Well d(David Tribe) with the attitude that everybody against GM are nutters and implying that people like isitreallysafe are stupid is certainly not going to gain the trust of consumers. You may think so but there are many very intelligent scientists, consumers and farmers that have serious well founded concerns and what you think is of little importance to them.
No Bill (Agronomist), I don't need to go to Canada but have spoken to many Canadians regarding this issue. For example, I met up with a busload of very pro-GM group of farmers at Grains Council of Australia and after chatting with them about the pros and cons they understood why it would not be such a good deal for Australian farmers.
They agree that there is no yield advantage, it is more a weed control tool.
When you explain our different growing season (ie no weeds and 2-3 month shorter growing season) and weeds (ie massive ryegrass problem to be controlled pre-emergent and the fact that neither glufosinate ammonium or glyphosate is effective on radish which is a problem for us and not Canada), they can understand why it would not benefit us as much as it has benefitted them.
They agree that segregation would be too expensive and too difficult to achieve.
They were concerned that statistics show they have lost their average US$32.68/tonne premium over Australian prices (1990-2000 ABARE statistics). They are now getting up to US$30/tonne less for their canola compared to Australian canola (Graincorp market report re China).
Australia is the biggest supplier of non-GM canola in the world and if we adopt GM and all sell as GM, there will be considerable economic loss experienced by all farmers.
Non-GM farmers are not prepared to accept this economic loss - why should we?

Dear Julie NonGM Newman:

Can you answer my simple question of a few days ago? Have you and the Network of Concerned Farmers joined the JIGMOD? Was there a vote of your members or something like that? I can’t understand how I am in a position to bully anyone, as you keep saying, but this is a simple question. Could you answer please? Have you been quoted without permission by JIGMOD?

Also, the Age in Melbourne has turned against you, even though they still incorrectly believe that there is any problem with “contamination” of crops overseas. Can you cite any such problems? Where farmers have actually lost money?

Here is what the Age said (in part, to stay within our space limits).

Fear of the unknown no longer justifies GM crop bans

February 20, 2006
Page 1 of 2

Edtorial, The Age, Melbourne, February 20, 2006.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/editorial/fear-of-the-unknown-no-longer-justifies-gm-crop-bans/2006/02/19/1140283944554.html

Genetic engineering is one of the great scientific innovations, one that still seems new and mysterious for many people. GM foods are regarded with deep suspicion in Australia, as well as Europe and Japan. It may come as a surprise, then, that 18 years have passed since the world's first release of a GM organism - a bacterium released in Australia to control crown gall disease in stone fruit and other crops - and to realise how pervasive imported GM food is, particularly as public resistance has prevented further local releases since GM cotton was introduced 10 years ago. GM cotton comprises about 90 per cent of the national crop and is the source of about a third of the vegetable oil consumed in Australia.

Yet cotton is the exception to GM policy. GM canola won federal approval but commercial use has been blocked until 2008 by all states except Queensland. Why are cotton and canola treated differently? A report by a federal taskforce that reviewed farming policies has recommended an end to the moratoriums. Two years ago, The Age made the same call.

The fact is, arguments that we do not have enough information to assess risks grow weaker by the year

Tens of billions of meals with GM foods have been eaten. This real-world experiment….. has had no documented ill effects on human health.

Critics of GM crops seized on the abandonment last year of a CSIRO trial of peas that were made weevil-proof, and thus 30 per cent more productive, by the insertion of bean DNA, because of ill-health in mice that were fed the peas. But researchers know what went wrong. The gene is safe to eat in beans, but insertion altered its shape, which triggered an immune response. What this illustrates is that every GM crop must be rigorously assessed.

Despite the need to monitor identified concerns such as genetic drift and impacts on wild populations, the worst fears for the environment have also not been borne out, while proven benefits include lower water and pesticide use (the latest cotton varieties cut spraying by more than 80 per cent).

It is the economic benefits that have driven the adoption of GM crops such as canola, corn and soy in the US, Brazil, Canada, Argentina and China (which is releasing the first GM cultivars of rice, the world's most important food crop). US agriculture authorities say this increased farmers' annual revenue by $2.3 billion; ABARE warns Australia's failure to grow GM crops will cost it $3 billion by 2015….

….The numbers and crop areas are likely to double by 2010, because there is little more arable land and few countries have the luxury of being able to reject high-yield, pest-resistant crops. Feeding their people and alleviating poverty depends on the GM crops already being grown by more than 8 million farmers - 90 per cent of whom are resource-poor. This is not a reason to abandon all caution, but Australians do need to be aware of the broader global picture. With a population set to increase from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050, how else does the world feed itself? More immediately, how are Australian farmers to compete with overseas growers of more productive GM crops? These are not questions Australia can continue to ignore.

No Rebel, I have not been misquoted by JIGMOD, as I explained, we are united at an international level and are united in different areas in opposition to GM. While I am not responsible for other organisations quotes, I am more than happy to be quoted at an international level of the injustice proposed for non-GM farmers.
Only 18% of the worlds canola is GM and almost all of that is grown in Canada. Canada has lost their average premium of US$32.68/tonne over Australian non-GM canola and are now accepting up to US$30/tonne less than ours. That is a clear indication of a significant loss experienced by those farmers that don't grow GM and yet are expected to market as GM.
Why would you think the Age has turned against us? It is just a standard pro-GM article of which there are many scattered around. They have just missed the point of what the debate is about.
The "feed the world" rubbish is a laugh. We are currently experiencing a global food glut causing some countries to heavily subsidise farmers to limit production.
Claiming GM crops are more productive is just plain wrong as GM canola does not benefit farmers any more than non-GM chemical resistant or hybrid canolas.
We can only be "left behind" if benefits outweigh risks and it is clear that risks far exceed even the claimed benefits.
If you want GM canola to be grown, work on ensuring the non-GM farmer is not faced with the liability for the losses it will cause.

Excuse me d, I am not stupid. You have it wrong with DNA which is the genetic material of nearly all living organisms. Changes in the DNA cause mutations and the DNA molecule can make exact copies of itself by the process of replication thereby passing on the genetic information to the daughter cells when the cell divides. This structure should be a very important issue and is not, I repeat not a miniscule food risk as you are playing with DNA structures and mutating food that I am expected to eat.

The DNA that has escaped from your tampering into the human gut is a major concern. I want more tests that show me without doubt that your tampering with DNA does not cause any issues with my health. You have not done this so far and I disagree with your implications that I am an idiot. Stop throwing stones and get to the real issues here as you are acting like a spoilt child. Yelling "nutters" and "misleading" or that we are stupid won't make us eat it.

(2006) Jumping Genes Cross Plant Species Boundaries. PLoS Biol 4(1): e35
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040035
http://gmopundit2.blogspot.com/2006/02/survey-of-recent-studies-on-mutator.html
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040005

In the early 1950s, legendary plant geneticist Barbara McClintock found the first evidence that genetic material can jump from one place to another within the genome. The variegated kernels of her maize plants, she determined, resulted from mobile elements that had inserted themselves into pigment-coding genes, changing their expression. McClintock's mobile elements, or transposons, moved over generations within a single species. More recently, another form of genetic mobility has been discovered—genetic information can sometimes be transferred between species, a process called horizontal gene transfer. While horizontal genetic transfer occurs most commonly in bacteria, it has been detected in animals as well. Most transfers between higher animals involve the movement of transposons. Horizontal transfer can also occur between the mitochondrial DNA of different plant species. Until now, however, no one had found evidence for horizontal transfer in the nuclear DNA of plants.

In a new report, Xianmin Diao, Michael Freeling, and Damon Lisch studied the genomes of millet and rice, two distantly related grasses that diverged 30–60 million years ago. While the two grasses show significant genetic divergence from accumulating millions of years of mutations, they carry some natural mutaion causing genes (Mule transposons) segments that are surprisingly similar. The authors conclude that these sequences were transferred horizontally between the two plants long after they went their separate ways.

A survey of recent science about these Mutator mobile genes (Mules) that move around between species such as maize, millet, rice diverse angiosperms, yeast Yarrowia lipolytica, Petunia, flatworm Caenorhabditis,sugarcane, fungus Fusarium oxysporum, fruitfly Drosophila, and grasses, scramble and delete genes, are genetically unstable, and which are common in nature and completely NATURAL.

Question to IS it safe: Why do you eat ANY food if (according to your worries) is is so full of dangerous natural DNA (see above) that can move into our genes ( like natural soy genes do) and cause so much havoc including cancer?