SHILL ALERT: Ag Sec Vilsack Mistakenly Pitched "GMOs-Feed-The-World" to an Audience of Experts

Vilsack Mistakenly Pitched "GMOs-Feed-The-World" to an Audience of Experts--Oops

Posted October 14th, 2009 by admin

By Jeffrey Smith
Author and founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology
October 13, 2009

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was getting lots of appreciative applause and head nods from the packed hall at the Community Food Security Coalition conference today, held in Des Moines, Iowa. He described the USDA's plans to improve school nutrition, support local food systems, and work with the Justice Department to review the impact of corporate agribusiness on small farmers. But then, with time for only one more question, I was handed the microphone.

"Mr. Secretary, may I ask a tough question on GMOs?"

He said yes.

"The American Academy of Environmental Medicine this year said that genetically modified foods, according to animal studies, are causally linked to accelerated aging, dysfunctional immune regulation, organ damage, gastrointestinal distress, and immune system damage. A study came out by the Union of Concerned Scientists confirming what we all know, that genetically modified crops, on average, reduce yield. A USDA report from 2006 showed that farmers don't actually increase income from GMOs, but many actually lose income. And for the last several years, the United States has been forced to spend $3-$5 billion per year to prop up the prices of the GM crops no one wants.

"When you were appointed Secretary of Agriculture, many of our mutual friends--I live in Iowa and was proud to have you as our governor--assured me that you have an open mind and are very reasonable and forward thinking. And so I was very excited that you had taken this position as Secretary of Agriculture. And I'm wondering, have you ever heard this information? Where do you get your information about GMOs? And are you willing to take a delegation in D.C. to give you this hard evidence about how GMOs have actually failed us, that they've been put onto the market long before the science is ready, and it's time to put it back into the laboratory until they've done their homework."

The room erupted into the loudest applause of the morning.

Secretary Vilsack knew at once what kind of crowd he was dealing with. Or so I thought.



http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2592

Looks like Vilsack gets the last laugh.

Yet there has been a string of incidents indicating GM food and feed are far from safe. These include studies carried out by biotech companies producing the GM crops, which they have kept secret under confidential business information.

* Kidney and blood abnormalities in rats fed one of Monsanto's GM maize in Monsanto's secret dossier.

* Villagers in the south of the Philippines who suffered mysterious illnesses when another GM maize came into flower in a nearby field two years in a row. Antibodies to the Bt protein inserted into the GM maize were found in the villagers.

* A dozen cows that died after eating a third GM maize made by Syngenta, and others in the herd had to be slaughtered because of mysterious illnesses. Autopsies failed to be carried out, which is why Greenpeace and farmers are demonstrating in front of the Robert Koch Institute

* Senior scientist Arpad Pusztai and colleagues in Scotland found young rats fed GM potatoes ended up with damage in every organ system; the most dramatic being an increase in thickness of the stomach lining to twice that in controls. Scientists in Egypt found similar effects in mice fed GM potatoes with another gene.

* The US Food and Drug Administration had data dating back to early 1990s that rats fed GM tomatoes had developed small holes in their stomach.

...

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GMOSandHumanHealth.php

Rebuttal.

The "junk science" practiced by the Corporate Owned science labs is deplorable. They have reconfigured "science" so that they can tell us what is and what is not safe.

Have a bad experience, even a life threatening experience, after a vaccine. Well, obviously you made it up.

Brain cancer and brain tumor rates go up astronomically after cell phone towers proliferate? Well, it's probably unrelated - could be solar flares, ya know.

Pesticides dangerous? No, the scientists who were smart enough to skew their research (And thus keep their jobs) prove otherwise.

And on and on.

then we need to start redefining "quack."

:rofl:

5. Does it oppose proven public health measures? Opposition to fluoridation and immunization are tipoffs to extremely poor judgment.

Flouridation has been proven over the world to be worse than useless, in fact dangerous.

That's some resource you've got there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackwatch

But thanks for bringing up fluoridation woo woo. It just supports my point.

To suggest Biotech is good science is erroneous. It's as sloppy, misguided and dishonest as it gets. It's corporate junk science, pathetic propaganda, research boondoggles, venture capital and vested interests colluding in the most destructive way.

GE fantasy shattered by human genome project

"In everyday language the talk is about a gene for this and a gene for that. We are now finding that that is rarely so. The number of genes that work in that way can almost be counted on your fingers, because we are just not hard-wired in that way."
Craig Venter, Celera Genomics, 12 February 2001

http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/GEfantasy.htm

13 February 2001

Although few may have yet noticed, the primitive scientific model on which the foundations of genetic engineering have been constructed was dealt a quiet but earth-shattering blow this week with the formal publication of the base pair sequence of the human genome. That at least must be the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from what has now been revealed (see press reports below).

Although the human genome project is nominally specific to our own genetic code, the "surprising" nature of its results have much broader implications relating to science's understanding of the genome functioning of all species. The project graphically demonstrates that organism biochemistry is driven as much (if not considerably more so) by the multi-dimensional relationships between the thousands of genes involved (which are in turn symbiotically linked to the functioning of the organism as a whole in its environment), as it is by the previously assumed linear influence of individual genes which has largely dominated scientific thinking up until now.

This realisation is one which has been anticipated and highlighted by critics of genetic engineering from the outset, but which (for reasons best known to itself) large portions of the biotechnology community have chosen to ignore. It represents an implicit acknowledgement of why genetic engineering is inherently risk laden, and it is a dramatic illustration of the old common sense adage that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

Current methods of modern biotechnology predominately rely on an out-of-date model of the way genes influence biological processes within an organism. Although the model espouses some limited embellishments beyond this, it has been largely a simplistic 'one-for-one' component-based model of biochemical processes.

...

http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/GEfantasy.htm

Unfortunately, once GMO's are released into the environment you can't entirely get them out.

Different day

Piece of shit DLC MonSatan anti-Democratic, anti-American corporate whore.

So, whether these GMO are gliotoxins or not, it seems our bodies are being overloaded by multiple path toxins of various kinds, yet the manufacturers get approvals based upon their products' singular safety or worse.

I hope people continue to present the downsides of GMO crops. There are many.

It's not just the adverse health issues because many of us eat lots of junk and chemicals already, but the cross-contamination issues that sound really challenging. Hearing about Monsanto bullying farmers when their seeds get mixed in with the farmers' crops.