Safe, you said:

You sign an agreement which states:-
Cannot save and replant Monsanto's genetically engineered seed.
Must use Monsanto's proprietary chemicals.

And later:

The DVD analogy is perfect. DVD's don't breed by themselves. ..The way around the Trade Practices Act is to give discounts with packaged deals.

I am sorry we appear to be ganging up on you, but you do move your own goalposts!

“DVD's don't breed by themselves” - but your point was about seed saving and replanting, so it’s not the copying of the seed or the DVD, but what happens afterwards (ie copying is irrelevant, whether done by the person or “by itself” – by the plant producing more seed). I could copy DVDs at home and no one would know, or bother suing me. If I gave them to friends or sold them at the market, I could be in trouble. Monsanto has no concern about the seed breeding more seed; it’s the fact the farmer wants to grow another harvest with that new seed rather than selling it as produce. Monsanto asks farmers to agree not to do that (make money from copies).

Similarly, you initially said Monsanto's agreements state you must use their chemicals. (This is not correct anyway - see my earlier post.) Discounting will not get around the TP Act or US anti-trust law if the farmer is still obliged (as you argue) to buy the chemicals. If farmers are choosing to buy them because of the discount, that is not generally a problem in law - it's just like "buy a shirt, get a tie for half price" - unless there is still the obligation to buy both together. An incentive to buy is not the same as an obligation.

Example 1. I assume that Lord Sainsbury declared his financial interests and gave up personal involvement in the companies when he became a minister, like all other ministers in the UK Government. There is no suggestion that he gave money to his own companies or that he has a stake in the John Innes Centre. What is he supposed to have done wrong except support GM technology?

Example 2. Chapela’s study was flawed because he failed to control for an obvious artefact. This does not necessarily mean that transgenes were not in Mexican corn, just that Chapela’s study did not show it. In the end, the editor of Nature recognised this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/05/science/05CORN.html

Chapela instead of recognising the problem chose to portray himself as an anti-GM martyr. If that is what he wants fine, but he should not be surprised if he doesn’t get a lot of respect.

A study conducted 4 years later conducted in a better fashion failed to find any transgenes in Mexican corn. Again this does not mean that transgenes were never present, just that they could not have been widespread.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/35/12338

The idea of the research in Oaxaco in Mexico I gather is to prove that you can keep GM out of the local indigenous people's crops that don’t want GM. Of course the conclusion was there was no contamination to this area. Has anyone but me realised the location of this experiment was done more than 1440 km by road from the US border? These particular villages are surrounded by mountains more than 2200 metres high? For a pollinated seed to get there, it would have to fly more than 2200 metres high and then drop down into a valley without getting hit by the next group of mountains. The tests were done along the deepest part of the valley along villages that are immediately below the mountains. Not much chance of getting pollinated is there?

Lord Sainsbury - it is a conflict of interest to own a Company and be a major influence in parliament within the same interests as his company. To distance himself from his commercial interests, Sainsbury established a blind trust to control his assets after joining the government. Lord Sainsbury was ennobled by Tony Blair, but did not declare his interests in Diatech in the 1997 register of Lords' interests. His recent words "We have already committed nearly £50m for the bioscience sector since 2004. Most recently in April, we launched two new calls for proposals worth £12m (£8m for Safety Biomarkers and £4m for the exploitation of bioscience for industry). "

Don't give me a newspaper article from NY times or Berkeley campus to discredit a scientist even if he has said that he is non-GM. I am sure that he was a respected scientist before the pro-GM lobby got hold of his work.

I am concerned that the spread of GM into non-GM farms will give farmers no choice but to sign up for GM even though they don't want it, therefore giving consumers no choice. Give me the end point royalties of GM and the sample of what the GM agreement will be. I'm sure that Monsanto has already drawn it up

In the US as well, farmer-to-farmer exchange has been made illegal. Dennis and Becky Winterboer were farmers owning a 500-acre farm in Iowa. Since 1987, the Winterboers have derived a sizeable portion of their income from ‘brown bagging’ sales of their crops to other farmers to use as seed. A ‘brown bag’ sale occurs when a farmer plants seeds in his own field and then sells the harvest as seed to other farmers. Asgrow (a commercial company which has plant variety protection for its soybean seeds) filed suit against the Winterboers on the grounds that its property rights were being violated. The Winterboers argued that they had acted within the law since according to the Plant Variety Act farmers had the right to sell seed, provided both the farmer and seller were farmers. Subsequently, in 1994, the Plant Variety Act was amended, and the farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed was amended, establishing absolute monopoly of the seed industry by making farmer-to-farmer exchange and sales illegal.

This is how non GM seeds are treated, pretty much the same as GM seeds.

GM food is safe.
GM seeds are sold the same way "normal" seeds are.

So all that is left is contamination. If you look at what is happeneing now indiginous communities are patenting their own plants, cross contamination is not just a GM issue.

Your opinion only that GM is safe not mine. I still believe that it is a biohazard.

The supposed tests that you have shown me are not showing that GM is unequivocably safe at all and from what I can tell they have manipulated results and are not showing everything that the scientist found.

The contamination is a real factor and you don't seem to want to know about that. No-one is given a choice with contamination and how long would it be before the 1% that is allowable becomes 5% etc. One, two or three years? You take away my right as a consumer and the farmers right to not have or want GM food. This is a disgrace to Australia that we are bulldozed into accepting GM food when we don't want it.

Monsanto manipulates the government and scientists. http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/02-11-14-01.all.html shows "donations" to Yale and Peking Universities. $400K for equipment and $250K for each student gives incentive based research manipulation. Another is the University of Maryland.

http://www.rachel.org/BULLETIN/bulletin.cfm?Issue_ID=525 "Monsanto is notorious for marketing dangerous products while falsely claiming safety. The entire planet is now contaminated with hormone- disrupting, cancer-causing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), thanks to Monsanto's poor judgment and refusal to be guided by early scientific evidence indicating harm". "rBGH was never properly tested before FDA allowed it on the market. A standard cancer test of a new human drug requires two years of testing with several hundred rats. But rBGH was tested for only 90 days on 30 rats. This short-term rat study was submitted to FDA but was never published. FDA has refused to allow anyone outside FDA to review the raw data from this study, saying it would "irreparably harm" Monsanto.[2] Therefore the linchpin study of cancer and rBGH has never been subjected to open scientific peer review".

http://www.monitor.net/monitor/11-14-95/milksafety.html "A new study published in August shows this to be wrong. IGF-1 by itself in saliva is destroyed by digestion, but IGF-1 in the presence of casein (the principal protein in cows' milk) is not destroyed by the digestive system. Casein has a protective effect on IGF-1, so IGF-1 in cows milk remains intact in the gut of humans who drink rBGH-treated milk. There was reason to believe that this might be true because researchers in 1984 had shown that another growth hormone, Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF), in the presence of casein was not degraded by the digestive system. However, proof had been lacking for IGF-1 until now".

And if you think that the American Government has nothing to do with Monsanto think again. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060216-9.html "President George W. Bush today announced his intention to nominate one individual and appoint three individuals to serve in his Administration:

The President intends to nominate Linda Avery Strachan, of the District of Columbia, to be Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Congressional Relations. Ms. Strachan formerly served as Director of Federal Government Affairs for the Monsanto Company. "