November 2007 genetic engineering update, Part 1

Following stories have been collected by Ecological Farming Association's GE News, the indispensable electronic clipping service on genetic engineering.
Badlands Journal editorial board

New York Times
ttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/business/27sugar.html
November 27, 2007
Round 2 for Biotech Beets...ANDREW POLLACK
Each growing season, like many other sugar beet farmers bedeviled by
weeds, Robert Green repeatedly and painstakingly applies herbicides in a
process he compares to treating cancer with chemotherapy.
"You give small doses of products that might harm the crop, but it harms
the weeds a little more," said Mr. Green, who plants about 900 acres in
beets in St. Thomas, N.D. But next spring, for the first time, Mr. Green intends to plant beets genetically engineered to withstand Monsanto's powerful
Roundup herbicide. The Roundup will destroy the weeds but leave his crop
unscathed, potentially saving him thousands of dollars in tractor fuel
and labor.
For Mr. Green and many other beet farmers, it is technology too long
delayed. And the engineered beets could pave the way for the eventual
planting of other biotech crops like wheat, rice and potatoes, which
were also stalled on the launching pad. Seven years ago, beet breeders were on the verge of introducing Roundup-resistant seeds. But they had to pull back after sugar-using food companies like Hershey and Mars, fearing
consumer resistance, balked at the idea of biotech beets. Now, though,
sensing that those concerns have subsided, many processors have cleared
their growers to plant the Roundup-resistant beets next spring. It would be the first new type of genetically engineered food crop
widely grown since the 1990s, when biotech soybeans, corn and a few
other crops entered the market.
"Basically, we have not run into resistance," said David Berg, president
of American Crystal Sugar, the nation's largest sugar beet processor.
"We really think that consumer attitudes have come to accept food from
biotechnology"...

There's abundant evidence to warn people against GE crops
Sydney Morning herald, November 28 2007
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2007/11/27/1196036886354.html
Announcements in Victoria and NSW that genetically engineered (GE) crops will be allowed threaten more than just the income of Australia's farmers and food companies. There is irrefutable evidence that GE foods are unsafe to eat.
Working with more than 30 scientists worldwide, I documented 65 health risks of GE foods. There are thousands of toxic or allergic-type reactions in humans, thousands of sick, sterile, and dead livestock, and damage to virtually every organ and system studied in lab animals. Government safety assessments, including those of Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), do not identify many of the dangers, and analysis reveals that industry studies submitted to FSANZ are designed to avoid finding them.
The process of inserting a foreign gene into a plant cell and cloning that cell into a GE crop produces hundreds of thousands of mutations throughout the DNA. Natural plant genes may be deleted or permanently turned on or off, and hundreds can change their function. This is why GE soy has less protein, an unexpected new allergen and up to seven times higher levels of a known soy allergen.
The only human feeding study conducted on GE foods found genes had transferred into the DNA of gut bacteria and remained functional. This means that long after we stop eating a GE food, its protein may be produced continuously inside our intestines.
Lab animals fed GM crops had altered sperm cells and embryos, a five-fold increase in infant mortality, smaller brains, and a host of other problems.
Documents made public by a lawsuit revealed that scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration warned that gene-spliced foods might lead to allergies, toxins, new diseases and nutritional problems. When 25 per cent of US corn farmers planted GE varieties, corn sales to the European Union dropped by 99.4 per cent. All corn farmers suffered as prices fell by 13 to 20 per cent. In North America a growing number of doctors are prescribing a non-GE diet. Next year, the US natural food industry will remove all remaining GE ingredients.
Consumer buying pressure will likely force the entire food chain in North America to swear off GE within the next two years. Such a tipping point was achieved in Europe in April 1999. Australia should be taking notice of the response to GE foods throughout the world. It is certainly not the time to let the state bans expire.
Jeffrey M. Smith Executive director Institute for Responsible Technology Iowa, USA

Bush's Ag Secretary Nominee is GMO Shill
News Type: Opinion - Fri Nov 2 2007 [edited]
http://minnieapolis.newsvine.com/_news/2007/11/02/1067645-bushs-ag-secre...
On Halloween, Pres. Bush nominated Edward Schafer for the post of Agriculture Secretary. Schafer is a two-time North Dakota governor and former co-chairman of the Governors Biotechnology Partnership. While the White House is highlighting Schafer’s experience at directing emergency aid to the 1997 flooding disaster, voters and the Senate would do well to consider his role in shielding the biotech industry from consumer product labeling laws.
According to an online search, Ed Schafer was the former co-chairman of the Governors Biotechnology Partnership. He was instrumental in getting former Pres. Clinton to back off of requirements that GM modified foods be labeled as such. See the article from The Guardian in May of 2000, titled, "Clinton bows to food producers."
There was quite a flurry of press about Mr. Schafer in 2000. You might like to look up the Salon article from its archive, "Stalking the wild Frankensalmon," from May 5, 2000. Quote:
"On Wednesday, 13 governors joined forces with the biotech industry to try to persuade American consumers to become more enthusiastic consumers of engineered food. "It makes sense to say that this isn't just the big, bad chemical companies trying to engineer something to jam down your throats," said North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer… How political is the coalition? Consider that two of the group's three Democratic governors are from states housing the headquarters of biotech gorillas Monsanto and DuPont."
And an editorial and letter to editor in Gentech, also from May 2000, has even more of his own words about the 'promised land' of GM foods...
" In 1998, the Governor let his constituents know his innermost feelings about the "new" agriculture. In his State of the State address, he said: "...today different winds blow across our fields of waving wheat. Washington has changed the rules on...agriculture."
His 1999 address included a commercial for Monsanto's pesticide: "Every day I read about a new innovation...Roundup-ready crops..."
This year, the governor made no mistake about his intentions: "Genetic engineering will make farms smaller, more specialized and more profitable."
This ill-informed politician is the chief executive of an agricultural state, North Dakota, which produces enormous surpluses. Farmers in his state are paid subsidies not to grow corn and soybeans, yet the governor believes that genetically modified foods are the keys to easing world hunger. "

Modified forests could severely impact natural land
By: Josh Grenzsund, Columnist
Oregon Daily Emerald, 24 October 2007
http://media.www.dailyemerald.com/media/storage/paper859/news/2007/10/24...
Oregon has a growing self-perception, and reputation, as being a leader in the local and natural food craze. While "local" may be easy to define, it is harder to define what we mean when we say "natural."
A lot of the anxiety behind consumers' demands for "natural" foods comes from fear of the unknown. Will genetically engineered organisms spread their modified genes to their formerly "wild" counterparts and irrevocably alter the "natural" world? Maybe it's already happened. According to an article from Capital Press, "The West's Agricultural Web Site," there are as many as four million genetically improved Douglas Fir "super trees" growing in about 790 test plots in Washington and Oregon.
While that may sound like a lot of pollen blowing unchecked under the summer sun, one has to choose how to interpret the information. One could side with the official line, pushed by forest products companies like Weyerhaeuser that focus on the benefits that could be had by faster reforestation after clear cutting or fire. Or one could side with the anti-modification advocates who not only push a more sensational story, but in the past have backed up their views with vandalism and arson. One such case in 2001 actually helped U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken give Stanislas Meyerhoff a 13-year prison sentence, and qualified him as a terrorist.
In contrast to the dramatic measures used by some modification opponents, the corporate story, at least according to Weyerhaeuser, says that what is occurring in Oregon's forests is quite natural and nothing to pay much mind to. Weyerhaeuser will tell the press that their trees that display remarkable disease resistance, rapid growth, and straight trunks are not actually "genetically modified," but rather are just "genetic families" that have been bred for their desirable qualities. This is reassuring. As a discerning public we have generally acknowledged that breeding is acceptable, and a slightly controlled choice of which little fir tree gets to push its straight trunk into genetic futurity is just good business. Corporations will claim that breeding better, more disease-resistant organisms will also help with humanitarian problems, from hunger to global warming. It is, in short, inevitable, desirable progress.
The problem, however, begins to develop when Weyerhaeuser markets these same straight little trees as "genetically improved" stock for when "things are too important to be left to chance." Just a little looking will reveal some of the steps that they have taken in order to assure high survivability and growth rates.
When the Tree Biosafety and Genomics Research Cooperative at Oregon State University was still known as The Tree Genetic Engineering Research Cooperative, they publicized their work with "Roundup® resistant" trees. Aside from the obvious involvement of Monsanto on this project, Weyerhaeuser also helps fund the tree lab at OSU.
The old TGERC Web site still has information posted about their hundreds of lines of transgenic trees that "have demonstrated high levels of tolerance and no detectable growth loss after multiple Roundup® applications…[and others]…that contain a synthetic gene from the cry3a strain of Bacillus thuringiensis…showed strong resistance to the cottonwood leaf beetle…and enhanced growth rate." Here is where forest products companies end their tale and the anti-modification advocates pick it up.
While he most inflammatory propaganda from this camp will go on about "frankenforests" of genetically modified trees that will devastate native forests and change the entire notion of what the natural world is, there are more reasoned arguments that intelligently refute the economic and humanitarian claims of corporations. The coherent core of these counter-claims takes a step back and looks not only at the trees and how they fall into the saws and pulps of our economic cycles, but how they stand as organisms within a larger cycle of plant and animal organisms in the places we call our forests.
In their publication, "Genetically Modified Trees: The ultimate threat to forests," the Friends of the Earth argue that the reason we should not genetically modify our trees, and thus our forests, is because we are not the only creatures who value trees. Insects, birds, and animals do not acknowledge property and national forest boundaries. They will eat or use whatever tree they happen to encounter and, for example, a tree with insecticide properties could pollinate across boundary lines, impact insect populations and disrupt an entire food chain.
This possibility of broad pollination raises a darker part of the issue: property. If, in two or three generations, forest life contains modified genes through cross-pollination, will the companies give up their ownership of that modified gene, or will we, the people, have to give up the trees that make up our forests?
We should not allow for that possibility. We should resist technological determinism when discussing whether or not we should modify organisms' genes, because giving in to its apparent inevitability will allow the genetic composition and fate of our world, and eventually our bodies, to be established by corporations' economic concerns. This local and worldwide issue is one in which you don't want to miss the forest for all the trees.

NAFTA and Biotech: Twin Horsemen of the Ag Apocalypse
The Last Days of Mexican Corn
By JOHN ROSS
CounterPunch, November 21 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross11212007.html
Mexico City.
The single, spindly seven foot-tall cornstalk spiring up from the planter box outside a prominent downtown hotel here was filling out with new "elotes" (sweet corn) to the admiration of passer-bys, some of whom even paused to pat the swelling ears with affection. Down the centuries most of the population of this megalopolis migrated here from the countryside at one time or another over the course of the past 500 years and inside every "Chilango" (Mexico City resident) lurks an inner campesino.\
But the solitary stalk, sewn by an urban coalition of farmers and ecologists under the banner of "No Hay Pais Sin Maiz" ("There Is No Country Without Corn") in planter boxes outside the downtown hotels, museums, government palaces and other historical monuments can just as easily be seen as a signifier for the fragile state of survival of Mexican corn.
As the year ripens into deep autumn, the corn harvest is pouring in all over Mexico. Out in Santa Cruz Tanaco in the Purepecha Indian Sierra of Michoacan state, the men mow their way down the rows much as their fathers and their fathers before did, snapping off the ears and tossing them into the "tshundi" basket on their backs.
In the evenings, the families will gather around the fire and shuck the "granos" from the cobs into buckets and carry them down to the store to trade for other necessities of life. It is the way in Tanaco in this season of plenitude just as it is in the tens of thousands of tiny farming communities all over Mexico where 29 per cent of the population still lives. But it is a way of life that is fading precipitously. Some say that these indeed may be the last days of Mexican corn.
In fact, this January 1 may prove to be a doomsday date for Mexican maiz when at the stroke of midnight, all tariffs on corn (and beans) will be abolished after more than a decade of incremental NAFTA-driven decreases. Although U.S. corn growers are already dumping 10 million tons of the heavily subsidized grain in Mexico each year, zero tariffs are expected to trigger a tsunami of corn imports, much of it genetically modified, that will drive millions of Mexican farmers off their land - in NAFTA's first 13 years, 6,000,000 have already abandoned their plots - and could well spell the end of the line for 59 distinct "razas" or races of native corn.
Corn was first domesticated eight millennia ago in the Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca and Mexico remains the fourth largest corn producer on the planet but its 22,000,000 ton annual yield pales in comparison to U.S. growers who are expected to harvest near 300,000,000 tons this year, accounting for 70 per cent of the world's maize supply. A third of U.S. corn acreage is now under genetically modified seed.
Big Biotec has had its guns trained on Mexican corn for a long time but under the national biosecurity law, Monsanto and its ilk have been barred from selling their GMO seed here. Now the transnationals are putting a full court press on the CIBOGEN, the inter-secretarial committee on bio-security, to vacate the prohibition on GMO sales - the measure was originally enacted in the late '90s in an effort to protect native seed from contamination and homogenization by genetically modified materials.
This September, the CIBOGEN was on track to designate experimental GMO farms in the north of Mexico (Sonora's Yaqui Valley and the Valley of Culiacan) where there are no native corns that could be corrupted by the engineered seeds but the designation was abruptly postponed around issues of potential contamination to the great frustration of a powerhouse pro-GMO coalition motored by the Biotec giants and including the Mexican National Farming Council (big growers), the National Association of Self-Service Stores (Wal-mart - now the biggest tortilla retailer in the country), and the National Farmers Central (CNC) which groups together rank and file farmers attached to the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party.
A dubious milestone in the history of corn was reached in July when scientists at the National Genetics & Biodiversity Laboratories announced that they had successfully mapped the genome of Mexican maiz. That was the good news. The bad news is that the genome will be available to anyone who can pay the Institute's asking price.
Who owns the genome is crucial to the survival of Mexican corn. There is little doubt that the Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis Missouri would love to get its hands on this breakthrough information so that for-profit scientists could design seeds modeled upon the DNA of native corns for commercial sales.
Mexican corn is a rich source of genetic history. Millions of adaptations to specific conditions have created a seed stock with extremely variegated properties. For millennia, native seed savers have set aside corn seed that is resistant to drought whose DNA structure Monsanto will now be able to simulate in its laboratories and market under its brand.
Monsanto took a giant step in locking up the genetic wealth of Mexico this past April 18 when it signed an agreement with the National Association of Corn Producers (CNPMM), a section of the CNC that groups together big corn farmers, to establish regional seed banks in the center and south of the country. CNC members were designated "guardians of the seed" and charged with assembling collections of native corn to be housed in Monsanto-financed repositories.
(Big bucks from Cargill and Maseca-ADM have also funded the seed banks.) "Allowing Monsanto to get so close to the secrets of Mexican corn is like asking Herod to baby-sit," writes Adelita San Vicente, an activist with the "No Hay Pais" coalition in a recent agrarian supplement of the left daily La Jornada.
55 per cent of the crops needed to feed the human race are now grown by just ten corporations. The biggest players in this monopoly game are Bayer, Dow, Dupont, Syngenta (once Novartis), and Monsanto. None of these conglomerates is a seed company. They all began their corporate life selling chemicals for war and farming.
Monsanto, which dominates 71 per cent of the GMO seed market, has operated in Mexico since the post-World War II so-called "green revolution" that featured hybrid seeds ("semillas mejoradas") that only worked when associated with pesticides and fertilizers manufactured by the transnational chemical companies. Selling hybrid seeds and chemical poisons in Mexico continues to be profitable for Monsanto whose total 2006 sales here topped 3,000,000,000 pesos ($300 million USD.) It doesn't hurt that Monsanto Mexico sells hybrid seed for $2 Americano for a packet of a thousand when its states-side price is $1.34.
22,000,000 Mexicans, 13,000,000 of them children, suffer some degree of malnutrition according to doctors at the National Nutrition Institute and Monsanto insists that it can feed them all if only the CIBOGEN will allow it to foist its GMO seed on unwitting corn farmers. But the way Monsanto sells its GMO seed is severely questioned.
Farmers are forced to sign contracts, agreeing to buy GMO seed at a company-fixed price. Monsanto's super-duper "Terminator" seed, named after California's action hero governor, goes sterile after one growing cycle and the campesinos are obligated to buy more. By getting hooked on Monsanto, Mexican farmers, once seed savers and repositories themselves of the knowledge of their inner workings, become consumers of seed, an arrangement that augurs poorly for the survival of Mexico's many native corns.
Moreover, as farmers from other climes who have resisted Monsanto and refused to buy into the GMO blitz, have learned only too traumatically, pollen blowing off contaminated fields will spread to non-GMO crops. Even more egregiously, Monsanto will then send "inspectors" (often off-duty cops) to your farm and detect their patented strains in your fields and charge you with stealing the corporation's property.
When Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser came to Mexico several years back to explain how Monsanto had taken his farm from him for precisely these reasons, local legislators laughed that it was a science fiction scenario. "It is going to happen to you," the old farmer warned with all the prescience of an Aztec seer.
Mexican corn is, of course, not the only native crop that is being disappeared by global capitalism. Native seeds are under siege from pole to pole. In Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together to form the birthplace of agriculture, one of the very first acts of George Bush's neo-colonial satrap L. Paul Brenner was to issue the notorious Order 81 criminalizing the possession of native seeds. The U.S. military spread out throughout the land distributing little packets of GMO seeds, the euphemistically dubbed Operation "Amber Waves." To make sure that Iraq would no longer have a native agriculture, the national seed bank, located at Abu Ghraib, was looted and set afire.
The threat to native seed has become so acute that the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization is funding the construction of a doomsday vault on remote Svalbard Island in northern Norway 800 miles from the North Pole. It was thought that seeds cryogenically frozen and stored in deep underground bunkers would be insured of survival. But as the polar bears of that gelid bioregion now know only too well, nothing is safe from the globalizers' hunger to destroy the planet and what it grows.