Tag: gm
From: Guardian
Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe
The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination….
WHY BEES MATTER
Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.
In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.
Related:
American and Russian scientists have discovered that hamsters fed Genetically Modified food have serious health impairment in the second generation and, by the third generation, are unable to procreate. In other words, they can have children and grandchildren but that’s the end of the line. [Will this same effect be found in humans? Monsanto and other GMO companies claim they intend to put an end to hunger. One cannot help but wonder if they plan to do this by putting an end to people.]
Salem News 2010 Apr 26 (Cached)
Transcribed by Jeff Fenske from The Power Hour with Joyce Riley, 7/1/09
Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating:
“I was speaking to a top biologist, one of the top biologists in the world, from India in January, and he said:
after looking at 600 scientific journals, he’s concluded that the major reason we’re seeing an uprise in real problems in health statistics in the United States in the last thirteen years is primarily due to the introduction of genetically modified foods in our diet.”
~
“Unless it says ‘organic’ or ‘non-GMO,’ the ‘100% Natural’ thing will mean nothing if it contains soy, corn, cotton or canola.”
~
“There’s a lot of religious organizations that have taken positions against GMO. Many organizations say: GMO means God Move Over.”
From: True Food Network
Oppose GE Papayas!
COMMENTS NEEDED BY NOVEMBER 3rd TO STOP GE PAPAYA IN FLORIDA!
The US Department of Agriculture is accepting public comments between now and November 3, 2008 on a petition that would allow commercial growing and marketing of the first genetically engineered (GE) papaya trees on mainland US soil. If approved, this would remove all regulatory oversight of this GE variety by USDA of a virus-resistant papaya tree known as the Ring Spot Virus Resistant Papaya.
The USDA admits that this GE papaya will contaminate both organic and conventional non-genetically engineered papaya groves if it is approved. GE papaya pollen carried by wind, bees and other insects will contaminate the papaya groves of organic and conventional growers.
In Hawaii, a previously approved virus resistant [Hawaiian] papaya has caused extensive contamination of organic, conventional and wild papaya groves on most of the Hawaiian Islands in just a few years. This contamination has spread far more quickly than the USDA predicted in its initial assessment. Once native and cultivated papaya varieties are contaminated with transgenic pollen and the resulting seeds are planted, there is no calling it back.
Read Entire Article, Take Action
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMleWZXhi6s]Part 1 of 10
On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE — French-German cultural tv channel) by French journalist and film maker Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto – A documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8kgJfw699E]
“Were developing a society because of all these different toxins known to affect brain function.
We’re seeing a society that not only has a lot more people of lower IQ, but a lot fewer people of higher IQ. In other words: a dumbing down, a chemical dumbing down of society.
So everyone is sort of mediocre. That leaves them dependent on government, because they can’t excel.
We have these people of lower IQ who are totally dependent. Then we have this mass of people who are going to believe anything they are told because they can’t really think clearly—and very few people of a very high IQ have good cognitive function who can figure this all out.
And that’s what they want.
So you can kind of piece it together as to why they are so insistent in spending so many hundreds of millions of dollars of propaganda money to dumb down society.”
– Dr. Russell Blaylock
Transcribed by Jeff Fenske
From: Independent Catholic News
Three widely respected theologians have condemned Terminator technology which produces genetically engineered plants with sterile seeds as “grossly immoral”.
Writing in a new publication, commissioned by Catholic development charity Progressio, Jesuit Priest Roland Lesseps, Father Sean McDonagh and Father Donal Dorr say the controversial GM technology, which is currently restricted by a temporary UN ban, offers “no benefit for farmers and consumers” and would have “long-term consequences for the environment”.
…the theologians warn that the technology could have catastrophic effects on the poorest farmers in the developing world. Presently, 1.4 billion farmers rely on the practice of seed-saving to grow food to feed their families. If Terminator technology is commercialised, farmers’ food security would be under threat. “Since poor farmers cannot afford to buy seed every year, they will go hungry”, writes Roland Lesseps.
The theological argument against Terminator is equally striking, say the report’s authors. “Terminator technology attacks the very principle of life itself”, writes Lesseps. “Destroying the life principle in an organism is not a right relationship with creation which should be received as a gift from God to be shared by all.”
Related: The World According to Monsanto
From Traffic Technology Today
OnStar has set its sights on stolen vehicles. The company unveiled its Stolen Vehicle Slowdown technology in Los Angeles this week. The system actually slows a stolen vehicle remotely. “We are the first to do anything like this. We are pioneering the way,” says OnStar spokesman Brad Williams.
The devices will be featured on 2009 GM car and truck models. Once an owner reports a car has been stolen, OnStar works with police.
The OnStar advisor sends a signal to the car that interacts with the powertrain system to prevent the driver from accelerating.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-842180934463681887]
On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural tv channel) by French journalist and film maker Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto – A documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.
On this…island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.Doomsday Seed VaultThe seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It’s almost ready for ‘business’ according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. …Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits ‘suicide’ after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.
This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world’s majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical. …
Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?