GMO - Genetic Fallacy: How Monsanto Silences Scientific Dissent

Published: December 3, 2013

That a former Monsanto scientist should find himself in charge of a specially-created post at the very journal that published two landmark studies questioning the safety of that company's products should surprise no one who is aware of the Monsanto revolving door. This door is responsible for literally dozens of Monsanto officials, lobbyists and consultants finding themselves in positions of authority in the government bodies that are supposedly there to regulate the company and its actions.

- By James Corbett - December 3, 2013

In September of last year, an international research team led by Dr. Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen published a landmark study in the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology. The study, titled “Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize,” purported to show adverse health effects on groups of rats fed Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and Roundup Ready corn, including liver congestions, necrosis, tumors and early death.

The researchers followed 200 rats over two years, divided into 10 groups each of 10 males and 10 females. Three of the groups were fed Monsanto’s patented NK603 GMO corn alone, three groups were fed the corn treated with Roundup herbicide, three groups were fed Roundup-treated water but no GMO corn and a control group was fed neither GMO corn nor Roundup herbicide. The team’s results indicated that the rats fed the Roundup or the GMO corn, separately or combined, were more likely to experience a range of ill health effects than the non-GMO control group. Tellingly, the adverse health effects did not start to appear until the fourth month of the study, while a previous industry-sponsored feeding trial on the same corn variety only lasted three months. That study did find signs of toxicity as well, but these results were dismissed as “not biologically meaningful.”

The paper and its results, deemed “surprising” because it goes against all of the industry-sponsored research showing the supposed safety of GMOs, caused an immediate stir in the scientific community and online.

But it was not long at all before the biotech industry PR machine went into damage control mode and began smearing the study.

The desperation became apparent when the European Food Safety Authority was tasked with examining the study that threatened to expose the shoddy approval process that the EFSA itself had used to conclude in 2009 that the NK603 maize was “as safe as conventional maize.”

As researcher and author of “Seeds of Destruction,” William Engdahl, points out in a new op-ed, “EFSA argued that Seralini had used the wrong kind of rats, not enough rats and that the statistical analysis was inadequate. By these standards, all toxicity studies on glyphosate and GMOs should be retracted because they used the same type and approximate number of rats as those in the Séralini study.”

Amazingly, despite this concerted PR campaign to smear the Seralini study, seven “expert witnesses” were unable to rebut the study in a Filipino courtroom. In October, a Flipino court of appeals upheld a decision to ban BT eggplant from the country despite the efforts of seven industry witnesses attempting to rebut the substance of Seralini’s findings.

Perhaps this is why the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology took the unprecedented decision to retract the study last week. Unprecedented because it goes against the journal’s own express principles and guidelines for such retractions. The publisher of the journal, Elsevier, is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, whose criteria for retracting a paper are:

• Clear evidence that the findings are unreliable due to misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error;
• Plagiarism or redundant publication;
• Unethical research.

The editor of the journal, Dr. A. Wallace Hayes, himself admits that the paper meets none of these criteria. In his own statement on the retraction, he admits that he “found no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data.” Yet still, the paper is being retracted because “the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive),” apparently a new standard for article retraction that seems to apply especially to articles critical of the GMO industry in general and Monsanto products in particular.

It is not at all unfair to be cynical about this retraction either. On a radio program late last month, Dr. E. Ann Clark pointed out a surprising connection between the Journal and Monsanto that might account not only for the retraction of the Seralini paper, but also the recent retraction of a similar study from Brazil that demonstrated the toxic effects on mice of the Bacillus thuringiensis insecticide that forms the basis of the Bt GMO crops.

That a former Monsanto scientist should find himself in charge of a specially-created post at the very journal that published two landmark studies questioning the safety of that company’s products should surprise no one who is aware of the Monsanto revolving door. This door is responsible for literally dozens of Monsanto officials, lobbyists and consultants finding themselves in positions of authority in the government bodies that are supposedly there to regulate the company and its actions. This list of officials includes Linda Fisher, a senior EPA official who later became Monsanto’s VP of Government and Public Affairs, Michael Taylor, Obama’s Deputy FDA Commissioner who also served as Monsanto’s VP for Public Policy, and US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who served as a corporate lawyer for Monsanto in the 1970s. These positions of influence have been used to help Monsanto and its biotech peers obtain an FDA ruling which asserts that GMO foods are not substantially different from non-modified foods, win approval for their products from regulators by self-sponsoring studies with almost identical methodologies to the Seralini study that was just retracted, and pass favorable legislation like the Monsanto Protection Act, preventing the company from being taken to federal court in the event that GMOs are discovered to be harmful to human health. In his position as “Associate Editor for Biotechnology,” former Monsanto employee Richard E. Goodman has now overseen the retraction of two papers that had been critical of his former employer, yet this fundamental conflict of interest is nowhere commented on in reportage of the Seralini study’s retraction.

Sadly, this is par for the course when it comes to the so-called science behind the safety of GMOs. Time after time, shoddy and poorly-designed toxicity studies that show the safety of these products are given the seal of approval by bought-and-paid-for regulators, and independent studies that show contrary findings are subjected to arbitrary and nonsensical principles that supposedly undermine their validity. As a recent article at GM Watch points out, numerous GM-related studies have been retracted in the past few years for misleading and downright fraudulent research.

The list of frauds and abuses continue to mount, from concerns over the introduction of Bt Brinjal in India to the mysterious appearance of GMO wheat in supposedly non-GMO crops in the western United States to the appearance of unapproved GM corn in shipments of supposedly non-GMO corn to China just this week. These types of problems have led to the outright refusal of a growing number of countries to accept genetically modified crops. But in a world where the issue of containment of GMO crops is increasingly called into question, and where even the ability to label GMO foods may be stripped from the people altogether thanks to overarching closed-door agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently under negotiation between the US and 11 of its Pacific Rim counterparts, these issues are becoming increasingly pressing. And if critical science, like that conducted by Seralini’s team, can be so easily sidelined, dismissed and retracted, what does that say about the system that is currently in place to ensure the validity and accuracy of food toxicity studies?

As a team of independent scientists and researchers from across the world wrote in an open letter last year during the eruption of the Seralini affair:

“When those with a vested interest attempt to sow unreasonable doubt around inconvenient results, or when governments exploit political opportunities by picking and choosing from scientific evidence, they jeopardize public confidence in scientific methods and institutions, and also put their own citizenry at risk. Safety testing, science-based regulation, and the scientific process itself, depend crucially on widespread trust in a body of scientists devoted to the public interest and professional integrity. If instead, the starting point of a scientific product assessment is an approval process rigged in favour of the applicant, backed up by systematic suppression of independent scientists working in the public interest, then there can never be an honest, rational or scientific debate.”

GMO - Seeds of Death - Full Movie
http://venusproject.org/enlightening/gmo-seeds-of-death-full-movie.html

An Accidental Cattle Ranch Points the Way in Sustainable Farming

- By STEPHANIE STROM - November 11, 2013 - The New York Times

PESCADERO, Calif. — When Tom Steyer first learned that his wife, Kat Taylor, wanted to sell beef from the cattle herd on their ranch here, he rolled his eyes.

Mr. Steyer is the founder of Farallon Capital, one of the largest hedge funds in the world with some $20 billion under management for universities, foundations and some of the country’s wealthiest people — and he was sure beef was a lousy business investment, particularly on a small scale.

“Practically every year since 1865 has been a bad year for beef,” he said, only somewhat in jest. “And Kathryn” — virtually everyone else calls her Kat — “knew nothing about selling beef.”

Mr. Steyer may have made billions of dollars for his investors before retiring this year, but he would have lost money betting against Ms. Taylor and Leftcoast Grassfed, the brand name of the Steyer-Taylor beef.

While Ms. Taylor says, modestly, that it is hard to know how profitable the business is, her husband said it had outperformed his expectations. “We could sell 10 times the amount we raise, in 10 minutes,” he said.

The couple did not set out to raise prime grass-fed beef at TomKat Ranch, which sprawls across some 1,800 acres in this rural community near the ocean off Highway 1. The plan was to create a model conservation project, demonstrating ways to improve soil health, use solar energy and conserve water. “This wasn’t about cows,” Ms. Taylor said.

But once cows became part of the plan to restore the land, it was not too long before TomKat also became an agricultural project, one that the couple hope will help develop sustainable farming practices that can be put to use far beyond Pescadero.

“Think of the ranch as a huge science experiment,” Mr. Steyer said. “Can you raise animals sustainably? Can the land become the carbon sink that it once was? Can you demonstrate a way of doing agriculture, raising food, that doesn’t damage the environment?

Since his retirement, Mr. Steyer has stepped up his work on environmental causes, creating a national campaign to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and spending heavily to support candidates around the country whose credentials on environmental issues mesh with his goals.

No statistics are available on the size of the market for grass-fed beef. But in a sign of the growing interest in it, the Agriculture Department this fall began publishing a monthly report on prices for such meat in partnership with the Wallace Center, part of a network of nonprofit groups established by the Rockefellers that work on food issues.

Ms. Taylor has a full-time job as chief executive of One PacificCoast Bank, the community development bank she and Mr. Steyer started. On a sunny spring day this year, she drove out to the TomKat ranch to talk about Leftcoast Grassfed, arriving in a beat-up Toyota SUV together with her constant companions Fang and Ziggy, a wheezy pug and fluffy chow.

She said the ranch’s goal was to help reverse the trend of lower levels of carbon in soil, a worldwide issue that coincides with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the air.

In a book, “Grass-Fed Cattle: How to Produce and Market Natural Beef,” the author Julius Ruechel theorized that soil was enriched as a result of the migration of giant herds of ruminants and other animals across the world’s great plains.

According to his book, large herds of heavy, hoofed animals help force dead plant materials back into the ground, where they are broken down by microorganisms in the soil. Herd migration also churns up the earth, allowing rain to penetrate it further and slowing runoff, and natural “fertilizers” containing additional microbes are left in the herd’s wake.

All of that produces more and better grass, which then feeds the herds the next time they migrate across the land.

“The conservation movement now largely says these large, migrating herds aren’t so bad after all,” said Wendy Millet, the ranch director who formerly worked at the Nature Conservancy. “Ranches can be working landscapes if people understand how animals and land work together.”

TomKat is aiming to mimic the migratory patterns that developed the world’s great plains on a small scale by rotating cows, birds and pigs around the ranch in a deliberate dance.

The ranch has been farmed since at least the mid-1800s, when homesteaders named Honsiger contributed their name to a creek on the property that still is home to coho salmon and steelhead. The Honsigers put up barns and houses, orchards and stock ponds that still dot the property, and their descendants have perpetual access to a grave site near its entrance.

In the 1970s, it was owned by an Austrian count and countess, Alfred and Beatrice Von Homola, who used it for family retreats and entertaining. “Then the count died of a heart attack while on a European voyage, and the countess was heartbroken and reportedly couldn’t bear to return to the ranch,” Ms. Taylor said.

The countess leased the property to new occupants who effectively worked it to the bone. “They literally had sold everything, even the topsoil,” Mr. Steyer said. “People came in with dump trucks and carted it away.”

When a friend of Ms. Taylor’s called her about the ranch in 2002, technology titans were snapping up big swathes of property in the area and putting up gates and fences. “He told me if we didn’t buy it, it was going to end up as a housing development,” she said.

Having grown up in San Mateo, Ms. Taylor wanted to keep the ranch as an integral part of the community.

This spring, for instance, silos were installed where nongenetically engineered feeds are stored that can be bought by nearby farmers and ranchers. Such feeds are in scarce supply and thus out of reach of most farmers, but TomKat makes the investment in a bulk buy and then passes on the savings to its neighbors.

The silo is housed at a barn leased to the Early Bird Ranch, a poultry, egg and pig business owned by Kevin Watt and his wife, ShaeLynn.

When TomKat’s herd has finished grazing a pasture and been moved to another spot, Early Bird’s chickens and turkeys move in and dine on the insects that have been attracted to the cattle droppings.

“The bugs are a good source of protein for my birds, and my birds eat up the insects and parasites that are bad for the cattle when they return,” Mr. Watt said. “And of course, they leave a little beneficial deposit behind, too.”

The Watts sell their chickens locally in farmers’ markets and sell eggs, bacon, Italian sausage and other products via a website, goodeggs.com, in the San Francisco market.

Mr. Watt said Early Bird cleared roughly $6 in profit on each bird. Out of that, they make a lease payment to TomKat for the acres they use for their poultry, which rotates depending on where the TomKat herd has been. “It really is a symbiotic system, for the chicken and turkeys and cows as well as for Early Bird and the ranch,” he said.

Similarly, a company devoted to aquaponics, Inka Biospheric Systems, is developing a fish and vegetable business on the ranch. Inka’s goal is to raise the food it needs for its fish, things like barley fodder, earthworms and black soldier flies, using waste manure generated by the horses Ms. Taylor keeps on the ranch.

The vermicompost byproduct Inka produces is used to fertilize more stressed locations on the ranch and made into compost teas that can be spread on the orchards and on livestocks as a natural pesticide.

“We’re the garbage men of the organization,” said Brian Whitney, the recently retired chief executive of Inka. “What we are slowly doing is taking on the waste streams the ranch creates and converting those into assets.”

Inka pays the ranch a portion of its revenue, but its profits, when it starts generating them, will flow into a philanthropic foundation, in the same way that a foundation benefits from the operations of One PacificCoast Bank.

“We want to see if we can create a closed-loop system here — water with fish waste will get pumped into the land, and the land will produce things that go back into the fish,” Ms. Taylor said.

Not everything in the experiment works, of course. The ranch originally bred its herd to deliver calves in the fall on the theory that since most calves are born in the spring, it would be producing fresh beef in the off-season.

But the colostrum in cow’s milk is highest in the spring, when the herd is eating the new grass.

“Nature intended for babies to be born in the spring, and we eventually had to go along,” Ms. Taylor said.

The herd, which started with 30 heifers in 2006, now numbers 120, about half of which are breeding stock. They produced about 60 calves this year.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 11, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the subtitle of Julius Ruechel’s book “Grass-Fed Cattle.” It is “How to Produce and Market Natural Beef,” not “How to Raise and Market Natural Beef.” Also, an earlier version misspelled the formal first name of Kat Taylor, an owner of the TomKat Ranch. It is Kathryn, not Katherine.

28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima

Michael Snyder - Global Research, October 23, 2013

The map below comes from the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center.  It shows that radiation levels at radiation monitoring stations all over the country are elevated.  As you will notice, this is particularly true along the west coast of the United States.  Every single day, 300 tons of radioactive water from Fukushima enters the Pacific Ocean.  That means that the total amouont of radioactive material released from Fukushima is constantly increasing, and it is steadily building up in our food chain.  Ultimately, all of this nuclear radiation will outlive all of us by a very wide margin.  They are saying that it could take up to 40 years to clean up the Fukushima disaster, and meanwhile countless innocent people will develop cancer and other health problems as a result of exposure to high levels of nuclear radiation.  We are talking about a nuclear disaster that is absolutely unprecedented, and it is constantly getting worse.  The following are 28 signs that the west coast of North America is being absolutely fried with nuclear radiation from Fukushima…

1. Polar bears, seals and walruses along the Alaska coastline are suffering from fur loss and open sores…

Wildlife experts are studying whether fur loss and open sores detected in nine polar bears in recent weeks is widespread and related to similar incidents among seals and walruses.

The bears were among 33 spotted near Barrow, Alaska, during routine survey work along the Arctic coastline. Tests showed they had “alopecia, or loss of fur, and other skin lesions,” the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.

2. There is an epidemic of sea lion deaths along the California coastline…

At island rookeries off the Southern California coast, 45 percent of the pups born in June have died, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. Normally, less than one-third of the pups would die.   It’s gotten so bad in the past two weeks that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.”

3. Along the Pacific coast of Canada and the Alaska coastline, the population of sockeye salmon is at a historic low.  Many are blaming Fukushima.

4. Something is causing fish all along the west coast of Canada to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

5. A vast field of radioactive debris from Fukushima that is approximately the size of California has crossed the Pacific Ocean and is starting to collide with the west coast.

6. It is being projected that the radioactivity of coastal waters off the U.S. west coast could double over the next five to six years.

7. Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

8. One test in California found that 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.

9. Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…

• 73 percent of mackerel tested

• 91 percent of the halibut

• 92 percent of the sardines

• 93 percent of the tuna and eel

• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

10. Canadian authorities are finding extremely high levels of nuclear radiation in certain fish samples…

Some fish samples tested to date have had very high levels of radiation: one sea bass sample collected in July, for example, had 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium.

11. Some experts believe that we could see very high levels of cancer along the west coast just from people eating contaminated fish…

“Look at what’s going on now: They’re dumping huge amounts of radioactivity into the ocean — no one expected that in 2011,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told Global Security Newswire. “We could have large numbers of cancer from ingestion of fish.”

12. BBC News recently reported that radiation levels around Fukushima are “18 times higher” than previously believed.

13. An EU-funded study concluded that Fukushima released up to 210 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 into the atmosphere.

14. Atmospheric radiation from Fukushima reached the west coast of the United States within a few days back in 2011.

15. At this point, 300 tons of contaminated water is pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

16. A senior researcher of marine chemistry at the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute says that “30 billion becquerels of radioactive cesium and 30 billion becquerels of radioactive strontium” are being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

17. According to Tepco, a total of somewhere between 20 trillion and 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium have gotten into the Pacific Ocean since the Fukushima disaster first began.

18. According to a professor at Tokyo University, 3 gigabecquerels of cesium-137 are flowing into the port at Fukushima Daiichi every single day.

19. It has been estimated that up to 100 times as much nuclear radiation has been released into the ocean from Fukushima than was released during the entire Chernobyl disaster.

20. One recent study concluded that a very large plume of cesium-137 from the Fukushima disaster will start flowing into U.S. coastal waters early next year…

Ocean simulations showed that the plume of radioactive cesium-137 released by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 could begin flowing into U.S. coastal waters starting in early 2014 and peak in 2016.

21. It is being projected that significant levels of cesium-137 will reach every corner of the Pacific Ocean by the year 2020.

22. It is being projected that the entire Pacific Ocean will soon “have cesium levels 5 to 10 times higher” than what we witnessed during the era of heavy atomic bomb testing in the Pacific many decades ago.

23. The immense amounts of nuclear radiation getting into the water in the Pacific Ocean has caused environmental activist Joe Martino to issue the following warning…

“Your days of eating Pacific Ocean fish are over.”

24. The Iodine-131, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 that are constantly coming from Fukushima are going to affect the health of those living the the northern hemisphere for a very, very long time.  Just consider what Harvey Wasserman had to say about this…

Iodine-131, for example, can be ingested into the thyroid, where it emits beta particles (electrons) that damage tissue. A plague of damaged thyroids has already been reported among as many as 40 percent of the children in the Fukushima area. That percentage can only go higher. In developing youngsters, it can stunt both physical and mental growth. Among adults it causes a very wide range of ancillary ailments, including cancer.

Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish caught as far away as California. It spreads throughout the body, but tends to accumulate in the muscles.

Strontium-90’s half-life is around 29 years. It mimics calcium and goes to our bones.

25. According to a recent Planet Infowars report, the California coastline is being transformed into “a dead zone”…

The California coastline is becoming like a dead zone.

If you haven’t been to a California beach lately, you probably don’t know that the rocks are unnaturally CLEAN – there’s hardly any kelp, barnacles, sea urchins, etc. anymore and the tide pools are similarly eerily devoid of crabs, snails and other scurrying signs of life… and especially as compared to 10 – 15 years ago when one was wise to wear tennis shoes on a trip to the beach in order to avoid cutting one’s feet on all the STUFF of life – broken shells, bones, glass, driftwood, etc.

There are also days when I am hard-pressed to find even a half dozen seagulls and/or terns on the county beach.

You can still find a few gulls trolling the picnic areas and some of the restaurants (with outdoor seating areas) for food, of course, but, when I think back to 10 – 15 years ago, the skies and ALL the beaches were literally filled with seagulls and the haunting sound of their cries both day and night…

NOW it’s unnaturally quiet.

26. A study conducted last year came to the conclusion that radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster could negatively affect human life along the west coast of North America from Mexico to Alaska “for decades”.

27. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is being projected that the cleanup of Fukushima could take up to 40 years to complete.

28. Yale Professor Charles Perrow is warning that if the cleanup of Fukushima is not handled with 100% precision that humanity could be threatened “for thousands of years“…

“Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.”

Are you starting to understand why so many people are so deeply concerned about what is going on at Fukushima?