by the amount of lobbying on this. There were “remarkable displays of special interest power,” he says. “These guys came into the legislative process in a way that is rarely equaled in the state of Oregon. We are a small state. There was a lot of money put in, a lot of lobbying effort, far above what is regular procedure in our state, and they were able to force the issue to the top of the agenda for our state.”

Oregonians for Food and Shelter spent more than $200,000 lobbying the Oregon state legislature in 2013, and the Oregon Farm Bureau Federation spent well over $150,000, according to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission.

Governor Kitzhaber signed the preemption bill into law on October 8, 2013, and because the bill also declared an “emergency,” the law went into effect immediately.

In last-minute negotiations, Buckley was able to insert an exemption into the bill for his district, Jackson County, so that its ballot initiative to ban the growth of GMOs in the region remains on the ballot later this spring. All six of the world’s biggest pesticide and GMO companies—BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—donated $455,000 to the effort to overturn the ballot initiative. Buckley said it was “more than eight times more” than any other county ballot measure has ever received.

“As more money is flooding in from out-of-state,” says Higley of Our Family Farms Coalition, “residents of the county are getting really activated to educate themselves, and getting so frustrated that they’re actually getting more involved in the campaign.”....

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jh: 

Excellent news, consumers: Biotech giants that've been secretly inserting genetically engineered organisms into thousands of food products you buy, have just announced that they're coming clean!

Wow, you mean no more GMO Frankenfood ingredients will be slipped into our diets? Oh, come on – these are food profiteers, so they're not about to come that clean. So maybe they're agreeing at last (and at least) to label any products that contain ingredients with tampered DNA. No, no – right-to-know labeling is what food tamperers fear most, for they know we won't buy those items if we know what's in them. Okay then, what do they actually intend to do?

They're giving us a website.

Say what? Yes, the entirety of their grand gesture of "corporate transparency" is to put a mess of PR and useless gobbledygook on a slick site called GMOAnswers.com. They say we can ask "virtually any question," and their "experts" will be happy to tell us why GMOs are good for us. In other words, "come clean" is an industry euphemism for "whitewash."

The website will be controlled by – and its "answers" written by – agents of Monsanto and a handful of other corporations that control the dangerous and deceitful genetic manipulation industry. "We want to get into the conversation" with those opposed to GMOs, stated a biotech exec – ignoring the fact that these same industry schemers did not allow any opponents into "the conversation" they had in back rooms with our government officials when they conspired to foist these nasties on our families without our knowledge.

Monsanto and Gang are notorious liars, political manipulators, and thugs. They can put all the propaganda they want on their Wizard-of-Oz website, but – like putting earrings on a hog – it can't hide their ugliness.

"In Bid for Support, Biotech Companies Vow More Transparency," The New York Times, July 29, 2013.