Studie "The GMO-emperor has no clothes" (engl.) - Nabu

The scientifically false principle of substantial
equivalence was put in place in U.S immediately
after the Earth Summit to undo the articles
on Biosafety in the Convention on Biological
Diversity.
The false assumption of “substantial
equivalence” of GMOs GE and non-engineered
organisms establishes a strategy of deliberate
ignorance. Since the transgenic is never assessed,
ignorance of risks is then treated as proof of
safety. “Don’t look, don’t see, don’t find” leads
to total lack of information about the ecological
impacts of genetic engineering.
“Substantial equivalence” also contradicts
the claim to novelty and invention through
patents. Mahyco has a patent on Bt Brinjal.
When industry wants to avoid risk assessment
and issues of liability, the argument used is
that the genetically engineered organism is
“substantially equivalent to the non-engineered
parent organism. However, when industry
wants intellectual property rights and patents,
the same GMO become “novel” or substantially
in-equivalent to the parent organism”. This is
ontological schizophrenia.
Besides the impact on health, GMOs have
severe ecological impact, the most significant
being genetic contamination. The Canadian
farmer Percy Schmeiser lost his canola seed due
to contamination from neighboring GE crops.
5. Genetic Contamination is Inevitable,
Co-existence is not possible
In addition to causing harm to public health
and ecosystems, GE seeds and crops provide
a pathway for corporations to “own” seeds
through patents and intellectual property
rights (IPRs). Patents provide royalties for the
patent holder and corporate monopolies. This
translates into super profits for Monsanto. For
the farmers this means debt. For example, more
than 250,000 Indian farmers have been pushed
to suicide in the last decade and a half. Most
of the suicides are in the cotton belt where
Monsanto has established a seed monopoly
through Bt cotton.
At a conference in Washington, D.C. on
the Future of Farming, U.S. Secretary of
Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, referring to organic
farming and GMOs said, “I have two sons, I
love them both and I want them to coexist.”
Filmmaker Debra Grazia responded from the
floor “but one of your sons is a bully.”
GMOs contaminate non-GE crops.
Contamination is inevitable, since crosspollination
is inevitable, within the same species
or with close relatives.
The most dramatic case of contamination and
genetic pollution is the case of Percy Schmeiser,
a Canadian Canola seed grower, whose crop
was contaminated by Monsanto’s Round-Up
Ready Canola. Instead of paying Percy for the
damage of contamination in accordance with the
“Polluter Pays” principle, Monsanto sued Percy
for “Intellectual Property theft.”
The contamination of canola in Canada is so
severe that 90 percent of certified non GE
Canola seed samples contain GE material (www.
lynnmaclaren.org.au/media-release-major-graintraders-reject-gm-canola).
As Arnold Taylor, Chair of the Organic
Agriculture Protection Fund said:
“There is no organic canola in Canada any more,
virtually none, because the seed stock is basically
contaminated… we’ve lost that crop” (GM Canola
‘contaminated’, Canadian Farms, The Age.com.
au, July 5, 2011).
In the Agriculture Canada study, scientists
in Saskatoon found that nearly half of the 70
certified seed samples tested were contaminated
with the Roundup Ready gene. Thirty-seven
percent had the Liberty Link gene and 59
percent had both.
Reuters, 19 Sept.2011
Super weeds pose growing threat to U.S. crops
Farmer Mark Nelson yanks a four-foot-tall weed from his
Kansas soybean field. The “waterhemp” towers above his
beans, sucking up the soil moisture and nutrients
his beans need to grow... “When we harvest this field, these
waterhemp seeds will spread all over kingdom come” he
said. An estimated 11 million acres are infested with “super
weeds” some of which grow several inches in a day and defy
even multiple dousings of the world’s top-selling herbicide,
Roundup, whose active ingredient is glyphosate.
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