The Guardian 7 May, 2008
How safe is GE canola?
Vic Williams
How good is our watchdog (or more appropriately "lapdog") the food standards body ANZFA, the authority responsible for the safety of our foods, when they meekly accept the word of Monsanto and others that their GE food is safe?
The Food and Drug Authority of the USA has been ordered by the White House that the word of Monsanto and its ilk on GE food safety from their tests is the golden rule.
Remember when you buy canola oil that there are seven different GE canolas, but only two have been tested. There have been no tests on milk or meat from cattle fed crushed seeds of GE canola. Monsanto tests with GE C173 canola meal, found that after four weeks rats of both sexes had livers 12% to 16% heavier than normal. The Network of Concerned Farmers also reported a study of GE canola that caused rats to have 12% to 16% heavier livers.
The liver removes toxins from the blood and excretes them. Any excess the liver cannot deal with are accumulated.
The liver swells and its function are impeded. What would have happened to the livers of the rats if they had been tested for four months, not four weeks, from the toxins from GE canola?
One of the untested GE canolas, Aventis M36, was created by inserting barnase, a known toxin. Its pollen will not cross fertilize, but the barnase is present in all cells of the plant.
How could M36 canola have been passed safe for humans? Independent tests on animals showed they killed over half of the baby rats three weeks after birth when the mothers had been fed GE soy flour.
Dead soil, dead bees
Good soil and live bees are needed for good crops. The practice of GE agriculture is destroying both.
Round Up Ready is the most used weed killer for many Monsanto crops. Mae-Wan Ilo states in his book Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare that glyphosate in Monsanto Round Up is toxic to earthworms and to many species of mycorrhizal fungi vital for recycling nutrients.
An Australian study found ryegrass after fifteen sprayings became resistant to Round Up and that it needed to increase its use seven times before it became effective.
In Andhra Pradesh, India, where Bt cotton and ordinary cotton were grown, the farmers found other crops would not take after Bt cotton had been grown in the soil whereas ordinary cotton left the soil fertile.
There have been reports from US that in some areas bees have been totally wiped out. A study where bees were given sugar solutions with a high level of protease inhibitors that gives a transgenic rape oil seed resistance to insects, found they had difficulty in distinguishing between the scents of different flowers.
A PMID* in 1998 found pollen from Bt plants caused immune responses in bees. Further work by PMID in 2003 and 2006 found the immune response affected memory functions in bees so they could not locate the hive.
Spiegel Online International 2007 had substantial evidence that pollen from Bt plants was the cause of colony collapse disorder of bees around the world.
How will we grow food, when the end result of GE agriculture is dead soil and dead bees?
* PMID is an acronym for PubMed Identifier which is a unique number assigned to each PubMed citation of life sciences and biomedical scientific journal articles, similar to the ISBN for books.