Roundup is the most commonly used herbicide in the world. It is widely used on genetically modified plants grown for food, clothing and animal feed. Most genetically modified crops are genetically modified specifically so that they can be sprayed and grown with Roundup. Roundup is a weedkiller, so crops grown where Roundup are sprayed are usually genetically modified so they can survive being sprayed with this poison at the same time as the weeds it is intended to kill. Roundup is found throughout the food chain in most countries, including America, India and France. It has contaminated rivers and waterways in all countries where it is sprayed onto crops, and so it can find its way into food even if the farmer has not sprayed his own fields.
A group of scientists in the University of Caen, France, has published a study on the previously unknown toxic effects of Roundup on human embryonic cells. The study is titled ‘Time and Dose-Dependent Effects of Roundup on Human Embryonic and Placental Cells’ and was authored by Nora Benachour, Herbert Sipahutar, Safa Moslemi, Céline Gasnier, Carine Travert, Gilles-Eric Séralini. It has scientifically proven that Roundup adversely affects human embryonic cells if used at doses that are currently legally recommended. It also finds that the human endocrine system is disrupted by this widely used herbicide. This means if you eat food that has been sprayed with Roundup, it can unbalance your hormones and adversely effect your fertility.
Rice with human proteins to take root in Kansas Pharmed food crop approved for growth despite controversy. Published online: 18 May 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070514-17 Emma Marris
Rice modified to express proteins often found in breast milk will be planted in Kansas.
Rice modified to express proteins often found in breast milk will be planted in Kansas. The go-ahead for the planting came on 16 May from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
It's certainly not the first crop designed to produce pharmaceutical proteins given the go-ahead in the United States or elsewhere (see 'Turning plants into protein factories'). But this is among the first food crops containing genes that produce human proteins to gain approval for large-scale planting. Many other pharmaceutical genetically-modified (GM) crops are grown indoors or in inedible plants such as tobacco.
The rice strains, made by Ventria Bioscience in Sacramento, California, produce lysozyme, lactoferrin and human serum albumin in their seeds. All three are commonly found in breast milk. Lysozyme and lactoferrin are proteins with antibacterial, viral and fungal properties, according to the company.
Ventria says that they aim to use the rice to create drinks that can combat diarrhoea, and dietary supplements to help reverse anaemia1. Diarrhoea, which often stems from gastrointestinal infection, is a major killer of children worldwide.
Many further regulatory hurdles involving other agencies would need to be passed before products made from this rice could be sold to consumers.
Public comment
The crop, which has been tested in Peru, was given preliminary approval in March, and the USDA then opened the proposal up for public comment. Of the more than 20,000 comments they received, only 29 were positive, although many of the negative comments consisted of form letters.
In the end, the USDA thought that the fears of many that the rice would escape into the environment or the food supply were not warranted, thanks to the many cautious procedures proposed by Ventria - including the fact that they plan to plant the test field more than 480 kilometres away from any commercial rice farms.
The permit states that any seeds eaten by animals or birds would pose them no significant risk. It adds that the chance that a tornado or other extreme weather event might disperse the seed widely is low, but requires an emergency management plan to deal with this.
A 2005 report by the USDA's Office of the Inspector General criticized the agency's approval of GM crops as being too lax, but the agency says that it has improved the approval process since then and that it has always been more vigilant about crops that produce pharmaceuticals.
In 2006, a fairly typical year, according to USDA public affairs specialist Rachel Iadicicco, the USDA received 14 requests for outdoor plantings of GM crops expressing pharmaceuticals or industrial compounds. Of those fourteen, ten have been granted, three are pending and one was withdrawn. Some of these resulted in plantings in 2006, and some were planted this year. The agency requires a new permit each year.
References
1. Bethell D. R., Huang J., et al. BioMetals, 17. 337 - 342 (2004). | Article |
Roundup-Ready biotech crops, glyphosate-resistant weeds Nebraska Research Safeguards Sustainable World Crop Yields
By Dennis T. Avery, Hudson Institute
Thursday, July 5, 2007
The journal Science editorialized on May 23rd that the world is becoming too dependent on Roundup-Ready biotech crops. It claimed agriculture had become as dependent on glyphosate for weed control as human medicine had become on antibiotics. The journal predicted: “There is going to be an epidemic of glyphosate-resistant weeds.”
In the very same issue, however, the University of Nebraska reported that it has developed crop tolerance for the herbicide dicamba, adding a new genetically engineered weed control option to our arsenal. This will permit continued expansion of sustainable, low-erosion, high-yield farming during the next 40 years of surging world crop demand.
“We can now spray dicamba [a phenoxy herbicide] on a number of different [crop] plants and have no visible symptoms at all,” says Nebraska molecular biologist Donald Weeks. He found that dicamba-resistant soybeans could withstand five times the typical field application of the herbicide. Dicamba features a low toxicity—about one-third as high in mice as the organic pesticide pyrethrum—and low soil persistence.
Giving up herbicides and low-till would lead to more soil erosion, driving lower yields and eventually ruining much of the world’s cropland. Conservation tillage has cut soil erosion in crop fields by up to 90 percent through low-till and no-till farming. Both use herbicides to kill weeds, rather than relying on traditional plowing. Organic, which bans low till, is not a solution. It takes nearly twice as much land to produce a ton of food because the fields must produce their own nitrogen as well as the food.
Until now, only the tolerance for the Roundup has been bioengineered into crop plants. Roundup kills all weed types, and that’s a big reason why glyphosate-tolerant crops are now being planted on more then 220 million acres per year, worldwide. They’ve been the fastest-spreading farm technology in history.
Nebraska’s new dicamba resistance effectively ends the mini-panic over glyphosate, however. Now, the industry has two effective all-weed herbicides that can be bred into crops and rotated—or even stacked in the same seeds—to prevent any major resistance. In addition, farmers can also utilize Bayer’s Liberty-Link, a non-biotech breeding intervention that relies on gluphosinate and a different mode of action than glyphosate. There are also sprayed-on weed killers such as atrazine, which offer low costs and low environmental impacts, but without the reduced pesticide sprayings of the herbicide-tolerant plants.
Even more important, Nebraska’s success in finding a disarming gene for dicamba raises hopes that other disarming genes can be found to provide tolerance for still more herbicides, thanks to the world’s genetic diversity.
Dicamba tolerance is also a body blow to activist claims that genetically engineered crops should be banned. Weeks’ creation works through the plants’ chloroplasts, which means the modified crops can’t spread resistance through pollen carried by wind or insects. Over time, this will even disarm the activist claim that biotech crops threaten the plantings of nearby organic farmers.
It looks like biotech crops will be with us for the long haul—helping humanity feed a peak human population of perhaps 9 billion people without taking more cropland away from nature.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may write them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
Hundreds of Brazilian women activists from the group Via Campesina today raided a research unit of U.S. agricultural biotech company Monsanto destroying a tree nursery and an experimental field of genetically modified corn. Just how much of those fields were destroyed, and how, was still unknown, a Monsanto press agent said Friday. There were no immediate reports of injuries in the invasion of the Monsanto farm about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city.
WOMEN INVADE MONSANTO FIELDS IN BRAZIL
Hundreds of Brazilian women activists from the group Via Campesina today raided a research unit of U.S. agricultural biotech company Monsanto destroying a tree nursery and an experimental field of genetically modified corn.
Just how much of those fields were destroyed, and how, was still unknown, a Monsanto press agent said Friday.
There were no immediate reports of injuries in the invasion of the Monsanto farm about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city.
The women were angry over the Brazilian government's decision last month to give clearance for two varieties of GMO corn for commercial use.
The action happened four days after hundreds of members of the same group invaded a corporate tree farm owned Swedish-Finnish paper maker Stora Enso near Brazil's border with Uruguay to protest the planting of trees that are harvested to make pulp.
In that case, police fired rubber bullets to oust the demonstrators, triggering a series of protests throughout southern Brazil that they had employed excessive force.
A spokesperson for Via Campesina, a group defending peasants and land reform, told Reuters by telephone today, "The authorization of these varieties shows once more that (President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's) government favors agribusiness and big foreign companies, abandoning land reform and family farming." Last year, Via Campesina launched a similar campaign against a Syngenta Seeds (SYT) transgenic corn and soy research facility in Parana state in south Brazil, leading to the death of at least one activist by Syngenta contracted security guards.
The country’s National Biosafety Council decision permits the usage of two forms of GMC produced by Monsanto and Bayer called MON810 and LibertyLink, respectively (Last month French officials banned MON810 after a watchdog group said it had “serious doubts” over the GMC's safety).
At the time of the decision by the Brazilian government to allow the GMO corn Via Campesinareacted with fury. The group said the decision went against the advice of two governmental agencies: the health ministry's ANVISA health vigilance unit, and the environmental ministry's Ibama institute. In fact, Health Minister, José Gomes Temporao, a member of the Council wanted further studies on the possibility that these varieties of maize might be toxic or allergenic. Environment Minister Marina Silva, who opposes cultivation of transgenic species, chose not to even attend the meeting.
Via Campesina said the companies behind the engineered corn had presented studies that were "completely inadequate and insufficient to guarantee the safety of these products in terms of human health."
It said it also feared the man-made seeds would contaminate natural crops, with unpredictable results for the environment.
Via Campesina charges expanded use of genetically modified seeds harms Brazil's environment and makes it difficult for poor farmers to compete with the nation's rich landowners and agribusiness companies.
Commenting on the Council's decision, María José da Costa, of the Small Farmers Movement (MPA), told IPS, "We have lost some battles with the government before. But in our view, this is the greatest tragedy of the Lula government."
A letter from the Campaign for a GM-Free Brazil, reports ISP, said that sowing transgenic maize will inevitably contaminate native varieties of maize, which can be grown organically and are ecologically sound.
The measure, it said, is a "flagrant and unconstitutional imposition that sets the economic interests of companies interested in growing GM maize commercially above the health of the population, the need to protect the environment, and also the interests of farmers and consumers who do not want to plant or eat transgenic foods."
According to da Costa, considering the "harm done to people" due to soybeans and other transgenic crops in Brazil, "the disasters that will be caused by the authorisation of GM maize will be of far greater proportions."
She said that maize, in particular, which was first domesticated in Latin America, will now suffer "a great loss of biodiversity, as well as genetic degeneration and impoverishment."
She said that native seeds cultivated by small farmers and indigenous peoples "run the risk of disappearing through cross-contamination."
Unlike soybean plants which are almost entirely self-pollinating, maize is generally cross-fertilised, and its pollen "can be carried several kilometres and contaminate other types of maize at great distances, transported by insects and the wind," she said.
Furthermore, she said, farmers will have no legal recourse for any complaints against contamination of their crops, because jurisdiction is unclear.
And if contamination of their maize does occur, they will have to resort to other seeds, and they will become dependent on the transgenic species, because GM seeds are designed to produce a second generation of seeds that will not germinate.
"The food sovereignty of small farmer communities will be endangered, because they will have to buy seeds outside the community, and they will have to pay royalties to the transgenic seed companies," said da Costa. At present, farmers save their seed from year to year for the next planting.
She also called attention to the technical studies cited by the Science and Technology Ministry in support of the authorisation of transgenic maize, noting that most of them were carried out abroad, and fail to take into account the uniqueness of Brazil’s diverse ecosystems.
The following is from AFP.
Brazilian protesters destroy GM crops: group
Around 300 women rural residents in Brazil burst into a property owned by the US company Monsanto and destroyed a plant nursery and crops containing genetically modified corn, their organization said.
The women were protesting what they saw as environmental damage by the crops.
They trashed the plants within 30 minutes and left before police arrived at the site in the southern state of Sao Paulo, a member of the Landless Workers' Movement, Igor Foride, told AFP.
The Brazilian government had "caved in to pressure from agrobusinesses" by recently allowing tinkered crops to be grown in the country, he said.
In Brasilia, a protest by another 400 women from an umbrella group, Via Campesina (the Rural Way), was held in front of the Swiss embassy against Syngenta, a Swiss company that is selling genetically modified seeds in Brazil.
The demonstrators called attention to an October 2007 incident in which private guards working for Syngenta killed a protester taking part in an occupation of land owned by the company.
Via Campesina said in a statement that "no scientific studies exist that guarantee that genetically modified crops won't have negative effects on human health and on nature."
It added that on Tuesday, another 900 of its members had entered a property owned by the Swedish-Finnish paper giant Stora Enso and ripped out non-modified eucalyptus saplings they claimed were illegally planted.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
