"GM crops on the other hand have been evaluated for toxicity in an array of tests designed by toxicologists within the regulatory agencies from around the world, and no detrimental effects have been seen."

Really? Then back that up. Provide the studies. And notice that this is the second time I've had to demand evidence. Then again, it is hard to find what does not exist, so better to try to reverse burden of proof and go for a factually incorrect red herring.

I notice your tendency to reverse burden of proof when your arguments hit an indefensible point, and your tendency to ignore inconvenient evidence.

You tried to back your E. coli claim once, but you did it with an article rewritten by a journalist, not a scientist. Furthermore, the article itself debunked the supposed threat of E. coli in organic foods.

Had you followed the standard you demand of others (peer-reviewed journal articles), you would have found that there is no increased threat from organics: Preharvest Evaluation of Coliforms, Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Organic and Conventional Produce Grown by Minnesota Farmers in Journal of Food Protection, Volume 67, Number 5, 1 May 2004 , pp. 894-900(7)

So you must be a native american? Why? because if you are not, your ancestors were not exposed to corn before a few hundred years ago, and unless you are an insect, that is hardly enough time to expect humans to evolve co-evolve with a food. We do agree that most of what we eat is novel from an evolutionary perspective, but we are living longer, and age is a factor in disease. We die of cancer mostly because other things don't kill us first like they used to. Clearly our current food choices contribute to disease, but that is a problem of the individual choices that we make in a free society. Many of the most serious diseases have known causes, the biggest of which is over-eating. GM crops on the other hand have been evaluated for toxicity in an array of tests designed by toxicologists within the regulatory agencies from around the world, and no detrimental effects have been seen. You can always point to the unknown, and say what if?

Mr. Obvious

Because there is thousands of years of empirical data anc co-evolution with plants and animals in our environment. Industrialized and designer foods are concommitant factors with diabetes,learning disorders, and a host of other ills. The dyes used to color genetically modified salmon for instance did not exist hundreds of years ago.

Mr. Barnes issued a challenge. I would ask Mr. Barnes to point out the similar studies on organic produce. Why should Mr. Barnes' challenge be accepted as being more suitable for testing GM crops than those posed by the regulatory agencies of the world. Where are his credentials that uniquely qualify him to set the standard. Perhaps I should challenge Mr. Barnes to produce the studies showing that organic production is safe? Show me the report that proves that all organic farmers have, without exception, processed animal waste properly and not caused sickness due to E. coli poisoning. Mr. Barnes, no one is stopping you from putting your hands in the dirt and showing how you can solve the worlds problem with your food-production wisdom. Last I looked, it was a free country.

Thewonderingyou, I issue the challenge because I know the full testing has not been done, despite the question being valid. I invite anyone and everyone to copy and paste the challenge on every GMO story that comes up, though.

Although the impact on human health is of the impact on human health is not the only concern surrounding GMOs, it is the most pressing and many of the independent animal feeding trials that have been done suggest potentially hazardous toxicity or allergenicity. So, I feel the challenge is valid.

So far, I've had only one piss-weak attempt at taking the challenge ( http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/17/6427/ ) -- that is if you accept red herrings and non-sequiturs as answers...

If we could just get the crop circle people to find the GM Crops the interests of transparency would be greatly enhanced.

Douglas Barnes: Thank you for your challenge. I--of course--am not one who would try to meet it, but let's all thank whoever we choose to thank that Mark Abram hasn't arrived to sully the point. Your excellent challenge goes unmet.

FEDCO seed co.- sweet corn variety "Cohasset" discontinued due to positive test for contamination from GMO corn.

In other words- a farmer that had NO intention of using Gm modified seeds has his crop "tainted" by GM corn's wind blown pollen. Basically, the GM seed co. now owns his crop and can destroy it, bring him to court and fine him.

We are losing control of our foods people.

When they get their genetic markers into every seed supply, ALL seed will become their "intellectual property" and then they can raise the prices of seed to "whatever the market will bear" and starve whoever they want to death.

Sounds like BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM to me.

"GM Crop Trial Locations May Be Hidden From Public"...

Not for long...that crap spreads (literally) 'like the winds'...so it'll be 'tested' in a Field/WallyWorld near you, and soon [and if you have one of those 'Heritage Gardens', make sure that none of those 'Mad-Cow Bees' are busily cross-pollinating out there...! And don't take any-crap from the Birds, either!]

[No wonder a trough-full of wealthy-assholes built a "bomb-proof" and near-Arctic repository for Seed-stock with some of their 'long-green' from Monsanto-dividends and held-Yuan, recently -- THEY surely DO 'know something' that YOU (and the rest of the World's-'poor' and 'targeted' and 'inoculated') do-Not -- and you can take that to your local Central-Reserve Bank!]

abbybwood February 17th, 2008 11:13 am

It is about time that everyone in the the US in particular and in the world in general watched that video. Seems like it has been around for some time ... let's hope the message eventually get through.

Very many thanks to you.

Abbywood, that was an amazing piece you posted about the GM food I will tell ya, I'm mad as hell and going to do something. Don't quite know what it is but I will let everyone know. Somehow !!

Just a preemptive post for any pro-GM people who show up...

The burden of proof rests upon the proponent of any proposed action. Hocus-pocus claims to "substantial equivalence" don't cut it. So, please point us to 1) an independent animal feeding trial showing that whichever particular strain you are claiming is safe (or every single GMO commercially available, if you support them all) is indeed safe and most importantly 2) an independent double-blind, placebo-controlled human trial with a focus on vulnerable groups like children, the elderly and those suffering from HIV, hepatitis or the like showing that strain (or strains you support) is safe.

Thanks.

When the alliance of science, technology, and capitalist economy is "disappearing" species all over the planet (see the rate of extinction - or should I call it 'execution'? - of species at www.theamericanmonitor.com), laying waste in a couple of hundred years to our millions-of-years old habitat and killing us with cancer, heavy metal poisoning, immunne deficiency diseases, etc., we don't call it terrorism, but rather progress, or growth, as the luminaries on Wall Street like to say in their never examined linguo (they don't speak, they have conditioned reflexes).

Growth, that is, of the riches of the very few and of the misery of the many. Nemesis is rising, though, and the time will come when it will deal a deserved and decisive blow to the scum of the earth.

Have you ever heard of an ordinary farmer, a "regular" peasant, as we used to say -- a worker of the earth, in other words -- concealing his labor and the fruits of that labor? The work of the earth worker has always been open to the light and the waters of the skies, for all to behold and to admire (see all the old poems celebrating the fruits of the earth -- for instance, "Works and Days" by Hesiod, himself a farmer).

Who hides their crops? Drug pushers and Monsanto.

Wait until you see this documentary, "The Future of Food":

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3323612535345191089&q=the+future+of+food&total=1667&start=0&n...

The advantages touted by advocates of bioengineered food is just the propoganda side of the coin that makes seed, patented private property.

They're using patent law to monopolize the food industry and further our dependency on the primary commercial providers of seed, like Monsanto.

Like the Megapharms and Energy Transnationals, they use legal processes for ends not intended, and sometimes, specifically proscribed by law.

This is old fashioned corruption and greed expanded through globalism to levels undreamed of by the worst despots in history. As long as they own the Press, we're screwed.

Scientists used to be happy trying to understand nature, but now we are trying to control it. Ecosystems are naturally in balance and the balance has evolved and been maintained over myriad ancestral generations. Making plants resistant to one organism may throw the ecosystem out of balance. Competition is important in nature and prevents over population of pest organisms and resulting outbreaks of diseases We are getting onto a slippery slope when we try to control nature with genetic engineering.

@ Ron Bunsten, LOL you posted twice -- computers have no mercy, they take our human glitches quite literally. Umn, Ron, you seem to have a lot on your mind (most over 65 -- like myself -- have that condition) why don't you start a bloggie thing?

Elsewise, I want to say, in case some frankenfreak chimes in, that, yes, we do all know that gene mixing is what nature does all the time, from bacteria and all the way up.

However, germs, plants and others do this, so to speak, "on line", the result is tested immediately in the real world where there are no free lunches, dinner, supper and certainly no dessert...

If you have ever messed with any kind of computer code and compare it to the immense complexity of genetic code, one is gobstop flabbergasted that anybody could just go and make fixes on the genes of living creatures. What I am saying is that these azzholes don't really know what they are doing (except that they know they can make money). The term, "frankenfoods" is not as pejoritive as it is accurate.

The scary thing is that, obviously, the human genome is going to be messed with. No law can stop it from happening. The knowledge is there -- it's like with the atomic bomb and the "Bomb in the mind" http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174870

I really don't see what we can do, a handfull of dry martinis help, but they wear off...

The patents granted on the GM franken food must be used to pin legal liability on the agra giant firms making them. These patents are not good for anything else, and in fact, patenting gene codes should be a blasphemy to all those bible thumpers up there. Imagine, someone claiming to own the rights to "God's" creation or any part of it. What egregious hubris!

Then those same perpetrators are not compelled by law to keep their frankenstien food sequestered where it can not infect natural food crops.

By now, everyone should know that corporate lawyers are stealing samples of corn from every supposed, non-GM cornfield, and having it tested to see if the owner of the field can be sued for having traces of the franken food in their field. Why aren't the owners of the franken corn patents being sued for allowing their bastard creation to escape? Why, it's because those are the ones who own and run our government including our court system.

Here are some interesting examples of indigenous farming practices:

http://www.ciesin.org/docs/004-176a/004-176a.html

Wow..what timing...my first time commenting here..but I've compelled by the celestine moment to tell you a story..
The Monsanto Slow Learner's society. What part of "Go Green or Die" don't they understand?
I'm in the process of retiring from the trades..no pension..what the heck, I'm going back to farming. I'm voluntarily disenfranchised from the pathology of cities to start a final career choice... now that I'm 65 and presumably qualified to be grown up: growing veggies and free range chickens, maybe a goat for a pet, and a horse for the orchard harrow. I can be useful from 65 to 95 growing food for the politically confused city folk.
This article puts an undeniable and confirming touch of synchronicity on the day of strangeness. I'm visiting 88 year old Mom, in the hospital with her fading memory and dizzy spells. She's a country girl, the last of 7 generations of horse people who farmed and gardened the old fashioned natural way..food, veggies, kids, large houses, lots of hands for harvest and everybody got an education. I still waft poetic about waking for chores at 6:00 to the smell of her fresh baked wood stove bread.
She doesn't understand the battle over GM foods and feedlot hog problems that the younger generation, now all in their 60's is having. She was fading yesterday when they locked her up in the big hospital. She said she was floating around on a cloud looking back on the small problems of earth. They said she was hallucinating. She barked back that she wasn't hallucinating, she was "..looking for the Mother Ship!"
We held hands, talked for 8 hours about the farming wars and I told her to hang in there for one more spring. We'll take a shot at how to put together a garden farm again now that the industrial wars have confused the species into a civil war over food... and these abandoned farms out there. I promised that if they keep her that I would bring in a small bag of horse manure.
She loves the smell of horses...any smell of any kind of horse.
We had far ranging discussions about a feedlot pork farmer who has recently shut down an 800 hog barn due to the rising costs of feed and energy. It was preceded by an exchange about a beef feedlot farmer of several thousand head plus 2,000 acres of agribusiness scale grains who had sold out the lands and barns to anonymous vendors for about 8,000,000.
We finished up with a curious story about another family who sit on an abandoned farm of beautiful rolling sandy loam berry and fruit soil with large spring fed ponds and deteriorating buildings. They invested in a seniors residence of about 50 people and buy all their fresh veggies from the supermarket.
All of them seeem to have entered a Disney-esque reality about what growing food is all about..led by introverted pathologists like Monsanto.
I related all this discussion on the curious ears of a struggling bunch who are seeing open ended growth potential in organic permaculture and raised bed gardening.
These folks scratch their collective head about urban populations who miss the salient point that they all face starvation from a strange civil war.
It points to the obvious to a lot of readers who already understand that this war doesn't involve any kind of terrorism. It involves turning ones back on this madness.
The Civil War is the "Blessed Unrest" as Hawken would say...all the while learning the finer arts of community gardening of course.

Wow..what timing...my first time commenting here..but I'm compelled by the "celestine moment" to tell you a story..
The Monsanto Slow Learner's society. What part of "Go Green or Die" don't they understand?
I'm in the process of retiring from the trades..no pension..what the heck, I'm going back to farming. I'm voluntarily disenfranchised from the pathology of cities to start a final career choice... now that I'm 65 and presumably qualified to be grown up: growing veggies and free range chickens, maybe a goat for a pet, and a horse for the orchard harrow. I can be useful from 65 to 95 growing food for the politically confused city folk on any one of a dozen abandoned farms in the area..
This article puts an undeniable and confirming touch of synchronicity on the day of strangeness discussing this objective.
I'm visiting 88 year old Mom, in the hospital with her fading memory and dizzy spells. She's a country girl, the last of 7 generations of horse people who farmed and gardened the old fashioned natural way..food, veggies, kids, large houses, lots of hands for harvest and everybody got an education. The library and the music room were the two most important rooms in the house to her..hmm maybe after the horse stalls of course..I still waft poetic about waking for chores at 6:00 to the smell of her fresh baked wood stove bread.
She doesn't understand the battle over GM foods and feedlot hog problems that the younger generation, now all in their 60's is having. She was fading yesterday when they locked her up in the big hospital. She said she was floating around on a cloud looking back on the small problems of earth. They said she was hallucinating. She barked back that she wasn't hallucinating, she was "..looking for the Mother Ship!"
We held hands, talked for 8 hours about the farming wars and I told her to hang in there for one more spring. We'll take a shot at how to put together a garden farm again now that the industrial wars have confused the species into a civil war over food... and these abandoned farms out there. I promised that if they keep her that I would bring in a small bag of horse manure.
She loves the smell of horses...any smell of any kind of horse.
We had far ranging discussions about a feedlot pork farmer who has recently shut down an 800 hog barn due to the rising costs of feed and energy. It was preceded by an exchange about a beef feedlot farmer of several thousand head plus 2,000 acres of agribusiness scale grains who had sold out the lands and barns to anonymous vendors for about 8,000,000.
We finished up with a curious story about another family who sit on an abandoned farm of beautiful rolling sandy loam berry and fruit soil with large spring fed ponds and deteriorating buildings. They invested in a seniors residence of about 50 people and buy all their fresh veggies from the supermarket.
All of them seem to have entered a Disney-esque reality about what growing food is all about..led by the introverted pathology of "agribusiness" in general and specifically folks like Monsanto.
I related all this discussion on the curious ears of a struggling bunch who are seeing open ended growth potential in organic permaculture and raised bed gardening.
These folks scratch their collective head about urban populations who miss the salient point that they all face starvation from a strange civil war.
It points out the obvious to a lot of readers who already understand that this war doesn't involve any kind of terrorism. It involves turning ones back on this madness.
The Civil War is the "Blessed Unrest" as Hawken would say...all the while learning the finer arts of community gardening of course.

And Nader, who is the person who one could most trust to put an end to this gets no support. Repeatedly.

It would appear as if the GM food companies are beginning to get the message that their activities are not too popular and that paying off the government may well not be enough to get their "new products" to market. It would not be surprising that the next great rights struggle will be against companies like Monsanto who want to profit from GM food that they hold the patent to.

Only in an insane society can destruction of "property" (fields full of genetically modified plants) be considered terrorism while the destruction of biodiversity be considered honest work.

And then you get morons who say things like "We have to start looking at how to produce a large amount of food on a small amount of land with a minimal environmental footprint and for that you need new technology." The article then goes on to say "A second crop, a potato, is in the final stages of approval in Brussels, but it would only be used to produce starch for the paper industry."

Before it becomes more officially illegal, just let me say that burning down fields full of corporate mutant plants, especially the ones with terminator genes, is as far from terrorism as GWBush is from honest. All of this madness needs to be stopped, by any means necessary.

There isnt much responsible science.
If there was ever a threat to society and the world--its people with the moral reasoning of infants playing with things they dont understand(while pretending they do).

Human rights extremists(they believe humans have a right to do anything) and anti nature zealots is what I like to call them.

Monstanto's earnings are up, no surprise. I doubt if people realize who is invested in this outcome or who are the major stockholders at Monsanto. Anyway, I just love responible science at work.

poet,
WTF?

If folks don't fight this.. if CITIZENS don't fight this we are screwed. But now environmentalists are considered "Eco Terrrorists".... so.. they have laws preventing us from doing anything except moaning about it.

They want to hide it because they are probably afraid of controversy EH??

This is ridiculous!

Where are MY sovereign rights over MY BODY!???

Beware of the Andromeda strain of the Frankenspores!

The article states, "Only one GM crop is approved for cultivation in Europe, an insect-resistant maize, which is grown on about 110,000 hectares in member states. It is not grown in Britain because the corn pest it protects against is not found in this country."

Look for Monsanto to fix that problem by importing them.

Not sure how that happened, but to complete the thought above--

In India after bribing the right governmental officials, Monsanto opened its own GM research facility complete with acerage devoted to growing and multiplying these little beasties.

When the local farmers wer informed of its existence and the implications for their livelihood, they marched en masse and burned down the buildings and the fields. Monsanto got the message and apparently so has the rest of the GM infrastructure. I think that is the explanation for what this article talks about.

In India after bribing the right governmental officials, Monsanto opened its own GM research facility complete with acerage devoted to growing and multiplying these little beasties.

In India after bribing the right governmental officials, Monsanto opened its own GM research facility complete with acerage devoted to growing and multiplying these little beasties.

In India after bribing the right governmental officials, Monsanto opened its own GM research facility complete with acerage devoted to growing and multiplying these little beasties.

In India after bribing the right governmental officials, Monsanto opened its own GM research facility complete with acerage devoted to growing and multiplying these little beasties.