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Conclusions

I've come to a few conclusions in regards to food safety. First, anything coming from a industrial /factory farm is most likely unsafe. Second, there is no accountability with GM foods and thus there is no real safety. (70% ish of foods in the US are GM foods) Third, I don't trust 75%-90% of seed producers. Forth, rural and local farms are some options to choose from. (I love famers markets) Fifth, NAIS is not for the local former; vote against it. Sixth, the easiest way to know more about food safety is to understand label laws and labeling in gerneral, eg. stay away from hydroginated/modified foods. And finally, food is no longer just food and we have to inform ourselves about it as long as the world works to make farming into a profiteering business model.

There is a plethora of information out there. This blog has been following, some of, my research online and feel free to use them for your information.

Most of What You Eat is Not Real Food

From: Dr. Mercola's website

The Speigel Online conducted an interview with legendary chef Alice Waters about the "eat local" movement, which has become a force to be reckoned with in the United States in recent years.

Waters was one of the pioneers of that movement -- she transformed her state's cooking in the 1970s into world-renowned "California cuisine" with her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. She promoted the use of in-season produce from local farms, and advocated planting vegetable gardens in schools.

More than three decades later, Waters is still promoting sustainable agriculture. She is now vice president of the international Slow Food movement, which promotes regionally grown goods and local culinary traditions.

In the interview, Waters expressed her opinion that most of the food currently being consumed is not real food. Real food, she argues, is grown by people who take care of the land, and who refrain from using herbicides and pesticides. Real food is food that's grown for taste, and it's grown in a way that pays people a good wage for their work rather than being grown at somebody else's expense.

To read the whole interview, and see what Waters has to say about seasonal food, the spread of the eat-local movement, and the food policies of President Obama, click the link below.

Sources:

Spiegel Online February 13, 2009

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Do you ever wonder when the concept of “food” expanded from meat, vegetables, raw dairy products, fruit and other such natural items to include the highly processed, preserved, artificially flavored and often brightly colored concoctions that now exist in supermarkets?

Perhaps it began in the ‘50s with the advent of the TV dinner, or around the time McDonald’s began expanding their hamburger business. It’s anyone’s guess, really, but this quasi “food” really caught on.

Nowadays, 90 percent of foods Americans purchase every year are processed foods, and in 2006, 2,800 new candies, desserts, ice cream, and snacks were introduced to the marketplace, compared to just 230 new fruits or vegetable products.

Of course, food marketers do a masterful job at making it seem like fast foods and junk foods are the obvious choice, and they spend mega-billions every year to convince you and your kids to choose highly processed convenience foods over REAL foods.

But there are some rays of hope shining through.

Real Foods are Becoming More Popular

When you hear the term “what’s old is new,” it most often applies to fashion or slang terms … but it can also be applied to food. That is, increasing numbers of people are reverting BACK to the ways of our ancestors, and choosing to purchase food directly from local farmers, and cook it using slow, traditional methods.

For instance, after declining for more than a century, the number of U.S. small farms has increased 20 percent in the past six years. This is in large part a result of the growing demand for locally grown foods, which is slowly but surely shaping the business of food in the United States.

An interesting study, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, recently hit this point home. After surveying nearly 500 people, they found food shoppers were willing to pay more for locally grown food, and those shopping at farmers’ markets were willing to spend the most for food grown close to home. The top reasons people gave for wanting locally grown food?

• Better food quality
• Better taste
• Freshness

How Can You Identify REAL Food?

There are major incentives to center your diet on real foods as opposed to “food products,” the primary one being it is essential for optimal health. Real foods also taste delicious, and when bought from sustainable sources help to protect the environment. So how can you tell the difference?

Real food almost always has the following characteristics:

• Grown
• Variable quality
• Spoils fast
• Requires preparation
• Vibrant colors, rich textures
• Authentically flavorful
• Strong connection to land and culture

“Food products,” meanwhile, tend to have these traits:

• Produced, manufactured
• Neat, convenient
• Always the same
• Keeps forever
• Instant results
• Dull, bland
• Artificially flavorful
• No connection to land or culture

If you want to take things a step further, and I suggest you do, here is what you need to look for (whether you’re at the grocery store or farmers’ market) to find not just any food, but high-quality food:

1. Grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers (organic foods fit this description, but so do some non-organic foods)

2. Not genetically modified

3. Contains no added growth hormones, antibiotics, or other drugs

4. Does not contain artificial anything, nor any preservatives

5. Fresh (if you have to choose between wilted organic produce or fresh conventional produce, the latter may be the better option)

6. Did not come from a factory farm

7. Grown with the laws of nature in mind (meaning animals are fed their native diets, not a mix of grains and animal byproducts, and have free-range access to the outdoors)

8. Grown in a sustainable way (using minimal amounts of water, protecting the soil from burnout, and turning animal wastes into natural fertilizers instead of environmental pollutants)

Foods that meet these standards will almost always be a wise choice.

Looking for Real Food Sources Near You?

As you discover the alternative food networks in your area -- things like farmers’ markets, food coops, and community-supported agriculture -- you’ll begin to feel a connection to your community that you likely never felt before. And sources of sustainable food are becoming surprisingly easy to find these days.

To find sustainable agriculture movements in your area, from farmer’s markets to food coops and more, please see this comprehensive list.

If that doesn’t turn up anything, you can often find real food sources by:

• Asking workers in your local health food store
• Searching online for local farms in your area

GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS FEED BIOTECH GIANTS, NOT THE POOR

From the page:

Contacts: Bill Freese, Center for Food Safety, 202-547-9359 (North America); Nnimmo Bassey, Friends of the Earth Nigeria, +234 80 37 27 43 95 (Africa); Helen Holder, Friends of the Earth Europe Brussels: +32 474 857 638 (Europe)

Biotech Companies Exploit Food Crisis by Raising GM Seed and Pesticide Prices, Record Profits Projected

Biotech Propaganda Distracts Attention from Real Solutions for Small Farmers

Washington D.C., February 11, 2009 - A new report released today by the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth International warned that genetically modified (GM) crops are benefiting biotech food giants instead of the worldís hungry population, which is projected to increase to 1.2 billion by the year 2025 due to the global food crisis.

The report explains how biotech firms like Monsanto are exploiting the dramatic rise in world grain prices that are responsible for the global food crisis by sharply increasing the prices of GM seeds and chemicals they sell to farmers, even as hundreds of millions go hungry.

The findings of the report support a comprehensive United Nationsí assessment of world agriculture ñ the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - which in 2008 concluded that GM crops have little potential to alleviate poverty and hunger in the world. IAASTD experts recommended instead low-cost, low-input agroecological farming methods.

"GM crops are all about feeding the biotech giants, not the worldís poor," said Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Friends of the Earth Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International.

"GM seeds and the pesticides used with them are much too expensive for Africaís small farmers. Those who promote this technology in developing countries are completely out of touch with reality," he added.

"U.S. farmers are facing dramatic increases in the price of GM seeds and the chemicals used with them," said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the US-based Center for Food Safety and co-author of the report. "Farmers in any developing country that welcomes Monsanto and other biotech companies can expect the same fate - sharply rising seed and pesticide costs, and a radical decline in the availability of conventional seeds," he added.

GM seeds cost from two to over four times as much as conventional, non-GM seeds, and the price disparity is increasing. From 80% to over 90% of the soybean, corn and cotton seeds planted in the U.S. are GM varieties. Thanks to GM trait fee increases, average U.S. seed prices for these crops have risen by over 50% in just the past two to three years.

Exploitation of the food crisis has been extremely profitable for Monsanto, by far the dominant player in GM seeds. Goldman Sachs recently projected that Monsanto's net income (after taxes) would triple from $984 million to $2.96 billion from 2007 to 2010.

The exorbitant cost of GM seeds is not the only problem. The vast majority of GM crops are not grown by or destined for the world's poor, but instead are soybeans and corn used to feed animals, generate biofuels, or produce highly processed food products consumed mostly in rich countries.

The report documents that nearly 90% of the global area planted GM crops in 2008 was found in just 6 countries with highly industrialized, export-oriented agricultural sectors in North and South America, with the U.S., Argentina and Brazil responsible for 80% of GM crops. The United States alone produced 50% of the world's GM crops in 2008.

Despite more than a decade of hype, the biotechnology industry has not introduced a single GM crop with increased yield, enhanced nutrition, drought-tolerance or salt-tolerance. In fact, the biotechnology industry's own figures show that 85% of all GM crop acreage worldwide in 2008 was planted with herbicide-tolerant crops. Herbicide-tolerant GM crops - chiefly Monsanto's Roundup Ready varieties used with Monsanto's Roundup herbicide - have increased overall use of chemical weed killers. Roundup prices in the U.S. have more than doubled in the past two years.

Meanwhile, biotech propaganda has obscured the huge potential of low-cost agroecological and organic techniques to increase food production and alleviate hunger in developing countries. The report mentions several such projects, such as push-pull maize farming, practiced by 10,000 farmers in east Africa. The enormously successful push-pull system controls weed and insect pests without chemicals, increases maize production, and raises the income of smallholder farmers.

The report Who benefits from GM crops 20092 is available online at: http://www.foei.org/en/publications/pdfs/gmcrops2009full.pdf

An executive summary is online at: http://www.foei.org/en/publications/pdfs/gmcrops2009exec.pdf

The Center for Food Safety is national, non-profit, membership organization founded in 1997 to protect human health and the environment by curbing the use of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture. On the web at: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org

Friends of the Earth International is the world's largest grassroots environmental network, with 77 national member groups, some 5,000 local activist groups on every continent, and over 2 million members and supporters around the world. www.foei.org

Privacy Statement • Site Map • Contact Us

The Center for Food Safety
660 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, #302
Washington DC 20003
P: (202)547-9359, F: (202)547-9429
office@centerforfoodsafety.org

MONSANTO PESTICIDES

"99.9% of GM plants are to absorb or produce pesticides. People don't see that. They only see the propaganda about growing food in a desert or feeding the world, how all other problems will be solved if this technology is allowed."

I had to quote that. It's exactly the situation. Here is the wonderful article where you will find a great article and interview written by Ken Roseboro (Posted by Linn Cohen-Cole in opednews)

Revisiting the Codex alimentarius

Must see list of quick summary.

Food Price inflation

From the chicago federal reserve

The fact that struck me while reading it was that this had a direct effect by increased cost of fertilizer and seed. Now you see how the biotech companies tighten their grip even as the markets are faltering. Why? because they can. people need to eat.

here is the link

R-CALF USA’s TOP 10 REASONS to OPPOSE NAIS’ PREMISES REGISTRATION

As posted by the R-calf which is Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund and United Stockgrowers of America
1. Registering a premises with the Federal government without receiving just compensation
constitutes a voluntary surrender of any constitutional rights – right of property and
freedom from unreasonable governmental searches – associated with registered premises.
2. Registering a premises with the Federal government without receiving just compensation
constitutes a voluntary submission to any invasion of private property rights and
government intrusion into private business operations associated registered premises.
3. Registering a premises without entering into a contract that expressly limits the Federal
government’s authority over the premises may result in subjecting the premises and its
registrant to any and all future rules, regulations and policies that the Federal government
may later decide to impose on such registrants.
4. Registering a premises under the guise of protecting against the spread of Foreign
Animal Diseases effectively gives the Federal government a license to abandon the most
effective means of preventing Foreign Animal Diseases in the first place – disallowing
imports from disease-affected countries.
5. Registering a premises without entering into a contract that expressly prohibits the
Federal government from allowing access to premises information could subject the
registrant to unwanted exposure to other Federal and state agencies and animal rights
extremists.
6. Registering a premises could result in greater legal exposure of cattle producers for
events that occur after the registrant’s cattle leave the farm or ranch.
7. Registering a premises would result in the voluntary inclusion of the registrants’ farm,
ranch, home, and cattle to a general system of permanent registration of personal property
that currently is only applicable to items that could be highly dangerous if misused –
automobiles and guns.
8. A registered premises alone provides no greater disease trace-back potential than simply
knowing the owner of the animal or animals in question . . . unless there is far more to the
Federal government’s plan than to simply obtain registered premises.
9. Premises registration is the foundational building block needed by the Federal
government to immediately implement a full-scale, mandatory National Animal
Identification System (NAIS), with little to no input from cattle producers.
10. Voluntary premises registration sends a strong signal to the Federal government that U.S.
cattle producers give the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) a high approval rating
for all the agency’s policies and actions that impact U.S. cattle producers – it
demonstrates that U.S. cattle producers have the utmost faith and trust in the USDA’s
past, present and future actions.

R-CALF USA does not support USDA’s aggressive efforts to register U.S. livestock premises.
For more information, call 406-252-2516, or visit.

This is a great article and full of information!

I was going to just cut and past the most important aspects of this article, give you a link to check it out yourself. After reading the entire reading, I felt that it would give it no justice , to cut and past, so please read it all.

Monsanto U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools

By Nancy Scola
AlterNet
February 15, 2008

I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.

Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca, N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to cattle.

The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."

That was until America's land-grant system met George W. Bush. Tucked into the appendix of his latest national budget is a nearly one-third cut in the public funding for agriculture research at the land grants. The size of the cut is surprising, but not its existence -it's part of a multiyear drive by the Bush administration to completely eliminate regular public research funding. In a press briefing last week, a USDA deputy secretary illuminated the Bush administration's rationale for the transition to competitive grant making: "That's how you get the most bang for the buck."

Wallace Huffman, an Iowa State agro-economist, is deeply unimpressed with Bush's "bang" approach to land-grant research. "There's a sense in the president's office that you invest in research like you invest in building cars," Huffman told me last week. Land-grant school officials are similarly skeptical. In a survey, Kansas State argued that the loss of regular funding would upend education. Minnesota complained that cuts would undermine ongoing research projects. North Dakota simply asked, "What is the future of ag research?"

Good question. A reasonable answer? The future of agricultural research at America's land-grant institutions belongs to biotech conglomerates like Monsanto. And it seems likely that it's a future of chemical-dependent, genetically modified, bio-engineered agriculture.

In stark contrast to how the federal government and many states are wallowing in red ink, the St. Louis-based Monsanto boasted more than $7 billion in annual sales in 2007 -simply the latest in four years of record-smashing profits. And so when our president says that the time has come for public land-grant institutions to get cracking at "leveraging nonfederal resources," you can be sure that Monsanto's ears perk.

But, it doesn't take a presidential invitation to get Monsanto to sink its roots in the land-grant system. Those roots are already planted. Iowa State's campus boasts a Monsanto Auditorium and the school offers students Monsanto-funded graduate fellowships on seed policy with a special focus on "the protection of intellectual property rights." Kansas State has spun off Wildcat Genetics, a side company whose purpose is the selling of soybean seeds genetically engineered to survive the application of Roundup® -the result of a decades long relationship with Monsanto, the pesticide's maker.

But don't get the wrong idea about Monsanto's land-grant activities. By that, I mean, don't think the company is the only multinational biotech conglomerate firmly rooted in American land-grant soil.

Head on down to Texas A & M. There you'll find the a chair for the "Dow Chemical Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering." Similar chairs exist at West Virginia State and Louisiana State. The agricultural college of the University of California at Davis is funded in part by DuPont and Calgene.

The University of California at Berkeley's Plant and Microbiology Department entered into a $25 million/five-year quasi-exclusive research agreement with the Swiss-based Novartis, which then became Syngenta, which now funds the land-grant research group on soybean fungi. In 2005, Purdue, Indiana's land-grant school, developed an application of the so-called Terminator gene pioneered by Delta Pine and Land Co.; school officials and researchers later took to the hustings when the public resisted the idea of self-sterilizing plants.

But the agricultural industry's relationship with the land-grant system is not an entirely new development. In 1973, former Texas agricultural commissioner and activist Jim Hightower lamented the situation in his landmark report, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: The Failure of America's Land Grant College Complex.

But the world of agriculture is today a far, far different place than when Hightower wrote.

For one thing, in the early 1970s Monsanto was still a decade away from genetically modifying its very first plant cell. For another, back then the federal government was still committed to providing steady research funding.

And, importantly, it was neither possible nor profitable for our nation's bastions of higher learning to be players in the global agribusiness. But intervening tectonic shifts in American public policy help us to understand why a public institution like Purdue would fight so darn hard to defend a biotech advance like the Terminator gene: in a manner of speaking, they own the thing.

Jump ahead to 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court under Warren Burger decided that, as long as they'd been tweaked from their natural state, living organisms from seeds to microbes or Terminator genes could be patented just as if they were a new cotton gin or tractor blade. And in that same year, Congress gave universities a kick towards the marketplace by encouraging institutions to file patent claims on the discoveries and inventions of their faculty researchers -no matter if their work was funded in whole or in part by taxpayer dollars.

The summed effect was that, suddenly, a public institution like Purdue had a great deal of motivation for working with Delta Pine and Land Co. to see if they might make a buck off their biotech invention in the marketplace. What's more, the policy shift made it so individual lab geeks themselves stood to profit, eligible for a large slice of whatever windfall their discovery generated.

As the biotech industry has since exploded, the impact on the land-grant system is perhaps not unexpected. "Researchers want to be at both the cutting edge of science and the cutting edge of the marketplace," says Andrew Neighbour, until recently the director of UCLA's office on the business applications of faculty research. (The entire University of California system functions as that state's "land-grant institution.") And so the advent of patentable and profitable plants (and animals, for that matter) has meant a shift in research focus away new knowledge and towards the creation of marketable products.

The land-grant institutions find themselves in a pickle. "On the one hand," says Paul Gepts, professor of agronomy and plant genetics at UC Davis, schools pushed into the free market have developed the habit of patenting research and found a taste for private business deals. But on the other hand, "they have a public role where the information they produce should be available to all."

As things stand, "public universities," says Dr. Gepts, "are a contradiction."

This embrace of patents and profits means that land-grant agricultural research centers today are not playgrounds of academic collaboration they once were. "Things have changed enormously," says William Folk, a plant geneticist at the University of Missouri. "When I started in the '70s," he recalls fondly, "meetings were filled with people criticizing each other and sharing ideas." But today, he says "if you have an idea that has any potential commercial value, you're reluctant to share."

Not surprisingly, school administrators argue that a negative reading of the cozy relationship between agricultural researchers and biotech corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta is hogwash. When asked, Neal Van Alfen, dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, acknowledges that about 20 percent of the $165 million annual research budget is contributed by industry. But Dean Van Alfen is quick to add, "It forms just one part of who we work with." Research conducted in conjunction with industry interests, he insists, is simply one chunk of "an awfully large amount of work."

But numbers and percentages don't tell the whole story, because of the way that industry engages in the land-grant system. In short, they skim. Here's how it works: (a) federal and state governments hand over taxpayer money to build and sustain the basic infrastructure, without which research can't hope to take place, then (b) the biotech industry injects some smaller amount of much-needed cash into the system, and then (c) agribusinesses skim off and patent the most promising (and potentially profitable) discoveries that rise to the top.

Still, administrators argue, scientific professionalism keeps industry in check -a researcher who fudges his or her findings to curry industry favor is in for a short career. But that line of reasoning misses the real concern. What's alarming isn't that global agribusiness conglomerates like Monsanto, Dow Chemical and DuPont are getting the answers they want from our land-grant entomologists, agronomists and plant geneticists.

It's that at public institutions, private interests are the ones asking the questions.

What must be kept in mind is that land-grant researchers are generally expected to bring to the table their own research funding, and the situation can already be fairly dire. When UC Davis' Paul Gepts comments on how his institution's support is limited to a base salary, I attempt a lame joke: "They give you a desk too, right?" Yes, he responds, but a phone is another matter.

Faculty researchers are so hungry for funding that, says Missouri's William Folk, "if companies want to entice researchers to work on their projects, all they have to do is wave a bit of money." "The availability of funds, he says, "makes an enormous difference in what we can do."

"We're opportunists," Folk says, with compassion, of himself and his fellow researchers, "we go after money where it might be."

When it comes to how industry-university relations shape academic research, UCLA's Andrew Neighbour is the person to talk to. While an administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, Neighbour managed the school's landmark multiyear and multimillion-dollar relationship with Monsanto. (Note: WashU is a private institution.) "There's no question that industry money comes with strings," Neighbour admits. "It limits what you can do, when you can do it, who it has to be approved by."

And so the issue at hand becomes one of the questions that are being asked at public land-grant schools. While Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, et al., are paying the bills, are agricultural researchers going to pursue such lines of scientific inquiry as "How will this new corn variety impact the independent New York farmer?" Or, "Will this new tomato make eaters healthier?"

It seems far more likely that the questions that multinational biotech conglomerates are willing to pay to have answered run along the lines of "How can we keep growing our own bottom lines?"

I put it to Dr. Folk. "The companies are there to make money, no doubt," he responds.

What suffers for falling outside the scope of industry interest? Organic farming, for one. The Organic Farming Research Foundation was founded in the 1980s after, Executive Director Bob Scowcroft tells me, farmers interested in weaning themselves from chemical dependence approached their local land-grant outreach agents for help for pest management. As Scowcroft tells it, their advice was invariably in the spirit of, "Well, sure, I can tell you what to spray."

OFRF began arming land-grant researchers with modest grants but found that academics interested in conducting organic-related research faced obstacles beyond funding.

"Coming out of the organic closet could be the beginning of the end of your career," says Scowcroft. Looking outside biotech agriculture is, he says, "like throwing 30 years of the Green Revolution in your boss's face." Today, says John Reganold, an OFRF grantee and apple researcher at Washington State University, academics interested in organic farming "just don't have the money to do what we need to do."

Also the subject of minimal industry attention: so-called orphan crops, like sorghum and cassava, which feed millions of people in the developing world but aren't considered patentable or profitable. UC Davis' Paul Gepts is working to breed a disease-resistant variety of the East African common bean, an important protein source for AIDS sufferers. He's turned to an English charitable group for funding, and all involved have agreed to resist patenting the plant -once a useful variety is developed, the science will be left in the public domain.

While it's clear that funding cash is the carrot used by agribusiness to entice researchers into asking the questions industry is most interested in having answered, there is a stick involved: corporately held patents used to block them from asking others.

That's certainly been Paul Gepts's experience, when he thought he might tackle the question of gene transfer in Mexican maize varieties. The question, though, is a sensitive one for Monsanto, as one of the arguments against transgenic crops is the difficulty in containing their spread -raising the specter of a threat to the world's biodiversity. As the maize he was interested in was patented by Monsanto, Gepts asked the company for some samples. Their response: no way.

When I asked Gepts for his take on Monsanto's motivation for the refusal, I hadn't yet finished the question when he answered: "Avoiding scrutiny," he said. Missouri's Folk seconds the contention that such private claims on science impede research, saying, "Our ability to do science is constrained by the patents held by agribusiness."

All this said, it's not fair to say that there hasn't been resistance against public land-grant schools mutating into institutions of private science. After Novartis had become involved in UC Berkeley's Department of Plant and Microbiology, the school ordered an internal review by the academic senate, which ultimately deemed the relationship "a mistake." Lawrence Busch, a Berkeley faculty member who headed the review said at its conclusion: "I think it is high time for serious discussions of what the devil we want our universities to be."

When Mike Hoffmann -the Cornell entomologist I startled by sharing Bush's proposed budget cuts - recovers from his shock, he offers his take on "what the devil" our universities should be. The principle that should guide Cornell, Berkeley, Missouri and our other land-grant institutions is simple, he says: public funding for the public good. The mission of America's centers of agricultural learning is, he concludes, "to produce new knowledge for the public benefit. That's why we have the land-grant system, and I think it's pretty important."

Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer who has in the past served as the chief blogger at Air America, an aide to former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, as he explored a run for the presidency, and a congressional staffer on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The Public Patend Foundation and More class-action suits against Monsanto

PUBPAT Challenges Monsanto Patents Being Used To Bankrupt American Farmers

September 29, 2006

Patent Office Asked to Review and Revoke Agricultural Giant's Widely Asserted Patents

New York, NY -- The Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") filed formal requests with the United States Patent and Trademark Office today to review and ultimately revoke four of Monsanto Company's patents related to genetically modified crops that the agricultural giant is using to harass, intimidate, sue - and in some cases literally bankrupt - American farmers. In its filings, PUBPAT submitted prior art showing the patents were obvious in light of earlier work by other inventors and, as such, should have never been granted.

Monsanto has filed dozens of patent infringement lawsuits asserting the four challenged patents against American farmers, many of whom are unable to hire adequate representation to defend themselves in court. The crime these farmers are accused of is nothing more than saving seed from one year's crop to replant the following year, something farmers have done since the beginning of time. The Center for Food Safety found in its study of the matter that, "Monsanto has used heavy-handed investigations and ruthless prosecutions that have fundamentally changed the way many American farmers farm. The result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seed."

"Monsanto's aggressive assertion of its patents is not only obnoxious and offensive to the core fabric of American life and culture, it is also causing substantial public harm," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director. "It appears as though Monsanto wants to control all of America's farmland and - unfortunately - the patent system is providing them the perfect means to accomplish that goal by bullying independent and family owned farms right out of existence."

Copies of the Requests for Reexamination filed by PUBPAT against the four patents Monsanto is widely asserting against America's famers can be found at PUBPAT > Monsanto v. Farmer Patents.

Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers Report

2005 report documents Monsanto's lawsuits against American farmers, revealing thousands of investigations, nearly 100 lawsuits and numerous bankruptcies.

Monsanto Sued For Alleged Glyphosate Monopoly

By Jeff Caldwell
Agriculture Online News
September 28, 2006

Plaintiffs say company unfairly dominates market years after Roundup patent expired

The Monsanto Company is the target of a class-action antitrust lawsuit filed this week in federal court.

Pullen Seeds and Soil, based in Sac City, Iowa, led the group filing Pullen Seeds and Soil v. Monsanto Company, No. 06-599, Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Plaintiffs allege the company violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, as it allegedly has a monopoly over the glyphosate herbicide marketplace with its Roundup products. Monsanto's patent on Roundup product name expired in 2000.

"During the post-patent period...Roundup has maintained an 80% (or more) market share of all the glyphosate herbicides sold in the United States despite Monsanto's charging dealers 300% to 400% more for brand-name Roundup than the price charged by generic competitors," according to the Pullen v. Monsanto court document filed Tuesday. "Monsanto's ability to charge higher prices for Roundup is the result of a comprehensive anticompetitive scheme which Monsanto began implementing in the 1990s."

In the class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday, Pullen, a licensed grower of Monsanto's soybeans and corn containing glyphosate tolerance and seller of Monsanto seed, is joined by an estimated 100,000 class members around the nation (1,000 in Iowa), according to Iowa State University agriculture law specialist and ag law center director Roger McEowen. But, according to Monsanto spokesman and public affairs manager Andrew Burchett, the anticompetitive practices named in the suit do not exist.

"There are dozens of different brands and formulations of glyphosate available from more than 30 different companies in the United States," Burchett says. "This is far more competition than exists with regard to any other agricultural chemical."

Plaintiffs also allege Monsanto retained product exclusivity "by acquiring seed companies that were developing modified seed technology, eliminating those products that could have led to the development of genetically modified seeds that could be used with non-glyphosate herbicide," according to McEowen.

"These efforts to block the development of competing genetically modified seeds had a direct effect on Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide monopoly because had competing seeds been developed, farmers would have had a choice not only to buy competing seeds, but also to use different types of herbicides instead of glyphosate," according to the court document. "Thus, the development of these competing seeds would have created an increased demand for other non-glyphosate herbicides that would have competed with Roundup.

"This would have dramatically reduced Roundup's market dominance and Monsanto's ability to charge monopoly prices," the document reads.

Also at issue in the Pullen case is the practice of "bundling" crop input products like herbicides with seed. While this is not uncommon in the crop seed industry, it could become a major argument in the case.

"In addition to the exclusive dealing requirements with its seed company licensees, Pullen claims that Monsanto has used various types of bundled rebates to ensure that seed companies produce and sell seed containing Monsanto's seed traits virtually exclusively," McEowen says.

Yet, the arguments used by Pullen, et. al., according to Burchett, are not new and instead appear to be attempts to find holes in previously resolved cases.

"This complaint appears to recycle old allegations regarding our marketing and pricing of glyphosate -- complaints that DuPont and others previously have made in lawsuits and which were the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that was closed in 2004 with no enforcement action," Burchett says. "We believe this complaint is without merit and will vigorously defend against it."

The process now awaits the formal organization of the plaintiff class, which McEowen says will seek "declaratory and injunctive relief for Monsanto's alleged violations...and treble damages under Iowa antitrust law for the overcharges Pullen and other class members have paid." He estimates the "very difficult" case could take up to 10 years.

Calls to Pullen Seeds and Soil were not returned.

Both articles posted directly from Say not to gmo website.

Ironic

More pressure on Monsanto and their bovine growth hormone and all of a sudden they sell it to eli-lilly: GREENFIELD, Ind., Aug 20, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ -- Elanco, a division of Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY), today announced that Lilly has signed an agreement to acquire the worldwide rights to the dairy cow supplement, Posilac(R) (sometribove), as well as the product's supporting operations, from Monsanto Company (NYSE: MON).

Ben & Jerry's fights efforts to ban 'hormone-free' dairy labeling

This was in 2008. We are still on the rBGH hormone issue here. I posted a great article a while back on this hormone and much proof has been rounded up to say that this is a safe hazard for americans. Here is the article on ben and jerry's icecream

From the page:
"The hormone, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration to boost production in dairy cows in the early 1990s, was not approved in Canada, Japan or the European Union, largely out of concerns it may be harmful to animals. And “there are unanswered human questions with it. It probably should never have been approved,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports."

Monsanto and Greenwashing

Green washing, in short, is putting up a front that your company is for the environment when in fact this is far from the truth.

From the page:
"

• Monsanto (NYSE:MON)

What it says: "We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world be successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and more fiber, while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment" (Monsanto website, accessed November 4, 2007).

What it does: In June 2007, Monsanto acquired Delta & Pine Land Company, a company that creates "terminator" seeds. These seeds grow into plants that produce sterile seed. This means farmers can't replant seeds from a previous crop, making them dependent on the company year after year. In the 1930s Monsanto bought the company that invented PCBs, a now-banned industrial coolant, and became the source of nearly all PCBs in the U.S. In a January 2002 Washington Post article ("Monsato Hid Decades Of Pollution"), it was revealed that Monsanto hid 40 years worth of PCB pollution in Anniston, Alabama. It's alleged the company dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into open-pit landfills and routinely discharged toxic waste into a nearby creek. "

Link

in the 1997 and the epa post below you'll see that another similar event happened in Missouri.

More on Monsanto and government ties

Are some of these connections and what they represent becoming clearer to you?

Read about every progressive's favorite chemical company: Monsanto's 1998 Annual Report
Here's their 2007 one. The following is from the 1998 report. (See page 10 thru 13)
Be sure to read "PART III, ITEM 10. DIRECTORS AND EXECUTIVE OFFICERS OF THE REGISTRANT." Here are some of the preceding jobs of the Monsanto directors:

Steven L. Engelberg, 54, Senior Vice President, Partner, Keck, Mahin & Cate, 1986; Partner-in-Charge,-Monsanto Company eck, Mahin & Cate Washington, D.C. office, 1986; Chief of Staff of Office of the United States Trade Representative (on leave from Keck, Mahin & Cate until May 1993), 1993; Vice President, Worldwide Government Affairs--Monsanto Company, 1994; and present position, 1996.

R. William Ide III, 56, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary--Monsanto Company; Partner, Kutak Rock, 1989; President, American Bar Association, 1993-1994; Partner, Long, Aldridge & Norman, 1993; and present position, 1996.

Note that William D.Ruckelshaus is a Director of Monsanto.

Mr. Ruckelshaus is Chairman of Browning-Ferris Industries, Inc. He was twice the EPA Administrator and served as Deputy Attorney General of the United States. In addition, he held the positions of Majority Leader of the Indiana House of Representatives, Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Senior Vice President of Weyerhaeuser Company. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He is also Chairman of the Board, Browning-Ferris Industries.

It's obvious that Monsanto is well connected in Washington. How does this insider power get used? Here's a nice example from Times Beach, Missouri:
WHY IS EPA IGNORING MONSANTO?

In our humble opinion, Mr. Ruckelshaus', (director of Monsanto-ex EPA director) Enterprise For The Environment looks suspiciously like a green washing front for corporate interests. i.e.

Read a few excerpts from an Interview with William Ruckelshaus by Timothy K. Judge and Bruce W. Piasecki Published in Corporate Environmental Strategies, the Journal of Environmental Leadership

JUDGE: The effort you are leading at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Enterprise for the Environment has been underway for about a year now. How is Enterprise for the Environment changing the debate and ultimately the publics view on environmental issues?

RUCKELSHAUS: "Well, it's not changing any debate yet because we haven't agreed on anything. We may change the debate of the people going through the process, but as of yet we have had no impact on the public simply because what we've been doing has largely been screened from public view. But, if we are able to arrive at a consensus, given the broad based nature of the people trying to arrive at a consensus, it could have a significant impact on the way the public perceives the environment. It's just too early to tell exactly what we are going to come up with and how significant it will be. But, if we arrive at a consensus on a whole number of issues that we are dealing with, it could have a significant affect on environmental policy going forward into the next century...."

Entire post was copied from this site.

1997 EPA and Monsanto ties

I don't know how I found this but the digging continues. This whole article speaks on toxic dumps and exchanges between chemical companies. The EPA tried fining a small interest environmental group 25,000 a day until they let loose there documents. In short, the documents listed all of the mess ups of the EPA and tied chemical companies to the destruction. As well as what the EPA said was safe, was not. They burned dioxin anyways and i'm sure it's effected the people that live in the area.

The article.

From the article:
"Monsanto has denied ever having given Bliss any waste containing
dioxin or PCBs. So far, officials of U.S. EPA are taking
Monsanto at its word and, instead of investigating the chemical
giant, are investigating and harassing the citizens who have
brought these documented facts to light."

                               --Peter Montague
(National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981/AFL-CIO

Great Article written in 2001 touches on another Monsanto case in 1980's with EPA

Errors, Lies, & "Corrections"

January 2001

By Edward S. Herman


from the page:
" New York Times reporters have had a strong propensity to swallow chemical industry propaganda: most dramatically with Keith Schneider's proposition that exposure to dioxin is no more threatening than “spending a week sun-bathing” (originally said to be the view of “scientists,” but eventually admitted to be Schneider's own creation); and Gina Kolata's error laden review and Nicholas Wade's angry repudiation of the book Our Stolen Future—“creating an environmental scare without evidence,” Wade told the authors, without having read the book (see Mark Dowie, “What's Wrong with the New York Times's Science Reporting,” Nation, July 6, 1998). “Junk science” for the Times is not the science produced by industry or its hired hands to protect its right to sell, it is the science of environmentalists and tort lawyers; the paper's use of the phrase replicates the views of industry. The Times has never yet reported the sensational disclosure that both Monsanto's and BASF's studies showing the harmlessness of dioxin, which were actually used by the EPA in fixing tolerances, were based on fraud. It has never reviewed or cited the powerful book by Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle on Toxic Deception: How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law, and Endangers Your Health (Birch Lane, 1996), and I will be surprised if it ever reviews Joe Thornton's recent Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy (MIT Press, 2000) as this impressive work calls for radical constraints on the chemical industry. "

And this relates to MONSANTO:
"For example, when the EPA discovered in the late 1980s that Monsanto had failed to deliver several hundred internal studies of possible ill-effects of chemicals, contrary to law, and a follow-up moratorium on penalties resulted in the industry coughing up 11,000 internal studies that should have been submitted to the regulators, the Times never even reported this development, with its huge implications for the workability of existing procedures for testing and protecting the public from any adverse effects of chemicalization of the environment."

Dig and you will find something

I'm not sure what I've found put I did notice a connection. Check this out. So this is a lobbyist list for IL in 2004 and on it you'll find the following:

MONSANTO COMPANY
800 N. LINDBERGH BLVD.
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI 63167
Telephone: (314)694-1000 Fax: (314)694-3508
EXCLUSIVE
 TIERNEY, DAVE
CONTRACTUAL
RONAN POTTS, LLC
CLIENT
LOBBYIST ON THEIR OWN BEHALF

Now if you look up Ronan Potts, LLC you'll see that in the
same year prior to this lobbyist list, Ronan Potts, LLC
went to court for fraud. You can see it here.

Obviously they got caught and as any smart person would
guess this was something Ronan Potts, LLC knew before
there court case.  Those that are smart claim to be
innocent until proven guilty and they got busted.
I'm inferring that Monsanto knew who they were getting
into business with. I infer this because of there long
track record.

Let me also add that this group was one of the largest
for the Former Corrupt Governor Of IL George Ryan.
This fraud case is what got them all busted.

Late November 2008, Monsanto continues to thrive

I just stumbled upon this article and found it a bit daunting. Last year November Monsanto expanded it's facilities here in IL. Providing more to there round up line up etc. If you look at much of the facts found up herbicides and their patent seeds types are not good for our environment.

Here is the article if you choose to read it.

Here is a current court case between the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the USDA

Pretty interesting turn of events here. This is directly related to NAIS. Here is the link that has everything listed in reverse chronology.

About NAIS and why it effects you

The first logical question is as follows: What is NAIS? Glad you asked says the USDA, "the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is a modern, streamlined information system that helps producers and animal health officials respond quickly and effectively to animal disease events in the United States."

It looks totally harmless until you read this from a completely different source:
Research and documentation by M. Oakley

"Agreement on the Privileges and Immunities of the International Criminal Court

3.1.2 Ownership and control of property privileges Description

"premises to mean the buildings or parts of buildings and the land ancillary (connected to or existing as) thereto, irrespective of ownership, used for the purpose of...". The word "premises" includes a place and a conveyance in this section. Conveyance is the transfer of ownership of real property from the original owner to another... such as land....such as what happens when you sign up for Premises ID under NAIS and CONVEY ownership and control of your land and livestock to the USDA acting as agent for the federal government.

[Now we know how and why the word [premises] was used. The word premises is not only a redefinition of ownership and control within our legal system, but now under the International Criminal Court is also globally recognized and eliminates our private property rights and makes our own laws unavailable to us.]

Sect 3.2.1 cont.

As reflected in the discussions of the ICC Preparatory Commission Working Group, "the concept of legal capacity means that States (countries, provinces, commonwealths, or sovereign nations) will not subject the Court to national jurisdiction or legislation, and the Court will consult national authorities when it needs to act. Implementing legislation should not restrict the Court in the exercise of its functions or fulfillment of its purpose and should reflect the fact the Court is not subject to national law."

States may need to ensure steps are taken to guarantee the Court will have the capacity that may be necessary to exercise its functions and fulfillment of its purpose in that State, such as the capacity to contract, acquire and dispose of property and participate in national legal proceedings."

http://www.icclr.law.ubc.ca/Publications/Reports/ICC%20Reports/APIC_Guide_ENG.pdf

There is far more to this, but you get the idea: Bruce Knight was advocating a return to the International Court System because it would facilitate the NAIS. It would do this by ignoring Constitutional laws and rights, substituting global efforts to seize privately held lands and material property and any suits brought against state or federal agencies attempting to force NAIS would now be directed to the ICC.....where the individual is not recognized as owning or controlling property.

Think they can’t get away with this? Well..here is a law from 1949 that says they can and you can’t do anything about it.

Agreement on Privilege and Immunities of the Organisation of American States.

http://www.oas.org/juridico/english/treaties/c-13.html

© 2009 Marti Oakley "

I'm still doing research but it's curious to see these two sides.