Bayer branded Mexico’s behaviour as “unscientific”, a popular term of insult these days.
Mexico, the birthplace of modern corn, is no longer a welcome place for GMO corn. That is thanks to a presidential decree issued on December 31 that phases out the use of the “probably” carcinogenic herbicide glyphosate and bans the cultivation and importation of genetically modified (GM) corn. As NC reported in May, the German GMO giant Bayer at first was able to win a temporary reprieve from the government’s planned three-year phase out of the herbicide. But that decision was then overturned by Mexico’s Collegiate Court.
Reality Dawns
Now, reality is dawning for Bayer and other GMO manufacturers as Mexican health regulators begin putting the new rules into practice. Last week, for the first time ever, those regulators rejected a GMO corn permit for future importation solicited by the German pharmaceutical and crop science giant. As Reuters reports, Bayer was furious, branding the decision as “unscientific”, a popular term of insult these days:
“We are disappointed with the unscientific reasons that Cofepris used to deny the authorization,” the statement said, identifying the rejected corn variety as using its proprietary HT3 x SmartStax Pro technology…
Bayer […] criticized what it described as continuous regulatory delays with Cofepris as well as the possibility of additional permit denials that could have a “devastating impact” on Mexican supply chains.
The company said genetically modified crops including corn have undergone more safety tests than “any other crop in the history of agriculture” and have been judged safe for humans, animals and the environment.
This is a curious statement coming from a company that faces thousands of lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions over allegations that Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer — now Bayer’s Roundup week killer — causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Bayer, now worth $46 billion — $20 billion less than what it paid for Monsanto in 2018 in a deal that ranks as one of the worst, if not the worst, corporate acquisition in history — continues to reject claims that Roundup causes cancer even as new lawsuits pile up against it. As Yves noted in May, the company “has not only not taken the product off the market or attempted to reformulate it, it hasn’t even toughened up the warnings on its labels, apparently believing that doing so would be an admission of guilt.”
And now it’s hurling abuse at the Mexican government over its decision, guided primarily by the precautionary principle, to halt GMO imports. Industry lobby groups in Mexico have also blasted the ban, warning that if it is interpreted to include animal feed or other industrial uses, it could fuel food inflation in the country.
This is no idle warning. Food prices in the country are already surging, after seven straight months of rising year-on-year food inflation. For the policy to pay off, the government’s support of Mexican producers, in particular small-scale farmers, will need to translate into swift, significant, sustainable production increases. Greenpeace insists it is possible and has published a report to help governmental agencies “gradually replace the use, acquisition, distribution, promotion and import of [glyphosate].”
A Brave Judge
Business associations have repeatedly tried to persuade Mexican judges to overturn the government’s ban. But so far the judges are standing firm — something they’ve been doing since 2013, when a brave judge by the name of Manuel Zaleta ruled in favor of a motion brought by a grassroots coalition seeking to safeguard Mexico’s diversity and common ownership of corn. Since then the cultivation of GM corn in Mexico, even in field trials, has been banned. In his ruling Zaleta cited the potential risks GMOs posed to more than 7000 years of indigenous maize cultivation in Mexico.
Over the years Mexico’s GMO lobbies have filed over a hundred appeals against the judicial rulings, but they have all led nowhere. Just this Wednesday (Oct. 12), the first chamber of Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice unanimously rejected four appeals filed by transnational companies against the 2013 ruling. In addition, it threw out all of the legal challenges brought by the four GMO giants Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, PHI and Dow.
The Supreme Court also ruled that any judges who intervene in a class action trial “may issue any ruling that they consider pertinent to protect the rights and interests of a collective”, provided that the requirements of the law are met.
In a statement, the group Demanda Colectiva Maíz, which filed the first motion against GMO cultivation in 2013, described the decision as historic since it ratifies the precautionary measure that is needed to protect the country’s native corn:
“This decision is a game changer for the preservation of native corn and cornfields, as well as for the beekeeping sector and the bees themselves,… which have been severely affected by the entry of GMO crops such as soybeans and corn as well as the use of pesticides likee glyphosate.”
A Note of Caution
While Demanda Colectiva Maíz says the latest ruling is cause for celebration, the group also injected a note of caution: there’s no guarantee that it will be adhered to. Without a firm rule of law to back up the judicial decisions, “harm cannot be prevented, as has already been the case in the Yucatan Peninsula, where soybeans and even transgenic corn are grown illegally and with impunity despite the Supreme Court’s prohibitions.”
The Mexican government’s GMO ban and the Supreme Court’s rulings face an even bigger threat from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). USDA is already in a “food fight” (to borrow from a recent Politico article) with the EU over its proposed Farm to Fork initiative. Under the proposal EU members will pledge to slash their pesticide use, reduce food waste, improve animal welfare and increase the amount of land used for organic or sustainable practices. Brussels will also ban imports of crops grown using agrichemicals that exacerbate global environmental problems. And that is likely to harm agricultural interests in the US. USDA has branded the EU’s plan as “anti-technology”, another popular term of insult these days.
The EU is the fifth-largest export partner for US agricultural goods, worth more than $11 billion per year. Mexico is the US’ third-largest agricultural trading partner. In 2020, $18.3 billion of agricultural goods and related products flowed from the US to Mexico. For its part the US purchased 85% of Mexico’s total agricultural exports, worth $33 billion. That gives the USDA a huge amount of leverage over Mexico. And it’s not afraid to use it. In a recent interview with the Spanish press agency EFE the US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said he had already held conversations with Mexican authorities on the issue:
“I have had conversations with the secretary (of Mexican Agriculture, Victor) Villalobos, about some of the potential opportunities for Mexico, in terms of transgenic crops and possible restrictions that we believe may cause some problems. There are also problems with glyphosate and some other aspects of our relationship, but I am convinced that we have a good and positive working relationship. And whatever differences may arise, we can fix them. It is the good thing about the T-MEC.”
In the interview Vilsack also revealed that he has contacted Brazil and Mexico to propose a common agricultural strategy, which he hopes will serve as a counterweight to the EU’s “Farm to Fork” initiative:
“I got a very positive response from Brazil, and I also had an opportunity to speak with Secretary Villalobos, from Mexico, and he also understands the opportunities that this presents. I believe that the American continent in particular has the opportunity to come together because we share common approaches in technology, common approaches in agriculture, and we believe that that offers another alternative, another way to reach a future of zero emissions.”
Unfortunately, Vilsack did not explain how an even more intensive approach to agriculture would help bring this about. As an article in Modern Farmer points out, the main problem US agriculture has is not underproduction but overproduction, especially in key sectors such as corn, soy, wheat and dairy:
An obsession with production and yield has led to these sectors producing far more than the market needs, which in turn has led to large subsidies, mass governmental purchases and attempts to shoehorn excess production into products such as biofuel. The problem, as has been noted over and over again, is not that the world doesn’t produce enough food: It’s that people don’t have enough money to buy the food.
And, of course, there are the other problems. The obsession with yield and profit and growth has led to fewer jobs, corporate monopolies, land-squatting and environmental disasters fed by excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers.
Mexico would rather take a different course, one aimed at achieving greater food autonomy, producing healthier food and safeguarding its own biodiversity. But as I warned in May, it will have its work cut out, especially given how much these goals threaten to undercut the commercial interests of its biggest trading partner as well as the financial interests of BigAg behemoths like Bayer.
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Non-GMO food is not “healthier”, or at least it isn’t due to the GMO origin. Eating lots of fresh non-GMO fruits and vegetables is healthier than eating a lot of processed foods using GMO crops, but you could substitute GMO fresh produce versus non-GMO derived processed foods and experience the same impact. There are sounder cultural and even religious objections to GMO than human consumption worries.
Sometimes Science takes more than a few generations to falsify itself.
It doesn’t hurt too bad, and certainly doesn’t affect planetary ecology, when the issue is how many epicycles you need to keep the Earth in the centre of the Universe, or whether the Copenhagen Interpretation is correct.
But when the issue is whether to introduce novel molecules into coupled non-linear dynamic systems like ecosystems and our bodies, ramifications could hurt and also persist.
Scientists often wear safety goggles, or gloves etc for precautionary reasons. They don’t want what they are doing to affect them in unintended ways.
Albert Hoffman ‘discovered’ LSD in an unintended way. The effects of that molecule on the non-linear dynamic system that is society have been relatively profound.
Good or Bad is an ought from is problem, but Science can certainly be proven Wrong (whether it can ever be Right is not for here) by later Science.
Science should not be a reason do DO anything.
Actions in the eco-political sphere are moral, and must be decided on moral bases.
Science and Profit as motives behind a technology as powerful and new as genetic engineering will drive everything rapidly away from initial conditions, with exponential loss of steerability.
This is a biotechnology. There should be a Hippocratic Fundamental: first, do no harm.
The problem is not that simple, it’s not GMO vs. non-GMO, it’s what is the genetic modification. In case of corn, most GMO corn is “Roundup-Ready” corn, with only benefit being resistance to glyphosate. Glyphosate is difficult to completely remove by washing, so GMO corn ends up being laced with glyphosate, so nutritionally is different than non-GMO corn.
Purely from the nutritional side, you have sorts that are engineered to produce larger fruit/vegetable by retaining more water, so the nutritional value per weight is lower. This is the case with sorts that were developed by selective breeding, not just GM.
The main issue is that the industrial agriculture in general sacrifices nutritional value for aesthetics and size, as the latter are more profitable than nutritional value. Yes, there are tons of beneficial GMO’s that were developed in the labs, but the ones that are widely used are mostly herbicide- and pesticide-resistant forms that are harmful to the ecosystem and potentially harmful to the consumer.
My point is that consuming GMO food isn’t unhealthy. If the only objection to GMO corn were a claim that it was unhealthy for people to eat, then there would be little resistance to GMO, because that is not really one of the problems that present the most reason for caution with this technology. I’m very much against trying to scare people with stuff like this, mainly because the blowback when little fibs eventually get understood can be very unpredictable. An example from the world of COVID is Dr. Fauci’s e-mails concerning origins. These had nothing to do with vaccines, but the argument is “well if “they” want to obscure this, why wouldn’t “they” also withhold what they really know about vaccines?” And it’s a fair question, but pretty unfortunate if you want to decrease hesition.
Except we don’t know if consuming GMO food is unhealthy or not. We don’t think it is, because the mechanisms used to resist pesticides don’t exist in that form in our bodies. But uh, we also often find that molecules interact with things that we didn’t think they would. And by often, I mean all the time with every molecule and nowadays even with things we thought we had nailed down.
But that’s all beside the point and the usual human self-centred nonsense. Preserving the Mexican diversity of indigenous domesticated Zea lineages is worth keeping dominant foreign strains of all flavours out. At least until long after we’re sure we’ve taken notes on everything that’s already there that might be better than what we’re bringing in.
If you want a link to covid, I’ve been thinking today about how as a society we seem to have lost the capability to deal rationally with systems we don’t or can’t understand fully (yet).
Here is a small sample of the genetic diversity of corn which the Mexican authorities work to preserve from GMO intrusion. First I will give the basic website where Americans can buy-by-mail multi-pound samples of some heirloom Mexican corns.
https://masienda.com/shop/
Now here is a link to the first of several corn-types which the Masienda company is selling. They are bought in Mexico from certain particular farmers who have been found to be keeping these particular varieties alive.
https://masienda.com/shop/heirloom-white-xmejen-naal-corn/
They are described as having particular special culinary features when used in certain particular processes and recipes.
Late to this. One of my former lawyers, a biomedical engineer whose first job was at the NIH and next at a Big Pharma you heard of, who was hardly a food purity freak (she had no problem eating the occasional burger and fries, or if she was very late at the office, getting a candy bar from the vending machine, although she did try not to do the latter unless she was really hungry), strenuously objected to GMOs and avoided them for a decade before she largely gave up as Too Hard. She said it was a mass experiment with no consent and no controls, unscientific and unethical. This was not her normal line of talk, BTW.
I agree that GMO, per se, is not a nutritional issue. After all, there are lots of food that have been GMO-ed over history, my favorite being the today’s, orange carrot.
But for me, it’s the industrialization, which in turn leads to the mono-culturalism of today food crops. From a healthly agricultural eco-system perspective, I can believe the way to go is for nearly everyone to grown just one type of corn, and one type of soy, and one type of potato, and one type of wheat and so on.
The orange carrot was not GMOd. It was classically bred. We should always be keeping the language rectified, as Confucius said 2,000 years ago.
This is really way too certain to be true. We know so little about nutrition especially about the effect of pesticides and GMOs impact on the gut biota I think it would be wise to err on the side of caution. The precautionary principle is good in this context. I think Nassim Taleb has written about this subject, stating that the potential downsides are so great, any upsides are not worth bothering about.
Double Win !
The real story is that the GMO corn has to be bought each year from Bayer – because patents. This ruling closes the Mexico market. Now farmers can save seed corn each year – just as they have always done.
It also means Bayer can’t sue farmers whose fields get “polluted” by GMO corn thanks to pollinators – something that has happened in the USA.
Yes!
These biotechnology giants hold patents on their ‘genes’ which then proliferate into surrounding crops and wild, non-domesticated close crop relatives. Then, as Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser 1 S.C.R. 902, 2004 SCC 34 clearly shows, anyone whose crop has been contaminated by those genes through pollination, then may be found guilty of misappropriating ‘their’ biotechnological patents simply because they save seed from one year to the next. In Canada’s prairies, there is no longer any wild rapeseed nor close rapeseed relatives near wherever the ‘patented’ crops have been planted. Nor can uncontaminated canola be planted without the risk that parts of the crop will be pollinated with pollen from nearby ‘patented’ canola crops.
This is NOT a matter of the ‘safety’ of the GMO crops. It is a matter of proprietary genes which cannot be stopped from proliferating into non-GMO crops, transforming the crops into property owned not by the farmer but by biotechnology corporations like Bayer.
Mention of the Percy Schmeiser affair makes me think about the Prairie Canada farmer I see each time I go to an Acres USA conference. This farmer once shared with me that he/she was part of a lawsuit attempting to break and void Monsanto’s “Roundup-Ready” crop patents on the grounds that a patent is issued for some useful advancement of the arts and/or sciences, and since “Roundup Ready” was not humanly useful, the patent should never have been issued and should be voided.
They did not win the case.
But then I told this farmer of a very different tactic used by Dow Chemical to beat Monsanto to a stop in court. Monsanto had sued Dow for “patent infringement” based on Dow’s ” Roundup Ready” offerings being suspiciously like Monsanto’s. But Dow Defense researchers discovered that glyphosate blocks the shikimic acid metabolic cycle in plant cells at a spot two-reaction-steps different than the spot the Monsanto patent filers described glyphosate as stopping the shikimic acid cycle in their patent filing. Therefor, Monsanto had “mis-filed” its patent and the patent was automatically self-voiding. When the Monsanto lawyers realized that the Dow lawyers were about to present this defense, they urgently secured an all-lawyers conference with the judge. Monsanto quietly dropped the case rather than have the fact of its patent having been mis-filed come out in court.
I heard of this from Retired Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology Don Huber of Purdue University in a lecture he delivered at an Acres USA conference. I don’t know how he found this out, but I trust that he believes it to be true. And he is a careful scientist. I think he would not make a mistake this big in a matter this important.
So I told my conference-friend the Prairie Canada farmer about this and suggested that he/she could ask Professor Huber more about this, and if Professor Huber cared to explain more about it to this farmer, that this farmer could take this intelligence back to herm’s group and they could all see if they wanted to sue Monsanto again, this time over mis-filing of patent. And force the voiding of Monsanto’s ( now Bayer’s ) patent that way.
If I see this farmer again, I will ask if he/she and/or the group has thought about this any.
Fantastic!
Thank you for the kind word of support and validation.
Professor Don Huber is over 80 years old. We all hope for many years more activity on his part, but how long can he continue, really?
If anyone reading my just-prior comment finds this specifically interesting and wants to ask Professor Huber more about this for crafting possible legal-decapitation strikes against the Roundup-Ready family of patents, there is not much time left to ask Professor Huber about any of this. I don’t know if he would be willing to say anymore about that little mis-filed patent corner of recent history than he has already said. But if he truly hates Monsanto with a white-hot hatred which is pure and true, he might well be willing to tell a question-asker more about it, if a question-asker shows up to ask a question in time, while Professor Huber is still active.
He will be present in public at the upcoming Acres USA annual December conference.
He will be presenting an all-day pay-to-attend pre-conference talk on managing disease resistance in crops through soil-based and soil-vectored nutri-vita-mineral inputs management. He co-wrote a chapter in a big book on that subject, by the way.
https://books.google.com/books?id=WeR23VTJE64C&pg=PP9&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
Here is info about that upcoming conference.
https://www.acresusa.com/event/eco-ag-conference-2021/
Here is a Huber article to show the quality of Huber thinking you get while Professor Huber is still alive and among us.
https://eco-farm.org/sites/default/files/Managingnutritiontocontrolplantdisease.pdf
As my memory comes into even sharper hindsight view, I think the Corporate Person sued by Monsanto was DuPont rather than Dow Chemical. But the principal is the same.
It was DuPont which discovered that the slobs at Monsanto had misfiled their “patent” and which panicked Monsanto into silently dropping their lawsuit against DuPont. Sorry for the slip up there.
That ” sue-the-farmer” shakedown racket was a basic part of the Monsanto business model.
Monsanto would infect as many farmers’ crops as possible from adjacent wind-blown pollen GMO crops.
Then Monsanto would send tresspassers taking samples from every farm around Monsanto’s genetic pollution point-source. If Monsanto found any traces of its filthy patented gene, Monsanto would accuse the farmer of ” unauthorised use” and threaten to sue the farmer but would accept a settlement payment to make the threat of suit go away.
” Nice little farm you got there. Too bad if something was to happen to it.”
I don’t know why farmers’ groups never thought to try getting goverlegal prosecutors to prosecute Monsanto under the RICO laws. ( I don’t know if farmers themselves could have legally sued Monsanto under the RICO laws. I don’t know how that aspect of law works)
If Bayer is running the same shakedown racket, Bayer should be RICOed.
Absolutely! This is a shakedown racket.
I am just a bi-weekly wage nobody with a tiny backyard garden. I don’t know much about “law” but I somehow suspect I wouldn’t have “standing” to be part of any RICO activity against these Corporate Mafia Racketeers. I just hope that those who would have such standing can overcome their induced defeatism and sense of weary resignation to ” the way things are” long enough to try and get such legal extermination strikes organized and under way.
Since Bayer and all these others are the kind of AristoCorporations to which our law enforcement servants always defer unless the “people” can torture and terrorise them into enforcing the law against the Corpo-aristocrats, maybe enough thousands of aggrieved farmers and food-handlers with the right “standing” can create a movement to torture and terrorise the legal-enforcement structure into enforcing legality in this case.
I see this as a move by Mexico to move towards resilience and sustainability. Not only is it the right and smart thing to do but it will be vital as we move forward in terms of national survival. The results for the NAFTA experiment are in and it has been a disaster for Mexico – and for the US as well. I really do not see GMO agriculture as it is presently practiced as being a long-term winner and it is time to get off this highway to nowhere. Mexico is going to have tough times to enforce it but they will have the advantage of knowing that it is really the only way forward. After all, giving up more than 7,000 years of indigenous maize cultivation in Mexico just so a foreign corporation can book more profits does no seem that good an idea.
Not the worst merger ever. Think AOL-Time Warner.
I guess that depends on your definition of “worst” — the AOL-Time Warner merger does not have the same kind of impact on health and the environment.
I don’t think that the Monsanto-Bayer merger made anything worse, it just consolidated the harm in one corporate entity.
If it ends up driving Bayer into non-reversible roach-motel liquidation, then it will have made things better.
If Bayer appreciates the “science” of GMO agriculture so much, let them use it extensively in Germany and the EU. Because it is not a safeguard against hunger and famine at all. It is the opposite because it creates such a toxic monoculture that not only is it unhealthy and cumulatively so, but it is vulnerable to natural blowback – the weather (oops all those crops failed to develop resistance); those pesky bugs who do rapidly develop resistance to pesticides; those pesky weeds too, and fungi of all ilk. We will wind up breeding the worst of the worst varieties of all the things we are trying to prevent. It’s inevitable with vetted GMO – because it won’t be able to change with the conditions … because profits. GMO will be stuck in the mud without sufficient variability (of next-gen poisons and snippets of DNA) to survive – just a question of time. And good Ag practices will become a thing of the past unless they are protected and promoted. Let’s ask Bill Gates and all the suckers at Bayer to drink a GMO drink every morning. No food products necessary, just the chemical garbage.
One way to save and preserve a small present day stub of good Ag practices is to buy the food produced by good practices Ag producers using good Ag practices. Certified organic is one subset of people using good Ag practices. There are some others. It would take a fair amount of amateur knowledge on the part of the mere citizen to know if a farmer is using good Ag practices if he/she refuses to get Certified Organic for reasons of protest or etc. Perhaps several years of gardening and reading about gardening and plants and agronomy can get citizens up to a level of being able to make some judgements about who the “good Ag practice” farmers are. And then buy their food. Otherwise they will go out of business and out of farming and there go the last of the good Ag practices.
In general I don’t like the idea of massive food imports designed to destroy the American rural economy and society. But the “Big Ag” parts of the American rural economy and society have embraced “cancer juice agriculture” so religiously that one may have to buy non-toxic foreign food out of health-survival and self-preservation.
I believe this is, quite literally, the first and best hope of Mexico and Mexicans to stave off mass starvation within the next century. Gods willing the USA will follow their example sooner rather than later.
There’s some “GMO’s are perfectly healthy!” shills in the comments above. Sure, they’re just fine to eat… today. But we’ve already seen the accelerating cycle of pests getting resistance + stronger pesticides + pests getting resistance + stronger pesticides… we’re already at dousing fields in glyphosate, a chemical with uncertain (shall we say) long-term or even medium-term effects on the environment and the human body. What happens when even such a monstrosity as glyphosate doesn’t work anymore? Will GMO seeds still be available? Will anything grow, in land leached dry and thoroughly poisoned by the GMO-heavy industrial farming methodologies? Who will care how healthy or not a GMO crop would have been, when the land itself now produces nothing?
There’s a real danger that few are aware of in America – that in a remarkably short period of time, the majority of our farms might switch from producing “too much” food to far, far too little. When this happens – I don’t think, at current velocity, that it’s an ‘if’ anymore – that’ll be the end of the Republic and possibly of all of us. Personally.
I’ll end this by noting that it’s a great idea to keep a kitchen garden. For so many reasons! All I have right now is a balcony, but I’m maxing it out to the degree possible anyway, with onions and soon potatoes. It’s a great time to personally learn as many food-growing skills as possible. For fun! For (not very much) profit! And for the further waves of History that are well on their way, and easily visible on the horizon…
Yes, and very much thanks to NC for posting this positive article. I have just been looking up how to freeze and/or make jam from rose hips. The time is now, pick them after the first ‘soft’ freeze as they are sweeter then – amazingly easy to do. I’ve had beautiful rosehips on my semi wild double pink prairie rose. Can’t wait to do this!
I suspect that all varieties of rose hips may be at least borderline edible. I further suspect that some may be actually good. But I don’t know.
Here is an article which very shallowly touches upon that issue.
https://www.gardenguides.com/88146-rose-hips-edible.html
And here is a bunch of rose hip images collected under the general search-title ” edible rose hip images”. Why would I include such a seemingly worthless link? Because each image viewed “full size” in running sequence also offers the URL that it was fetched from. Any one of those URLs may be clicked on to see if its source is interesting and useful on the subject. I call this ” image wormhole-portal searching” and it has led me to things that the search obstruction engines would never ever find. ( I can offer examples of that very thing if people demand proof).
Anyway, here is the link.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A2KLfRx5WGphp8wAsYVXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=edible+rose+hip+image&fr=sfp
From numbers I’ve looked at before, I remember that the EU imports of “food” were skewed by an enormous amount of imported protein-rich fodder for beef and dairy herds. This included a large quantity of American GMO soy.
Corn isn’t as good for protein as soy, but Mexico has its own local legumes that I’m sure could also be fed to EU cattle. Cutting the GMO-ridden US crops out of the picture doesn’t leave two markets in a bind if those markets can deal with each other instead.
I am not sure if a country with as small an industrializable good topsoil landbase as Mexico could really grow the mass quantities of legume cattlefeed that EUrope would want.
Ukraine could. Russia could. And Ukrussia together totally could. Putin has declared Russia to be a Franken Free Zone ( no GMOs allowed). That would make Russia a potentially huge source of uncontaminated Clean Genes cattlefeed, if EUrope cared to pay a shinola price for it. Ukraine could be such a source if it can keep itself Franken Free. Part of the reason the DC FedRegime supports the Banderazi Coup Regime in Kiev is because the coupsters would support American companies fracking all over East Ukraine , which is the best-soil part of Ukraine. And also they would legalize the Frankengenetic contamination of all Ukraine’s agri-bulk commodity crops. That is part of what East Ukraine has been rebelling against.
And this might be a secondary or tertiary reason, after and below the geo-strategic reasons, why Putin does not want Banderazi Ukrainistan reaching the border with Russia. Perhaps he does not want a united Banderazi Ukrainistan blowing its filthy GMO Frankengenes over the border to sap and impurity the vital bodily fluids of Russia’s clean-genes agriculture.
Of course growing and shipping agribulk industrial feed and fodder to the EU cattle is a very intensive carbon emitting process. If EUrope were to limit itself to eating meat and milk-cheese-etc. from cows which were fed on pasture/range/hay ONLY, NO imported fodder and NO imported shitcorn/shitsoy feedlot feed, then the EU would be eating far less beef, but its beef would all be eco-friendly carbon capture beef.
( And of course if the US changed all its shitcorn/shitsoy land for feedlot cattlefeed into grass and range land for cattle on pasture/range ONLY, think of all the carbon America would no longer be emitting to grow petrochemical GMO feedlot beef and milk. And then think of all the carbon which America would be capturing and bio-sequestering with cattle on pasture-range on all the no-cornsoy-anymore MidWestern land mass.)
Just another little wrinkle on that issue.
If someone were to show proof of this to Greta Tunberg, would she believe it? And if she decided she did believe it, would she start eating carbon-capture shinola beef to do her part to drive the process of skycarbon-capture/suckdown/bio-pedo-sequestration forward? And if she did that, could she convert her millions of loyal followers to the same course of action?
Feeding cattle with grains it’s like feeding children candy all the time. Cattle are grass eaters. That’s why cattle fed grains in, for example, CAFOs, are dosed with antibiotics to keep them “healthy.” Grain fed cattle produce inferior meat compared to grass/finished cows.
In other words, CAFO meat is shitmea which force-emits mass quantities of skycarbon; whereas,pasture-range meat is shinola meat which sucks skycarbon back down to earth and bio-sequesters it into the soil.
People who are ready and able to pay a shinola price for shinola meat grown in a shinola carbon-capture system like pasture and range can be part of subsidising the pasturemen and range-runners to capture carbon and soil sequester it.
The alleged safety of GMO food for human or animal consumption has not been established. Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology Don Huber spent many years recently gathering information on this issue. For people who want to do an ” image wormhole-portal” search for possibly interesting Don Huber leads, here is a bunch of images of Professor Don Huber.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrJ7FlUi2phF00AuZhXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=professor+don+huber+image&fr=sfp
One can also enter the search phrase . . . you tube Professor Don Huber videos . . . . and quite a few come up. There are no transcripts. People who will not watch a video can go without the information in the videos. Perhaps one can try finding transcripts of interviews and things by Don Huber in the Search Obstruction Engines. Good luck with that, but why not give it a whirl . . .
Here is a link to some interviews with Don Huber. I see mention of one transcript way down the list. Otherwise, it requires listening to interviews. Those who don’t want to listen to interviews don’t need to know what Don Huber knows or thinks about this issue.
https://paradigmchange.me/huber/
Here is the closest I can find to a “curriculum vitae” for Professor Huber. It is text and can be read.
https://www.nvlv.nl/downloads/Dr_Huber_bio.pdf
Anything more will choke this comment so I will stop here.
Now . . . “glyphosate” is a chemical, not a GMO, so it could be considered tangential to this post. However, since many of the GMOs created were Roundup Readiness GMOs created specifically to sell and use more glyphosate, glyphosate is not altogether irrelevant to this post. So here is a link to quite a few little explorations of the glyphosate-and-health issue, with links to sources towards the bottom.
http://www.pacificholistic.com/glyphosate
About the alleged but unproven and never-even-researched “safety” of ingesting GMO derived food products, here is an anecdata-heavy article to the contrary which I first saw in one of my young nieces Elle Magazine back issues, of all places. ( Of course it also showed up in Common Dreams which would carry more cred with the cultural leftists, but it was the same article, and I don’t have time to be bothered to try finding the Common Dream co-offering of that same article).
https://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a12574/allergy-to-genetically-modified-corn/
Here is an anecdotal account I heard from presenter Gary Zimmer many years ago at an Acres USA conference. He told us about how he was once consulting for a big commercial corn grower somewhere in Africa. He said the corn-grower told him the following interesting observation . . . . that for years the people of the surrounding African villages would sneak into his corn plantation and steal corn to take back to the villages for food. He and his operation would just live with it. But for the year just previous to his telling about all this to Gary Zimmer, this corn plantation operation switched over to some kind of GMO corn. The traditional corn-theft began and stopped almost immediately thereafter. This corn plantation manager told Gary Zimmer that he happened to ask some of the villagers why they were not “taking” corn they way they normally did. He told Gary Zimmer that the villagers told him that when they took some and cooked it and ate it, that it made them sick enough that they didn’t want any more of it. So they stopped taking it.
This would be an interesting story for some young eager crusading Investigational agriculture-journalist to go follow up on, perhaps by asking Gary Zimmer about it and then maybe going to the corn plantation in Africa to ask the managers and the villagers there all about it. Gary Zimmer should remain healthy and alive for quite a few years yet. Here is Gary Zimmer.
https://www.midwesternbioag.com/leadership/gary-zimmer-2-2/
And of course Arpad Puztai found out some things about the deadly menace of a certain kind of GMO potato to the lab rats he fed it to, and immediately got fired from his academic university position by the
GMO-Industrial Complex in revenge, and to silence his efforts and terrorise any other scientist who might pursue the issue.
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_geneticfood36.htm
The GMO-Food Industrial Complex obstructs the labelling of GMO food to consumers because they want to keep it concealed who ate what so that no-one can trace their illness back to legally liable-izable corporate sources of GMO food. That is why forced labelling of GMO food is so important, so that blame can be fixed in a courtroom-legal way when mass sickness and disease from GMO food can no longer be denied.
And so much for the canard that GMO food is somehow “safe” to eat.
Just to stick a fork in the ” GMO food is safe to eat” canard to make sure it is really done, here is a book on the subject called Genetic Roullete. Here is the link to a NOmazon source to show that we can still get books from NOmazon.
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/genetic-roulette/
And here is a counter-GMO self-defense book available through another NOmazon source.
https://bookstore.acresusa.com/collections/books-videos/products/genetically-engineered-food-a-self-defense-guide
Any sincere GMO believers and also any paid GMO Hasbarists are free to try debunking both or either of these books.