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.

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[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.

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The fairly new Product Verification Program is what Whole Foods has been searching since GMOs came to the US, the company says.

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Two conferences reveal the nature of the problem

Between 15—19 May, a Vatican organised ‘study week’ looked at ‘Transgenic Plants for Food Security in the Context of Development’ – a title that gives some idea of the expected outcome of a more pro-GMO stance, however there won’t be an official position statement on GMOs and both sides of the argument claim to have a degree of Papal support. In the no-to-GMO camp are quite a number of social justice activists who fear that native crops and native peoples could be dislodged by the cash-crop power of GMOs and they share an uneasy alliance with some bishops and theologians, whose view is that GMOs are both a threat to the environment and human health and a possible step on the path to usurping the role of God as Creator. On the opposite side are many agribusinesses, some other development campaigners and some other theologians, who see GMOs as the logical tool to destroy poverty, feed the hungry, and maintain stewardship of the environment.

Some watchers have said that several of the speakers at the conference have financial links to Monsanto, one of the world’s largest GMO producers. The counter-argument is that with GMOs being big agribusiness, it’s inevitable that most people working the field will have had funding or sponsorship from one of the very few companies at the top of the GMO tree.

Uganda seeks to change policy, and minds

And in Uganda, another conference is currently exploring  the production of GMO crops in Africa. The participants are looking at the gap between policy and research, and giving evidence on how investment in GM technology could benefit the continent. One claim being made at this event is that the widespread adoption of GMO agriculture could ‘significantly reduce’ the cost of food in developing countries by 2050. However, this could only be achieved if consumer preferences were changed, a transformation that has happened without protest in the USA and patchily and with massive protest, in much of Europe.

Vatican courtesy of David Paul Ohmer at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Before we get to said blogger I’d like to link this passage from Wikipedia, offering a very small taste of Monsanto’s activity in the US (I have linked to much more information after the cartoon).

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In a huge break for the United States’ anti-GMO movement, a federal judge ruled that the US Fish & Wildlife Service should not have allowed genetically modified crops to be planted within a Prime Hook, a national wildlife refuge in Delaware.

The suit, filed by the Center for Food Safety, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, and the Audubon Society in Delaware, challenged that the US Fish & Wildlife Service knowingly put habitat at risk when it allowed farmers to plant GMO’s inside the 10,000-acre wildlife refuge. The results were better than anyone expected.

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Jonathan Harrington, who is a professional agronomist, admitted today that he imported two varieties of GM modified maize, grew and harvested them, gave seed to his neighbours to grow, and fed the resulting crop to Welsh sheep and cattle.

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Certainly, anything that can digest itself warrants a closer look — and now a company in Kansas has licensed that proprietary corn offspring, dubbed Spartan Corn III (it even sounds like a name your drunk uncle Larry would approve of), for the ultimate consummation of the marriage in a baptism of commercialization.

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We loved the passionate Shiva as she spoke out about the spin toward getting GMOs into the world food chain. She noted that there has always been famine but now she sees this “pseudo crisis” as a movement to bring GMOs into the fold.  She noted the difference between food and commodities. We agree with Shiva in her thinking the diversity of food that we help balance the playing field.

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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.”

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This new kind of corn, in an ideal scenario, would allow the kernels to be used as food, while the (formerly) wasted part of the corn plant could be converted to biofuel. A gene from a cow’s stomach, one of the most effective digesters of plant sugars in the world, is implanted into a corn cell using genetic engineering, fundamentally changing the corn plant. As reported in Biofuels Journal:

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Researchers at Michigan State are trying to get corn-stover to digest itself after harvest. Doing so would mitigate the costly pretreatment steps needed for the production of cellulosic ethanol from the non-edible parts of the corn plant.

MSU’s scientists are adding genetic material to the corn’s genome, genes that would normally be responsible for the digestive enzymes produced by fungi and the microbes in cow rumens. The newly transgenic plants store these enzymes in vacuoles in the leaves and stalk in a way that doesn’t affect the plant while it’s alive.

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