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June 21, 2011




Food Freedom reports:



Adding to the risks of GE crops is Monsanto's Roundup, the world's best-selling herbicide that is made to be partnered with GE Roundup Ready crops. According to a new report, regulators have known for years that Roundup causes birth defects.

Regulators were apparently aware as long ago as 1980 that glyphosate, the active chemical ingredient of Roundup, caused birth defects in lab animals. However, the information was not made public. Instead, regulators misled the public about glyphosate's safety.

According to the Huffington Post:

"... [A]s recently as last year, the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, the German government body dealing with the glyphosate review, told the European Commission that there was no evidence glyphosate causes birth defects ...


Golden rice is a strain of rice genetically modified to produce beta-carotene, which your body converts to vitamin A. It has been promoted as a way to alleviate vitamin A deficiency, which is common in developing countries where people don't have regular access to beta-carotene-rich foods, like vegetables and fruits.

It sounds like a plausible theory, and the push to cultivate golden rice in Asia has been promoted as a noble cause that has gathered the support of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- in the form of $20 million toward development.

But it doesn't take much digging beneath the surface to uncover the true motives of the corporations seeking to plant golden rice in the developing world, and they have much more to do with dollars and cents than they do with alleviating nutritional deficiencies. In fact, there's reason to believe that genetically modified (GM) golden rice will do little to improve vitamin A levels in the poor -- and may actually make vitamin A deficiency (VAD) worse.

Golden Rice is Not a Viable Source of Vitamin A

Your body can convert beta-carotene into vitamin A, which is an essential nutrient your body needs for healthy eyesight and warding off viral infections. But, your body can only perform this conversion under certain conditions. Specifically, beta-carotene is fat-soluble, which means dietary fat is required for your body to convert it into vitamin A. But many people in developing countries eat very low-fat diets, as they simply do not have access to animal foods or other fat sources very often.

In fact, it has been suggested that malnourished people might not convert beta carotene to vitamin A efficiently, which blows the usefulness of golden rice clearly out of the water, as its intended recipients are virtually guaranteed to be malnourished.

Further, you would need to eat an unrealistic amount of rice each day -- upwards of 16 pounds a day-- to get the recommended amount of vitamin A. As stated in this golden rice case study from Iowa State University:




Golden Rice May Cause Vitamin A Deficiency by Thwarting Biodiversity


As written in a Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific (PANAP) press release:


… In a biodiverse farm, a family would have easy access to all these [beta carotene and vitamin-A-rich foods]. But the mono-cropping agricultural technology, promoted through IRRI's [International Rice Research Institute] Green Revolution, has to a large extent, destroyed dietary biodiversity in rural Asia, which is the main cause of malnutrition.

This has seriously aggravated VAD. In fact, the Green Revolution has caused the loss of thousands of diverse local rice varieties, which were replaced first by IRRI's so-called 'high yielding varieties' and then by hybrid varieties. Many of these local varieties had special nutritional value. Golden Rice perpetuates the industrial model of agriculture and so instead of reducing VAD, it will actually contribute to worsening its rate of occurrence."

Former Monsanto Director Leading the Golden Rice Initiative

The leader of IRRI's Golden Rice project is Gerald Barry, the previous director of research at Monsanto. In case you are not familiar with Monsanto, they are the world leader in genetically modified crops and they have been aggressively trying to plant their seeds in nations around the world for some time now.





Asia is simply the next region on the roster, and this is precisely why Food Freedom called golden rice a "Trojan horse for introducing GM crops around the world:


The alarming part is, Monsanto is apparently seeking to monopolize the world's food supply with its toxic GM crops -- and already we are beginning to see the ramifications of this dangerous approach to farming.

Regulators Knew World's Best-Selling Herbicide Could Cause Birth Defects

A new report from Earth Open Source has revealed that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide not only causes birth defects, but industry regulators have known this for years and did nothing about it. After reviewing industry studies and regulatory documents used to approve Roundup, they noted:



Glyphosate is the world's bestselling weed killer, and it's found in more than 30 percent of all herbicides. While Roundup Ready crops can withstand the toxin because of GM genetic material from viruses and bacteria, the weed killer is thought to be contributing to Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), a deadly plant disease that causes plants to turn yellow and die.

As reported by GM expert Jeffrey Smith, numerous studies have linked glyphosate to increases in SDS, including in crops that have never been sprayed with the herbicide but were planted in a field that received an application the previous season.

The use of Roundup herbicide has increased dramatically since the GM Roundup Ready crops were introduced. In the first 13 years, American farmers sprayed an additional 383 million pounds of herbicide due to these herbicide-tolerant crops. The repeated exposures have given Mother Nature all she needs to stage her comeback, not only in the form of SDS, but also in the form of devastating superweeds.

Despite all of these glaring red flags, nothing is being done to remove this toxin from the market. As Earth Open Source reported:

"All of these concerns could be addressed by an objective review of Roundup and glyphosate … just such a review was due to take place in 201. However, shortly after the Commission was notified of the latest research showing that glyphosate and Roundup causes birth defects, it quietly passed a directive delaying the review until 2015 …

But in reality, the Commission's slowness in preparing the new data requirements for the incoming regulation mean that glyphosate may well not be re-assessed in the light of up-to-date science until 2030. The beneficiary will be the pesticide industry; the victim will be public health."

Why is Bill Gates Supporting Monsanto's GM Crops?




How to Bow Out of the Madness

If you want to get involved on a global scale, you can sign PANAP's People's Statement on Saving the Rice of Asia, which calls upon national, regional and international policy makers to ban genetically modified rice, along with seven other actions, to "save … rice, the staple food of half the world's population, from the greed of agrochemical transnational corporations."

In Thailand, the Thai Ministry of Agriculture has already implemented a successful "Rice Strategy," which bans GM rice, labeling it unnecessary and a risk to sustainable farming -- and the hope is that regions around the world will soon follow suit.








[+]Sources and References [-]Sources and References