By Nathan B. Batalion Published by Americans for Safe Food. Oneonta, N.Y.
Page 4 of 6 (Page 1, Page 2, Page 3)
Terminator Trees
Monsanto has developed plans with the New Zealand Forest Research Agency to create still more lethal tree plantations. These super deadly trees are non-flowering, herbicide-resistant, and with leaves exuding toxic chemicals to kill caterpillars and other surrounding insects, destroying the wholesale ecology of forest life.
As George McGavin, curator of entomology Oxford University noted, "If you replace vast tracts of natural forest with flowerless trees, there will be a serious effect on the richness and abundance of insects ... If you put insect resistance in the leaves as well you will end up with nothing but booklice and earwigs.
We are talking about vast tracts of land covered with plants that do not support animal life as a sterile means to cultivate wood tissue. That is a pretty unattractive vision of the future and I for one want no part of it."
Insects and Larger Animals
Lab tests indicate that common plant pests such as cottonboll worms, will evolve into superpests immune from the Bt sprays used by organic farmers. The recent "stink bug" epidemic in North Carolina and Georgia seems linked to bioengineered plants that the bugs love. Monsanto, on their Farmsource Web site, recommended spraying them with methyl parathion, one of the deadliest chemicals.
So much for the notion of Bt cotton getting US farmers off the toxic treadmill. Pests the transgenic cotton was meant to kill -- cotton bollworms, pink bollworms, and budworms -- were once "secondary pests." Toxic chemicals killed off their predators, unbalanced nature, and thus made them "major pests."
Animal Bio-invasions
Fish and marine life are threatened by accidental release of GM fish currently under development in several countries -- trout, carp, and salmon several times the normal size and growing up to six times as fast. One such accident has already occurred in the Philippines -- threatening local fish supplies.
Killing Beneficial Insects
Studies have shown that GM products can kill beneficial insects -- most notably the monarch butterfly larvae (Cornell, 1999). Swiss government researchers found Bt crops killed lacewings that ate the cottonworms that the Bt targeted.
A study reported in 1997 by New Scientist indicates honeybees may be harmed by feeding on proteins found in GM canola flowers. Other studies relate to the death of bees (40 percent died during a contained trial with Monsanto's Bt cotton), springtails (Novartis' Bt corn data submitted to the EPA) and ladybird beetles.
Poisonous to Mammals
In a study with GM potatoes, spliced with DNA from the snowdrop plant and a viral promoter (CaMV), the resulting plant was poisonous to mammals (rats) -- damaging vital organs, the stomach lining and immune system. CaMV is a pararetrovirus. It can reactivate dormant viruses or create new viruses, as some presume has occurred with the AIDES epidemic.
CaMV is promiscuous, which is why biologist Mae Wan-Ho concluded that "all transgenic crops containing CaMV 35S or similar promoters which are recombinogenic should be immediately withdrawn from commercial production or open field trials. All products derived from such crops containing transgenic DNA should also be immediately withdrawn from sale and from use for human consumption or animal feed."
Animal Abuse
Pig number 6706 was supposed to be a "superpig." It was implanted with a gene to become a technological wonder. But it eventually became a "supercripple" full of arthritis, cross-eyed, and could barely stand up with its mutated body. Some of these mutations seem to come right out of Greek mythology, such as a sheep-goat with faces and horns of a goat and the lower body of a sheep.
Two US biotech companies are producing genetically modified birds as carriers for human drug delivery -- with little concern for animal suffering. Gene Works of Ann Arbor, Michigan has up to 60 birds under "development." GM products, in general, allow companies to own the rights to create, direct, and orchestrate the evolution of animals.
Support of Animal Factory Farming
Rather than using the best of scientific minds to end animal factory farming, rapid efforts are underway to develop gene-modified animals that better thrive in disease-promoting conditions of animal factory farms.
Genetic Uncertainties
Carrying GM pollen by wind, rain, birds, bees, insects, fungus, bacteria, the entire chain of life becomes involved. Once released, unlike chemical pollution, there is no cleanup or recall possible.
As mentioned, pollen from a single GM tree has been shown to travel one-fifth of the length of the U.S.
Thus there is no containing such genetic pollution. Experiments in Germany have shown that engineered oilseed rape can have its pollen move over 200 meters. As a result German farmers have sued to stop field trials in Berlin.
In Thailand, the government stopped field tests for Monsanto's Bt cotton when it was discovered by the Institute of Traditional Thai Medicine that 16 nearby plants of the cotton family, used by traditional healers, were being genetically polluted. US research showed that more than 50 percent of wild strawberries growing inside of 50 meters of a GM strawberry field assumed GM gene markers.
Another showed that 25 to 38 percent of wild sunflowers growing near GM crops had GM gene markers. A recent study in England showed that despite the tiny amount of GM plantings there (33,750 acres over two years compared to 70 to 80 million acres per year in the US), wild honey was found to be contaminated. This means that bees are likely to pollinate organic plants and trees with transgenic elements.
Many other insects transport the by-products of GM plants throughout our environment, and even falling leaves can dramatically affect the genetic heritage of soil bacteria. The major difference between chemical pollution and genetic pollution is that the former eventually is dismantled or decays, while the latter can reproduce itself forever in the wild.
As the National Academy of Science's report indicated, "the containment of crop genes is not considered to be feasible when seeds are distributed and grown on a commercial scale." Bioengineering firms are also developing fast growing salmon, trout, and catfish as part of the "blue revolution" in aquaculture. They often grow several times faster (six times faster for salmon) and larger in size (up to 39 times) so as to potentially wipe out their competitors in the wild.
There are no regulations for their safe containment to avoid ecological disasters. They frequently grow in "net pens," renown for being torn by waves, so that some will escape into the wild. If so, commercial wild fish could be devastated according to computer models in a study of the National Academy of Sciences by two Purdue University scientists (William Muir and Richard Howard). All of organic farming, and farming per se, may eventually be either threatened or polluted by this technology.
Disturbance of Nature's Boundaries
Genetic engineers argue that their creations are no different than crossbreeding. However, natural boundaries are violated by crossing animals with plants; strawberries with fish, grains, nuts, seeds; and legumes with bacteria, viruses, and fungi -- or human genes with swine.
Unpredictable Consequences of a Gunshot
Approach DNA fragments are blasted past a cell's membrane with a "gene gun" shooting in foreign genetic materials in a random, unpredictable way.
According to Dr. Richard Lacey, a medical microbiologist at the University of Leeds, who predicted mad cow disease, "wedging foreign genetic material in an essentially random manner ... causes some degree of disruption ... It is impossible to predict what specific problems could result." This view is echoed by many other scientists, including Michael Hansen, Ph.D., who states that "Genetic engineering, despite the precise sound of the name, is actually a very messy process."
Impact On Farming
"The decline in the number of farms is likely to accelerate in the coming years ... gene-splicing technologies ... change the way plants and animals are produced." Jemery Rifkin
"The decline in the number of farms is likely to accelerate in the coming years ... gene-splicing technologies ... change the way plants and animals are produced."
Jemery Rifkin
Decline and Destruction of Self-Sufficient Family Farms
In 1850, 60 percent of the working population in the US was engaged in agriculture. By the year 1950 it was four percent. Today it is two percent (CIA World Factbook 1999 - USA).
From a peak of 7 million farms in 1935, there are now less than one-third, or 2 million, left. In many urban areas, where family farms are becoming largely extinct, the situation is more stark. For example, Rockland Country, New York (one-half hour from New York City) had 600 family farms in 1929. Exactly seventy years later only six remained.
Similar declines have occurred throughout the US and abroad. Of the one-third remaining US farms, 100,000, or five percent, produce most of our foods. Agri-corporations have taken economic and legislative power away from the small, self-sufficient family farms, sometimes via cutthroat competition (such as legal product dumping below production costs to gain market share -- legalized by GATT regulations).
The marketing of GM foods augments this centralizing and small-farm declining trend in the US, as well as on an international level. For example, two bioengineering firms have announced a GM vanilla plant where vanilla can be grown in vats at a lower cost, and which could eliminate the livelihood of the world's 100,000 vanilla farmers -- most of whom are on the islands of Madagascar, Reunion and Comoros.
Other firms are developing bioengineered fructose, besides chemical sugar substitutes, that threatens, according to a Dutch study, 1 million farmers in the Third World. In 1986, the Sudan lost its export of gum arabic when a New York company discovered a bioengineering process for producing the same.
Synthetic cocoa substitutes are also threatening farmers. It is estimated that the biotech industry will find at least $14 billion dollars of substitutes for Third World farming products. Far beyond hydroponics, scientists are developing processes to grow foods in solely laboratory environments -- eliminating the need for seeds, shrubs, trees, soil and ultimately the farmer.
General Economic Harm to Small Family Farms
GM seeds sell at a premium, unless purchased in large quantities, which creates a financial burden for small farmers. To add to this financial injury, Archer Daniels Midland has instituted a two-tier price system where it offers less to farmers per bushels for GM soybeans because they are not selling well overseas.
Many GM products, such as rBGH, seem to offer a boom for dairy farmers -- helping their cows produce considerably more milk. But the end result has been a lowering of prices, again putting the smaller farmers out of business. We can find similar trends with other GM techniques, as in pig and hen-raising, made more efficient. The University of Wisconsin's GM brooding hens lack the gene that produces prolactin proteins.
The new hens no longer sit on their eggs as long and produce more. Higher production leads to lower prices in the market place. The end result is that the average small farmer's income plummeted while a few large-scale, hyper-productive operations survived along with their "input providers" (companies selling seeds, soil amendments, and so on).
In an on-going trend, the self-sufficient family farmer is shoved to the very lowest rung of the economic ladder. In 1910 the labor portion of agriculture accounted for 41 percent of the value of the finally sold produce. Now the figure has been estimated at between six to nine percent in North America. The balance gets channeled to agri-input and distribution firms, and more recently, to biotech firms. Kristin Dawkins in Gene Wars: The Politics of Biotechnology, points out that between 1981 and 1987, food prices rose 36 percent, while the percentage of the pie earned by farmers continued to shrink dramatically.
Continued to page 5 of this article
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