I'm trained as a physical (non-biological) scientist but don't need to understand the science of genetic meddling with food. All I have to be is a customer with rights. The right to know what is in the food I buy. For it to be labelled clearly if it does or doesn't pass muster as GM-free. The peddlers of GM food have spent many millions of dollars to defeat attempts to ensure honest labelling. They have also spent a heap of money to block farmers' claims for damages for GM contamination of their crops. They even had the effrontery to send a bill to a Canadian farmer whose formerly clean crop was poisoned by wind-blown contaminated product from a neighbouring field - charging him for the GM contamination of his product [1]. The peddlers - Monsanto - spent a fortune nobbling a couple of judges until they were finally done over in the Supreme Court [2] . Monsanto also pulled out all the stoppers to get a peer-reviewed scientific paper censored and publishers warned off [3] when it showed Monsanto to have misled the regulators. The team, led by Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini of Caen University, eventuality got in under the radar [4,5].

Monsanto, persistently thwarted in Britain and Europe, is looking elsewhere to expand its captive market, and an IPA-compliant government temporarily in office in Australia leaves us wide open to be the next target. Hence Asher Judah’s article.

[My own objection to GM food is the yuk factor, whatever the science (to which I’ll refer if challenged). Like most people I wouldn’t want to eat pies made from ground road kill either.]

[1] http://thegranddisillusion.wordpress.com/monsanto-vs-farmer/]
[2] http://www.i-sis.org.uk/whoOwnsLifeNotMonsanto.php
[3] http://www.gmoseralini.org/seralini-retraction-is-black-mark-on-scientific-publishing-georgetown-professors/
[4] http://retractionwatch.com/2014/06/24/retracted-seralini-gmo-rat-study-republished/
[5] http://www.enveurope.com/content/26/1/14

It seems to me Emperor Julian that you are demanding the right to remain ignorant.

I will start with Percy Schmeiser. His canola crop was not 'poisoned' by wind-blown pollen from his neighbour. He had 1100 acres (almost all of his farm) planted to canola that tested 95% positive to the Roundp Ready trait http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/index.do

Schmeiser gave 3 different versions of how the material got onto his farm, none of which were convincing to the judge in the court case who described him as an unreliable witness. His farm worker testified that Schmeiser got him to spray a good 3 acres of canola with Roundup and when it survived to harvest it separately and store it on a truck on the farm. Why would you spray canola with a herbicide that kills it, unless you knew it was going to survive?

The Supreme Court case was entirely based on whether Schmeiser should pay a licence fee. Schmeiser's lawyers claimed that as Schmeiser had not used Roundup on his crop, he hadn't used the patent.

Seralini's rat study was one of the most appalling bits of science I have ever come across, on a par with most homeopathy research. The faults in his study are massive: used a rat breed that is prone to tumours where more than 70% of the rats get tumours by 2 years, used incorrect statistical analyses. Had 9 treatment groups with only 1 control group, failed to follow report data and failed to euthenise the rats appropriately. Of course it should never have been published.

Agronomist

Judge MacKay focused solely on whether Schmeiser harvested Monsanto’s GM canola and whether the NAFTA laws entitled the company to claim a licence fee for this. He did not address the question of how the stuff came to be growing on Schmeiser’s farm beyond the fact that after it appeared by magic he sold it and its progeny. The question of whether Monsanto’s patent, conferring Roundup readiness, was a factor in Schmeiser’s income was also ignored. The Supreme Court later kerzonked Monsanto Judge MacKay’s assumption that these were irrelevant to whether the company had a right to extract a fee. This was a severe blow to Monsanto’s strategy of increasing its captive market by selling its GM seeds to farms from which it would spread by natural processes such as birds, insects and wind to clean farms.

Professor Seralini’s research is precisely matched to Monsanto’s, including the breed of rat, with the difference that Monsano’s team ended its research and made its report when apparently insignificant changes were starting in the test rats whereas Seralini continued from that point for a couple of years of exposure, showing that over that time a statistically significant proportion of test rats compared with control rats developed tumours. As time progresses and both test and control rats develop tumours the analysis becomes less sensitive and the results less reliable. Monsanto will not like the implication that further research is needed to confirm (or not) the late onset of tumours from Frankencorn. After all, asbestosis takes decades to show.

Meanwhile Australia, with a precarious IPA government, will be in the firing line as we can see from the chorus of demands from Monsanto’s shills to turn us into a captive market for GM agriculture. Australia’s labelling laws, like Europe’s but unlike North America’s, are sensible and informative[1]. Watch for administrative action, by-passing the Senate, to rewrite them.

[1] http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumer/gmfood/labelling/Pages/default.asp