The Killing Fields - Australian governments do deals with GMO corporate fascists and move closer to committing additional crimes against humanity.

1) UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
WASHINGTON D.C. 20460

SUBJECT: Criminal Investigation of Monsanto Corporation - Cover-up of Dioxin Contamination in Products - Falsification of Dioxin Health Studies:

http://www.pbs.org/pov/stories/vietnam/discuss/38/post.5

2) The story of how three corporate giants -- Monsanto , GE and Westinghouse -- covered their toxic trail:

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200103/conspiracy.asp

3) EPA's Phony Investigation of Monsanto by William Sanjour – physicist and former senior officer at the USEPA:

http://www.greens.org/s-r/078/07-49.html

4) Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith - Institute for Responsible Technology:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/monsanto-the-worlds-poste_b_434900.html

http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/SeedsOfDeception/TableofContentsChapterSummaries/index.cfm

5) The desecration of Nature in a world ruled by Monsanto et al:

http://bst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/29/3/236

http://www.grain.org/seedling_files/seed-06-01-3.pdf

6) Crime and Corruption - Monsanto and cancer milk - Fox News Kills Story & Fires Reporters:

http://asbestoscancerlung.co.cc/news-articles/monsanto-cancer-milk-fox-news-kills-story-fires-reporters.html

The good news:

http://current.com/items/90333588_federal-court-upholds-ban-on-genetically-modified-alfalfa-monsanto-petition-denied-in-full.htm

Well the other big bonus with zero-till (spray instead) is much less carbon emissions. If farmers end up wearing a carbon tax it is going to drive towards spraying even in cases that they may otherwise choose to till. Its a tough choice - there are currently only 2 ways to remove weeds from crop competition and to preserve nutrients and moisture. Both have their upsides and their downsides. If you want to promote one over the other, best that you do so with both eyes open.

Bernie, I am not sure that kow-towing to the Greens was big on Kim Chance's agenda with GM crops. I am told it was the advice he was getting from his minders and the fact that certain emotive anti-GM groups had those minders ears.

Needless to say, Chance didn't let the truth get in the way of his actions on this subject. Having put himself out on that limb, there is little chance of him climbing down - hence his most recent attack.

Protagoras would have us believe Jeffrey Smith, a self confessed believer in his ability to levitate. Sad, but true.

Country Gal, as you say no-till is more dependent on chemicals. However, it is certainly better for the soil than old fashioned tillage. I suppose it is a case of whether people think soil erosion is better than herbicide use as to which one they choose.

“Needless to say, Chance didn't let the truth get in the way of his actions on this subject.”

Agronomist – You, Chairman Bernie and Big Ag. GM totalitarians need to understand that in a democracy, “No” from a majority public, means “No!”

And no sane man would regard the insidious hijacking of our food supply by multi-national greed merchants as anything more than criminal folly in conception and criminal in execution.

In Chairman Bernie’s state of WA, soil salinity is engulfing the equivalent of 19 footy fields every day while Australia feeds 60 million people every year. However the state of Australia’s environment is of no concern to GM lobbyists or indeed, the APVMA who disgracefully “regulate” agricultural chemicals by implementing standards inferior to those in developing countries.

When the science says "No" Monsanto and its clones fudge the data while Nature suffers the lingering death of a thousand cuts:

1) 9 Feb. 2010: “Former managing director of Monsanto India, Tiruvadi Jagadisan, is the latest to join the critics of Bt brinjal, perhaps the first industry insider to do so.

“On Monday, he elaborated by saying the company (Monsanto) "used to fake scientific data" submitted to government regulatory agencies to get commercial approvals for its products in India":

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/83093/Monsanto%20%27faked%27%20data%20for%20approvals%20claims%20its%20ex-chief.html

2) “Robert Kremer is a microbiologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and an adjunct professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri. He is co-author of one of five papers published in the October 2009 issue of The European Journal of Agronomy that found negative impacts of Roundup herbicide..:

http://www.nongmoreport.com/articles/jan10/scientists_find_negative_impacts_of_GM_crops.php

3) “After 24 hours, the application of Roundup reduced juvenile wood frog survival from 96% to 32%, juvenile tree frog survival from 100% to 18%, and juvenile toad survival from 100% to 14%. Across all species, only 21% of all juvenile amphibians survived the Roundup application after one day:”

http://4ccr.pgr.mpf.gov.br/institucional/grupos-de-trabalho/gt-transgenicos/bibliografia/pgm-e-riscos-ambientais/Relyea,%202005,%20Ecolo%20Appli.pdf

A GM pig will remain a GM pig, no matter how much gloss one applies.

Protagoras, the public may believe they want to change the facts, but unfortunately the facts remain the facts. The simple facts are that regulatory authorities around the world have reviewed GM crops and found no evidence of health risks. They have been consumed now for 15 years among millions of people worldwide and not so much as a sniffle has resulted. No humans have grown tails, despite Kim Chance’s claims.

Jagadisan’s claims about Monsanto faking BT brinjal data are farcical. The guy is 84 and retired decades ago before BT brinjal was even thought about. He then goes on to distance himself from the supposed fraud conducted when he was the GM in India. It wasn’t him, but supposedly someone else – he doesn’t know who. His comments about Terminator technology are also laughable. It wasn’t even Monsanto’s technology– the USDA and Delta & Pineland had the patent and it hadn’t even been patented when Jagadisan last worked. This is where I have problems with these claims. If they have that many obvious errors, how can I believe anything else they say?

Of the “five papers published in the October 2009 issue of The European Journal of Agronomy that found negative impacts of Roundup herbicide” all but one showed effects from spraying glyphosate on susceptible plants. Yep, if you treat plants with herbicides there will be an effect, because herbicides are designed to kill unwanted plants. What is so surprising about that?

Lastly, if you treat frogs with detergents they get sick. Particularly if you treat them with 64 L/ha of product as Relyea did.

“ The simple facts are that regulatory authorities around the world have reviewed GM crops and found no evidence of health risks.”

Agronomist - Both you and I know that the above statement is meant to deceive because peer-reviewed scientific papers have long ago debunked your myth. Genetically modified crops are not thoroughly tested, regulated or proven safe.

Just one example is the research conducted by David Schubert, Ph.D, who is on the faculty of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in San Diego California, where he is head of the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory:

“The U.S. regulators rely almost exclusively on information provided by the biotech crop developer, and those data are not published in journals or subjected to peer review,” said Schubert.

Co-author William Freese added: "In one case, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ignored a published study by an FDA scientist suggesting that GM corn could cause food allergies, and instead asked Monsanto and Syngenta to essentially re-do FDA's analysis.

"GM food regulation in the U.S. bears as little relation to good science as the typical used car ad to the true state of the automobile. Both are designed to sell a product," said Freese.

Astonishingly, user agreements drawn up by companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta explicitly forbid the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails or whether GM crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.