It's on! Farmers begin suing Monsanto over genetic pollution

[coryhub]

It's on! Farmers begin suing Monsanto over genetic pollution!

Here's the article:

http://www.naturalnews.com/040625_lawsu ... ution.html

[Lesley]

It''s about time! The quicker the better!

[ObsessedMrFixit]

Oh, happy day!

[jgivens]

We can only make a difference where Monsanto is concerned if we all pitch in and cause a ruckus. Monsanto has gotten away for years with murder and it is time to hold them accountable. With the millions they have, it will be an uphill battle and they have not much to lose cuz they can keep reaching for barrels of money. Monsanto is just one of the corporations who run this country.

[ObsessedMrFixit]

Yeah, but if the farmer's lawyer is smart, he'll crowd-fund it if (when?) they need more money.

[gluten]

Hi, As the wind blows the dust accross the plains so does the genetic pollution travel with it. The mutations that take place naturally take generations and the body usually adapts to these changes. But when the mutations are rapid can and will our bodies adapt. Jon

[LindyLou]

That's a great idea MrFixIt! I would contribute!

[Zizzle]

There's a lot of GMO testing in Hawaii where my sister lives. I suppose they are trying to avoid contamination of mainland crops by taking over Hawaii with their experiments. The people there are just starting to organize. It's shameful.

[Zizzle]

Could Glyphosphate from Round-up be the/a cause of MC?? This article is very convincing, and includes new research from the very respected Stephanie Seneff.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... n=20130609

[tex]

Hi Zizzle,

You included the "magic words" to persuade me to read that article, namely, Stephanie Seneff.

While I wouldn't argue that the article has no merit, I'd like to point out that it contains at least several tactics often used by unscrupulous bloggers to provide what appears to be compelling evidence, when compelling evidence does not actually exist.

1. First off, Mercola's introductory sentence:

Their report, published in the journal Entropy1, argues that glyphosate residues, found in most commonly consumed foods in the Western diet courtesy of GE sugar, corn, soy and wheat, “enhance the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and toxins in the environment to disrupt normal body functions and induce disease.”

contains a lie by implication — GMO wheat seed has never been offered for sale for commercial production, anywhere in the world. Therefore any claim that GMO wheat is commonly consumed, would be a bald-faced lie. Of course, he was smart enough to carefully word his statement so that it only says that glyphosate residues are found in "most commonly consumed foods", and if it can be proven that any miniscule amounts from test plots have actually entered the food supply (as inferred by the recent discoveries in Oregon), then there is a trace of truth in his statement. The problem is that the way most readers will interpret the sentence is that GMO wheat is commonly consumed, and that is simply not true.

2.

She points out the clear correlations between increased glyphosate use over recent years (the result of genetically engineered crops causing weed resistance, necessitating ever-larger amounts to be used) and skyrocketing autism rates.

While that sounds very logical, in the real world it rarely happens. Many more acres of crops have been sprayed with glyphosate as the years have passed, but the amount used per acre has changed very little, if any. I'm not aware of anyone who is using significantly more glyphosate per acre now, than they were using 20 or 30 years ago. That means that the dosage to which the crop on the sprayed acres is exposed, is virtually unchanged. What has changed is the number of acres sprayed (but that's not what she said).

3. Dr. Swanson's graph of "Glyphosate and Autism" is not nearly as incriminating as it appears to be. We all know that total glyphosate usage has increased virtually every year since it was introduced. And we all know that more cases of autism have been diagnosed with each passing year (when I was a kid, autism existed, but very few cases were ever diagnosed, because few chose to pursue it). At any rate, since both curves are conveniently increasing at an almost linear rate, since about the mid-1990s, all that Dr. Swanson had to do was to choose the correct scale for each set of data in order to get a superbly-matched overlay that gives the illusion of an almost perfect match. It's all smoke and mirrors, based on an opportuistic selection of scales for the data used in the graph. Anyone who understands graphs, can easily do the same, with all sorts of data. What a crock. If Dr. Swanson had chosen to cut the scale for one of the sets of data in half, for example, then the data would have graphed so that the correlation would have appeared much weaker, and at a quarter scale, the correlation would have appeared quite weak. And after all, there's no cause and effect evidence here, just circumstantial evidence. She probably could have plotted cell phone usage against autism and found that it correlates almost as well as glyphosate usage. But that wouldn't have matched her agenda, now would it.

4.

At 13 ppm, GMO corn contains more than 18 times the “safe” level of glyphosate set by the EPA.

Really? If the FDA actually has set a "safe" level for glyphosate levels in corn, they're doing a good job of keeping it a secret from farmers and ranchers who grow corn and feed it to livestock. Those quotation marks around the word "safe" imply that such a standard does not actually exist. Mercola just loves to use "creative" writing practices for creating arbitrary standards where none exist.

Other than all the usual overreaching BS, it's an interesting article.

Tex