Nope, it’s not a spooky tale left over from Halloween. After word got out that Canada’s flax seed crops had been cross-contaminated with a genetically modified variety, the country’s entire flax industry is in peril.
[Sugar Beet Field. Creative Commons photo by Gilles San Martin]
[Cairo. Creative Commons photo by Andrew A. Shenouda]
Over the summer, Egyptian officials rejected several import shipments of wheat, saying they were unfit for human consumption. Since then, the parliament has been pushing for stricter food standards. It looks like they got their wish.
“We are writing to express our shock and unequivocal denunciation of the experiments being conducted by your colleagues which involve the feeding of genetically modified Golden Rice to human subjects.”
Marketing the national agriculture as GM-free has been a key feature of the Welsh Assembly’s approach to boosting the Welsh farming economy. Given that over half of American consumers would prefer to buy GM free food if they could identify it, this has been a major selling factor.
A recent New York Times/CBS poll bears good news for ecopreneurs in the food industry. Fifty-Three percent of consumers said they would not buy genetically modified food. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell the difference between Frankenfoods and the real thing.
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.
Once again, labeling decisions made by the FDA and USDA, influenced heavily by big agriculture are keeping consumers from understanding what is in their food. The FDA’s position is: GMOs are the “substantial equivalent” of conventional crops and so does not require “disclosure of genetic engineering techniques…on the label.”
(image courtesy Aine D on Flickr)
Did you know that nearly half the sugar we bake those heart-shaped cookies with comes not from sugar cane, but sugar beets? Additionally, by next year, much of that beet sugar could be from genetically-engineered beets? The new beet seed was created by Monsanto to be able to withstand direct application of the herbicide Roundup, which has the active ingredient glyphosate.
The Environmental Protection Agency has enabled Monsanto in releasing the new GE crop by increasing the allowable residue of the herbicide by FIVE THOUSAND percent. Beets, being a root vegetable, are especially susceptible to retaining chemical residue.
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