THE BIOTECH BIRDS
“Just say NO to GMO”
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
~ o ~
To Gild Refinéd Gold
To gild refinéd gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet,
To smoothe the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
- William Shakespeare - From King John
* * *
May 11, 2008
Figuring Out What's
In Your Food
According to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of Americans say they won't buy food that has been genetically modified. But CBS News investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports that it's not that easy to avoid. While most packaged and processed foods do contain genetically modified ingredients, the labels don't have to say so.
Robyn O'Brien teaches her kids to keep a close eye on the labels of the foods they eat.
"In terms of labeling," she says, "they're not always comprehensive and thorough."
What concerns parents like O'Brien is not what's listed, but what is not. Particularly foods made with genetically modified organisms - or GMOs.
"My concern as a mother is, are these kids part of a human trial that I didn't know that I had signed them up for," O'Brien says.
Today, more than 90 percent of the U.S. soybean crop is genetically modified - had its DNA altered to increase production and withstand chemical weed killers like roundup. Nearly three-quarters of all corn planted in the U.S. is genetically modified.
Experts say that means if it comes in a can or a box and the label lists soybean oil or corn syrup as ingredients, odds are that it contains GMOs. Overall, 65 percent of all products in your local grocery store have DNA-altered ingredients...not that you'd know it by looking.
"The industry that makes genetically modified foods fought so hard to make sure that it wasn't labeled," nutritionist Marion Nestle tells Keteyian.
Nestle, a former FDA advisor, says this was a fight that boiled down to one basic fear.
"They didn't want it labeled because they were terrified that if it were labeled, nobody would buy it."
Robert Brackett is spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America.
"I think that consumers have that information available to them if they want to look for it," says Brackett, "You can find it on websites. You can go directly to the manufacturer."
When pressed by Keteyian to explain his organization's role in providing information to the consumer, Brackett said, "Well, it's our responsibility to make sure that the foods that are put in the grocery store shelves are safe."
The FDA and bio-tech giants like Monsanto say there's no evidence that GMOs are anything but safe, but food safety advocates ask: how would we know, if the food is not labeled?
"Labeling is the only way that health professionals are going to be able to trace if there is a problem," says Andy Kimbrell from the Center for Food Safety. "For example, if you're a mother and you're giving your child soy formula and that child has a toxic or allergic reaction, the only way you'll know if that's a genetically-engineered soy formula is if it's labeled."
The FDA does not require "disclosure of genetic engineering techniques...on the label," calling GMOs the "substantial equivalent" of conventional crops.
Baloney, says Kimbrell.
"There is nothing - nothing, substantially equivalent from a conventional crop to a GMO crop," he says. "And in every cell of these new GMO foods are bacterias we've never seen in food before: viruses, genetic constructs, antibiotic bugs that they put in there, laboratory contructs that they've put into every cell of these foods."
A new CBS News poll found that 87% of consumers would like GMO ingredients to be labeled, just as they are in Europe, Japan and Australia. Yet the U.S. Congress has never even held a vote on the issue, to give shoppers the opportunity to exercise their most basic right - to make a choice.
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/eveningnews/main3420.shtml
HAWAII BIOTECH, INC
Hawaii Biotech, Inc. (HBI) is a privately held biotechnology company focused on the research and development of vaccines for established and emerging infectious diseases. We have developed a proprietary protein production platform that is applicable to the production of vaccine antigens and other proteins. Our lead vaccine candidates target the West Nile virus and Dengue Fever. Additional subunits vaccine candidates that are produced from the proprietary protein production platform are currently under development.
HBI has built a management team with relevant experience at companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, QED Technologies, and Johnson & Johnson. Collaborators, past and present, include scientists from Harvard Medical School; the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston; the University of Hawaii; the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease (USAMRIID); the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Business Model
We are committed to the development of the highest quality products with superior efficacy as demonstrated through the various stages of clinical trials. We plan to begin to partner and license our West Nile and dengue vaccine candidates after immunogenicity data has been obtained from clinical studies. Licensing at earlier stages is also being considered, especially for a more complex vaccine, such as the one for dengue fever. We are also funding the development of our vaccine pipeline from grants and contracts for public and private sources. Our strategy should allow us to maintain a stream of revenues from these sources before FDA approval.
Hawaii Biotech will continue to rely on its internal research pipeline, supported primarily by grant revenues and supplemented by a strategic in-licensing program, to produce additional proprietary clinical development vaccine candidates. HBI has a strong track record of securing research funds from the National Institute of Health and the Department of Defense to support its research programs.
In 2006, HBI acquired rights to an adjuvant, GPI-0100, through the acquisition of Avantogen, Inc (formerly a wholly-owned subsidiary of Avantogen, Limited, an Australian public company). The GPI-0100 adjuvant is useful in helping to elicit broad immune responses to certain vaccines and therapeutics especially in the cancer area. HBI has licensed the rights for use of the adjuvant to companies, (including for use with certain animal health and cancer vaccines) and will continue to pursue licensing opportunities for the GPI-0100 adjuvant.
Funding
The Company’s progress has been financed by private equity funding, as well as over $50 million in federal funding since 1982. As the costs associated with developing vaccines are substantial, we will continue to seek additional sources of funding by way of equity financing, debt financing, grants, and other opportunities....
Hawaii Biotech, IncPhone: (808)486-5333
99-193 Aiea Heights Drive, Suite 200 Fax: (808)792-1343
Aiea, Hawaii 96701
Email: info@hibiotech.com
See also: http://www.kycbs.net/Kajima.htm
August 27, 2006
Monsanto Buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company
by F. William Engdahl. Global Research
The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. The Government has been working quietly on this technology since 1983. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government’s US Department of Agriculture-- Delta & Pine Land-- is about to become part of the world’s largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds (GMO), Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri.
Relations between Monsanto, Delta & Pine Land and the USDA, on closer scrutiny, show the deep and dark side of the much-heralded genetic revolution in agriculture. It proves deep-held suspicions that the Gene Revolution is not about ‘solving the world hunger problem’ as its advocates claim. It’s about handing over control of the seeds for mankind’s basic food supply—rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton—to privately owned corporations. Once the seeds and their use are patented and controlled by one or several private agribusiness multinationals, it will be they who can decide whether or not a particular customer—let’s say for argument, China or Brazil or India or Japan—whether they will or won’t get the patented seeds from Monsanto, or from one of its licensee GMO partners like Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta or DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International.
While most of us don’t bother to reflect on where the corn in the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or the rice in a box of Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice come from, when we grab it from the supermarket shelf, they all must originate with seeds. Seeds can either be taken by a farmer from the previous season’ seeds, and planted to produce the next harvest. Or, seeds can be bought new each harvest season, from the companies which sell their seeds.
The advent of commercial GMO seeds in the early 1990’s allowed companies like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow Chemicals to go from supplying agriculture chemical herbicides like Roundup, to patenting genetically altered seeds for basic farm crops like corn, rice, soybeans or wheat. For almost a quarter century, since 1983, the US Government has quietly been working to perfect a genetically engineered technique whereby farmers would be forced to turn to their seed supplier each harvest to get new seeds. The seeds would only produce one harvest. After that the seeds from that harvest would commit ‘suicide’ and be unusable.
There has been much hue and cry, correctly so, that this process, patented ‘suicide’ seeds, officially termed GURTs (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), is a threat to poor farmers in developing countries like India or Brazil, who traditionally save their own seeds for the next planting. In fact, GURTs, more popularly referred to as Terminator seeds for the brutal manner in which they kill off plant reproduction possibilities, is a threat to the food security as well of North America, Western Europe, Japan and anywhere Monsanto and its elite cartel of GMO agribusiness partners enters a market.
The Curious History of Delta & Pine Land
Delta & Pine Land is a company that, despite the pine in its name, has deep roots. Founded in 1888, it has its headquarters at One Cotton Row in Scott, Mississippi, nestled between Goat Island and Choktaw Bar Island on the Mississippi River, near the Arkansas border. However, the people running things at Delta Pine are anything but your typical Mississippi black-dirt cotton farmers.
In 1983, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) joined with the US Department of Agriculture in a project to develop Terminator seeds. It was one of the earliest experiments with GMO. It was a long-term project. The US Government has been serious about Terminator beginning more than two decades ago.
In March 1998 the US Patent Office granted Patent No. 5,723,765 to Delta & Pine Land for a patent titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The patent is owned jointly, according to Delta & Pine’s Security & Exchange Commission 10K filing, ‘by D&PL and the United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of Agriculture.’
The patent has global coverage. To quote further from the official D&PL SEC filing, ‘The patent broadly covers all species of plant and seed, both transgenic (GMO-ed) and conventional, for a system designed to allow control of progeny seed viability without harming the crop’(sic).
Then, in a manner reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, D&PL claims, ‘One application of the technology could be to control unauthorized planting of seed of proprietary varieties…by making such a practice non-economic since non-authorized saved seed will not germinate, and, therefore, would be useless for planting.’
D&PL calls the thousand-year-old tradition of farmer-saved seed by the pejorative term, ‘brown bagging’ as though it is something dirty and corrupt.
Translated into lay language, D&PL officially declares the purpose of its Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, is to prevent farmers who once get trapped into buying transgenic or GMO seeds from a company such as Monsanto or Syngenta, from ‘brown bagging’ or being able to break free of control of their future crops by Monsanto and friends. As D&PL puts it, their patent gives them ‘the prospect of opening significant worldwide seed markets to the sale of transgenic technology in varietal crops in which crop seed currently is saved and used in subsequent seasons as planting seed.’
Instead, the farmer or the country whose farmers depend on Monsanto patented GMO seeds must pay a license fee to Monsanto each year to get new seeds. ‘No tickee, no laundy,’ as the old Brooklyn poet would say.
Terminator is the answer to the agribusiness dream of controlling world food production. No longer would they need to hire expensive detectives to spy on whether farmers were re-using Monsanto or other GMO patented seed. Terminator corn or soybeans or cotton seeds could be genetically modified to ‘commit suicide’ after one harvest season. That would automatically prevent farmers from saving and re-using the seed for the next harvest. The technology would be a means of enforcing Monsanto or other GMO patent rights, and forcing payment of farmer use fees not only in developing economies, where patent rights were, understandably, little respected, but also in industrial OECD countries.
With Terminator patent rights, once a country such as Argentina or Brazil or Iraq or the USA or Canada opened its doors to the spread of GMO patented seeds among its farmers, their food security would be potentially hostage to a private multinational company, a company which, for whatever reasons, especially given its intimate ties to the US Government, might decide to use ‘food as a weapon’ to compel a US-friendly policy from that country or group of countries.
Sound far-fetched? Go back to what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did in countries like Allende’s Chile to force a regime change to a ‘US-friendly’ Pinochet dictatorship by withholding USAID and private food exports to Chile. Kissinger dubbed it ‘food as a weapon.’ Terminator is merely the logical next step in food weapon technology.
The role of the US Government in backing and financing Delta & Pine Land’s decades of Terminator research is even more revealing. As Kissinger said back in the 1970’s, ‘Control the oil and you can control entire Continents. Control food and you control people…’
In a June 1998 interview, USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps, defined the US Government policy on Terminator seeds. He explained that USDA wanted the technology to be ‘widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.’ He meant agribusiness GMO giants like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow. The USDA was open about their reasons: They wanted to get Terminator seeds into the developing world where the Rockefeller Foundation had made eventual proliferation of genetically engineered crops the heart of its GMO strategy from the beginnings of its rice genome project in 1984.
USDA’s Phelps stated that the US Government’s goal in fostering the widest possible development of Terminator technology was ‘to increase the value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open up new markets in Second and Third World countries.’
Under WTO rules on free trade in agriculture, countries are forbidden to impose their own national health restrictions on GMO imports if it is deemed to be an ‘unfair trade barrier.’ It begins to become clear why it was the US Government and US agribusiness which during the late 1980’s pushed at the GATT Uruguay Round for creation of a World Trade Organization, with its supranational arbitrary powers over world agriculture trade. It all fits into a neat picture of patented seeds, forced on reluctant WTO member nations, under threat of WTO sanctions, and now of Terminator or suicide seeds.
A closer look at who runs and owns Delta & Pine Land is instructive.
Arkansas Politics and D&PL
The largest shareholder in D&PL is the Stephens Group of Little Rock, Arkansas. Here is where things become interesting indeed.
The man who is Chairman of the Board of DP&L is Jon E.M. Jacoby, who came to DP&L as representative of the Stephens Group. Jacoby is a Director and Vice Chairman of The Stephens Group LLC, the Arkansas-based private equity firm owned by the Stephens family.
The Stephens Group prides itself on being the nation's largest investment bank outside Wall Street, based, of all places, in little ol' Little Rock, in hillbilly land, Arkansas, one of the poorest states in the United States. Stephens Inc. is also one of the biggest institutional shareholders in 30 large multinationals including the Arkansas based firms Tyson Food, the world’s largest chicken industrial factory operation and the infamous Arkansas giant, Wal-Mart.
Jackson Stephens, who founded the group with his brother, Witt, were more than just lucky Arkansas bankers and billionaires. Stephens evidently built his career and fortune by being connected to the ‘right’ people. He was a US Naval Academy classmate of Jimmy Carter and during the Georgia bank scandals of President Carter’s Office of Management & Budget chief, Bert Lance, it was Jack Stephens who stepped in to bail Lance out of an extremely embarrassing financial debacle with Lance’s old bank, National Bank of Georgia.
How Stephens helped Jimmy Carter’s fellow Georgia buddy, Lance, is the interesting part. Stephens introduced Lance to a Pakistani businessman, Agha Hasan Abedi. Abedi was the founder of a curious Luxembourg-registered, London-based bank called BCCI.
In 1990, BCCI was convicted of money laundering for the Columbian Cocaine Cartels in Miami.
In October, 1992, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released an 800-page report on the BCCI collapse. They called the BCCI scandal, ‘the largest case of organized crime in history, spanning over some 72 nations,’ adding that it represented an ‘international financial crime on a massive and global scale,’ and that the bank ‘systematically bribed world leaders and political figures throughout the world.’
The Senate report concluded that among the provable charges against BCCI were ‘BCCI's criminality, including fraud…involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the America; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; its support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.’
Jackson Stephens was no casual business acquaintance of BCCI’s Agha Hasan Abedi. In response to the concerns over Jackson Stephens' involvement in BCCI, the Ohio Attorney General noted in a 1993 report, ‘Stephens' name has been linked to securities violations that allegedly occurred when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a foreign bank dominated by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi, acquired stock and control over the Washington-based First American Bank.’ In 1991, Stephens joined BCCI investor Mochtar Riady in buying BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.
The Stephens Group was well-connected to another interesting Asian banking group, the billionaire Indonesian Riady family of Moktar and his son James Riady, who own the Lippo Bank in Indonesia. The Riadys are Chinese-Indonesian businessmen who, of all places, moved to Arkansas in the 1970’s, despite holding billions of assets in Asia. Stephens and Riady hit it off and soon Stephens and Riady bought a bank in Hong Kong. Stephens then invited Riady to invest in a Little Rock, Arkansas bank called Worthen.
BCCI and Jackson Stephens, chairman of the Stephens Group of Arkansas were well known to one another. Stephens Group board member, Jon E.M. Jacoby, today Chairman of Delta & Pine Land, and still a Vice Director of The Stephens Group, was a very senior, trusted member of the Stephens’ inside circle for more than 35 years.
Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group financially staked Sam Walton when he started Wal-Mart in 1970. Stephens also financed Tyson Foods to become the agribusiness global giant it is today. Jon Jacoby, as senior executive of the Stephens Group, had arranged the 1970 Wal-Mart deal. Jon E.M. Jacoby and Jackson Stephens went way back.
Jacoby was Vice President of Stephens Inc. in the early 1990’s, shortly after the BCCI scandals and early into the Presidency of another Jackson Stephens protégé, former Arkansas Governor and recipient of Stephens’ political largess, William Jefferson Clinton.
When an Arkansas reporter questioned Jacoby on allegations of Clinton’s alleged corruption as Governor of Arkansas, Jacoby quipped, “You see a girl walking down the street. You can say, ‘There goes a beautiful girl’ or "There goes a whore.’ What the hell's the difference? They've both got legs.”
Arkansas politics is known for its colorful metaphors and its colorful politicians like William Jefferson Clinton. It’s good to get a little of the flavor of this Arkansas colorfulness to get a better picture of Delta & Pine Land.
Stephens Group, Tyson Farms and Other Arkansas Fairy Tales
A tangled web of relations links the Stephens Group and Delta & Pine Land of Scott, Mississippi with another satellite in the agribusiness orbit of the influential Stephens Group. The Stephens Group is also linked intimately with Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the US’ largest agribusiness processor of industrialized chicken meat, and arguably one of its most unsanitary ones.
Tyson Foods curiously emerged from the recent Avian Flu (H5N1) virus scare as a winner, using the lie that their factory farm mass-bred assembly-line chickens were more ‘sanitary’ than free-roaming small farm chickens of Asia.
Washington Administrations, at least since the Presidency of Bill Clinton, seem to have a love affair of some sort with Tyson Foods.
It began when Clinton sought to name an Arkansas crony, Mike Espy, to be his Secretary of Agriculture. Before Clinton could submit Espy’s name to the Senate for confirmation, however, Espy was sent to Arkansas for a meeting that would decide if Espy had the right stuff. The meeting was with Don Tyson, head of Tyson Foods.
Tyson apparently concluded that Espy indeed had the right stuff, at least as far as Tyson was concerned. Soon after being named head of USDA, Espy enacted measures significantly weakening Federal chicken waste and contamination standards. That opened the floodgates for expansion of Tyson Foods chicken factory farms into the huge concentrations of chicken waste and rivers overflowing with toxic pollution in Arkansas and beyond.
The Wall Street Journal on May 28, 2003 reviewed the allegations surrounding then-President Clinton and his wife, Hillary. They detailed some relevant points from the Clintons’ Arkansas days:
1977
Hillary Rodham Clinton joins the Rose Law Firm. Jackson Stephens joins with former Carter administration budget director Bert Lance and a group of Mideast investors--later identified as key figures in the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International--in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Financial General Bankshares in Washington, D.C
1978
October: Mrs. Clinton, now a partner at the Rose Firm, begins a series of commodities trades under the guidance of Tyson Foods executive Jim Blair, earning nearly $100,000. (author’s emphasis). The trades are not revealed until March 1994.
November: Bill Clinton is elected Governor of Arkansas.
The Rose law firm was the house law firm of Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group investment bank in Little Rock. To be the corporate law firm of the Stephens Group was no casual affair. It implied a deep trust relationship and perhaps more. As one crony of Jackson Stephens put it at that time, ‘Jackson Stephens? He’s the man who owns Arkansas.’
The head of the prestigious Rose law firm in Little Rock in those days was C. Joseph Giroir jr. In 1977 Giroir hired a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton to work for Rose. It was all one cozy Arkansas-Indonesia family back then.
The Wall Street Journal commentary on the Clinton years had the following entry for 1987, as Clinton was still Arkansas Governor:
1987:
Officials at investment giant Stephens Inc., including longtime Clinton friend, David Edwards, take steps to rescue Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company with George W. Bush on its board. Over the next three years, Mr. Edwards brings BCCI-linked investors and advisers into Harken deals. One of them, Abdullah Bakhsh, purchases $10 million in shares of Stephens-dominated Worthen Bank. (author’s emphasis).
Jackson Stephens’ political largesse was non-partisan: Democrats Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and then Republican George W. Bush, the man now in the White House as Monsanto seeks approval to take over the Stephens Group’s Delta & pine land.
In December 1992, just after Clinton had been elected President in a campaign financed at critical points by Jackson Stephens and friends, including the Indonesian-American Riady family, Vince Foster, an Arkansas friend of the Clinton’s, and a law partner at Hillary’s Rose law firm, met James McDougal. Foster arranged for McDougal to buy the Clintons' remaining shares in Whitewater Development Co. That land deal was focus of Congressional investigation of the Clintons. McDougal was loaned the money for the purchase by Tyson Foods counsel Jim Blair, the long-time Clinton friend and commodities adviser who in 1978 had ‘tutored’ Hillary in her fabulously successful commodities speculation. The loan by Tyson’s Jim Blair to McDougal was never repaid.
No sooner did Bill and Hillary Clinton move into the White House, and the Tyson Foods-approved Mike Espy took over as US Secretary of Agriculture, than Hillary’s former law partner, Joseph Giroir, set up a corporation. It was called Arkansas International Development Corporation (AIDC). In fact, it appears that the AIDC was set up to do joint ventures with the Indonesian Lippo Group of the business partners of Jackson Stephens, Mokhtar and James Riady.
The Arkansas International Development Corporation brokered a deal between Indonesia’s Lippo Group and Arkansas’ Tyson Foods that opened Indonesia to import Tyson Foods industrially-produced Arkansas factory farm chickens. One food Indonesia does not need to import is certainly chickens. The cheap Arkansas imports destroyed the fragile economy of domestic Indonesian small family chicken farmers.
Another project of AIDC was to issue bonds to build an airport in the Arkansas backwoods for the sole purpose of shipping Tyson Farms chickens to Indonesia. Recall that Clinton’s wife had been profiting from the trading advice of Tyson Foods since October 1978, a month before her husband became Governor.
Under the Clinton Presidency, agribusiness, especially agribusiness tied to the Stephens’ interests, made huge advances.
Agriculture Secretary Espy was forced to resign in October 1994, and was indicted on charges of accepting bribes and other gratuities. Among the charges against him were making false statements, concealing money from prohibited sources, illegal gratuities, illegal contributions, falsifying records, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering, and illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies. The largest corporate offender was Tyson Foods. Tyson had illegally offered Espy $12,000 in airplane rides, football tickets and other payoffs. Espy got off because the law makes it easier to convict a briber than a bribee. Tyson paid the government $6 million to close its case.
Tyson had been enthusiastic supporters of the Clinton family for years. In 1994, Time reported that a senior pilot for Tyson, Joe Henrickson, had been grilled for three days by the Espy Independent Prosecutor, Dan Smaltz, and FBI agents. They grilled the Tyson pilot about earlier transfers of cash to the (Arkansas) Governor's (Bill Clinton) mansion. According to Time, Henrickson claimed to have carried white envelopes containing a quarter-inch stack of $100 bills on six occasions.
Time magazine reported that, ‘In one case, [Henrickson claimed] a Tyson executive handed him an envelope of cash in the company's aircraft hanger in Fayetteville and said, 'This is for Governor Clinton.’ Arkansas has its political traditions and the Stephens and Tyson families are evidently skilled practitioners of that art.
The real interest in Jacoby’s Delta & Pine Land
By now the question comes, what is so attractive about the Stephens Group’s Delta & Pine Land that Monsanto makes its second bid to add it to its global genetically-engineered seeds empire?
It’s the patent Delta & Pine Land, together with the US Government, holds--Patent No. 5,723,765, titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The USDA through its Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) in Lubbock, Texas, as already noted, has worked with Delta & Pine Land since 1983 to perfect Terminator GMO technology. Patent No. 5,723,765 is the patent for Terminator technology.
One year later, in early 1999 Monsanto, the largest producer of GMO seeds and related agri-chemicals, announced it was acquiring Delta & Pine Land along with Delta’s Terminator patents.
In October 1999, however, following a worldwide storm of protest against Terminator seeds that threatened the very future of the Rockefeller Foundation’s ‘Gene Revolution’ Dr. Gordon Conway, President of the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation, met privately with the Board of Directors of Monsanto. Conway convinced Monsantom that for the long-term future of their GMO Project, they must go public to indicate to a worried world that it would not ‘commercialize’ Terminator. Development of the genetic revolution and genetic engineering as a research area had been the project of the Rockefeller Foundation over decades, along with researchers in the family’s Rockefeller University.
The Anglo-Swiss Syngenta joined with Monsanto in declaring solemnly that they would also not commercialize their work on GURTS or Terminator suicide seed technology.
That 1999 announcement took enormous pressure off of Monsanto and the agribusiness GMO giants, allowing them to advance the proliferation of their patented GMO seeds globally. Terminator could come later, once farmers and entire national agriculture areas like North America or Argentina or India had been taken over by GMO crops. Then, of course, it would be too late. The Rockefeller-Monsanto 1999 press conference was clearly application of classic Lenin Bolshevik tactics—Two Steps Forward, One Step Back…
Despite the Monsanto declaration of a moratorium on Terminator development, the US Government and the again independent Delta & Pine Land refused to drop their Terminator development.
In 2000, a year after the Monsanto Terminator moratorium announcement, the Clinton Administration’s USDA Secretary, Dan Glickman, refused repeated efforts by various agriculture and NGO organizations to drop the Government’s support for Terminator or GURTs. His Department’s feeble excuse for not dropping support for the work with Delta & Pine Land was that it allowed the US Government to put ‘leverage’ on D&PL to ‘protect the public interest.’ Six years later it became clear: the only leverage the US Government had put on D&PL’s commercialization efforts on GURTs had been to lever it into commercial reality.
Delta Vice President, Harry Collins, declared at the time in a press interview in the Agra/Industrial Biotechnology Legal Letter, ‘We’ve continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We’re on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off.’
Nor did their partner, the United States Department of Agriculture, back down on Terminator after 1999. In 2001 the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) website announced: ‘USDA has no plans to introduce TPS into any germplasm…Our involvement has been to help develop the technology, not to assist companies to use it.’ As if to say, ‘see, our hands are clean.’ Then they went on to say the USDA was, ‘committed to making the [Terminator] technology as widely available as possible, so that its benefits will accrue to all segments of society (sic)…ARS intends to do research on other applications of this unique gene control discovery…When new applications are at the appropriate stage of development, this technology will also be transferred to the private sector for commercial application.’ Terminator was alive and well inside the Washington bureaucracy.
In 2001, the USDA and Delta & Pine executed a Commercialization Agreement for Terminator, its infamous Patent No. 5,723,765. The Government and Delta & Pine Land were not at all concerned about worldwide outcry against Terminator.
That announcement came two years after Monsanto had dropped its planned takeover of D&PL, with its Terminator patents.
The world was left with the (misleading) impression that Terminator was dead. Reality was it was anything but dead. Seven years later, long after public outcry against Terminator technology had died down, Monsanto re-entered and bought Delta & Pine Land and its Terminator patents.
Delta & Pine Land’s global net
The key scientific member of the Delta & Pine Land board since 1993 has been Dr. Nam-Hai Chua. Chua, 62, is also head of the Rockefeller University Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory in New York, and has been for over 25 years, the labs which are at the heart of the Rockefeller Foundation’s decades-long development, and spending of more than $100 millions of its own research grants to create their Gene Revolution. Until 1995, Chua was also a scientific consultant to Monsanto Corporation, as well as to DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Chua is at the heart of Rockefeller’s Gene Revolution. And, clearly, Delta & Pine Land and their research on Terminator have been in the center of that work.
Delta & Pine Land is well-placed globally to proliferate its suicide seeds now, with the corporate and financial clout of the giant Monsanto company. Delta & Pine already has subsidiaries including D&PL Argentina, D&PL China, D&PL China PTE in Singapore, Deltapine Paraguay, Delta Pine de Mexico, Deltapine Australia, Hebei Ji Dai Cottonseed Technology Company in China, CDM Mandiyu in Argentina, Delta and Pine Land Hellas in Greece, D&M Brazil Algodao of Brazil, D&PL India, D&PL Mauritius Ltd.
This vast global network combined with Monsanto’s dominant position in the GMO seeds and agri-chemicals market along with the unique DP&L Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, now give Monsanto and its close friends in Washington an enormous advance in their plans to dominate world food and plant seed use.
F. William Engdahl is Contributing Editor of Global Research and author of the soon-to-be-released book, Seeds of Destruction: theDark Side of Genetically-engineeredFood. He also authored ‘ A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,’ Pluto Press, He may be contacted at his website, http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3082
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See also: Sukamto Sia: The Indonesian Connection; The Heavens & The Earth
January 14, 2006
Quietly, Hawaii serves as
world's biotech lab
By Paul Elias, The Associated Press
LAIE, Hawaii — Genetic engineering saved Ken Kamiya's papaya farm on Oahu's north shore, and it may yet rescue the orchid from the grips of a nasty flower-killing virus.
But in Kona, Una Greenaway lives in dread that biotechnology will ruin her organic coffee plantation. Pineapple industry officials have made it clear they want nothing to do with genetic engineering.
So it goes in the Aloha State, where genetic engineering has riven a state just now awakening to the fact that balmy and remote Hawaii has — for better and worse — long served as the world's largest outdoor biotechnology lab.
Since scientists first planted the spectacular commercial flop that was the Flavr Savr tomato on a small plot here in 1988, federal regulators have approved more than 10,600 applications to grow experimental biotech crops on 49,300 separate fields throughout the United States. More of these are in Hawaii than any other state.
Through the powers of biotechnology, low-nicotine tobacco, disease-resistant cotton and soy immune to weed killer are grown here. Hawaii's genetically engineered corn projects outnumber even those grown in Iowa and Illinois.
Biotechnology companies say the weather affords them a year-round growing season, while anti-industry activists say the five-hour plane ride from California gives the "gene jockeys" remoteness from prying eyes.
Whatever the reason, farmers such as Kamiya are satisfied with genetic engineering's effects on Hawaii....
The day before, Kamiya spent five hours in Honolulu at a meeting helping to defeat a proposed measure from qualifying for the ballot that would have banned genetic engineering on Oahu island and effectively put him out of business.
But that's precisely what Hawaiian organic coffee growers like Greenaway and others want. They're shocked Hawaii has become biotechnology's chief laboratory and are concerned about their economic future.
Greenaway worries that the creeping march of biotechnology in Hawaii will soon spell her financial ruin if consumers fear famed Kona coffee was somehow tainted by biotechnology.
Researchers in the state are attempting to genetically engineer coffee plants to grow decaffeinated beans, which don't occur naturally. The researchers haven't yet grown their experimental coffee plants outdoors, even though federal regulators gave permission in 1999.
Still, Greenaway is haunted by the prospect that the work will move outdoors, then mix with her crop and dilute her coffee's punch. She worries no caffeine junkie paying $20 a pound for Kona coffee wants that.
"Genetic engineered coffee would be an economic disaster in Kona," Greenaway said.
In many ways, the biotechnology debate in Hawaii is a microcosm of the global debate over biotechnology.
There hasn't been a single allergic reaction or other health problem credibly connected to consuming biotech food. Still, many scientists do worry about the threats biotechnology poses to the environment, mainly through inadvertent cross-pollination with conventionally grown crops. That poses a particular problem for organic farmers who charge a premium to guarantee customers their groceries are free of genetic engineering.
The industry and its supporters proudly point out that biotechnology is actually helping small farmers by reducing pesticide use. Close to 8 million subsistence farmers throughout the developing world are growing genetically engineered soy and corn that require less toxic weed killer and bug spray, making farming better for the environment and for those toiling in the fields.
Yet, growing numbers of consumers and activists fret that the major biotechnology companies — specifically the titan Monsanto Inc. of St. Louis — are asserting a Microsoft-like grip on the world's food supply that will ultimately kill organic and family farms.
In Hawaii alone, several anti-biotech measures have been introduced recently in the Legislature mimicking laws in four California counties banning biotech, though none have passed here so far. A federal lawsuit filed last year effectively halted all experiments in Hawaii that involve splicing human genes into plants to produce medicine.
That kind of skittishness resonates with large food producers, which in the past have succumbed to consumers' skepticism about biotech food.
In 2000, McDonald's successfully cowed potato farmers to reject genetically engineered potatoes. Two years ago, bread makers forced Monsanto to abandon its plans to market genetically engineered wheat. And recently, pineapple industry representatives wrote the University of Hawaii that the industry doesn't want or need biotechnology.
But Steve Ferreira, a University of Hawaii researcher working on genetically engineered papaya, thinks those growers' sentiments would change if they were facing the decimation of their crops.
"Their need is not as urgent as it was with the papaya farmers," Ferreira said.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-01-14-biotech-hawaii_x.htm
From the Hawaii Biotech website:
Several reasons make Hawaii a viable
place for Hawaii Biotech:
Large University of Hawaii Research Effort
Hawaii Biotech is a potential beneficiary of a much larger biotech research effort occurring at the University of Hawaii (UH). UH has established a new $150 million biomedical research facility, which will house 30-40 new biotech researchers. When combined with more than $50 million in biotech related research currently in place at UH, this expanded effort is expected to provide a catalyst for the development of the biotech industry in Hawaii.
As the largest, most well established biotech company in Hawaii, Hawaii Biotech is uniquely positioned to benefit from this research. The Company has excellent, long term relationships with UH and its technology transfer office. Company founders are from UH. Hawaii Biotech has concluded a broad-based, multi-project research collaboration with the University and, as the first project under this agreement, is actively collaborating with the UH researchers on its anthrax program.
Important Tax Credits
The State of Hawaii offers a 20% refundable tax credit for qualified R&D, including clinical trials, conducted in Hawaii. No State tax liability is needed to claim this credit and its refundable nature makes this credit an additional source of financing for Hawaii Biotech. In addition, Hawaii offers 100% State tax credits to investors who invest in Hawaii biotech (and other high tech) companies.
Clinical Trial Center
Hawaii is emerging as a preferred location for human clinical trials conducted by major pharmaceutical, biotech, contract research organizations (CROs), and site management organizations (SMOs) looking to bridge Caucasian, Japanese, and other Oriental populations. Hawaii’s dense population and ease of patient recruitment gives it a competitive advantage compared to other areas in the country with a large Japanese ethnic population. In addition, Hawaii has developed certain clinical development capabilities that have attracted non-ethnic studies as well.
Close to 300 clinical trials are currently underway in Hawaii. Sponsors and managers include each of the ten largest global pharmaceutical companies, 42 of the 50 largest pharmaceutical/biotech companies, major CROs and SMOs, and government agencies.
Representative names include Merck, Pfizer, Amgen, Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Idec, Biogen, Quintiles, Radiant Research, and the NCI. This clinical trial capability provides Hawaii Biotech with convenient access to a critical mass of infrastructure important to its Phase II licensing and value creation strategy.
http://www.hibiotech.com/overview/whyhawaii.htm
April 13, 2005
Anheuser-Busch Starts Rice War
WASHINGTON - (AP) Anheuser-Busch Cos., the nation's No. 1 buyer of rice as well as its largest brewer, says it won't buy rice from Missouri if genetically modified, drug-making crops are allowed to be grown in the state.
The St. Louis-based beer giant, which says it is concerned about possible contamination, is the latest company to express concern over plans by Ventria Biosciences to grow 200 acres of rice engineered to produce human proteins that can make drugs.
Biotechnology firms have been seeking federal approval for outdoor plantings, often called "biopharming" because the idea is to lower drug-making costs by using plants to grow medications.
Other food companies, environmentalists and farmers have said they fear genetically altered rice could cross-pollinate with other food crops, introducing the foreign genes into the regular food chain.
Last month, Arkansas-based Riceland Foods Inc., the world's largest rice miller and marketer, asked federal regulators to deny a permit for Ventria's project, saying its customers don't want to risk buying genetically modified rice. Anheuser-Busch is believed to be the first major company to threaten a boycott over the issue, according to comments filed last month with the Agriculture Department.
"Given the potential for contamination of commercial rice production in this state, we will not purchase any rice produced or processed in Missouri if Ventria introduces its pharma rice here," Jim Hoffmeister, a vice president at Anheuser-Busch, said Tuesday.
Scott Deeter, president of Sacramento-based Ventria, called Anheuser-Busch's threat "totally irresponsible" and said fears of contamination are overblown. He cited Ventria's plans to use "a totally closed system of production" with a plant that pollinates itself and is separated geographically from any other crop.
Biopharming has been growing for a decade despite continued attacks from genetic engineering foes who fear such work has not been studied enough to ensure the safety of the nation's food supply if accidental mixing occurs.
Genetically modified crops are regulated by the USDA, with state governments allowed to review safety procedures and suggest more stringent regulation of the companies before a permit is issued.
Ventria is seeking USDA approval to grow rice genetically enhanced with synthetic human genes to produce the proteins lactoferrin and lysozyme, which the company hopes to harvest and refine for use in medicines to fight diarrhea and dehydration. The USDA can either deny Ventria's permit or issue a permit with additional conditions.
Since 1995, the USDA has approved more than 300 biopharming plantings around the country, though most are for small outdoor plots of less than acre each. If Ventria's application is approved, it would be the largest such growth site to date, USDA spokeswoman Karen Eggert said. No human drug made from genetically engineered crops has been approved for commercial use.
The issue has already roiled California's $500 million-a-year rice industry. Last year, California regulators denied Ventria's application to grow commercial quantities of rice with human genes after rice growers said they feared international customers would refuse to buy conventionally grown crops out of contamination fears.
Meanwhile, farmers in southeast Missouri, where nearly all of the state's $100 million rice crop is grown, have presented Missouri's agriculture director a petition with 175 signatures opposing the plans. Missouri is the sixth-largest rice-producing state.
Despite the concerns, the Missouri Farm Bureau has continued to support Ventria, which recently announced it was moving from Sacramento to Northwest Missouri State University to be the anchor tenant of a new center for plant-made pharmaceuticals.
"Any concerns have been addressed thoroughly to the satisfaction of the scientific community," said university president Dean Hubbard.
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/13/tech/printable687708.shtml
July 27, 2004
Lawsuit Threatens Genetic Drug
Crops' Future In Hawaii
Legal Action Calls For Identifying Secret Locations
HONOLULU -- Even though they are far from winning in court, opponents of genetically altered drug crops have succeeded in shutting down the industry in Hawaii.
Experiments to alter sugar cane and corn to produce life-saving drugs began last year in Hawaii at eight mostly-secret sites.
This research at Kunia is not into potential human drugs. All drug crop field tests in Hawaii stopped within months of lawsuits claimed the crops threatened the environment and food supply.
The companies said their crops are harmless, but fear what would happen if the lawsuits revealed their locations.
"Whether there are going to be demonstrations; whether people are going to attempt to pull out the existing plants; that means millions of dollars in research could be lost," attorney for biological agriculture companies, Margery Bronster, said.
"They do have alternative means to keep these sites secure. They just don't want to spend the money on it. So, under those circumstances, I certainly have no sympathy," attorney for research opponents, Paul Achitoff, said.
The federal government Monday asked Judge David Ezra to throw out this lawsuit, saying since all the companies have pulled out, there is nothing here for the federal government to regulate. However, Ezra said if he does that that might encourage the companies to bring a controversial crop to Hawaii. Then when someone files a lawsuit, just pull it out and plant it somewhere else.
If Ezra allows the lawsuit to continue, it could be years before the companies resume research in Hawaii.
"We end up having a bump in the road that just further impedes and delays making these medicines available," Bronster said.
"Companies like Dow Chemical, Dupont, Monsanto; they can invest in security instead of putting the public at risk," Achitoff said.
The federal government said it's not sure if it will issue new research permits even if the companies want them.
http://www.thehawaiichannel.com/news/3583244/detail.html
September 2, 2003
Biotech Crops Pose Challenge
By Jim Paul, Associated Press
CHAMPAIGN, ILL. - It would be so much easier if genetically altered corn were green or purple, instead of the same yellow as ordinary corn.
But there is no simple way to ensure that biotech varieties go only where they're accepted. While some safeguards are in place, the process is still evolving among seed companies, farmers and grain handlers.
Some say changes aren't Keeping up with the steadily increasing use of biotech crops. They fear problems similar to what happened in 2000, when a biotech corn known as StarLink that was not approved for human consumption accidentally got mixed with other crops. The resulting scare triggered food recalls and caused a worldwide drop in corn prices.
"There needs to be some improvement ... to avoid a train wreck," said Steve Pigg, president of the Illinois Corn Growers Association.
The percentage of biotech in the Illinois corn crop is about 25 percent, and it has been increasing steadily.
Genetically altered corn is bred to resist plant diseases and pests, allowing producers to increase yields and reduce costs. But some people question the safety of tinkering with nature and at least seven biotech corn varieties have not been approved for use in the European Union, according to the National Corn Growers Association.
With the harvest just weeks away in some parts of Illinois, the stakes are high for farmers and grain handlers.
Any co-mingling of grain, however small, headed for a country that won't accept it endangers the entire shipment, said Peter Goldsmith, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois' College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.
Government leaves it up to the industry to ensure the "identity preservation" of crops, said Jeff Squibb, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Agriculture.
Spokesmen for Monsanto Co. and Pioneer Hi-Bred International, two major producers of genetically altered seed, said they have programs aimed at making sure farmers and grain handlers know what to do with biotech crops.
"The responsibility lies with the grower," said Bryan Hurley, a spokesman for Monsanto. "But there is an infrastructure that has been built to facilitate this and information and education to go with that."
Farmers planning to plant biotech seed that isn't approved for export must tell their seed company in the spring which elevator they plan to take the crop to in the fall, spokesmen for Monsanto and Pioneer said....
Come harvest time, elevator operators depend on farmers to tell them if they have genetically altered crops in their truck.
"I'm counting on it. I need to know it. If I don't know it, I've got zero chance" of separating biotech grain during a busy harvest, when more than 800,000 bushels of corn can arrive in a single day, said Dave Hastings. He's general manager of the Ludlow Co-op Elevator Co., which operates in Champaign, Ford and Iroquois counties....
Hastings said biotech grain will be stored in separate bins at his company's elevators. He is training his staff to ask more questions when farmers cross the scales at Ludlow Co-op, but worries that even that won't be fail-safe.
"Sooner or later when we get busy, we won't ask and we'll miss a guy," he said.
Pigg said farmers will do their job, but want more help from seed companies and grain handlers. He said he once was told by one grain elevator "just don't tell us" when he inquired about delivering a biotech variety he had grown....
February 22, 2000
The Growing Corn Controversy
COLERIDGE, Nebraska - (CBS News) - In a cold business calculation made over a cold Nebraska winter, Boyd Ebberson is backing away from genetically modified corn.
The decision bothers him, reports CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews. Last year what he calls GMO corn -- the kind genetically engineered to kill insects -- cost him less to grow and required no pesticides.
However, Ebberson says, "I'm in the business to sell corn."
He's afraid of the market. Ebberson's biggest buyer warned him there may be no market for genetically modified products.
"My customer is giving me the indication he does not want the GMO," says Ebberson. "I'm going to do what he wants me to do. That's what I learned in economics 101."
Fear of genetically modified corn is building like a Western snowstorm. In a survey of more than 500 farmers, the American Corn Growers Association found 16 percent fewer acres will be planted with GMO corn this April. It's remarkable when you consider that farmers love the stuff.
Ebberson's own brother, Craig, who is also a veteran grower, says gene altered corn is safe. He's planting just as much as he did last year.
"We like the product and the technology and we're gonna continue using it," Craig Ebberson says.
Over the last three planting seasons gene modified crops have blanketed the heartland, totaling half of all the soybeans grown and a third of all the corn. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the biotech future: the worried consumer.
Consumers in Europe are demanding GMO-free imports. American manufacturers like Frito Lay and Gerber have announced their foods will be GMO-free.
"I feel it's a safe product and I would love for them to accept it, but if they don't, I'll do what they want," Boyd Ebberson says pragmatically.
The tale of the two brothers Ebberson reflects the confusion over gene altered technology. One brother is placing his bet on science, the other is hedging his in the shifting winds of consumer demand.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/02/22/tech/main163715.shtml
September 20, 1999
Bad Seeds
The battle heats up between the U.S. and Europe
over genetically engineered crops
BY JEFFREY KLUGER
The folks at McDonald's could not have expected an especially warm reception in France, but the manure in the parking lots still must have taken them by surprise.
For the past month it's been hard to visit a McDonald's anywhere in France without running the risk of encountering mountains of fresh manure - as well as not-so-fresh fruit and vegetables - dumped in front of the restaurants by protesting farmers.
There's a lot about McDonald's that angers the farmers - its sameness, its blandness, the culinary hegemony it represents - yet at the outset the demonstrations were remarkably genteel, with protesters occupying restaurants and offering customers an alternative meal of baguettes stuffed with cheese or foie gras.
But lately things have turned nasty. Protesters are finding ever more to dislike about the uniquely American food - especially the very genes that make the McDonald's beef or bun or potato what it is.
Around the world people are taking a closer look at the genetic makeup of what they're eating - and growing uneasy with what they see.
Over the past decade, genetically modified (GM) food has become an increasingly common phenomenon as scientists have rewoven the genes of countless fruits and vegetables, turning everyday crops into uber-crops able to resist frost, withstand herbicides and even produce their own pesticides. In all, more than 4,500 GM plants have been tested, and at least 40 - including 13 varieties of corn, 11 varieties of tomatoes and four varieties of soybeans - have cleared government reviews.
For biotech companies such as Monsanto, based in the U.S., and Novartis AG, based in Switzerland, the rise of GM technology has meant boom times. Sales of GM seeds rose in value from $75 million in 1995 to $1.5 billion last year, and the crops they produce are turning up not only on produce shelves but also in processed foods from cookies to potato chips to baby food.
But many people question whether it's a good idea for fallible human beings to go mucking about with the genes of other species. It's one thing if a scientific experiment goes wrong in a lab, they say, but something else entirely if it winds up on your dinner plate.
To date, there's nothing to suggest that re-engineered plants have ever done anyone any harm. Nonetheless, the European Union has blocked the importation of some GM crops, and since 1997 has required that foods that contain engineered DNA be labeled as such.
Plenty of trade watchers in Washington see the European actions as one more tweak from an increasingly powerful E.U. no longer intimidated by U.S. economic might. While that may be, the fact remains that the U.S. Congress may address a labeling bill of its own later this year, and some private groups are threatening lawsuits to force the issue.
Even without legal action, public opinion is turning a more skeptical eye on GM technology.
"The farmers in France are right," observes Dennis Kucinich, a House Democrat from Cleveland, Ohio, who stumbled across the GM food issue this year, and is turning it into something of a cause. "There's nothing more personal than food."...
For all the controversy that GM technology is causing, the fact is that biotech companies have succeeded in dreaming up some extraordinary plants. Monsanto, which produces the hugely popular herbicide Roundup, has made just as big a hit with its line of genetically modified crops that are immune to the Roundup poison - thanks to a gene that company scientists tweezed out of the common petunia and knitted into their food plants....
Such souped-up plants are understandably popular with farmers, for whom even a slight increase in yield can mean a big increase in profits. Last year in the U.S., 35% of the soy crop and 42% of the cotton crop were grown with GM seeds. Says Karen Marshall, a Monsanto spokeswoman: "These really do work and have tremendous benefits to growers."
But what happens when they don't work? Several years ago, a company developed a soybean with some genetic threads borrowed from the Brazil nut in an attempt to boost the bean's amino-acid content. The soy began acting like the nut - so much so that it churned out not just amino acids but also chemicals that can trigger allergies in nut-sensitive consumers. The company quickly scrapped the product.
Last May a study published by Cornell University showed that pollen from some strains of corn with built-in pesticides can kill the larva of the Monarch butterfly, a pest by nobody's standards.
"When butterflies start dying," says Kucinich, "I think it's fair to start asking questions."
Overseas, they have been asking them for some time. In recent years Europeans have become increasingly jumpy about bad food - and with good reason. Since the outbreak of mad-cow disease in 1996, the appearance of dioxin-contaminated Belgian chickens last May and the later recall of contaminated cans of Coca-Cola in France and the Benelux nations, health officials have grown fussier about what their citizens consume.
Since 1990 the E.U. has approved the sale of 18 GM products. (The U.S. Government views GM components in foods as mere additives and thus does not require the Food and Drug Administration to approve them. Instead, it subjects them to a less formal review, a relatively low bar that's easy to clear.) This year the E.U. banned the importation of nonapproved GM corn.
In the U.S., GM strains are mixed with ordinary strains, so the country's entire corn export to Europe was effectively outlawed.
"Until we have new rules, we don't want new substances released," says Jurgen Trittin, Germany's Environment Minister. "It's a de facto moratorium."
But one country's moratorium is another country's protectionism, and the U.S. is suspicious of Europe's actions. Tension between the U.S. and the E.U. was already running high recently after Europe decided to continue a ban on hormone-raised U.S. beef and the U.S. hit back with a 100% tariff on some E.U. food exports.
Coming in the midst of such a catfight, the GM ban looks like vengeance as much as prudence. What's more, if Europe is so worried about GM foods, why is it growing them? France produces its own small crop of GM corn and uses more of the stuff than any other country in Europe.
The transatlantic food fight will probably be high on the agenda of the World Trade Organization when it meets in November - good news for companies like Monsanto. Two years ago, chief executive Robert Shapiro gambled big on biotech, spinning off the company's chemical division to focus on the new science.
While the move made Monsanto a Wall Street darling for a while, investors aren't as sweet on it anymore. A year ago, Monsanto stock perched at a lofty 63; today it's mired in the upper 30s.
U.S. companies are not alone. In Europe, investors are backing off as biotech firms buckle under the pressure of public opinion.
In July, Deutsche Bank - Europe's biggest bank - published a report advising large institutional investors to avoid companies involved in the development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs):
"We predict that GMOs, once perceived as the driver of the bull case for this sector, will now be perceived as a pariah."
Swiss biotech giant Novartis has seen its share price dive 30% since January, and smaller firms are more vulnerable.
This month saw the first significant corporate casualty when Axis Genetics - a British company which makes vaccines from GM plants - was forced into receivership.
That news coincided with a survey of 1,000 British consumers by market research company Mintel which showed GM foods had overtaken madcow disease as the public's number one food safety concern.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the most GM foes can hope to push through an agri-friendly Congress is a proposal for voluntary labeling that biotech companies would be free to honor or ignore. In a demand-driven market, however, they would ignore it at their peril.
In Europe the Gerber baby-food company, a division of Novartis, gave in to anti-GM sentiments and announced that its products would no longer contain genetically modified ingredients.
"This decision was not a safety issue," insists Novartis spokesman Mark Hill, "but rather a response to preferences expressed by our consumers."
Not for the last time, to be sure, it's consumers who will have the final word.
~ ~ ~
26% of the U.S. corn crop was grown from genetically changed seeds last year
30% of U.S. dairy cows are injected with the recombinant bovine growth hormone, which boosts production of milk. The hormone is made with genetically engineered bacteria
35% of the 1998 U.S. soybean crop was grown from seeds that had been genetically engineered
75% of all cheeses contain chymosin, which is produced with bacteria that have been genetically engineered
~ ~ ~
What's for Dinner?
There's a lot more than seasoning in your food. Everything from meat to fruit to baby food is developed with the aid of genetic manipulation. Since the U.S. government sees GM components as mere additives, they require little government oversight. Even the simplest meal is loaded with small DNA tricks:
APPETIZER
Some tomato juice is made from tomatoes containing enzymes from Arctic flounder - an attempt to help crops withstand low temperatures
ENTREE
Pork loins could come from hogs treated with human-growth hormones to help them get bigger faster
Potatoes could include genes from the Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring bacterium toxic to insects
Squash may be inoculated with watermelon- and zucchini-virus genes to make the squash virus resistant
The corn in corn bread and other foods could contain a firefly gene, providing a phosphorescent marker to tag other implanted genes
DESSERT
The milk in that innocent-looking rice pudding may have been drawn from cows treated with genetically engineered bovine growth hormone to help boost milk production
- Reported by James Carney and Dick Thompson/Washington; Bruce Crumley/Paris; and Maggie Sieger/Chicago
* * *
Date: 11/09/01
To: The Catbird
From: Francis A. Boyle
CALL FOR A BAN ON THE GENETIC ALTERATION OF PATHOGENS FOR DESTRUCTIVE PURPOSES
The recent use of the US Postal Service to disseminate anthrax-contaminated mail underscores a more general threat to people worldwide brought about by the perversion of the biological sciences to cause harm through the deliberate spread of disease.*
This is the moment to outlaw all destructive applications of genetic engineering.
We call on the United States to immediately halt all projects designed to genetically modify naturally occurring organisms for military purposes.
We call on the States Parties to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention to extend the Convention's ban to cover allgenetic modification of biological agents for military purposes.
Since the line between offense and defense in this context is thin to non-existent, there should be no loopholes for "defense." Genetic modification of pathogens for development of vaccines or other medical purposes should be carried out in civilian laboratories and under strict international controls.
Finally, we call on the United States to support a Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention to assure strict compliance with the terms of the Convention both by states and by individuals and sub-state organizations.
Signed,
Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at University of Illinois College of Law, author of U.S. implementing legislation for 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.
Jonathan King, PhD, Professor Molecular Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Biology Electron Microscope Facility.
Martin Teitel, PhD, President of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Susan Wright, PhD, Associate Research Scientist at the University of Michigan.
~ ~ ~
*Several developed countries, including the United States, have initiated projects aimed at genetically engineering pathogenic and other microbes for military purposes. Military-sponsored projects include:
1) developing "superbug" capable of digesting materials such as plastics, fuel, rubber, and asphalt;
2) developing a strain of anthrax that overcomes the protection provided by vaccines in the name of "defense" against such genetically altered strains.
These projects are being justified under the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention as necessary for "defense."
Far from providing defense, these projects open up the possibility of more dangerous forms of biological warfare against which there is no defense.
They also undermine the Convention both because the actual motives for these projects are highly ambiguous (if a country were to withdraw from the Biological Weapons Convention, their projects would have direct offensive applications) and because they will stimulate similar projects elsewhere in the world. . . .
For more, GO TO > > > CIA: The Secret Nest
* * *
Then God said, "Behold I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.
And God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good....
- Old Testament, Genesis 1:29-30
* * *
From When Corporations Rule the World, by David C. Korten:
MAKING MONEY, GROWING POORER
ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS
The World Wide Fund for Nature has compiled a Living Planet Index that shows a drop of 30 percent in the health of the living wealth of earth's forests and waters over a single generation from 1970 to 1995. When the index reaches zero, bacteria and cockroaches may still be here but there will be few humans around to marvel at how much money we have left behind in our bank accounts.
A joint study released in September 2000 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute assesses five ecosystem types (agricultural, coastal, forest, freshwater, and grasslands) in relation to five ecosystem services (food and fiber production, water quantity, air quality, biodiversity, and carbon storage). It found that sixteen of the twenty-five eco-system/service combinations had declining trends.
Only one - food and fiber production by forest ecosystems - presented a positive trend, which was due to expanding industrial forest monocropping at the expense of species diversity.
These declines are all a consequence of human economic activity. Bio-invasion, the second greatest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss, now threatens some 20 percent of the world's endangered vertebrate species. It is a direct result of the introduction, through expanded trade, of exotic invasive species into ecosystems that have no defenses against them.
By 1995 we had already learned a lot about the costs to humanity of the reckless chemical and radioactive contamination of our soils and waters. Yet only in 1996, when Theo Colborn and her research team published Our Stolen Future, did the public become aware of the full implications of the 70,000 synthetic chemicals now dispersed in the human environment.
Thousands of these chemicals mimic the action of hormones in humans and other living creatures and are responsible for declining sperm counts, reproductive failures, a high incidence of deformities in frogs, fish, and birds, and the impaired intellectual and behavioral development of human children.
A newly recognized hazard of the nuclear era is the use of depleted uranium (DU), a waste product of the nuclear arms and energy industries that is used to harden military munitions. When used in combat the uranium in the round ignites on impact and combines with oxygen to form a cloud of uranium dust that is persistent and highly toxic to those who breathe or ingest it, causing disability and/or death. From 300 to 800 tons of DU munitions were fired in Iraq and northern Kuwait during the Gulf War leaving vast areas contaminated with the deadly toxic material with a radioactive half-life of 4 to 5 billion years - the present age of the earth.
DU has become a prime suspect as a source of the Gulf War Syndrome that afflicts as many as 90,000 of the 697,000 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf, even though the military steadfastly denies any possible link. Similar munitions were used by NATO troops in Kosovo, posing a considerable risk not only to NATO troops, but to the returning refugees who will suffer the consequences for generations to come. The continued production and use of such munitions reveals the extent to which a narrow focus on the immediate utility of a technology can result in a callous disregard of the longer-term consequences.
Two new pollution threats have come to public attention since 1995: electromagnetic radiation and transgenic organisms. Health authorities have noted recent sharp increases in asthma, sleep disorders, hypertension, tinnitis, memory loss, and influenza and flu-like illnesses.
The increase began in the United States in November 1996, at the same time that digital cell phones service was first introduced into a number of U.S. cities. Pulsed radio-frequency and microwave radiation levels have since increased bu up to 100,000-fold in some large cities. The 1996 Telecommunications Act mandated universal wireless services and banned state and local governments from regulating transmission facilities on environmental grounds....
The rapid and wide-scale commercialization and dissemination of transgenic organisms is also a post-1995 phenomenon. Conventional plant breeding, which involves selective cross breeding between plants of the same or closely related species, stimulates natural processes. Genetically engineered plants are by contrast commonly transgenic, meaning they are created by moving genetic material across nature's carefully erected species barriers and inserting them into the sells of a wholly alien species, even crossing the boundaries between bacteria, plants, and animals.
Bacterial genes may be inserted into corn or fish genes into tomatoes. Harmful as they are, at least nuclear and chemical wastes do not self-reproduce. Transgenic organisms do.
They also mutate and interact with other species - and once released into the environment they may prove impossible to recall or isolate.
Under pressure to rapidly achieve dominant market positions, biotech companies have rushed transgenic organisms to the market with minimal testing, government oversight, or regard for potential health and environmental consequences. By 1999, 100 million acres were planted in transgenic crops, primarily in the United States, Argentina, and Canada.
Faced with a growing public outcry from citizen groups alerted to biotech corporations playing Russian roulette for profit with the living systems of the planet, seven major biotech corporations formed the Council for Biotechnology Information to carry out a $50 million public relations campaign to assure the public that their products are both beneficial and harmless.
~ ~ ~
Rapidly expanding technological frontiers now give humanity god-like capacities to manipulate the basic building blocks of matter, life, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Corporations with billions of dollars at stake insist that they should be allowed to move ahead with commercializing and disseminating products based on these technologies until others provide conclusive proof that they are harmful.
But our understanding of the implications of such technologies for our own bodies and the earth's living systems remains minuscule. We are like a child with a box of matches sitting next to an open container of gasoline, armed only with the knowledge that striking a match will produce a pretty flame.
The consequences of letting corporations make for us such basic decisions about altering the chemical, electromagnetic, and genetic environment of the planet - in some instances permanently and irreversibly - purely on the basis of what is possible and profitable at the moment is becoming increasingly foolhardy.
* * *
From Cutting Corporate Welfare , by Ralph Nader:
Government Research and Development
The federal government (a.k.a. US Taxpayers) invests tens of billions of dollars annually in research and development (R&D), most prominently through the Dept of Defense, the Dept of Energy, and the Dept of Health and Human Services. These investments lead to new inventions and the awarding of thousands of patents-- publicly financed, and frequently publicly owned intellectual property.
Since the early 1980s, the government has routinely given away the fruits of the research it sponsors, granting private corporations exclusive, royalty-free rights to commercialize government-financed inventions while failing to include and/or enforce reasonable pricing requirements in the licenses.
The result: a corporate welfare bonanza for biotech, computer, aerospace, pharmaceutical, and other firms.
In the critical area of pharmaceuticals, for example, this research giveaway policy leads to superprofiteering by giant drug manufacturers, who charge unconscionably high prices for important medicines-- costing consumers, and often resulting in the denial of treatments to consumers who are unable to pay high prices.
In an irony that must keep the staff of the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association in stitches, perhaps the largest ripped-off consumer is the federal government-- the same federal government that paid for the drugs' invention-- which must pay extravagant fees through the Veterans' Administration and Medicaid....
It wasn't always so.
Following the creation of a major federal role in research sponsorship in World War II, the Justice Dept concluded in 1947 that "where patentable inventions are made in the course of performing a Government-financed contract for research and development, the public interest requires that all rights to such inventions be assigned to the Government and not left to the private ownership of the contractor."
The Justice Dept recommended also that "as a basic policy, all Government-owned inventions should be made fully, freely and unconditionally available to the public without charge, by public dedication or by royalty-free, non-exclusive licensing."
The Justice Dept offered what remains a compelling case for non-exclusive licensing: "Public control will assure free and equal availability of the inventions to American industry and science; will eliminate any competitive advantage to the contractor chosen to perform the research work; will avoid undue concentration of economic power in the hands of a few large corporations; will tend to increase and diversify available research facilities within the United States to the advantage of the Government and of the national economy; and will thus strengthen our American system of free, competitive enterprise." . . .
In the ensuing decades, government policy evolved unevenly between different agencies, with some gradual increase in exclusive rights transfers to private parties. The various agency policies favoring exclusive licensing were done without Congressional authorization. . . .
Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, big business, in collaboration with partners at major research universities, began lobbying for a major transformation in government patent policy.
Based on highly questionable evidence, the business-university alliance argued that exclusive licensing was necessary to spur private sector innovation and development of government-funded inventions.
The concerted business-university campaign succeeded in 1980 with passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which transferred exclusive control over many government-sponsored inventions to universities and small business contractors.
Universities were in turn permitted to exclusively license to private corporations, including big businesses. . . .
In 1983, President Reagan issued a Presidential memorandum that instructed executive agencies to grant exclusive rights to inventions to contractors of all sizes.
In 1986, Congress passed the Federal Technology Transfer Act, which authorized federal laboratories to enter into exclusive contracts with corporations to develop and market inventions originating in the federal labs.
The federal labs have enormous discretion in working out exclusive licensing arrangements and ... have given away hugely profitable taxpayer-financed inventions with no public return either in the form of royalties or, more importantly, meaningful restraints on company pricing.
* * *
March, 1991
From New Internationalist, issue 217:
JOHN MOORE'S BODY
Not everything inside John Moore's body
necessarily belongs to John Moore.
Pat Roy Mooney reports on the transnational companies
that claim our organs - and much more besides.
When Quincy McKeen of New England holidayed in Guatemala some years ago, he brought home wild flowers, and choosing the most beautiful he claimed it as his discovery and got himself Plant Patent 559.
The rainforest did the work but McKeen got the royalties.
Jerry L Stimac of the University of Florida, US, did something similar. He imported a fungus from Brazil which was poisonous to fire ants (and could be used to control them biologically) - and patented it. Scientists had obtained the fungus from Brazilian colleagues who in turn learned of its usefulness from local farmers.
This time unnamed farmers had the genius but Stimac got the profits.
Angharad Gatehouse was sent by his university to look for cowpeas in West Africa. He was given a handful, gleaned from farmers' fields, by The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. Using new biotechniques on the cowpeas, Gatehouse and his friends isolated a specific gene which confers resistance to insect pests and can be inserted into crops like soybeans and maize. Gatehouse moved from the University of Durban to the biotech ''boutique'', Agricultural Genetic Company of Cambridge.
Once the gene was described, Agricultural Genetics filed patent applications for their ''invention'' around most of the Western world. The West African farmers who discovered and used the plant's special qualities have long been forgotten.
Plant piracy of Third World fields and forests is common.
Consider the ''Polo'' potato from Bolivia now being adapted for Western convenience in the US and probably worth millions of dollars. Or the ''Alcobaca'' tomato from Brazil which has a shelf-life of several weeks and could revolutionize the West's tomato industry.
And don''t forget medicinal plants. According to the magazine put out by the pharmaceutical industry, Scrip, each of the 200 endangered drug-yielding plant species known in the tropical rainforests may have a market value of millions. By early next century the global market for medicinal plants could be worth maybe $47 billion.
The drug company Merck Sharpe and Dohme is working with Brazilian counterparts to exploit an anticoagulant called Tiki-uba used by the Urueu-wau-wau of the Brazilian state of Rondonia. Not to be outdone, another major company, Monsanto, is hot on the trail of several of the 1,000 medicinal plants used by the Jivaro peoples on the Brazilian-Peruvian border. The companies not only want the plants but also the knowledge of the people who discovered them.
Pirates become jailers.
It was in the Philippines about one year ago that much of this information emerged. Rene Salazar, a veteran farm organizer and now also a biotech researcher, sat dumbfounded in an agricultural biotechnology conference as the Philippine Under-Secretary for Science and Technology casually reported that the country's first bill to allow the patenting of life forms had passed third reading in the Lower House.
The Act, to allow the patenting of asexually reproducible plants, offered industry a great deal.
First, there was no need to work - no inventive genius was required. A company could merely ''discover a plant in a cultivated field and - so long as they were first to the patent office - obtain exclusive monopoly ownership over it. As Salazar said, ''The bill rewards craftiness not creativity''.
Second, uniquely under Philippine law, anyone else using the patented plant could be criminally liable. In industrialized countries, patent violations are for the civil courts and the onus and cost of patent protection falls on the company that profits from the patent. Not so under the proposed Philippine law. A company need merely go to the police and charge someone with unlawfully using their variety, and the criminal courts would takeover at taxpayer expense.
Rene Salazar, who also works with the South East Asian Regional Institute for Community Education, was furious: ''Maybe a third to half of the plant varieties on government recommendation lists are either chance mutations or the product of informal community breeding programmes. A Pioneer or a Sandoz company can walk into a farm community, take plant samples, patent the most interesting ones and then throw the community in jail if they continue to use the plants they themselves created.''
Within 24 hours, Salazar and a coalition of peasant and environmental organizations had united with scientists to protest against the legislation.
People piracy
On the other side of the Pacific in California it took leukemia patient John Moore a little longer to organize his protest. Moore is venting his spleen over the doctors and the UCLA hospital who claim to have ''invented'' his spleen cell-line when they removed the cancerous organ during surgery in 1976. Mr. Moore - or at least parts of him - were patented.
By the mid-1980s, UCLA had passed the patent to a small Boston biotech ''boutique'' known as the Genetics Institute which in turn passed on exclusive monopoly rights to Sandoz, the giant Swiss chemical transnational that - because it ranks in the top echelons of both drug and seed companies - so worries Rene Salazar. En route, Moore's doctor, David Golde, and the hospital picked up two and a half million dollars in royalties and 75,000 shares of stock.
Moore's problems are not unique. About the same time in France, a widow whose husband died of testicular cancer, attempted to retrieve some of his semen from the sperm bank. The bank demurred, claiming exclusive rights to the semen. French courts sided with the woman.
Moore also sued for property rights - but lost. Sandoz's lawyers argued that private (patient) ownership over all body materials would send biotech research costs through the ceiling and deny new discoveries. Moore claimed that his rights had been violated and that no-one should own any parts of him but himself. Further court actions are expected.
~ ~ ~
Be it plants, fungi or people parts, all the new biotech patents spell money.
The biotech body tissue trade is substantial - earning an estimated $2.2 billion in the US last year alone. Recently, a congressional investigation showed a 300 per cent increase over five years in medical schools seeking patents on products drawn from human materials.
What upsets Moore most is that Sandoz could take him to court for selling his own cells to other companies. At least in the US it would be a civil action - but the sad truth remains that not everything inside John Moore is necessarily John Moore's anymore.
In fact, all of John Moore may be up for grabs at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks in Geneva.
Buried amidst discussion of European Community agricultural subsidies lies an almost unreported demand from the US, backed by Australia and Japan, that the Uruguay Round should treat intellectual property as a potential barrier to international trade: if the Philippines or Brazil fail to offer US companies the same level of patent protection abroad as they expect at home, then this constitutes a barrier to trade.
According to US trade representative Carla Hills, US companies lost around $60 billion in royalties in 1986 alone, mostly to Third World patent pirates ripping off pharmaceutical patents, textile trademarks, and book and cassette copyrights. Even GATT officials have difficulty taking the US accusations seriously.
Were the figures true and the royalty charges levied on the South as Carla Hills demands, the surcharge would double total Third World debt repayments each year.
Trading on life
But the GATT proposal has still wider implications.
Says Hills, there should be ''no exclusions'' on either the forms of intellectual property or the subject-matter to be patented.
In other words, plants, animals, micro-organisms, John Moore's spleen cells and even John Moore himself along with all his products and processes would be patentable. Failure to permit such patents would expose a country to trade retaliation from other GATT members.
According to GATT, life is a trade issue.
Although daunted by the reach of the US demand, the EC, Nordic countries and Switzerland have called for the patenting of plants and micro-organisms, leaving it open as to whether or not animals should be patentable. Only Norway, in its written submission to GATT Director-General Arthur Dunkel, has flatly rejected the patenting of human beings.
Most countries in GATT, have over-looked the fact that any acceptance of the patenting of any life-form will inevitably lead to GATT rules for the patenting of all life-forms. The legislative history in industrialized countries shows clearly that holding rights over plant varieties leads to exclusive monopoly rights over micro-organisms and then animals. Asked directly whether the US really wanted to include human beings in its patent proposal, a Washington official giggled and admitted that Hills and Company simply could not find a way to exclude humans.
In fact, it is probable that no one in GATT is interested in patenting whole human beings. So why not develop wording that does exclude people?
In biotechnology, where fish and insect genes are inserted into crop plants, and human genes are put into mice, pigs, sheep and goats, the ''natural'' barriers between species and biological kingdoms are broken down. Life is homogenised.
If human beings were excluded from patentability, would the DuPont mouse - the first patented animal - be unpatentable because it contains a human gene? Would pharmaceuticals derived from human tissue be unpatentable? How many human genes can science insert into pigs before they start to read the menu? How many genes can be patented in a human being before the human being is patented?
Faced with these rather ridiculous but real imponderables, the US Trade Representative has opted not to attempt a definition of a human being but to call for no exclusions in the hope of avoiding the entire moral debate.
For Third World delegates in Geneva, the message should be clear: if it is technically impossible to isolate human beings from patentability then new transgenic technologies also make it impossible to isolate plants both from animals and microbes. It is equally impossible to legally isolate ''discovered'' from ''invented'' biological materials or ''wild'' from ''cultivated'' materials.
To accept the patenting of any life form in GATT is to ultimately accept the patenting of all life forms - including the whole vast biological diversity of Third World fields and forests.
The South is only belatedly becoming aware that the so-called ''raw-material'' of the Gene Revolution are the microbial, plant and animal genetic resources abundant in tropical and sub-tropical states. GAIT represents a grab for patent control over the sovereign and human intellectual property rights of the South.
(Pat Roy Mooney is a researcher for The Rural Advancement Fund International (RAFI), which campaigns about genetic resources from bases in the US, Canada, Australia and Norway. Together with Carey Fowler, Mooney received the 1985 Right Livelihood Award - the Alternative Nobel Prize - for his work on genetic resources.)
* * *
January 14, 1998
Coalition forms to urge withdrawal
of Cuban embargo
By Christopher Marquis, Miami Herald
WASHINGTON -- A group of business, government and religious leaders announced Tuesday the creation of a coalition to press for ending the U.S. ban on sales of food and medicine to Cuba.
The group, called Americans for Humanitarian Trade With Cuba, includes David Rockefeller, chairman of his family's trust; Archer Daniels Midland chairman Dwayne Andreas; and former U.S. officials Carla Hills, President Reagan's trade representative, and Lloyd Bentsen, President Clinton's first treasury secretary.
With little more than a week before Pope John Paul II travels to Cuba, the coalition is seeking to portray the 36-year U.S. trade embargo as inhumane and unworthy of U.S. ideals, calling it the harshest in the world. The pope has also criticized the trade ban, which raises Cuba's costs by forcing it to rely on more-distant exporters.
Working in conjunction with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the new group has vowed to press Congress to approve legislation to allow the direct sale of food and medicine. Such sales are banned under the Cuba embargo, although Americans may donate food and even sell licensed medical products through charity groups in Cuba.
Witness to hunger
Retired Army Gen. John J. Sheehan, former head of the U.S. Atlantic Command, recalled that he supervised processing of nearly 40,000 Cuban refugees seeking U.S. asylum at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, beginning in 1994. Many were children suffering from malnutrition, he said.
``We can no longer support a policy which causes suffering of the most vulnerable -- women, children and the elderly,'' Sheehan said. ``It is time for us to correct this policy and its unintended effects on the innocent people of Cuba.''
The coalition, which reflects the private sector's strongest push yet on Cuba policy, drew immediate criticism from some Cuban-American politicians. U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, D-Miami, said the group was mistakenly deflecting responsibility for Cuba's misery from President Fidel Castro to the United States.
Anti-embargo business leaders, she added, are motivated by greed.
``This is really an unholy alliance between the usual suspects who are always anti-embargo, the church groups and now Wall Street,'' she said.
``These businessmen would be wheeling and dealing with Mussolini if that dictator were still around, as long as there's a buck to be made.''
Battle lines form
The debate is focusing on bills authorizing food and medical sales proposed by Rep. Esteban Torres, D-Calif., and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. The House version has more than 90 co-sponsors, according to Torres.
Republican opponents, who control key foreign affairs committees, voice confidence that they can bottle up the legislation.
The new coalition is counting on pressure generated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents Fortune 500 companies and small businesses across the United States, and the National Council of Churches, which claims to represent 53 million Americans. A Cuban American, Hector Irastorza Jr., is the council's executive director.
In anticipation of the pope's first trip to Cuba, Castro opponents in Cuba and in exile plan to release a document today that outlines criteria for a political transition, including a general amnesty for all political prisoners, elections by direct and secret ballot, and greater freedom of political and economic activity.
Spearheaded by U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, the document is signed by island dissidents including Gustavo Arcos, president of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights; and by exiles including Carlos Alberto Montaner, head of the Cuban Liberal Union, and Jose Basulto, founder of Brothers to the Rescue.
Copyright © 1998 The Miami Herald
* * *
August 26, 2001
U.S., Europe Spar on Rules for
Genetically Modified Food
by Alan Sipress and Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Senior Bush administration officials are pressuring the European Union to abandon new restrictions on genetically modified foods that they say could cost U.S. companies $4 billion a year and disrupt efforts to launch a new round of global trade talks.
U.S. officials have repeatedly told their European counterparts that the regulations, which received preliminary approval last month, discriminate against U.S. products in violation of World Trade Organization requirements, raising the prospect of an emotionally charged trade dispute.
The European Commission's decision to require the labeling of genetically engineered products reflects a European anxiety about food safety that is far more profound than in the United States, the world leader in agricultural biotechnology.
This is a divide that threatens to further aggravate U.S. relations with Europe, already roiled by differences over global warming, arms control and other trade issues.
Undersecretary of State Alan Larson, the State Department's senior diplomat assigned to economic issues, called the new restrictions "trade disruptive and discriminatory." He said, "It's obviously a very serious problem that affects a very important trade and one that's of vital interest to a very important constituency in the United States which supports free trade."
Though U.S. officials have declined publicly to detail what type of punitive action the Bush administration might take against Europe, U.S. officials say the regulations are inconsistent with the terms of the WTO because they treat U.S. products less favorably than European ones.
For instance, Larson said, the European regulations would require that American crushed soybean oil bear a label, while European cheeses and wine made with biotech enzymes would not be covered. "There are potential WTO concerns about how it is structured now," Larson said.
U.S. officials have left open the possibility of bringing a legal case before the WTO, which, after lengthy litigation, could eventually impose a politically embarrassing judgment and stiff economic penalties on Europe. But Larson said the administration's immediate focus is on lobbying European governments to amend the regulations before they take effect. He added that the United States and Europe need to resolve the issue quickly so it does not become a "distraction" that interferes with their shared interest in launching new global trade talks as planned later this year.
Officials said that economic losses in the United States - where 75 percent of soybeans and more than 25 percent of corn comes from genetically modified seeds - could far exceed other transatlantic trade battles, such as those over bananas and growth hormones in beef. Resolution of the long-running banana dispute earlier this year removed a major irritant in American-European relations.
The dispute could also harden public opinion about biotechnology and its ability to transfer beneficial genes from one species into another. Proponents want it to be seen as a force for progress and global improvement, but it could become a symbol of divisiveness if it set off a bitter trade dispute. . . .
* * *
December 30, 2001
MEXICANS ANGERED BY MODIFIED CORN PLANTS
By Mark Stevenson, Associated Press
MEXICO CITY - In a cautionary tale about the difficulty of controlling genetically modified plants, corn researchers in Mexico went ever higher into remote mountain villages looking for natural varieties of the 4,000-year-old crop.
Time after time, they couldn't find them.
Samples revealed that just a few years of unlabeled U.S. imports had transferred modified genes to local corn in the Southern state of Oaxaca - even though planting genetically modified crops is banned in this country, the birthplace of corn.
The discovery, confirmed in the science magazine Nature this month, caused outrage among Mexicans, whose ancestors believed the gods created Man from an ear of corn.
"It's a worse attack on our culture that if they had torn down the cathedral of Oaxaca and built a McDonald's over it," said Hector Magallone, an activist with environmental group Greenpeace.
Some scientists worry that genetically modified strains could displace or contaminate Mexico's genetic warehouse of more than 60 corn varieties - a wealth that enriches staple crops worldwide and includes wild varieties that have yet to be cataloged.
The accidental spread of laboratory-inserted genes, scientists fear, could allow aggressive plants to crowd out other varieties, reducing biological diversity.
Diversity is prized as a hedge against disease, pests and climate change. While some plant strains may be vulnerable to one disease, others may have natural immunity that enables them to survive.
The case has grown international attention. In an open letter, 80 scientists from a dozen countries have asked the Mexican government to stop the genetic contamination.
But supporters of genetic modification say such crops may actually benefit the environment by allowing farmers to use less pesticide or soil tilling, cutting down on erosion.
Mexico is a net importer of corn - about 6.2 million tons annually, almost all from the United States. Perhaps one-fourth of it is genetically modified.
U.S. grain growers aren't worried by the contamination -- and even want to charge Mexican farmers for it.
"If a locally occurring variety receives some improvement from genetically engineered crops, it's up to the courts to decide whether farmers should be made to pay for that," said Ricardo Celma, head of the U.S. Grain Council's Mexico office.
"But we want the patent rights of the owners of that genetic modification to be honored."
Mexican activists see the situation differently. Greenpeace called for a ban on imports of genetically modified corn, and simultaneous support for natural varieties.
Corn, which is Mexico's staple crop, is imported mostly for human and animal consumption - not as seed.
Yet several modified strains were found, including one that makes the plant a toxin to ward off corn borers.
It is unclear how far the genetically modified crops have spread. A study by the Mexican Environment Ministry earlier this year found them in 15 locations in Oaxaca, but in low concentration of 3 percent to 10 percent of plants in most fields. . . .
Planting genetically modified crops has been banned in Mexico since 1998.
Officials of Mexico's Agriculture Department said there were no plans to either halt imports or demand labeling of genetically modified corn.
* * *
January 14, 2002
Biotech Firms on Quest for Fatter Fowl
By Paul Elias, Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - U.S. poultry growers have a chicken-and-egg dilemma.
For decades, people who raise chickens for dinner tables have been honing their "selective breeding" skills and have gotten pretty good at growing the fattest bird possible.
But meatier and faster-growing birds lay fewer eggs, and prolific egg-layers tend to be skinny. Chicken producers would love to increase production of meatier chickens by minimizing the influence of the skinny genes.
Origen Therapeutics and AviGenics are among biotechnology companies considering this dilemma as they pursue the perfectly engineered bird. And their solution is sure to rile a number of advocacy groups because it involves not just genetically modified food but also cloning and embryonic stem cells.
The idea is to create identical copies of eggs with desirable traits that can roll off assembly lines by the billions. The hatched chickens would be identically disease-resistant and grow and eat at the same rate.
This goal has yet to be fully embraced.
Biotechnology opponents fear that genetically modified organisms (GMO) are little understood and that the potential for harm to humans is great. Animal-rights activists argue that the science simply provides a more efficient way to harm chickens.
But with an estimated 8 billion chickens bred annually in the United States for food, these biotechnology companies see an industry ripe for their technology.
Besides, they argue, engineering chickens is no different from selectively breeding them, as the industry does now.
"There is very little that is natural" in the current breeding process, said Robert Etches, vice president of research at Origen.
Etches and his colleagues at Burlingame, Calif.-based Origen Therapeutics Inc. aim to breed bigger chickens faster by extracting embryonic stem cells from the fastest growing and biggest chickens and injecting them into fertilized eggs of the skinnier egg-laying chickens.
The process does not involve any genetic manipulation. . . .
Origen scientists hope they can coax the embryonic stem cells to take genetic control of the skinny chickens' eggs, suppressing the parents' genetic expression and creating a meaty chicken.
Robert Kay, chief executive of Origen, would not explain the company's methods and said the technology is still years from fruition. . . .
In Athen, Ga., meanwhile, scientists at AviGenics are attempting to get around the egg problem by cloning chickens with favorable traits such as large breasts.
Anthony Cruz, an AviGenics vice president, said the company has yet to successfully clone a chicken and won't predict when that may occur.
"There is still a lot of work to do," he said.
Indeed, these biotechnology companies readily concede they face years of technical and regulatory obstacles before they can revolutionize the poultry industry.
And first, they must convince chicken and egg producers their technology is needed - and that it won't, for example, backfire and create genetically uniform animal populations that could be wiped out with a single fatal epidemic.
See also: Down on the Factory Farm
* * *
February 17, 2002
Gene-altered leaf promises
low-nicotine cigarettes
By Philip Brasher, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - New cigarettes are due this spring with tobacco genetically altered to be very low in nicotine.
A new Agriculture Department study confirmed the low levels of nicotine, the chemical that gets smokers hooked, in the biotech tobacco and found that the crop poses little risk to the environment.
Tobacco grown on department-supervised test plots last summer is going into the cigarettes made by Vector Group, parent company of cigarette maker Vector Tobacco.
The company has asked the Agriculture Department to remove restrictions on where and how the tobacco can be grown, and the agency probably will go along. The tobacco was genetically altered to block the production of nicotine in the roots.
"This thing could be a home run and it could flop. We think the odds are that it is going to be a successful product," said Donald Trott, an analyst with the brokerage firm Jefferies and Company Inc.
Vector, which makes Eve-brand cigarettes as well as various generic and discount lines, has not said where it will sell the biotech cigarettes beginning in the spring or what they will be called. . . .
Government approval would make the tobacco one of the first biotech crops to have a consumer use.
Tobacco industry critics fear low-nicotine cigarettes could encourage more smoking. "A nicotine-free cigarette could still deliver very high levels of harmful toxic substances," said Matthew Meyers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Many tobacco farmers and Vector's rival cigarette manufacturers are concerned about the product, too. Growers say the biotech tobacco could get mixed with conventional leaf and jeopardize U.S. exports.
"It is a big issue. It has the potential to change tobacco and tobacco production controls that we have had on tobacco for many years," said Larry Wooten, a partner in a tobacco farm and president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau.
"Many of our farmer are not, I would say, aware of the serious implications that this has."
The government traditionally has controlled tobacco prices and production through the use of quotas, which entitle the owners to market a given amount of leaf each year.
Penalties on nonquota tobacco make it uneconomical to grow in the handful of states that have quotas, such as North Carolina and Kentucky, so Vector is setting up production elsewhere.
The company grew the crop on 5,200 acres in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, Iowa and Hawaii.
Company officials say there is no danger of contaminating conventional tobacco because the biotech version is grown and handled separately from conventional crops....
* * *
August 3, 2001
From The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Food ( http://www.thecampaign.org ):
US food industry seeks clarity
on new China GMO rule
WASHINGTON (Rueters) -- U.S. agriculture industry officials yesterday complained that China's new regulations governing the import of biotech products are hindering bilateral trade, especially for soybeans.
On June 6, China announced new regulations governing the import of foods containing genetically modified organisms. While Beijing still has not provided details on how the rules will be implemented, they require registration and labeling of GMOs and GMO products.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 68 percent of U.S. soybeans are now genetically modified.
During a hearing yesterday of the U.S.-China Security Review Commission, which was established by Congress last year, U.S. agriculture industry officials testified to the importance of developing China's vast market for wheat, soybeans, meat and other commodities.
Robbin Johnson, vice president of Cargill Inc., told the panel China "has been a good trading partner for more than 30 years" and was "making good headway" toward a growing relationship in agriculture trade.
But that progress was set back, Johnson said, "when China suddenly announced a new law restricting genetically modified organisms" and did so "without any implementing regulations."
Johnson said the result has been "confusion and disrupted normal trade flows."
He added that "until the situation is clarified, U.S. suppliers following ethical business practices are excluded from supplying China's $350 million per month demand for soybeans."
Dwain Ford, vice president of the American Soybean Association, echoed Johnson's remarks, telling the panel, "It is critical to our soybean exports that China resolve these rules in a rapid, transparent and non-trade distorting manner..."
China's purchases of U.S. soybeans have skyrocketed in recent years, with the value of shipments projected to be $1.28 billion this year, up from $472 million in 1999.
The U.S. industry also is hoping for growth in exports to China of soymeal, as the country's 1.2 billion people shift their diet to one that is higher in vegetable oil and protein.
The U.S.-China Security Review Commission, appointed by congressional leaders, is supposed to assess security challenges posed by economic and military aspects of the bilateral relationship.
Yesterday's hearing focused on agriculture, steel, aerospace, automobile and high-tech commerce between the two countries. . .
* * *
March 29, 2002
Farmers planting more biotech crops this year
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - American farmers will plant more genetically engineered crops this year, including one-third of the corn on U.S. soil, shrugging off international resistance to biotech food.
The farmers are expected to grow more than 79 million acres of genetically engineered corn and soybeans, the nation's two most widely planted commodities, a 13 percent increase from last year, according to an Agriculture Department survey.
The gene-altered crops require fewer chemicals. making them easier and cheaper to grow. The crops are engineered to produce their own pesticide or to be resistant to a popular weedkiller.
"Farming has become so competitive, so small margin, that if we can find something that works economically and environmentally we'll jump on it," said Minnesota farmer Gerald Tumbleson, who grows biotech corn and soybeans.
About 74 percent of this year's soy crop, or 54 million acres, will be genetically engineered, compared with 68 percent last year and 54 percent in 2000, the department said. In Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Kansas, 80 percent or more of this year's soybean crop is expected to be biotech.
Soy is a critical ingredient for a wide variety of foods and, like corn, also is used for animal feed.
Some 32 percent of the corn crop, or 25.3 million acres, will be of biotech varieties, compared with 26 percent in 2001 and 25 percent the year before.
Strong consumer resistance to agricultural biotechnology has arisen in Europe and Japan, but most U.S.-grown corn and soy is used domestically.
"The farmer looks at it strictly from profitability," said commodities, analyst Don Roose. "They're not shying away from it."
The biotech soybeans contain a bacterium gene that makes them immune to Roundup herbicide. In some cases, farmers can get by with treating their fields just once a year to keep away yield-robbing weeds.
In addition, about 10.5 million acres of cotton, or 71 percent of this year's cotton crop, will be bioengineered. Last year, 69 percent of the cotton was gene-altered.
The popular varieties of biotech cotton are either Roundup-immune or else produce their own pesticide. Most of the genetically engineered corn that farmers plant was designed to kill a common insect pest, the European corn borer.
The biotechnology industry was set back in 1999 by research raising fears, since alleviated, that the biotech corn was killing off Monarch butterflies. The following year, the industry was embarrassed when a type of gene-altered corn was found in the food supply without being approved for human consumption.
Yesterday's report "shows the continued high confidence that U.S. farmers have placed in seeds improved through biotechnology," said Michael Phillips of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
Other biotech crops, such as potatoes and tomatoes, have met resistance from farmers and the food industry, and wheat growers are nervous about the pending introduction of Roundup-resistant wheat. Wheat is far more dependent on export markets than other crops.
"That is a huge factor, the extent to which a crop is going to be exported," said Jane Rissler, a biotech critic with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
* * *
March 29, 2002
Company to release its rice research
for humanitarian use
Catbird: Pardon me while I laugh! (...or cry)
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A biotechnology company agreed yesterday to make public its data on the rice genome so that scientists can use the research to develop improved crops for the world's poor.
Syngentia AG, a Swiss firm, said academic institutions, governments and nonprofit organizations will be allowed to use the data as they wish, but competing companies would have to pay for rights to commercialize their uses of the material.
Rice is a staple for half the world's population. Its genetic model is relatively simple and so similar to other grains that scientists can use the rice map to manipulate genetic traits in a variety of crops.
Syngenta made the agreement with Science magazine, which will publish the research next week.
"This is a balance between humanitarian goals and commercial goals," said Steven Briggs, president of Syngenta's San Diego-based Torrey Mesa Research Institute.
Science ordinarily requires that scientists place such data in an international repository, known as Genbank, but Syngenta balked at the demand because the firm wants to prevent other companies from using the material commercially.
Science editor Donald Kennedy said the Syngenta research was valuable enough to warrant making an exception to its policy.
The data will make it easier for scientists to add nutrients to crops or increase resistance to drought and pests through both conventional breeding techniques and genetic engineering.
* * *
The BGH Scandals--The Incredible Story of Jane Akre & Steve Wilson (Part 1)
PR Watch, Volume 7, No. 4, Fourth Quarter 2000
Flack Attack
In our Second Quarter 1998 issue, PR Watch wrote about TV investigative reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, who were fired after refusing to go along with misleading alterations to their story about Monsanto's genetically-engineered bovine growth hormone.
Akre and Wilson recently won a landmark whistleblower lawsuit against the station that fired them, yet their former network continues its legal efforts to reverse the ruling and crush them financially. In this issue, we are honored to publish Jane Akre's firsthand account of her experiences standing up to corporate and media powers that have tried to silence them.
Journalists everywhere should take a close look at this case and its implications. If the Fox network and Monsanto get away with destroying the careers of these two seasoned reporters, the same thing can happen to anyone who tries to stand up for a story that they believe in. With few resources other than the courage of their convictions, Akre and Wilson have struggled to place issues before the public that otherwise would remain hidden from view. In addition to their battle in the courts, they have used the skills they honed in the newsroom to fight back in the court of public opinion.
They have created a website ( www.foxBGHsuit.com ) that includes a downloadable video of their suppressed news story, plus court documents and other facts about their case. We encourage you to visit their website and, in light of their continuing financial struggles, to consider making a donation to their cause.
We hope that after reading their story, you will also share it with others and help get the word out. The public needs to inform itself and take action when the news media fails to do its job properly, and this is an egregious example....
~ ~ ~
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: The Story We Weren't Allowed to Air
by Jane Akre
The truth is, only Monsanto really knows how many U.S. farmers are presently using their recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). The company persistently refuses to release sales figures but claims it has now become the largest-selling dairy animal drug in America. The chemical giant's secretive operations were part of what made the story of rBGH such a compelling one for me to explore as an investigative reporter.
In late 1996, my husband Steve Wilson and I were hired as investigative journalists for the Fox-owned television station in Tampa, Florida. Looking for projects to pursue, I soon learned that millions of Americans and their children who consume milk from rBGH-treated cows have unwittingly become participants in what amounts to a giant public health experiment.
Despite promises from grocers that they would not buy rBGH milk "until it gains widespread acceptance," I discovered and carefully documented how those promises were quietly broken immediately after they were made three years earlier. I also learned that health concerns raised by scientists around the world have never been settled, and indeed, the product has been outlawed or shunned in every other major industrialized country on the planet.
Clearly, there is not "widespread acceptance" of rBGH, not in 1996 when I began my research, and not today. By any standard, it was a solid story, but little did I know that it would become the last story of my 19-year broadcast journalism career and the heart of a dispute that could nearly destroy me and my family.
Even if you ask directly, "How much of your milk comes from cows injected with an artificial growth hormone?" We discovered that you are still likely to be misled or lied to today.
Steve helped me gather and produce a TV report based on the information we discovered. The investigation began with random visits to seven farms to determine whether and how widely rBGH was being used in Florida. I confirmed its use at every one of the seven farms I visited, and then I discovered what amounted to an ingenious public relations campaign that seemed to have succeeded in keeping consumers in the dark....
~ ~ ~
Who Is the Dairy Coalition?
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
Created by the PR and lobby firm of Capitoline/ MS&L with funding from the National Milk Producers Federation, the Dairy Coalition is composed of business, government and non-profit groups, including university researchers funded by Monsanto as well as other carefully selected "third party" experts.
Dick Weiss, director of the Dairy Coalition, now works with former Monsanto rBGH lobbyist Carol Tucker Foreman at the Consumer Federation of America.
Dairy Coalition participants include:
The International Food Information Council, which calls itself "a non-profit organization that disseminates sound, scientific information on food safety and nutrition to journalists, health professionals, government officials and consumers."
In reality, IFIC is a public relations arm of the food and beverage industries, which provide the bulk of its funding. Its staff members hail from industry groups such as the Sugar Association and the National Soft Drink Association, and it has repeatedly led the defense for controversial food additives including monosodium glutamate, aspartame (Nutrasweet), food dyes, and olestra.
The American Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful conservative lobby behind the movement to pass food disparagement laws like the one under which Oprah Winfrey was sued in Texas.
The American Dietetic Association, a national association of registered dietitians that works closely with IFIC and hauls in large sums of money advocating for the food industry. Its stated mission is to "improve the health of the public," but with 15 percent of its budget--more than $3 million--coming from food companies and trade groups, it has learned not to bite the hand that feeds it.
"They never criticize the food industry," says Joan Gussow, a former head of the nutrition education program at Teachers College at Columbia University.
The ADA's website even contains a series of "fact sheets" about various food products, sponsored by the same corporations that make them (Monsanto for biotechnology; Procter & Gamble for olestra; Ajinomoto for MSG; the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers for fats and oils).
The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, representing the top executive of every department of agriculture in all 50 states.
The Grocery Manufacturers of America, whose member companies account for more than $460 billion in sales annually. GMA itself is a lobbying powerhouse in Washington, spending $1.4 million for that purpose in 1998 and currently-funding a multi-million-dollar PR campaign for genetically engineered foods. *
The Food Marketing Institute, a trade association of food retailers and wholesalers, whose grocery store members represent three fourths of grocery sales in the United States.
_________________________________________
PR Watch is a publication of the Center for Media & Democracy 520 University Avenue, Suite 310 Madison, WI 53703 phone: (608) 260-9713 fax: 608-260-9714 email: editor@prwatch.org
* * * * *
Catbird Note:
I see that some food companies are now labeling their products "NO GMO" (Genetically Modified Organisms). From now on, my motto when shopping for birdseed is going to be:
"JUST SAY NO TO GMO!"
How about YOU?
* * * * *
FOR A CLOSER LOOK AT SOME OF THESE BIOGENETIC BIRDS, AND THEIR NESTS, POINT YOUR FIELD GLASSES DIRECTLY BELOW!
o o o
oo
o
Ajinomoto Inc. - From Hoover's Online:
"Essence of flavor" is the literal translation of "ajinomoto," which is also a generic term for monosodium glutamate (MSG)and the name of Japan's largest producer of seasonings.
Founded in 1888 to harvest iodine from seaweed, Ajinomoto is a top producer of amino and nucleic acids used in sweeteners, nutritional supplements, and animal feeds. It also makes foodstuffs (edible oils, frozen foods, and Knorr soups in Japan) and beverages.
Ajinomoto created the production technology for NutraSweet. Ajinomoto also markets NutraSweet in Europe.
The company operates in more than 20 countries and has more than 100 manufacturing plants worldwide.
Ajinomoto has been assessed a $6 million fine for price fixing in the US.
* * *
From The Informant, by Kurt Eichenwald: . . .
They started the tour in the upstairs lab, where a handful of tiny flasks were being automatically shaken. .... The irony was that those tiny cells of bacteria were the multimillion dollar heart of this giant operation. They were Archer Daniel Midland's proprietary biological secret that had allowed the company to break Japan's control of the business. . . .
The group headed out onto the plant floor, then down a metal staircase. . . .
Mimoto, already behind the rest of the group, slowed his pace. He waited until he felt sure that no one was looking. Quickly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, removing the moist handkerchief inside. He placed the handkerchief on the staircase banister, rubbing it as he walked down the steps. Before anyone noticed, he slipped the handkerchief back into the bag, sealed it, and casually placed it back in his pocket.
Mimoto knew that the multimillion-dollar bacteria used by ADM to produce its lysine was growing everywhere in this plant, even places where it could not be seen. He could only hope that, with the handkerchief, he had successfully stolen a sample of it for Ajinomoto. . . .
* * *
Former Ajinomoto exec charged with price fixing
WASHINGTON, Aug 23, 2001 (Reuters) - A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted a former executive with Japanese food additive maker Ajinomoto Co. Inc. on price-fixing charges, the U.S. Justice Department said.
The indictment, handed down in Dallas, charged that Tamon Tanabe, a former associate general manager, was part of a worldwide conspiracy between 1994 and 1996 to fix the price of nucleotides, a flavor enhancer found in soups, sauces, spices and other foods, the government said.
The charges against Tanabe are part of an "ongoing" antitrust investigation and carry a maximum fine of $350,000 and three years in prison, the department said.
It is likely that the Justice Department has called a temporary halt to the pronouncement of the sentence on the lysine case, until its investigations are over with the flavoring additive case. In the lysine case, Kyowa Hakko Kogyo, which had formed a cartel with Ajinomoto and also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a fine of US$10 million in October 1999. This leads one to think that there must be some good reason why the Justice Department requested twice for postponement of a sentence to Ajinomoto.
A plea is accepted only if the accused company confesses all about the cartel and makes a vow that it will never do the same thing again. If indeed Ajinomoto did form a flavoring additive cartel, the company may be punished severely as a malicious criminal that deceived the Justice Department. Its fine on the lysine cartel will be made much higher, followed by another heavy fine on the flavoring additive cartel and possibly an imprisonment of those who played significant roles.
Based on a thorough investigation that it has conducted on its own, Ajinomoto asserts that no cartel had been formed as far as flavoring additives are concerned and that the company plans to respond to the civil actions taken against it. Ajinomoto says that neither the headquarters in Japan nor the U.S. subsidiary has been investigated by the Justice Department and that the company is more than willing to cooperate to do away with the cartel suspicion, should an investigation request be made.
Even if this may be the fact, Ajinomoto's U.S. business will continue to be in the gray zone until the final sentence has been pronounced.
See also: Archer Daniels Midland ; G.D. Searle
Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld - One of the largest nests of Lobbyists in the world.
In 1998, this firm declared total lobbying income of $11,800,000. Among their clients are the likes of Alliance of American Insurers; America Online; American Express; American Financial Group; Apollo Advisers; AT&T; Biotechnology Industry Organization; Boeing Co.; Capital Gaming International; CBS Corp; Citigroup; Korean International Trade Assn; Miller & Chevalier; National Hockey League; Pfizer; PG&E Corp; Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America; Philip Morris; Pohang Iron & Steel; Samsung Electronics; Sri Lanka Apparel Exporters Assn; Time Warner; and Warner-Lambert, just to mention a few. . . .
For poop on the connections between Akin, Gump, Osama bin Laden and the Bush Gang, GO TO > > > Thorns in the Rose Garden
For poop on Lobbyists, GO TO > > > Birds in the Lobby
Archer Daniels Midland - The global giant food company that seems to be trying to bring the "Jack and the Beanstalk"tale to reality.
From The Informant, by Kurt Eichenwald: . . .
The large gray van, its windows tinted to block the glances of the curious, pulled away from the Decatur airport, heading toward Route 105. Inside, four foreign visitors watched as images of the modest town came into view. ... The vast fields of corn that could be seen from the air were no longer visible, replaced instead by an entanglement of industrial plants and office buildings. . . .
In the last few months alone, this road had been traveled by Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, and by Dan Quayle, the American vice president. Those men, like leaders before them, had been drawn to this out-of-the-way place in the center of American largely by one company and often by one man: Archer Daniels Midland and its influential chairman, Dwayne Andreas.
Few Americans were familiar with who Andreas was or what he did. But among the world's moneyed and powerful, he and his grain processing company were known well. In Washington, anyone who mattered was acquainted with Andreas-or more likely, with his money.
For decades, he had been one of the country's foremost political contributors, heaping cash almost indiscriminately on Democrats and Republicans-this year alone, Andreas money would be used by both George Bush and Bill Clinton in their battle for the presidency....
For much more, GO TO > > > The Archer-Daniels-Midland Monsters
Recommended Reading: The Informant; Rats in the Grain
Aventis - From InMotion Magazine:
"... splicing foreign proteins into common food products, proteins which in most cases humans have never eaten before, can set off dangerous food allergies - with symptoms ranging from fever, rashes, and diarrhea to anaphylactic shock and sudden death."
~ ~ ~
StarLink: More Bad News
for Biotech
By Ronnie Cummins
Little Marais, Minnesota
Quotes of the Month:
"Agricultural biotechnology will find a supporter occupying the White House next year, regardless of which candidate wins the election in November..."
- Monsanto's newsletter www.monsanto.com -10/06/00
~ ~ ~
"The [StarLink corn] protein, known as Cry9C and not found in other crops that are genetically modified, is safe for animals but may trigger allergic reactions in humans, including fever, rashes or diarrhea, according to government scientists."
- Washington Post, "Corn Woes Prompt Kellogg to Shut Down Plant" -10/21/00
~ ~ ~
"I think they ought to leave nature alone. There is a reason food grows like it does.''
- A consumer, Krista Beddo, shopping in a supermarket near Monsanto's headquarters in St. Louis, Associated Press, "Concern Surfaces Over Taco Recall" - 10/25/00
~ ~ ~
THE GENE GIANTS SUFFERED A SERIOUS SETBACK ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2000, when the Genetically Engineered Food Alert (GEFA) coalition www.gefoodalert.org revealed that an illegal, likely allergenic variety (Cry9C) of genetically engineered (GE) corn called StarLink had been detected in a major U.S. consumer food product - KRAFT taco shells.
The GE Food Alert Coalition, which tested the taco shells and broke the news about StarLink, is made up of seven U.S. groups, Friends of the Earth, Organic Consumers Association, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, National Environmental Trust, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
The StarLink scandal made headlines, generated thousands of news articles and TV clips, and brought home the realization to American consumers, that the nation's supermarkets are filled with an extensive inventory of untested, unlabeled, genetically engineered foods.
In 1998 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had approved the commercial cultivation of StarLink - corn spliced with a powerful Bt toxin (bacillus thuringiensis). Developed by a subsidiary of the French-German biotech conglomerate Aventis, StarLink was approved only for animal feed because of fears that this controversial Cry9C variety (50 to100 times more potent than other Bt-spliced varieties) could set off food allergies in humans.
Critics of GE food have warned for years that splicing foreign proteins into common food products, proteins which in most cases humans have never eaten before, can set off dangerous food allergies-with symptoms ranging from fever, rashes, and diarrhea to anaphylactic shock and sudden death.
The FDA admits that eight percent of all US children are now plagued by food allergies, and that the situation is growing worse. Nutritionists warn of a suspected link between food allergies and asthma. Even the staid New England Journal of Medicine warned in its March 14, 1996 issue that unlabeled genetically engineered foods are "uncertain, unpredictable, and untestable."
In 1996, a gene-altered soybean spliced with Brazil nut DNA patented by what is now Dupont's seed subsidiary, Pioneer Hi-Bred, was pulled off the market before commercialization after researchers learned that it could set off a deadly allergy in humans.
Even after this near-disaster, Plant Genetic Systems, the developer of StarLink corn (PGS was later bought out by Aventis), apparently continued gene-splicing Brazil Nut DNA into rapeseed, potatoes, tobacco, beans, and peas in European field tests in the open environment. (See Plant Molecular Biology (1998) 37:829-838.)
Denials - Then Mass Recalls
The biotech industry, Kraft/Phillip Morris, and the EPA at first tried to deny the validity of the GEFA lab tests, but within days public pressure forced Kraft, the largest food corporation in America, to recall 2.5 million boxes of the corn tacos.
This action was followed by a halt of sales of Cry9C seeds by Aventis on Sept. 26, and a formal recall order issued by the USDA on Oct. 9 for all 350,000 acres of StarLink corn planted across the US.
GEFA then struck again and forced further recalls (Safeway corn taco shells, Mission Foods corn products, Western Familybrand corn tacos) by announcing on Oct. 11 and Oct. 25 that StarLink corn had been detected in other brand-name products being sold in thousands of supermarkets. In the wake of the StarLink crisis, some of the largest US food and animal feed processors, Kellogg, ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland, and Tyson, either temporarily closed their grain mills or announced mandatory testing for Cry9C corn.
Meanwhile, the White House sent emergency teams to Japan and Europe, trying to reassure major US trading partners that the StarLink controversy would be kept under control.
By the end of October, consumer confidence in the safety of GE foods was severely shaken. Thousands of farmers and grain elevator operators expressed anger at Aventis and the biotech industry.
The state Attorney General's office in Iowa criticized Aventis and seed dealers for not telling farmers to keep StarLink out of the human food chain.
As one Iowa grain elevator operator told the Washington Post on Oct. 25, "I think we're just hitting the tip of the iceberg here. We just don't know what's in those elevators, and when we start letting this stuff go and it's tested, it's going to get worse."
StarLink Hits the Fan
Aventis, Kraft, Safeway, Mission Foods, Western Family, Shaw's, Food Lion, Randalls, Kroger, Albertson's, H.E.B., and scores of other food companies and supermarket chains (not to mention grain elevators and farmers) have begun totaling up several hundred million dollars in losses. Consumers claiming to have been poisoned by StarLink corn products filed a multi-million dollar class-action suit in Chicago. Kraft and a number of supermarket chains have voiced dissatisfaction with the lack of oversight of GE crops by US regulatory agencies.
The EPA is caught between a rock and a hard place: fending off pressure by the biotech industry to reverse itself and declare that Cry9C corn is safe for humans, and on the other hand, resisting pressure from public interest groups to take all of the nation's Bt crops-corn, cotton, potatoes, and soybeans-off the market because of their evermore obvious hazards.
Meanwhile, America's overseas allies are trying to figure out what to do about the growing demand on the part of consumers in their own countries to close the door on billions of dollars of GE-tainted US agricultural imports.
The US announcement on Oct. 27 that they would let Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, ConAgra and other grain exporters ship StarLink-contaminated corn to international markets only made matters worse. In effect the grain cartel and the White House were telling America's best overseas customers: Here, take this contaminated corn. Americans are refusing to eat this stuff. Tyson Foods, the largest poultry producer in the US, won't even feed it to their chickens, but you can eat it.
The fallout and collateral damage from the StarLink scandal will likely continue. As the New York Times stated Oct. 17,Aventis may be hit with a barrage of lawsuits: "Just what farmers knew and when they knew it could end up playing a role in lawsuits growing out of the affair, according to lawyers who handle agriculture cases. Aventis and the seed companies might have a hard time fending off liability for the expenses of farmers, grain elevators, millers and food companies in sorting out the mess if they did not do enough to head off foreseeable risks that mixing would occur."
The appalling lack of US government regulation and the greed of so-called Life Science corporations to rush untested, and in this case, likely dangerous products to market have now become obvious, even in the heartland of agbiotech, the United States.
Polls taken before the StarLink scandal broke showed that the majority (51% in a poll by Angus Reid) of Americans and Canadians (60% in a poll by Unilever) were already opposed to genetically engineered foods, while an overwhelming majority (80-94%) support mandatory labeling, mainly so that they can avoid buying these controversial foods.
U.S. farmers, and even a number of large food corporations, have already begun cutting back on their use of GE seeds or food ingredients, as reported previously in BioDemocracy News #29 ( www.purefood.org ).
While 33% of U.S. corn acreage was GE last year, this year it fell to 19.5%. Whether or not the StarLink debacle represents a mortal blow to the first generation of GE foods and crops remains to be seen. Certainly a review of recent global developments indicates that the crisis of credibility surrounding genetically engineered foods is steadily increasing.
FDA - No Labeling, No Safety Testing
The U.S. government's "no labeling" and "no safety testing" policy has become a serious liability and source of controversy.
The Center for Food Safety and other public interest groups filed a major lawsuit in 1998 in U.S. Federal Court to take GE foods and crops off the market. On October 2, the lawsuit was headed off by the FDA, but only by admitting in court that they actually have had no real policy in place on genetically engineered foods and crops since 1992. In effect, all so-called "regulation" up until now has been completely voluntary on the part of Monsanto, Aventis, and the rest of the biotech industry.
Commenting on the Oct. 2 decision, Center for Food Safety attorney Andrew Kimbrell stated:
"This court decision means that for almost a decade these novel foods have gone virtually unregulated in the United States. American consumers have been used as unknowing guinea pigs..."
Inside sources report that the FDA has postponed publishing new proposed regulations on genetically engineered foods, at least until after the November elections. In the aftermath of the StarLink controversy, the FDA understands that its forthcoming proposed regulations (no mandatory labeling, no mandatory safety testing, no required liability insurance) will likely set off a huge public backlash during the legally required public comment period.
But federal officials and the Gene Giants are caught in a terrible bind. If they do what most of the public wants and require mandatory pre-market safety testing and labeling, leading food corporations and supermarkets will do what they are already doing in Europe and Asia, that is remove GE foods and ingredients from their brand-name products. Stores won't sell products branded with the "skull and crossbones" of the GE label, and farmers will be very reluctant to grow these crops.
On the other hand if the FDA, USDA, and EPA continue to do the bidding of the biotechnology industry, they risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. export sales, not to mention the political risks of provoking the ire of U.S. consumers, who are now apparently awakening to the GE food controversy with a vengeance.
International Fallout
On the international front, the leading producers of genetically engineered crops, the U.S. (74% of all GE crops), Canada (10% of all GE crops), and Argentina (15%), face a similar dilemma. If they try to use the hammer of economic sanctions from theWorld Trade Organization to force Frankenfoods down the throats of the WTO's other 131 nation-state members, they risk provoking a trade war and possibly even a meltdown of the entire global "Free Trade" system.
If they don't use the police and enforcement power of the WTO, however, more and more countries are going to make it harder and harder for untested and unlabeled GE products to get into their countries. For example:
Europe, which has not approved a new GE crop since April 1998, told the US on Oct. 11 according to the Bureau of National Affairs journal, "that the only way the European Union's de facto moratorium on new GM (genetically modified) seeds is likely to be lifted is for U.S. farmers to be required to segregate genetically modified crops from those grown from traditional seeds..."
Meanwhile new human health fears over antibiotic resistance genes in GE cattle feeds are prompting Europe's leading food producers and supermarket chains to ban GE animal feeds in their meat and dairy production. Recently a government advisory board in Britain, the Advisory Committee on Animal Feeding Stuffs, admitted that antibiotic resistant marker genes found in genetically engineered foods and animal feeds may be able to transfer antibiotic resistance to the bacteria in animals' guts, giving rise to dangerous pathogens in humans that can't be killed by traditional antibiotics.
German scientists earlier this year-in a story widely reported across Europe-found that antibiotic resistant genes from GE rapeseed plants were combining with bacteria in the stomachs and intestines of bees. BBC reported on Oct. 6 that the UK's major grocery chains, Iceland, Sainsbury, Waitrose, Marks & Spencer's, and Asda are all removing GE ingredients from animal feed.
A recent UK poll commissioned by Friends of the Earth found 63% of British shoppers wanting supermarkets to drop GM ingredients from animal feeds. As reported in BioDemocracy News #29, the European Commission and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are now both calling for mandatory labeling of animal feeds, a move that analysts predict will all but kill non-segregated, GE-tainted US grain exports to Europe and Asia....
Cargill Segregating
Cargill, the world's largest grain company, announced in September that they are expanding their contract production and marketing of non-genetically engineered corn, and will strictly segregate these varieties at their processing plants in Paris, Illinois, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Liverpool, England.
As Cropchoice News reported Sept. 29, "Cargill's latest parlay into non-GMO comes at time when it and other big grain processors continue to downplay the demand for non-biotech grain. But like ADM and ConAgra, Cargill is making moves into the non-GMO market even as they suggest it is unimportant."
Cargill's shift reaffirms the conclusion of a recent study carried out by professor David Bullock at the University of Illinois which found that U.S. grain handlers can efficiently and economically segregate GE and non-GE grain varieties by simply designating specific grain elevators, grain processing plants, and transportation facilities as either GE or non-GE.
Government officials in Taiwan announced Oct. 17 that they will follow the lead of other Asian and Pacific countries and require mandatory labeling of food with genetically engineered ingredients. According to officials, labeling requirements will come into force in 2001-with similar measures being implemented in South Korea and Japan.
Taiwan is a major importer of U.S. grains, importing over 4.5 million metric tons of corn last year. According to Cropchoice News, "The government's decision is in response to intense pressure and follows publication of a Gallup poll in which 74% of Taiwanese said they expected the government to require labels on GMO food."
According to Reuters news agency, Uni-Food Enterprises, Taiwan's largest food company, reacted to the news by promising to comply with the labeling requirements and move toward using non-genetically engineered ingredients. Uni-Food Enterprises, with $2.6 billion in annual sales, produces animal feeds, dairy products, frozen foods, instant noodles, and soft drinks.
Japan Says No Thanks
According to an Associated Press story Oct. 25, Japanese authorities have warned the United States not to export StarLinkcorn to Japan. Government officials were embarrassed after a public interest group, the Consumers Union of Japan, announced in Tokyo that it had found traces of StarLink corn in snack foods sold in Japanese stores as well as in imported animal feed.
StarLink corn is prohibited in both human and animal feed in Japan. An earlier AP story on Oct. 24 reported that an entire 55,000 ton shipload of US corn destined for Japan was rejected after testing positive for StarLink, "sending shock waves through importers in Japan as well as other Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan."
According to the AP "Japan imports about 60 percent of its food, much of it from the United States. In 1999, Japan imported 15.9 million tons of corn from the United States, including 10.8 million tons for animal feed, the Foreign Ministry said. The remaining 5.1 million tons were for food, mostly for corn starch."
Korea imports about eight million tons of corn per year from the US. The Consumers Union of Japan and allied consumer groups in South Korea are calling for a moratorium on the importation of all GE foods into their countries. In a recent poll 82% of Japanese consumers said they were opposed to genetically engineered food - the highest level of resistance in the world.
Worried officials from the U.S. Grains Council and the National Corn Growers Association, two major agribusiness trade association groups, rushed to Tokyo in late September to outline industry plans to channel StarLink into "approved markets" and keep it out of shipments to Japan.
The White House also dispatched a trade delegation to Europe. According to www.AgWeb.com , an "emergency meeting" took place in Washington on Oct. 6 with agribusiness representatives meeting with high officials from the Clinton and Gore administration. A National Corn Growers Association official expressed the hope at this meeting that Japan would soon approve StarLink for animal feed, but after the recent developments in Japan, this scenario appears unlikely.
Latin Fallout
The StarLink scandal has spread into Mexico and Latin America as well, with TV coverage by networks such as Telemundo, Univision, and CNN. According to Reuters, Mexico Greenpeace protesters on Oct. 11 "wearing white overalls and mime-like white masks entered an upscale Mexico City supermarket and boldly labeled mainstream corn flour products that contain genetically modified corn with stickers bearing a giant "X," for "X-perimental."
Corn flour is the main ingredient in tortillas, Mexico's most important food product. Greenpeace also announced in October that 450 tortilla factories across Mexico will use only locally produced (non-GE) corn in their products.
Mexico is the world center of biodiversity for corn, with 25,000 varieties found in the country. Environmentalists warn that pollen and "genetic pollution" from genetically engineered corn plants could cause irreparable harm to Mexico's native corn varieties. Mexico is also the winter home for Monarch butterflies, who migrate south from Canada and the United States. An important study at Cornell University in 1999 found that the pollen from Bt corn kills Monarch butterflies.
According to a report posted by UK geneticist Mae-Wan Ho on the internet Oct. 18, Argentina, the second largest producer of genetically engineered crops in the world after the United States, "is having second thoughts as the world market [for GE soybeans and corn] collapses.
This was the message conveyed by both the Environment Minister Ruben Dario Patrouilleauz, who headed the Argentinean delegation to the Biosafety Protocol Conference in Montreal, and the Director General of Cultural Affairs, Raul Alfredo Estrado Oyuela. Both spoke at a special Parliamentary debate on agricultural biotechnology in La Plata, Federal Province of Buenos Aires, on Sept. 26."
Monsanto has been very successful thus far in getting 84% of Argentina's soybean farmers to plant GE (Roundup Ready)soybeans. This may soon change however as EU markets for Argentina's processed oils and animal feed begin to close down, and as EU and Asian markets for Brazilian soybeans (where GE soya is illegal) continue to rapidly expand.
Scientific Warning
On the scientific front, the StarLink controversy has shined the spotlight once again on the hazards of Bt-spliced crops in general, not just the Cry9C variety.
In dramatic testimony presented to the EPA Oct. 20, a highly regarded international expert, Dr. Michael Hansen of theConsumers Union, pointed out that:
(1) The EPA has ignored an EPA-funded study that shows that Bt toxins have induced signs of allergenicity in agricultural field workers, as well as an additional study indicating allergenicity in lab rats;
(2) the EPA has failed to require tests of all Bt crops for allergenicity using the blood serum and chemical reagents from these earlier studies-even though these tests could be done quickly with little expense;
(3) the EPA have failed to carry out adequate safety tests for StarLink or any of the other Bt crops which they have approved;
(4) government "acute toxicity" protocols are based on the erroneous scientific assumption that Bt toxins generated by gene-spliced plants in the field are identical to Bt toxins produced by bacteria in the laboratory; and
(5) the government continues to downplay the potential hazards of antibiotic resistant marker (ARM) genes-found in Bt crops and all genetically engineered foods-even though recent studies underline that ARM genes have the ability to transfer antibiotic resistance to soil bacteria, bees, mammals, and other organisms, including humans.
As Hansen reminded the EPA in May 1999, the British Medical Association, which represents some 85% of the doctors in Britain, released a report calling, in part, for a prohibition on the use of antibiotic resistance marker genes in genetically engineered plants. . . .
As Larry Bohlen of Friends of the Earth stated in a press release Oct. 20, "The EPA should not allow Bt corn to be planted next year unless they can assure mill workers, farmers and rural residents that they will not develop allergies and respiratory problems. Farmers could be affected and not even know the reason why due to the EPA's failure to test for health impacts."
In a related scientific development, researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that Bt corn does indeed pose a major hazard to Monarch butterflies, since Monarchs are found in concentrated numbers in and around milkweed plants in cornfields throughout the corn growing season.
Researchers were surprised to find, according to an Oct. 25 article in the Los Angeles Times, "just as many" Monarchs were breeding and feeding within cornfields as in nonagricultural sites. In other words, millions of Monarch butterflies throughout the Midwest corn belt are feeding on their only food source, milkweed plants, just at the same time that Bt corn plants are shedding their toxic pollen, pollen which lab and field tests have conclusively shown are poisonous to the butterflies.
The biotech industry has worked overtime in the past year trying to maintain that Bt pollen poses insignificant risks to Monarch butterflies. Besides the Bt threat, scientists have warned that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, sprayed on GE soybeans and other crops, kills off the Monarch caterpillar's sole food source, the milkweed plant.
Critics have pointed out that not only is Bt killing Monarchs, but that it is also killing beneficial soil microorganisms and thereby damaging the entire soil food web; as well as killing beneficial insects such as lacewings and ladybugs. Scientists also warn that bees and birds are likely being harmed by eating insects that have ingested the Bt toxin.
In addition, organic farmers, 2/3 of whom in the United States use a non-genetically engineered form of Bt spray as an emergency pest management tool, have pointed out that crop pests (beetles, boll worms, corn borers) will inevitably develop resistance to widely cultivated Bt-spliced crops, creating superpests that will overwhelm organic farmers and make organic agriculture more difficult, if not impossible.
For all of these reasons, Greenpeace, the Center for Food Safety, and a broad coalition of public interest groups-including the Organic Consumers Association -- are preparing litigation to have all genetically engineered Bt crops taken off the market.
Finally, on another scientific note, even the pro-biotech New Scientist magazine Oct. 7 (UK) pointed out what has now become painfully obvious: if biotech companies and the FDA are unable to keep an unapproved variety like StarLink out of the human food chain and contained in restricted farm plots, what are they going to do once the next generation of bio-pharm plants begin to be commercialized, plants containing vaccines and pharmaceutical drugs, crops that could harm and poison unsuspecting consumers?
As the magazine concluded, "We can't ignore the taco fiasco... Why was it left to Friends of the Earth to commission the tests that found StarLink in taco shells? The food industry needs to get its act together before the new generation of modified plants arrives. Next time, the consequences could be serious."
For the moment the proponents of the Biotech Century seem to have survived the latest storm. Unlike the FDA's last recall of a genetically engineered product, the nutritional supplement l-Tryptophan, in 1989, which left in its wake 37 deaths and 5,000 injuries, there are no dead bodies of StarLink victims visible on the TV news, but the Frankenfoods controversy continues to grow.
The question seems to be no longer, if there will be a biotech Chernobyl, but only when....
Stayed tuned to BioDemocracy News and the OCA website www.purefood.org for further developments.
- InMotion Magazine http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/geff9.html
AviGenics - A U.S. biotech company that plans to re-engineer nature's chickens with US taxpayers' money.
New Super Chickens Fuel GM Food Row
A United States biotech company plans to genetically engineer a chicken with an extra-large breast which will yield more meat, and then insert a DNA tag to stop anyone breeding without permission.
If successful, AviGenics, based on the campus of the University of Georgia, would be one of the first to put GM meat on US supermarket shelves, opening up new tensions with Europe over genetic engineering in food.
AviGenics is already one of three US companies racing to turn poultry into drugs factories - adding human genes to create "transgenic" birds, which would then produce human proteins such as insulin in their egg whites.
AviGenics claims to have already created transgenic roosters that have passed on the human gene for a substance called alpha interferon, used to treat hepatitis and certain cancers.
The company hopes to use the same technology to create a chicken for everyday eating.
Instead of adding human genes to make birds lay drug-rich eggs, genes - not necessarily human - would be added, or chicken genes removed, to give the birds bigger breast muscles, faster growing rates or greater disease resistance.
To keep proprietorial control over these valuable new animals, AviGenics is working on a novel kind of trademark, a DNA sequence which would be introduced into the chicken's genes and handed on to the bird's offspring.
The chief executive of AviGenics, Mr Carl Marhaver, confirmed that his company was working to create genetically engineered and trademarked poultry for the dining table, but would not comment further.
AviGenics does not plan to raise and market GM chickens itself, but to make its new strains available to large, well established poultry breeders.
AviGenics says it can use DNA trademarks to control the proliferation of its chickens once they are sold to breeders.
Until now it had been thought that the first GM creatures likely to reach the consumer would be farmed fish, genetically engineered to grow faster and bigger or to survive in colder waters.
Concerns have already been voiced about the dangers of GM fish escaping and mating with their wild counterparts. But proponents of GM chickens could argue that centuries of selective breeding have already produced birds as different from their wild ancestors as a musclebound GM superchicken would be from one of today's standard broilers.
In the short term, AviGenics' investment in GM chickens for food seems to depend on its success or failure in producing GM chickens to make drugs.
Mr Marhaver said AviGenics had made great strides in making hens that laid alpha interferon eggs, and was expanding its flocks to gear up for commercial production of the drug, the annual market for which is worth about $US1.5 billion ($2.55million) alone...
Cargill, Inc. - From U.S. News and World Report, 4/13/98, by David Kaplan:
Yakuza, Inc.
U.S. investors are spending billions of dollars to snap up huge portfolios of bad loans from Japanese banks. What the local banks aren't telling their new customers is that behind much of their economic woes stand Japan's wily crime syndicates.
In the late 1980s, the yakuza became major players in the nation's wildly speculative real-estate market. Japanese crime experts now believe that as much as 40 percent of the banking industry's bad loans are tied to organized crime, representing a whopping $235 billion...
The gangs have played such havoc with efforts to clean up the banking mess that one former top Tokyo cop calls his nation's economic crisis a "yakuza recession."...
At the front lines of this crisis, suddenly, are American investors, among them a Who's Who of equity funds, investment banks, and real estate trusts..
Over the next few years, U.S. financial companies hope to spend more than $20 billion on the bad-loan portfolios, according to real-estate specialists at Ernst & Young.
Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and others are betting that their experience in liquidating property will pay off big in Japan. The firms are paying as little as 10 cents on the dollar for Japanese properties that range from downtown high-rises to abandoned golf-course developments.
But the risks for U.S. investors are substantial. Yakuza experts warn that Western capital has never before collided with Japanese organized crime in such a major way. . .
~ ~ ~
Risky business. . . . Investors may be unprepared for what awaits them. "You've got inexperienced guys from New York coming here who don't know what they're getting into," says an investment banker with years of experience in Tokyo. . . .
In November, a mysterious fire struck the home of a top executive at the Japan subsidiary of Cargill Inc., the U.S. argibusiness giant.
Cargill was among the first foreign firms to buy portfolios of bad loans. When the fire occurred, Cargill executives were suspicious of foul play.
For more, GO TO > > > The Vultures in Cargill; Yakuza Doodle Dandies
Carla A. Hills - Carla A. Hills is chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hills & Company, International Consultants. The firm provides advice to U.S. businesses on investment, trade, and risk assessment issues abroad, particularly in emerging market economies.
Hills currently serves as a Member of the Board of Directors for American International Group, Chevron, Lucent Technologies Inc., and Time Warner. She is a Co-Chair of the International Advisory board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; a Vice Chair of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and U.S. China Business Council; a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Asia Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for International Economics, and the America-China Society; and a Member of the Trilateral Commission and the Inter-American Dialogue.
Hills served as United States Trade Representative from 1989-1993. As a member of President Bush's Cabinet, Hills was the President's principal advisor on international trade policy. She was also the nation's chief trade negotiator, representing American interests in multilateral and bilateral trade negotiations throughout the world.
Hills was chairman of the Urban Institute from 1983 through 1988, and was a member of the Executive Committee of theAmerican Agenda, co-chaired by Presidents Ford and Carter. In 1981-1982, she served as Vice-Chairman of President Reagan's Commission on Housing and in 1985-1986 as a member of the President's Commission on Defense Management. Hills has been active in the American Bar Association, serving as Chairman of the Antitrust Section 1982-1983, and as Chairman of the Conference of Section Chairmen in 1983-1984.
From 1974 to 1975, she was Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice.
In 1975, Carla Hills, already serving as an assistant attorney general, was named by Republican President Gerald Ford asSecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, becoming the third woman in the US to hold a cabinet-level position. Her lack of relevant experience was somewhat controversial during the appointment hearings. She was succeeded, when Democratic President Jimmy Carter took office, by Patricia Robert Harris, in 1977.
In 1989, President George Bush appointed her to another cabinet level position, this time as US Trade Representative. (At the same time, Bush appointed Elizabeth Dole, the former Secretary of Transportation, as Secretary of Labor.)
A free trade advocate, Hills was the primary US negotiator of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Born Carla Anderson in Los Angeles, she graduated from Yale Law School in 1958 and married Roderick M. Hills the same year.
Among other offices, she was president of the National Association of Women Lawyers in 1965.
She was first offered an appointment as assistant US Attorney by Elliot L. Richardson in 1973, but he resigned shortly thereafter during the Watergate scandal. The offer was renewed by his successor, William B. Saxbe, in 1974.
From 1978 through 1989 she was active again in her profession of law; after 1993 she has worked as a consultant and public speaker. She was one of the founders of the Forum for International Policy.
Hills co-founded the Los Angeles law firm of Munger, Tolles & Hills, where she was a partner from 1962-1974. She was an Adjunct Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles Law School, teaching antitrust law, and co-authored theAntitrust Adviser, which was published by McGraw-Hill....
~ ~ ~
Concrete benefits key to selling
biotech products, says Hills
By Dan Zinkand, Iowa Farmer Today
MONTEREY, Calif. -- Biotechnology supporters must stress existing concrete benefits, not just potential developments, a consultant to the U.S. Grains Council says.
"We have a story to tell," said Carla Hills, a former U.S. trade representative said Feb. 14 at the annual meeting of the U.S. Grains Council.
"Probably consumers are not going to buy the advantages that come 10 years or a half a decade after infusing the rice with Vitamin A to stop river blindness.
"They may like it, but that may not be enough to give it to little Johnny at the kitchen table," Hills said.
"But when we talk about the fact that food is identical, and it stops chemical runoff that is polluting our water, there you have something I think you can sell. And it is a fact that there is a reduction in the use of chemicals.
Hence, less runoff, and I think that is a story that can sell in Europe . . . because they use far more chemicals than do we."
Hills' stress on reducing chemicals could prompt other problems for farmers, said Eagle Grove farmer Delmer Voss and a member of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.
"If we start emphasizing that, is the consumer then going to say, `Those farmers . . . are just killing us with all these chemicals.'
"Are we going to have another fire to put out, raising their fears about all the chemicals we are using, in addition to the genetically modified? That's the fear I have," Voss said.
Hills said she would shape the message somewhat differently.
"The fact of the matter is, if you farm, you have to use fertilizer and pesticides and the more you use, the more there is runoff," Hills said.
"The fact that you can use less has got to be a plus."
Hills suggested Voss and others consult with ag journalists to formulate a positive message on biotechnology.
"If a group of farm reporters would talk to the major magazines, they would listen to you," Hills said.
Neil Strong of Novartis Crop Protection said care must be used in touting the benefits of biotechnology, while at the same time "castigating another set of technologies which have been very effective in the past and will be needed in the future, along with biotechnology," Strong said.
If too much stress is placed on reducing pesticides as one of the benefits of biotechnology, consumers may not understand this intricate message and may take it as an "all or none kind of thing. And the environmental groups would certainly like to do that," Strong said.
Hills acknowledged what Strong said, but did not change her assessment.
"I don't think you can get an applause for a new technology unless you can talk about some of its benefits. You can't really talk about infusing grain with iron because that is not here today," Hills said.
"So we will have to think long and hard about why it is today we are putting on the market Bt corn."
Hills said environmentalists she talks to are quite interested that Bt corn could lessen the application of pesticides, which she said could run off.
"It's not for me to tell you how to get your message out, but you're not going to get a whole lot of applause if there is no message at all.
"You can just wait to have it happen, but I'm afraid the opposition has the bumper stickers printed, tickets to every biotechnology food conference that is scheduled and a whole lot of the government leaders already in their pocket," she said.
"We are on the right side of the issue. That is what is important. It isn't that we are trying to play a game of smoke and mirrors.
"We are on the right side of the issue. We just have to sharpen up our message."
Communication is key to developing consumer support for biotechnology, Hills said. If support is not built and progress on biotechnology stalls, then much-touted products such as rice with Vitamin A to prevent river blindness will not be developed and commercialized by the private sector, she added.
Bill Griffin, a North Carolina corn grower said housewives read labels, and educational efforts need to be directed toward them.
He said the consensus at a meeting in North Carolina was that "we probably went a little too fast with genetic engineering. We introduced with the public knowing it."
Griffin said he feared what would happen if someone who ate a food with a biotech crop ingredient became sick. Regardless of the source of the illness, the media would blame biotechnology, he noted.
"I don't think we, the people, who work with the feed grains realize how much the housewives read these labels and how concerned they are about genetic engineering," Griffin observed. "I'm a farmer, I say bring it to me."
Hills said food safety is a key point with biotech crops. She said she hasn't read any reports that biotech crops are unsafe or have any risk factors "and that story has to get out."
The public mood switches quite quickly, Hills said.
While the average person probably can cannot define a genetically modified product "it doesn't sound tasty. I think that we have to do a whole lot to try to explain what we are doing. We can't have it behind the green curtain," she said.
The credibility of European governments suffered from numerous food scandals, including the "mad cow" disease in Britain.
By contrast, the United States has independent and credible risk assessment of food, Hills said....
For more on Carla Hills, GO TO > > > Bureau of Indian Affairs; HUD; Vultures in The Nature Conservancy; The Peregrine Gallery; The U.S. Dept. of The Interior
Carol Tucker Foreman - Former Assistant Secretary for Food and Consumer Services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
From the internet:
DOWNSIDE LEGACY AT TWO DEGREES OF PRESIDENT CLINTON
SECTION: BREACH OF TRUST
SUBSECTION: MISC. SCANDALS
Revised 1/8/01
In an explosive argument at the end of the third day of Schaeffer and Williams' trial in U.S. District Court, prosecutors alleged that Tyson Foods Inc. persuaded former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy in 1993 to halt development of a food-safety policy that would cost the company more than $130 million.
The Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service previously required poultry known to be contaminated with bacteria-laden feces to be trimmed away and discarded but currently allows poultry processors (of which Tyson is the world's largest) to rinse the poultry in chlorinated water or cook it without washing. Bacteria found in fecal contamination, are estimated by government scientists to sicken more than 4 million people each year and cause more than 3,000 deaths.
The procedure change was approved by Carol Tucker Foreman, assistant secretary for Food and Consumer Services and sister of former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker.
Foreman now says the decision was a mistake, that the previous policy was ''a penalty that made the plants take greater care.''
* * *
June 2, 2000
Carol Tucker Foreman to
the Rescue of Biotech
Clinton Appoints Former Monsanto & Tobacco Lobbyist as "Consumer Representative" to Global Biotech Forum
by: John Stauber, managing editor, PR Watch
Its no surprise to me that the Clinton/Gore Whitehouse has appointed recent and long-time Monsanto biotech lobbyist Carol Tucker Foreman as the "consumer advocate" to the global Biotech Consultative Forum.
Some suspect that this has been long in the works, that the primary reason she left her incredibly lucrative corporate lobby firm to take her current position as food czar with the Consumer Federation of America was to use her corporate, political and public interest connections to pave the way for a resolution of the current trade impasse on genetically engineered foods.
The Clinton/Gore-led effort to rush GE foods onto the market has resulted in an economic and political train wreck internationally, and fixing this mess for the Democrats and the food and biotech industry requires someone of Foreman's skills, someone who has the incredible ability to sell herself inside the beltway as a "consumer advocate" while pulling in huge money as a biotech and food industry lobbyist.
Her old lobby firm, now called Heidepriem & Mager, has as some of its current clients American Home Products Corporation, Dow Chemical, SmithKline Beecham, Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories and Monsanto and Upjohn's parent company Pharmacia.
Foreman was the executive director of Consumer Federation of America before starting her corporate lobby career, and while a corporate lobbyist she headed up the board of the food-industry funded Public Voice organization..
When she moved back to CFA last year, Public Voice became part of CFA. In April I attended CFA's National Food Policy Conference in Washington, DC. Most of the participants came from the agribusiness and biotech industry, and the principal speaker was Gordon Conway of Rockefeller Foundation, one of Carol's current funders who is the driving force behind ending the impasse over marketing biotech foods.
Security for the event was provided by IFIC, the International Food Information Council, a scientific front group funded by the food industry. One of the CFA employees I met and spoke with was PR crisis management expert Dick Weiss, who I had not see in a decade. At that time he was paid by the National Dairy Board to head up their PR campaign on behalf of genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, or rBGH. . . .
CFA badly needs infusions of corporate and foundation cash, and folding Public Voice into its operation under Carol has delivered the money. For instance, CFA's National Food Policy Conference was "held in cooperation with the National Food Processors Association, with technical assistance from the International Food Information Council. Support the 2000 biotechnology component was provided by the American Feed Industry Association."
The American Feed Industry Association (AFIA) is a huge trade association and lobby group unknown to most Americans, but it is the group RESPONSIBLE FOR LAUNCHING AND COORDINATING THE CAMPAIGN TO PUT FOOD DISPARAGEMENT LAWS ON THE BOOKS.
I capitalize this because these laws are the single biggest and most successful assault on free speech in the US in the past decade, and are responsible for imposing self censorship on the media regarding food issues. For more information on these laws, under which Oprah and Howard Lyman were sued, see our book Mad Cow USA (Common Courage Press, 1997).
In short, AFIA hired the law firm of Olsson, Frank & Weeda, another "patron and sponsor" of the CFA conference to draft a model 'food disparagement law' which the American Farm Bureau Federation has lobbied into law in 13 states.
Other corporate "underwriters and benefactors" or "patrons and sponsors" (I guess it depends on how much cash they dumped on CFA) of the National Food Policy Conference were:
Food Marketing Institute, International Dairy Foods Association, International Food Information Council, Kraft Foods (owned by Philip Morris), National Food Processors Association, The Procter & Gamble Company, Archer Daniels Midland, Chocolate Manufacturers Association, General Mills Foundation, Hershey Foods Corporation, IBP, inc., McLeod, Watkinson & Miller (food industry lobbyists and lawyers), National Pork Producers Council, National Yogurt Association, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Olsson, Frank & Weeda law/lobby firm, Protein Technologies International, Tropicana andUnilever.
In short, Carol Tucker Foreman is best seen as type of political Frankenstein creature. She is a smart, aggressive, well connected, hardball lobbyist, who has managed to continue to cultivate her image as a "consumer advocate" by serving as a go-between with groups like Public Voice, CFA and their corporate benefactors.
Her brother replaced Clinton as Governor of Arkansas, until felony corruption forced him from office.
But her family and political credentials as a Democratic insider and friend of the Clinton/Gore administration run deep.
Does anyone doubt that after delivering the goods for the agribusiness and biotech industry on genetically engineered foods she won't be back lobbying for them directly? For that matter, who really knows what her current financial arrangements are with any of these corporations? Probably just Carol herself.
Perhaps this appointment will have a good effect. It might if it draws attention to the incredible corruption that has taken place inside the beltway among so-called consumer and public interest groups like CFA. These groups epitomize what is wrong with the public interest community - at the national level it has sold out to big money from special interests, and when push comes to shove it will follow the money.
Nobody in DC is better at pushing and shoving, or shoveling money, than Carol Tucker Foreman.
Yes, she is now a forceful advocate for labeling genetically engineered foods. But then, what would you expect? She HAS to be; that's what provides her credentials. Remember, the game here is to broker a deal, and the biotech/agribusiness industry has learned the hard way that it has made mistakes and has to eventually accept some level of labeling in order to get back on track.
But, has Carol changed from the corporate lobbyist she's been? Not at all. Her specialty is wearing many hats, and winning for her clients. Right now, that's CFA and its foundation and corporate funders.
A deal will be sought in the name of consumer and environmental protection, but protecting corporate interests and agricultural biotechnology will be the real bottom line.
- John Stauber, managing editor, PR Watch www.prwatch.org
Commodity Futures Trading Commission - From: The Buying of the President (1996 ed): . . .
Phil Gramm has also been criticized for mixing government business and campaign politics by using his Senate office staff to work on campaigns. . . . At least two different aides to Senator Gramm have written memos about how Gramm's wife, Wendy...should be used for his reelection bid. . . .
That is particularly interesting in light of the powerful position she held in Washington as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As the nation's leading regulator of futures contracts for all agricultural commodities, Wendy Gramm was under tight ethical constraints as to the degree and nature of her personal daily interaction with agribusiness interests. In other words, the chairwoman of the powerful federal regulatory agency overseeing agriculture commodities futures trading would be helping her U.S. senator husband raise campaign funds from the corporations and individuals she regulated. . . .
The CFTC oversees federal regulation of the nation's fourteen commodities and futures exchanges. At those exchanges, contracts to buy and sell a seemingly endless variety of commodities are traded: oil and gas, soybeans, cattle, pork belies, corn, precious metals, cocoa, lumber, cranberries, and sugar, to name but a few. The regulatory duties of the CFTC are aimed largely at ensuring fairness and stability at the nation's commodities exchanges.
One week after Bill Clinton won the presidential election it became clear that Wendy Gramm would be leaving the politically appointed CFTC post.
On November 16, 1992, nine energy companies wrote to the commission seeking to exempt energy derivative contracts, a business valued at $5 TRILLION a year, from federal regulation....
In response to the energy companies' request, Wendy Gramm set in motion the process that led to those energy derivative contracts, and other exotic financial transactions, being exempted from regulation. . . . A Center for Public Integrity investigation shows that of the nine companies that requested the exemption, seven had donated to Phil Gramm campaigns through PACs, company officers, or employees. . . .
Cumulatively, Gramm's campaigns had received $157,250 from the people who were asking his wife to exempt energy derivatives and the other transactions from regulation....
During Wendy Gramm's tenure with the commodities commission, Phil Gramm accepted $38,500 in commodity honoraria, according to his actual disclosure records. . . At the same time she was heading the commodities commission, he was on theSenate Banking committee. That means that Phil Gramm, too, had regulatory jurisdiction and oversight regarding commodities.
On July 24, 1990, Phil Gramm voted to kill an amendment that would have lowered the sugar price support from eighteen cents a pound to sixteen cents a pound. That was a potential conflict of interest because Gramm's disclosure show that at the time the couple owned between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in a sugar company named Castle and Cooke.
ConAgra, Inc. - From the Progressive Populist, by A.V. Krebs:
CONAGRA: An Unhealthy Choice
For Farmers, Workers, Consumers
and Environment?
ConAgra Inc., is the nation's second largest food manufacturer. It is the only major food company that operates across the food chain -- providing feed, fertilizers and chemicals to farmers and ranchers, trading meat and grain, and producing packaged foods for consumers.
Corporate agribusiness today, from seedling to supermarket, is dominated by such transnational corporate giants as Unilever, Nestle, Philip Morris, RJR Nabisco, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
In attempting to demonstrate the nearly complete control that corporations have now acquired over our everyday lives, theAlliance for Democracy, a fledgling two-year old national populist movement, believes that food and the process by which we obtain our food is the appropriate place to begin an effort to achieve both corporate responsibility and corporate accountability.
The Alliance for Democracy (AfD), in its effort in seeking to end large corporation's domination of our economy, our government, and our culture, seeing the corporation's role as illegitimate in a self-governing democracy, believes that the time is now to publicly dramatize the need for corporate responsibility and accountability.
In ConAgra the Alliance sees a corporation that clearly reflects not only the prototype of a modern transnational corporation, but also one which graphically illustrates the unhealthy prices that family farmers, workers, consumers, the environment and our communities are being required to pay to support such corporate behemoths. It believes the record shows that by many of its recent actions ConAgra can be considered antithetical to the common good....
For more, GO TO > > > ConAgra: Thieving Crows in the Cornfields; www.purefood.org
Donald J. Tyson - a/k/a "Chicken Man" - In his book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton , investigative reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:
I had been given comprehensive intelligence files from the Criminal Investigations Division of the Arkansas State Police, going back as far as the early 1970's . . . I was scarcely able to believe what I was seeing. Among the famous names of the Arkansas oligarchy that jumped out from page after page of criminal intelligence files was Don Tyson, the billionaire president of Tyson Foods and the avuncular patron of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. . . .
A gruff barrel-chested man with a cropped beard and a reputation for ruthless business practice, Don Tyson is one of the great characters of Arkansas. He presides over the biggest chicken processing operation in the world from his "Oval Office" -- a replica of the real one -- with dooor handles in the shape of eggs....
The family business, based in Springdale, has grown at an explosive rate since the 1960;s, swallowing up rival companies in a relentless quest for market share....
The documents I was looking at made me wonder about the origins of his liquidity. Here were files from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, marked DEA SENSITIVE, under the rubric of the "Donald TYSON Drug Trafficking Organization."
One was from the DEA office in Oklahoma City, dated December 14, 1982. It cited a confidential informant alleging that"TYSON smuggles cocaine from Colombia, South America inside race horses to Hot Springs, Arkansas."
It cited the investigation tracking number for Don J. Tyson, a/k/a "Chicken Man," as Nadis 470067.
A second document from the DEA office in Tucson, dated July 9, 1984, stated that "the Cooperating Individual had information concerning heroin, cocaine and marijuana trafficking in the States of Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri by the TYSON organization." The informant described a place called "THE BARN" which TYSON used as a "stash" location for large quantities of marijuana and cocaine.
"THE BARN" area is located between Springdale and Fayetteville, Arkansas, and from the outside the appearance of "THE BARN" looks run down. On the inside of "THE BARN" it is quite plush. . . .
~ ~ ~
A memo by the Criminal Investigative Section, dated March 22, 1976, states that Don Tyson "is an extremely wealthy man with much political influence and seems to be involved in most every kind of shady operation, especially narcotics, however, has to date gone without implication in any specific crime . . ."
The memo was triggered by a dispute between Tyson and the Teamsters Union over allegations of drug dealing and prostitution at a Teamsters-owned hotel leased by Tyson.
Two sets of documents refer to alleged hit men employed by Tyson to kill drug dealers who owed him money.
Another report alleged that Tyson was using his business plane to smuggle quart jars of methamphetamine. All told, it was a staggering portrait of a drug baron.
None of the allegations led to criminal charges, and it would soon become clear why. Police officers who tried to mount a case against Tyson were destroyed by their superiors in the State Police.
The first to try was Beverly "B.J." Weaver, then an undercover narcotics officer in Springdale. Working the streets and bars of northwest Arkansas, disguised as a deaf woman, she collected detailed intelligence on Tyson's alleged smuggling network. . . .
"There were loads going out with the chickens," she explained.
"They'd put the coke in the rectums of the chickens, live chickens. That's how they'd move it." . . .
As the allegations from her informants mounted, she requested the intelligence files on Don Tyson. That is when her problems began. Her colleagues in the Springdale office -- who she now believes were "on the take" from the Tyson machine -- put out the word that she was "not stable," that she had "flipped out." Then it got rough. "They started passing out my photo on the streets, which put my life in danger. I became paranoid. I didn't trust my phone line. There was nobody I could really trust." . . .
By 1987 her position was untenable. Her career in ruins, she resigned from the police and found a job as a security guard in the Bahamas. . . .
~ ~ ~
To Don Tyson, who has reportedly again become disenchanted with Clinton and is giving money to Bob Dole in the 1996 campaign, the business of politics has never been particularly complicated. It consists of "a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money . . . a world where every quid has its quo." . . .
See also: Tyson Foods
G. D. Searle - The pharmaceutical firm that introduced NutraSweet. Later taken over by Monsanto.
See also: Ajinomoto, Inc ; Monsanto
For more, GO TO > > > The NutraSweet Syndrome
Isomedix - From Corporate Predators: Clean Food or Irradiated Dirty Food? (12/8/97): The irradiation industry is betting that consumers will settle for the latter.
Earlier this month, in response to a petition filed by Isomedix, a New Jersey radiation firm, the Food and Drug administration (FDA) authorized the use of irradiation-- a process by which food is exposed to high levels of nuclear radiation-- for meat products including beef, lamb and pork. Irradiation is already permitted in the United States for poultry. Irradiation kills significant numbers of micro-organisms, such as e. coli.
Companies like Isomedix are hoping to ride the wave of justified public concern over outbreaks of e. coli and other food contaminants to overcome consumer resistance to the controversial irradiation process. Public opinion polls show three quarters of the population oppose irradiation and would refuse to eat irradiated food.
There are sound reasons underlying consumer resistance to irradiation.
First, although the FDA has approved the use of irradiation, there are serious uncertainties surrounding the safety of irradiated foods. "No long-term studies on the safety of eating irradiated beef have been conducted, and the effects on humans are unknown," notes Michael Colby, executive director of Food & Water, Inc., a Vermont-based food safety organization that is the leading opponent of food irradiation.
Second, irradiation kills "good" as well as "bad" bacteria. That means if beef becomes contaminated after irradiation, dangerous bacteria will be free to multiply without competition from harmless bacteria.
Third, irradiation fails to deal with the real food safety problem: unhealthy conditions on animal farms and in slaughterhouses and packing-houses.
In the last two decades, the meat and poultry industries have become tremendously concentrated, with each sector dominated by a handful of giants like ConAgra, Cargill, Perdue and Tyson. These companies buy animals raised on "factory farms," where the animals are confined to small spaces in which bacteria can easily spread.
The animals are transported to increasingly mechanized slaughterhouses and processing plants, where feces routinely spill or spray on meat, and chicken carcasses are dipped in cold water tanks contaminated with fecal material. Animals pass by workers on the corporate assembly lines at staggering speeds-- often too fast for the workers to maintain proper sanitation standards, or even to identify contaminants on meat or poultry.
Genuinely insuring a safe food supply requires addressing these conditions so that animals are raised, slaughtered and processed in sanitary conditions.
There are other reasons to reject irradiation. At existing irradiation facilities (which overwhelmingly sterilize products like medical equipment rather than food), there is already a disturbing record of worker overexposure to nuclear radiation and of improper disposal of radioactive waste....
Although it has urged the government not to permit irradiation, Food & Water's emphasis has been on directing consumer pressure to food suppliers-- from McDonald's to Hormel to supermarket chains-- extracting commitments that they will not sell irradiated food products....
The solution to the problem of dirty and contaminated meat and poultry is to clean up the beef, pork and poultry farms and the factories in which animals are slaughtered and processed-- not to expose the food to nuclear radiation. That's the message consumers must send to the beef, pork and poultry companies, supermarkets, restaurant chains and other big food distributors.
For more, GO TO > > > All God's Creatures ; Down on the Factory Farm
Mike Espy - From Boy Clinton : . . . Drug trafficking was linked to Arkansas throughout the 1980's, occasionally to Clinton's friends and supporters.
An investigator wrote in the minutes of a Resolution Trust Corporation meeting held on June 29, 1994, that [Dan] Lasater "may have been establishing depository accounts at Madison [Guaranty] and other financial institutions and laundering drug money through them via brokered deposits and bond issues."
Among the "other financial institutions" Lasater has been linked to is the Arkansas Development Finance Authority created by Governor Clinton.
In 1994 when Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy resigned owing to allegations that he was accepting gifts from the Arkansas poultry tycoon , Don Tyson, London's Sunday Telegraph published a story based on numerous state and federal police documents showing that Tyson was "under suspicion of drug dealing from the early 1970's until the late 1980's" by such diverse organizations as the Arkansas State Police and the DEA. No charges were ever filed. . . .
* * *
From Multinational Monitor: "10 Worst Corporations of 1997" . . . Tyson Foods, the Arkansas-based chicken company which symbolized corporate corruption of the political process through its illegal gifts to former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy.
Tyson pled guilty in December to paying illegal gratuities and agreed to pay $6 million in fines and court costs. . . .
See also: Tyson Foods
For more on Mike Espy, GO TO >>> A Flock of Donkeys
Monsanto - From Conscious Choice, May 1999:
FRANKENFOODS
by Liane Clorfene-Casten
Like a Celtic sea monster emerging from the depths of a brackish Scottish lake, the footprints of bio-engineered and sterile seeds populating the world have become the focus of international debates, lawsuits, and activist campaigns that will not disappear very soon. The bio- engineering story could become the agricultural issue of the next decade.
In the center of it all is multinational giant Monsanto, the biggest player in the field right now.
But Monsanto is not alone in its efforts to spread bio-engineered and sterile seeds across the globe. It is aided by the White House, the Department of Commerce, the Secretary of State, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshevsky and an economic policy that puts free trade and corporate control ahead of all other concerns...
For much, much more, GO TO > > > The Monsanto Monsters; The NutraSweet Syndrome
National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA )
December 12, 1998
NASA NEWS RELEASE: 98-250
Eight Alabama Researchers Receive
NASA Biotechnology Grants
NASA has selected 48 researchers -- eight of whom are from Huntsville and Birmingham -- to receive grants (a.k.a. US taxpayer dollar give-a-ways) totaling approximately $33 million to conduct biotechnology research that may lead to new medical technologies.
As part of NASA's Biotechnology Program, the 48 grant recipients will study protein crystallization and cell science. This research, managed by the Microgravity Research Program at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., may result in improvements in structure-based drug design, tissue engineering and biosensor development.
NASA's biotechnology research has contributed information to the understanding of many diseases, including AIDS, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, respiratory syncytial virus and hepatitis. NASA's cell growth experiments have led to new research models in cellular and molecular biology and new tissues for transplant operations.
During NASA's selection process, 165 research proposals were peer-reviewed by scientific and technical experts from academia, government and industry. Forty of the grants are to conduct ground-based research, while the remaining eight will work to refine and fly experiments in space aboard the International Space Station....
For more, GO TO > > > NASA...and the War on Truth!
Tyson Foods - In his remarkable book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton , investigative reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:
I had been given comprehensive intelligence files from the Criminal Investigations Division of the Arkansas State Police, going back as far as the early 1970's . . . I was scarcely able to believe what I was seeing. Among the famous names of the Arkansas oligarchy that jumped out from page after page of criminal intelligence files was Don Tyson, the billionaire president of Tyson Foods and the avuncular patron of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. . . .
The documents I was looking at made me wonder about the origins of his liquidity. Here were files from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, marked DEA SENSITIVE, under the rubric of the "Donald TYSON Drug Trafficking Organization."
One was from the DEA office in Oklahoma City, dated December 14, 1982. It cited a confidential informant alleging that "TYSON smuggles cocaine from Colombia, South America inside race horses to Hot Springs, Arkansas." . . .
A second document from the DEA office in Tucson, dated July 9, 1984, stated that "the Cooperating Individual had information concerning heroin, cocaine and marijuana trafficking in the States of Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri by the TYSON organization."
The informant described a place called "THE BARN" which TYSON used as a "stash" location for large quantities of marijuana and cocaine. . .
~ ~ ~
But the past is beginning to catch up with Don Tyson.
He has been named as an official target in the criminal probe by Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz, who was appointed to investigate bribery allegations against Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, who was later indicted. His chief lobbyist, Robert Greene, has been indicted for lying to investigators in the case. From small beginnings, the Smaltz investigation has widened into a full-scale probe of the Tyson business empire, provoking vehement accusations that it is a "politically motivated witch hunt."
The Espy affair is a textbook case of Arkansas mores penetrating the U.S. federal government. CBS News' 60 Minutesreported that Espy was flown to Arkansas to seek the blessing of Don Tyson before he was nominated to his cabinet post.
Once installed at the Agriculture Department, Espy proved to be a friend of the chicken industry.