The concerted drive to inflict genetically modified food upon us by food corporations such as Monsanto with the compliance with the highly-corrupt FDA in the name of profit is nothing but a disgrace and a sham. Listening to their spokespersons quoting rigged and heavily-massaged trial results and lying about the safety of these substances, is no different to listening to the worst excesses of Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 40s.
Make no mistake about it, GM foods are nothing short of deadly, to humans and animals alike and even the best First Aid Courses won’t save you. According to these Big Food, Elite controlled corporations and their media poodles, GM foods are the answer to the world food crisis and a cheap, efficient way of feeding the starving millions worldwide. Of course they care about the starving millions – we believe them. Of course we do.
The truth is that the reason that genetically modified foods are being produced in the first place is so that the corporations who produce them can patent the genetics and thus control the market for them. Can you imagine owning the sole rights to the genome for a carrot or a tomato or even a strain of cattle? This is a very dangerous situation and very much ‘the thin end of the wedge’ in the sense that allowing a corporation to own a genome means that they can in effect corner a market and basically charge whatever they then wish for that product. That is really what GM is all about and why it is so insidious. It also gives them the power to make charges for seeds containing their genetic blueprint, as opposed to the natural genome, found on other private farms or lands.
There have already been court cases in the US and worldwide where Monsanto have illegally sent their ‘agents’ into private farmland to gather samples of seeds / plants bearing their genome blueprint, carried in by birds or the wind from neighbouring farms. In all cases the judges have found in Monsanto’s favour, declaring that the seeds were ‘Monsanto’s property’ and were being grown illegally. This is not satire by the way, this is the absolute truth.
In addition Monsanto (and other corporations’) GM seeds contain what has become known as the ‘terminator gene’. This means that unlike in days gone-by when farmers / growers could save the seeds from one year’s crop in order to propagate the following years crop, they are now forced to buy from the Corporations again and again, year on year as the ability of the plants to naturally produce seeds has been ‘deleted’ from the genome. In my humble view, although this is perfectly legal, it is absolutely, totally immoral and callous profiteering on a grand scale.
Here is a recent case against Monsanto that made the headlines…
“For 40 years Percy Schmeiser grew oilseed rape on his farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Each year, he would sow each year’s crop with seeds saved from the previous harvest. In 1998 Monsanto took Schmeiser to court. Investigators employed by the company had found samples of its GM oilseed rape among Schmeiser’s stock. Monsanto’s lawsuit alleged that the farmer had infringed on the firm’s patent. It even stated that Schmeiser had obtained Monsanto seeds illegally; going so far as to suggest that he might have stolen them from a seed house.
The corporation later admitted that Schmeiser had not obtained the seeds illegally, but said that wasn’t important. What did matter, Monsanto argued, was that it had found some of its canola plants in the ditch along Schmeiser’s field (note that the plants were not found in Schmeiser’s fields); that meant that the farmer had violated the firm’s patent.
The judge agreed with Monsanto, ruling that ‘the source of (GM) oilseed rape… is not really significant for the issue of infringement’. In other words, it was irrelevant how the patented canola plants got on Schmeiser’s land. It could have happened as a result of cross-pollination or by seed movement caused by wind. (The latter is the biggest cause of contamination involving GM crops, and the farm next to Schmeiser’s did grow Monsanto’s crop.) The judge told Schmeiser that all his seeds, developed over almost half a century, were now the property of Monsanto. The Ecologist May 2004
This is so typical of the immoral behaviour of the Elite corporations. Profit is everything and ordinary, hard-working, decent people and their families count for nothing other the fact that they are considered fair game for extortionate practices or at best regarded as ‘profit centres’ to be exploited to the maximum.
Worse still, it is a well-documented fact that thousands of farmers in India are committing suicide due to Monsanto’s hideously unethical and immoral business tactics. In early 2011 it was estimated that at least 250,000 Indian farmers had committed suicide in the previous decade due to Monsanto’s business practices causing their livelihoods to virtually evaporate. Powerful GM lobbyists however are stating that GM crops have transformed India’s agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.
“So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the ‘suicide belt’ in Maharashtra state. What I found was deeply disturbing – and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.
For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month. Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.
It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed. Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll. But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.
In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands – only to kill themselves as well. Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed – two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much. She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. ‘He cries when he thinks of his mother,’ said the dead woman’s aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.
In village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds. The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds. But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were ‘magic seeds’ – with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.
Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks. The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.
In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution. But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers’ lives have slid back into the dark ages.
Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years – up to 17 million acres – many farmers have found there is a terrible price to be paid. Far from being ‘magic seeds’, GM pest-proof ‘breeds’ of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite. Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.
With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off. Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.
When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year. But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so-called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own. As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.
Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children. As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a genetically modified plant created by Monsanto.
‘We are ruined now,’ said the dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’ Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. ‘He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,’ she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her home to pay their respects. ‘He was dead by the time they got to hospital.’
Asked if the dead man was a ‘drunkard’ or suffered from other ‘social problems’, as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. ‘No! No!’ one of the dead man’s brothers exclaimed. ‘Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes. ‘He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.’
Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a ‘factor in this tragedy’. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life. Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds – no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.
During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three ‘independent’ surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more expensive – and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent. (A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is ‘only double’ the price of ‘official’ non-GM seed – but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by ‘unscrupulous’ merchants, who often also sell ‘fake’ GM seeds which are prone to disease.)
With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. ‘We just want to escape from our problems,’ one said. ‘We just want help to stop any more of us dying.’ Cruelly, it’s the young who are suffering most from the ‘GM Genocide’ – the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these ‘magic seeds’. Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.” Andrew Malone, UK Daily Mail, 3rd November 2008
Dr. Arpad Pusztai a Hungarian-born protein scientist spent most of his working life at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland – a total of 36 years. He was considered to be the world’s foremost expert on plant lectins and has authored 270 scientific papers and 3 books on the subject.
However, in 1998 Pusztai publicly announced that the results of his extensive, meticulous research showed conclusively that feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats substantially harmed them, leading to his summary dismissal from the institute. The resulting controversy over his dismissal and the attempts to invalidate the conclusions of his research became known as the ‘Pusztai affair’.
The rats fed on the genetically modified potatoes showed significant intestinal damage and harm to their immune systems. These effects were not observed in control rats fed on unmodified potatoes, or unmodified potatoes mixed with snowdrop lectin. The team concluded that the effects observed were a result of the genetic modification, not the snowdrop lectin.
Dr. Pusztai commented, “We had two kinds of potatoes – one GM and the other non-GM. I had expected that the GM potato, with 20 micrograms of a component against the several grams of other components, should not cause any problems. But we found problems. Our studies clearly show that the effects were not due to that little gene expression, but it depended on the way the gene had been inserted into the potato genome and what it did to the potato genome.”
In early 2009 I was fortunate enough to briefly meet Arpad’s wife, also a scientist, Dr. Susan Bardocz at a conference in London. She told me that what actually happened, although it was obviously distorted in the media, was this;
As soon as the report on the trials was published, at the headquarters of a large corporation primarily concerned with the production and distribution of GM foods, alarm bells began to ring and so the head of the corporation involved (no prizes for guessing its name but it begins with M and ends with onsanto) contacted the then US President Bill Clinton to demand some sort of government intervention in order to limit the damage done to GM foods by this worrying turn of events. According to Susan Bardocz who was told this by the director of the institute, Clinton immediately contacted the British PM, Tony Blair and Blair immediately put pressure on the director of the Rowett Institute to dismiss Dr. Pusztai.
In addition to this, the Rowett Institute’s director Philip James, who had initially supported Pusztai, suspended him and used misconduct procedures to seize the data. His annual contract was not renewed and Pusztai and his wife were banned from speaking publicly. Phone calls to his office were diverted and his research team was disbanded. Initially the Rowett Institute claimed that they were not performing any research on GM crops but later the Institute claimed that Pusztai had voluntarily retired and apologised for his ‘mistake’. According to another version of the ‘story’, the experiments had never been performed in the first place and then yet another version emerged whereby a student had accidentally confused control data with experimental data. This is a typical modus operandus. Confuse the issue as much as possible so that the whole story becomes a total mess and no-one really knows the actual truth any more.
Dr. Bardocz also said that for the next ten years, Arpad’s life became unbearable. His work, not just the recent work he had done with GM food, but all of his past research going back 36 years was totally discredited. He was as a result, unable to obtain any sort of position anywhere in the world and all the stress he suffered culminated in him having a stroke in late 2008, severely affecting his health and his life.
Scientists who tell the truth revealed by their genuine research projects are really not at all welcome in the world of our Elite masters. The truth about most issues, not just health is far too dangerous to their position of power to be allowed out in the open and if it should accidentally leak out then a huge, no expense spared propaganda machine immediately cuts-in to discredit the source and cover-up or eliminate the process by which it was leaked. This can take the form of anything from a simple lie at one extreme, to mass-murder at the other. Either way, it is never a problem.
These silent killers are deadly, and do not discriminate. They target babies, the elderly, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged housewives, and businessmen alike. They poison livestock, pets and wildlife and the people behind them deny complicity in the carnage. These killers are the seemingly beneficial, killing fields of genetically modified (GMO) crops and the people behind them are the US and other Western governments, the Rockefellers, Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science.
Eugenics is a dirty word, yet particularly applicable to America’s GMO killing fields and their inception. In 1974 Henry Kissinger drafted the controversial NSSM-200, called “the foundational document on population control issued by the United States government.”
“According to NSSM-200, elements of the implementation of population control programs could include the legalization of abortion; financial incentives for countries to increase their abortion, sterilization and contraception-use rates; indoctrination of children; mandatory population control, and coercion of other forms, such as withholding disaster and food aid unless an LDC implements population control programs. NSSM-200 also specifically declared that the United States was to cover up its population control activities and avoid charges of imperialism by inducing the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations to do its dirty work.” Human Life International, 2008
In 1970, Henry Kissinger also said, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”
How do you control food? By consolidating agricultural interests into what was to be termed agribusiness, creating genetically modified organisms out of heritage seeds with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, patenting the new seeds and making sure that these new seeds are force-fed to US farmers as well as the rest of the world. By holding the patents on these seeds and requiring farmers to purchase new seeds every year, the control is complete. Also, by controlling how these GMO seeds are created, other more sinister uses come to mind. But firstly it is necessary to convince the world of your good intentions. This is accomplished through lies, deception and a modicum of controlled media manipulation. By promising farmers that this technology was safe and would result in increased yields at less cost, they were more than happy to comply. The fact that in most cases this claim was false had yet to be proven by the innocent farmers that believed the lie and by the time independent studies started revealing that GMO is harmful, it was too late, and agri-business was on its way to fulfilling its purpose. That is to make as much money as possible by spreading GMO seeds as far as possible and thus gaining control of the population via food.
“In what should amount to a wildly imaginative narrative created by an overzealous science fiction aficionado, the following agencies, their connections, and past actions are real, none-the-less.
Imagine, if you will, a world in which health sciences, disease control, cancer research, bio-weapons research, vaccine development, biotechnology, food and agriculture, national defence, and chemical companies all work together under the military. Then imagine if you will that a certain chemical company under the guise of a life sciences operation, produces an herbicide/defoliant for military use so destructive and highly toxic that contact with it causes cancer, diabetes and birth defects. And then that same chemical/life sciences company partners with a funding corporation whose team members include the ex-partner of the inventor of the world’s first completely synthetic organism, which was recently unleashed in the ocean and has since turned its ever-hungry sights on human flesh. Then imagine that same company with a monopoly on our food supply…
Sound like an episode out of the Twilight Zone or Dr. Who? Well, it’s not. It’s history, and it’s documented.” Barbara H Peterson, Farm Wars, June 2011