USDA green-lights field trials of Monsanto drought-resistant corn after admitting it performs no better than natural corn (NaturalNews) The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) does not even pretend to legitimately evaluate genetically-modified organisms (GMO) before approving them anymore, having recently green-lighted approval for a new variety of "drought-resistant" GM corn produced by Monsanto that admittedly grows no better under drought conditions than natural varieties do. According to the Washington Post, APHIS fast-tracked the corn, known as MON87460, without ever conducting an appropriate environmental risk analysis on the crop's efficacy, which includes determining whether or not the crop is even safe for humans or the environment. In fact, in accordance with the Obama Administration's new hands-off approach to regulating GMOs, APHIS decided to actually approve MON87460 even after a cursory evaluation of the data exposed it as a complete failure. "The reduced yield [trait] does not exceed the natural variation observed in regionally-adapted varieties of conventional corn," wrote the USDA in an earlier report on the crop published last fall. "Equally comparable varieties produced through conventional breeding techniques are readily available in irrigated corn production regions" (http://www.naturalnews.com/032453_GM_corn_USDA.html). MON87460 is the first GMO to be approved with resistance to drought, as opposed to a pesticide or herbicide. And even though many drought-adaptive varieties of natural or hybrid corn already exist, Monsanto is pushing MON87460 on farmers all across the Midwest, and primarily in the Western plains where drought conditions are still severe, with promises that it will translate into increased yields. Based on its initial findings, however, as well as the fact that GM crops are known to contaminate nearby conventional and organic crops, APHIS should have wholly rejected MON87460 and told Monsanto to hit the road. Instead, thanks to embedded special interests throughout the USDA and the highest levels of the federal government, this former regulatory body has become nothing more than a bureaucratic rubber stamp for the biotechnology industry. "[Bio]technology has been spectacularly unsuccessful at delivering complex traits such as drought tolerance, which involve multiple genes and complex interaction with the plant's environment," wrote Dr. Helen Wallace, director of GeneWatch U.K., in a piece last year on so-called drought-tolerant GM crops. "Meanwhile, conventional breeding and new techniques such as marker-assisted selection -- which uses knowledge of the plant's genome to inform breeding, without engineering the plant, have produced a long string of successes." Sources for this article include: http://www.washingtonpost.com http://www.naturalnews.com/032453_GM_corn_USDA.html http://myheirloomgarden.com
Ah the trickle down effect....... Ah the trickle down effect.......where corporate greed p!sses down on public interest. It goes to show what good corporate spruikers with carpet bags of money can achieve.....democracy in action! Just about the only organism that the Bio Tech industry isn't working on are GM politicians. GM Zombie politicians already exist, and being public domain, aren't patentable. : O
And there lies the problem. Nations depend upon scientists and big agra. Sometimes too much and with life threatening effects. Why are there so many ignorant or stupid people in the world that have no knowledge or memory of the spectacular crop failures in The Soviet Union, who at the time were known as the worlds largest producer of wheat. I atempted an online search for more info links but have little to share along those lines. I do have a very clear recollection that in the 60s 70s and 80s we as a country often sold grain to the Soviet union rather than letting them starve. Additionally there were news articles at the time about how ironic it was because people who had fled Russia were providing heirloom seed to save the same country that had persecuted them and caused them to flee. We are so stupid to let big government and big agra ram this crap down our throats with so little protest.
So now, the GM corn is only killing us. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pests Evolve to Eat Corn Designed to Kill Them Corn rootworm is once again making a dent in farmers' crops Posted Mar 18, 2014 7:06 PM CDT (Newser) – A hungry pest known as the western corn rootworm is gradually developing a resistance to genetically modified crops engineered to kill it, reports Nature. Entomologists say they're discovering more and more of the beetles that show no ill effects after chowing down on fields of Bt corn—so named because it contains a gene called Bacillus thuringiensis that's supposed to be lethal to the pest. This could be a major problem because Bt corn accounts for an astounding three-fourths of the nation's corn, reports Wired. The engineered corn first got planted in 1996, and it swiftly gained popularity with US farmers because it wiped out nearly all the rootworms that tried to eat it and eliminated the need for pesticide spraying. The key words there being "nearly all." The small percentage of rootworms resistant to the corn has grown, and the scientists lay much of the blame on bad land management. The agriculture industry viewed the Bt corn as a cure-all and didn't do things as simple as crop rotation to limit the spread of the pests. "Generally, one year of soybeans in a field with resistant western corn rootworms wipes out that population," a University of Nebraska-Lincoln entomologist tells the Farm and Ranch Guide. "The beetles will lay eggs that hatch, but when larvae try to feed on soybean plants, they don't find the nutrients they need and they die." The new study urges immediate changes along those lines before the problem gets worse. In the meantime, farmers growing the Bt corn will likely have to turn back to pesticides if their crops get infested.
Crop rotation has been normal practice for hundreds of years, to enrich the soil, and because plants like corn, take a lot out of the soil. If you fail to use common sense, you earned your own problem.
