Former Ag-Can research scientist warns against genetically engineered food

Dr Thierry Vrain, who once defended GE food, has reversed his position

No 739 Posted by fw, May 07, 2013

This is an abridged post of Dr Vrain’s original article, which is accessible by clicking on the following linked title.

Former Pro-GMO Scientist Speaks Out On The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food, Dr Thierry Vrain, True Activist, May 6, 2013

I retired 10 years ago after a long career as a research scientist for Agriculture Canada. When I was on the payroll, I was the designated scientist of my institute to address public groups and reassure them that genetically engineered crops and foods were safe. There is, however, a growing body of scientific research – done mostly in Europe, Russia, and other countries – showing that diets containing engineered corn or soya cause serious health problems in laboratory mice and rats.

I don’t know if I was passionate about it but I was knowledgeable. I defended the side of technological advance, of science and progress.

I have in the last 10 years changed my position. I started paying attention to the flow of published studies coming from Europe, some from prestigious labs and published in prestigious scientific journals that questioned the impact and safety of engineered food.

I refute the claims of the biotechnology companies that their engineered crops yield more, that they require less pesticide applications, that they have no impact on the environment and of course that they are safe to eat.

There are a number of scientific studies that have been done for Monsanto by universities in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Most of these studies are concerned with the field performance of the engineered crops, and of course they find GMOs safe for the environment and therefore safe to eat.

Individuals should be encouraged to make their decisions on food safety based on scientific evidence and personal choice, not on emotion or the personal opinions of others. We should all take these studies seriously and demand that government agencies replicate them rather than rely on studies paid for by the biotech companies.

The Bt corn and soya plants that are now everywhere in our environment are registered as insecticides. But are these insecticidal plants regulated and have their proteins been tested for safety? Not by the federal departments in charge of food safety, not in Canada and not in the U.S.

There are no long-term feeding studies performed in these countries to demonstrate the claims that engineered corn and soya are safe. All we have are scientific studies out of Europe and Russia, showing that rats fed engineered food die prematurely.

These studies show that proteins produced by engineered plants are different than what they should be. Inserting a gene in a genome using this technology can and does result in damaged proteins. The scientific literature is full of studies showing that engineered corn and soya contain toxic or allergenic proteins.

Genetic engineering is 40 years old. It is based on the naive understanding of the genome based on the One Gene – one protein hypothesis of 70 years ago, that each gene codes for a single protein. The Human Genome project completed in 2002 showed that this hypothesis is wrong.

The whole paradigm of the genetic engineering technology is based on a misunderstanding. Every scientist now learns that any gene can give more than one protein and that inserting a gene anywhere in a plant eventually creates rogue proteins. Some of these proteins are obviously allergenic or toxic.

….

One argument I hear repeatedly is that nobody has been sick or died after a meal (or a trillion meals since 1996) of GM food. Nobody gets ill from smoking a pack of cigarette either. But it sure adds up, and we did not know that in the 1950s before we started our wave of epidemics of cancer. Except this time it is not about a bit of smoke, it’s the whole food system that is of concern. The corporate interest must be subordinated to the public interest, and the policy of substantial equivalence must be scrapped as it is clearly untrue.

Thierry Vrain, Former research scientist for Agriculture Canada and now promoting awareness of the dangers of genetically modified foods.

Sources:

• Genetically modified food rapped by Dr. Thierry Vrain, Vancouver Sun, April 29, 2013

• GE Watch Comox Valley: Society for a G.E. Free BC – Links to 4 video clips featuring Dr. Vrain speaking from his farm about the issue of gmo science. Here is Part 4, 11:43 minutes. Links to parts 1-3 appear on this page — http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_haVyyFfnA8

SEE ALSO

• GMO Myths and Truths – an evidence-based examination of the claims made for the safety and efficacy of genetically modified crops. A report of 120 pages, it can be downloaded for free from Earth Open Source. GMO Myths and Truths disputes the claims of the Biotech industry that GM crops yield better and more nutritious food, that they save on the use of pesticides, have no environmental impact whatsoever and are perfectly safe to eat.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I claim no ownership of such materials. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing.

I love this story — New Zealanders create model of local food independence eliminating BIG FOOD oligopoly

Ooooby is a New Zealand player in a fast-growing global local-food movement

No 417 Posted by fw, February 21, 2012

Hard to believe that something out of New Zealand called an “Ooooby” using something else called “Rooby’s” are causing a stir around the globe among advocates of locally grown food. Find out why by reading this post.

Some people just talk, talk, and talk some more, about what we must do, should do, ought to do, could do, need to do about the many crises we face. Others, like the New Zealanders featured in this story, JUST DO IT! How refreshing.

The Ooooby Local Economic Model by Pete Russell, published on February 18, 2012, on a site promoting a book titled, Fleeing Vesuvius. Everything about this story is strange and wonderful. I have added subheadings and made minor editing changes. To read the original account, click on the preceding linked title.

Starting in 2008 as an online social network of gardeners, today Ooooby is a distribution network

Ooooby began in December 2008 on Waiheke Island, Auckland, as an online social network of food gardeners. An evolving project, it now also facilitates the distribution of locally grown food. Ooooby has (in May 2011) 3,600 members, 10,000 monthly visitors, 50 local suppliers and 150 weekly customers. Each month an Oooobyversity evening is hosted in Grey Lynn, Auckland, to share knowledge about food-growing and ways to enhance local production.

Ooooby’s predecessor – a print-based Barter Directory

Ooooby was conceived almost 20 years earlier with the creation of the National Barter Directory of Goods and Services (Australia) by Karen Russell, my mother. The Barter Directory, formed at a time of economic downturn, flourished as thousands of people began to barter as a way to stretch their spending power. This period taught me that if we help people to help themselves by providing the right tools, they will spontaneously improve their circumstances rather than complain about or wait for help from a higher authority.

That lesson has proven itself again with the successful development of the Ooooby concept. Whereas the Barter Directory was a print solution featuring any and all goods and services, Ooooby is primarily an online solution focusing initially on local food.

Fed up with the established economic order, people are looking for trading systems that are fair, trustworthy, simple, understandable and grounded in things that have real value

This time, however, the economic downturn is looking more like a chronic state of economic demise. More people than ever before are losing trust in the established economic order and looking for fair ways to exchange value with one another. The convenience and the reliability of readily available internet technology are enabling viable challenges to the dominant monetary system. It is becoming increasingly important that a trading system be simple, elegant, understandable and underpinned by items of real and tangible value.

Enter the Rooby – a local, sustainable “currency model” in the form of “internal credits” with tangible benefits over bank-issued  currency

The Ooooby economic model uses locally grown food and food-processing labour to underpin a system of internal credits called Roobys. Now serving over 50 local growers in the Auckland region, the Rooby system has operated successfully since October 2009.

Ooooby stall

Participants can earn and spend Roobys at Ooooby’s market stall in Parnell, Auckland, and via its weekly Auckland-wide local-food home delivery service. For every $10.00 a customer pays Ooooby, the producer earns 9 Roobys, each of which is worth $1.00 if used to purchase other Ooooby members’ goods or services, or $0.50 if redeemed for cash. The balance covers retail costs.

A currency based on local food affords people an opportunity to generate value from scratch. If you can grow some food you can create purchasing power. This is a sustainable currency model, quite unlike the dominant system in which only sanctioned institutions have the right to create money. Roobys represent a new model of fair and decentralized value exchange. There is no Ooooby bank issuing Roobys from thin air.

Next steps – increase Rooby’s accessibility and replicate Ooooby as locally-owned coops

The Rooby system is a prototype, a set of easily understandable agreements and online tools which facilitate exchange and provide transparent transaction records. The next step is to digitize the system in order to make it as widely available and as easily accessible as possible. The Ooooby model is to be replicated in other regions. Each Ooooby centre will be a locally-owned cooperative entity.

Security and control found in food independence

Local food production serves to rectify one of our greatest social threats, the control of our food supply by an oligopoly of megacorporations. It restores a region’s food independence, enabling interdependent relationships with neighbouring regions. Ooooby (www.ooooby.org) is a New Zealand player in a fast-growing global local-food movement.

Fair Use Notice: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing.

We need to get the court to protect farmers from Monsanto’s invasion —Farmer Jim Gerritsen

No 361 Posted by fw, December 11, 2011

“Gerritsen heads OSGATA, based in Montrose, Colo., which is leading 83 plaintiffs in the case against Monsanto. The individual farmers, seed companies and agricultural organizations that have signed onto the case represent about 300,000 members nationwide. “Monsanto is trying to achieve seed control based on aggressive assertion of patent infringement,” Gerritsen said, explaining that the farmers’ lawsuit has two goals: to protect organic farmers against patent infringement lawsuits and to challenge the validity of patents issued to Monsanto.” —Kathryn Olmstead

Maine Organic Farmer Leads Fight Against Monsanto By Kathryn Olmstead, Bangor Daily News, 10 December 11. Added subheadings and links are mine.

Gerritsen named to Utne Reader list of 23 world changing visionaries

Jim Gerritsen

I have wanted to catch up with Bridgewater organic farmer Jim Gerritsen ever since he was named in October to the 2011 list of 25 visionaries who are changing the world by the national magazine Utne Reader. When I finally succeeded last weekend, he was on his way to New York City to give a speech and participate in the Dec. 4 rally and “Farmers’ March” to Zuccotti Park organized by the Food Justice Committee of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Gerritsen, 56, who with his wife, Megan, and their family has operated Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater since 1976, is on a mission that has put him in the national – and international – spotlight. As president of Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, the trade organization for the organic seed industry, he is the lead plaintiff in a suit to protect growers and consumers of organic foods.

Monsanto’s gene-spliced organisms do “irrevocable damage”

The defendant is Monsanto Corp., world leader in production of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, intended to increase yields of herbicide-resistant crops – crops that can withstand sprays such as Roundup that kill the weeds around them. Airborne or insect-borne pollen from these transgenic, or gene-spliced, crops can do irrevocable damage to organic seed crops. But loss of crops is only the beginning.

“Farmers lose not only the value of the organic crop, but we are also open to patent infringement lawsuits,” Gerritsen said “Monsanto can contend that the (organic) farm is in possession of a (patented) Monsanto product.”

Monsanto’s lawsuits against farmers rack up $15 million in favorable judgments

To date, Monsanto has sued 90 American farmers for patent infringement, receiving an estimated $15 million for judgments in its favor, according to the Center for Food Safety. Many cases have been settled out of court with farmers bound to confidentiality. Monsanto dominates the sale of seed stocks worldwide, especially corn, soybeans and cotton, and sends private investigators to farms suspected of replanting saved seed.

Mainstream media breakthrough — NY Times carries the Gerritsen story

Hence, the legal action, OSGATA v. Monsanto, has captured the attention of international media, but mostly the alternative press in the United States – until Monday, that is, when Gerritsen’s role in Sunday’s Farmers’ March was reported in the New York Times under the headline: A Maine Farmer Speaks to Wall Street.

Gerritsen-led OSGATA represents 83 plaintiffs and 300,000 members

Gerritsen heads OSGATA, based in Montrose, Colo., which is leading 83 plaintiffs in the case against Monsanto. The individual farmers, seed companies and agricultural organizations that have signed onto the case represent about 300,000 members nationwide.

Monsanto alleges “patent infringement”

“Monsanto is trying to achieve seed control based on aggressive assertion of patent infringement,” Gerritsen said, explaining that the farmers’ lawsuit has two goals: to protect organic farmers against patent infringement lawsuits and to challenge the validity of patents issued to Monsanto.

Oh, the irony of Monsanto’s lawsuit

“Organic farming is predicated on the concept of crops free of GMO content,” he said, noting the irony of a suit against a farmer by the company that has destroyed that farmer’s crop.

“If organic seed is contaminated, there is no way to grow nongenetically modified crops,” he said. “The outcome will be either seed controlled directly by Monsanto or contaminated by Monsanto.“

The stakes of this case are high for both sides

If the 83 plaintiffs led by OSGATA are successful, Monsanto would be forced by the court not to sue farmers whose crops are contaminated by the corporation’s product. When lawyers for the farm groups – working on a pro bono basis – requested such a guarantee, Monsanto refused.

“They are reserving the option to go after those farmers,” Gerritsen said, adding that Monsanto filed a motion to dismiss the case last July. “We need to get the court to protect farmers from invasion, trespassing and patent infringement. We are anxious to get into court.“

If the plaintiffs achieve their second goal, the court will agree that the U.S. Patent Office erred in granting Monsanto patents for crops that do not fulfill the “social utility” standard, which requires that a new invention will result in some “social good.”

Gerritsen points the finger of blame at Obama and corporate-friendly U.S. government agencies

Gerritsen faults not only the U.S. Patent Office, but also the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which accepted Monsanto’s claim that GMO products are “substantially equivalent” to traditional seed and need not be labeled. Thus, consumers can’t know what foods have been grown using GMO technology.

“They can’t have it both ways,” he said, questioning the awards of patents for products because they are new, which then evade labeling because they are not new.

“President Obama promised mandatory labeling of genetically modified products and we must hold him to that,” Gerritsen said, acknowledging a possible challenge: The current deputy commissioner of the FDA, which regulates labeling, Michael R. Taylor, is a former vice president of Monsanto.

Gerritsen said the plaintiffs hope the case will go to trial by late winter or early spring. At this point, they are still awaiting a ruling on the motion to dismiss.

Case could drag on for years and end up in Supreme Court before Justice Clarence Thomas, former Monsanto attorney

“Once we win the case, one can imagine Monsanto will want to appeal,” he said, predicting a process that could take three to five years and end up in the Supreme Court, where they might face another challenge: Justice Clarence Thomas served as an attorney for Monsanto from 1976-1979 and has failed to recuse himself from other cases involving the corporation.

Gerritsen inspired by Occupy Wall Street

Meanwhile, Gerritsen is encouraged by the effectiveness of the Occupy Wall Street movement in putting a spotlight on inequity. “It is the new conscience of America,” he said. That’s why he made his first trip to New York City to let the Occupy protesters know that farmers are behind them. (Gerritsen appear 3:49-minutes into the video clip)

Genetically modified produce – “That’s not a healthy food ssyem.”

“I have not spoken to one farmer who doesn’t understand the message of Occupy Wall Street,” he told New York Times reporter Julia Moskin. “We have fifth- and sixth-generation farmers up where I live being pushed out of business, when all they want to do is grow good food. And if it goes on like this, all we’re going to have to eat in this country is unregulated, imported, genetically modified produce. That’s not a healthy food system.”

Source —Maine Organic Farmer Leads Fight Against Monsanto, by Kathryn Olmstead, Reader Supported News. Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her story about Jim Gerritsen originally appeared in the December 11, 2011 edition of the Bangor Daily News under the title Aroostook farmer the face of organic growers’ fight against Monsanto.

RELATED READING

• A Band of 60 Davids Challenges Monsanto, the Goliath, in Federal Court, May 29, 2011, “According to Daniel Ben Ravicher (University of Virginia Law School, 2001), lead attorney in the case and the Public Patent Foundation’s Executive Director and Lecturer of Law at Cardozo School of Law in New York City, ‘it seems quite perverse that a farmer contaminated by [transgenic seed] could be accused of patent infringement, but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement, so we had to act to protect the interests of our clients.’ ”

• Percy Schmeiser vs Monsanto: The Story of a Canadian Farmer’s Fight to Defend the Rights of Farmers and the Future of Seeds, Democracy Now!, September 17, 2010, “Gathered here in Bonn this week are some eighty Right Livelihood Award laureates, including the Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, who has battled the biotech giant Monsanto for years. When Monsanto seeds blew into Schmeiser’s property, Monsanto accused him of illegally planting their crops and took him to court. Ultimately his case landed in the Canadian Supreme Court. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1997 for fighting to defend the rights of farmers and the future of seeds.” (Includes video and transcript).

• How a British biologist blocked American corporations from exploiting human genome research for profit, “In a BBC Radio 4 interview on November 29, 2011, Sulston talked openly about his differences with American biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter over who would “own” human genome data – the public or the private sector.”

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing