Do you have any feelings, positive or negative, about the Monsanto Protection Act?

Your linked article failed to mention a few things. Michael Taylor, Elena Kagan, Dr. Roger Beachy and Tom Vilsack.
Also relevant.

I have very strong feelings about it. And it is a huge disappointment for me in the administration. People talk about food having been genetically modified for hundreds of years, but that is cross breeding, not DNA tampering in a lab. The beauty of cross breeding is that one gets a natural test by seeing what is produced. DNA tampered food may not demonstrate unseen effects on humans for many years.

I think it’s an example of the wacko lunatic fringe trying to force the rest of us to suck up to it’s philosophy.

Genetically modified foods have been in existence since prehistoric times. Heck, the first apple trees did cross-pollination to make stronger/better apple trees. Genetic modification is Darwinism. And that is a good thing.

What the anti-GM people are doing is griping about the pace and instruments of genetic modification. But what Monsanto (and others) are doing is nothing different than what Mendel did when he put two twigs in the same glass of water 400 years ago. Except Monsanto does it scientifically.

I see this noise about the supposed “dangers of GM” as simply Luddite attention getting and reactionary thinking in a world that is evolving. The anti-GM people want to stand in the way of progress and evolution – in the same way that the Catholic Church stood in the way of Galileo.

Yes, my view is not going to be accepted by the food purists, but it is how I feel.

Holy crap, I just found out they’re putting Fluoride in our water. Is there no end to these government plots to kill us. What’s next Soylent Green?

Not just fluoride, @Jaxk. They are putting other things in our water as well.

@bkcunningham lol, love the Kool-Aid man

@Jaxk Would love to know the basis of your fear that fluoride in your water will kill you.

I have very strong negative feelings about Monsanto & it has disappointed me extremely that they have refused to do any long term studies about the effects of their genetic tampering with the food that we eat (Monsanto says that doing long term testing is unimportant). The FDA is peopled with ‘former’ executives from Monsanto. Personally, I think that Monsanto is using the human-race for experimental subjects. We need to keep in mind that Monsanto supplied the military with Agent Orange in Viet Nam & Agent Orange did so much damage to the troops & to the people in Viet Nam. Monsanto produces a herbicide (Round-Up) that contains a key ingredient of Agent Orange. Round-Up is so dangerous that even diluting it by 500 times, it is STILL dangerous to the people who use it.

Educated consumers have to stay on their toes. Others? They can eat frankenfood if they wish. We won’t know for about 20 years if GMOs turn you green. :)

“But what Monsanto (and others) are doing is nothing different than what Mendel did when he put two twigs in the same glass of water 400 years ago. Except Monsanto does it scientifically”

—Gregor Mendel lived in the 1800s, not 400 years ago
—Gregor Mendel worked scientfically
—Genetic modification in a lab is very different from selective breeding. It allows adding genes from totally unrelated species. So the results can be wildly unlike anything extant, so the possibility for unexpected consequences is much, much greater.

I’m not saying GMO foods are automatically bad. But they allow alterations to the food supply that are entirely different from what we’ve had before.

I think I should be able to go to a store and buy a tomato or whatever and know that it is a natural product. Farmers and producers should not have to label a food as natural or unadulterated; that should be required of those who change up the natural order of things.

I do not have a problem per se with GMO foods. I just think they should be the ones required to label their junk. And, if a Monsanto Frankenfood contaminates some other farmers crop they should not be able to sue him. THEY should be required to compensate the farmer for contaminating his crop not them sue him for “stealing” their product.
What they are trying to do here is have their products declared a natural one that is unassailable in a court of law.

@glacial

First of all the comment was facetious. This is just another conspiracy theory like all the others including Fluoride in our water. I would love to see the argument that Monsanto is killing us. Personally I don’t drink water. I like foods that have a longer shelf life than I do. If given a choice between canned and fresh I will always choose canned. I would never buy any food that says Low Fat, Low Sodium, Low cholesterol or low anything. I’ve already made it past my personal ‘Use By’ date so I don’t see how any of this has hurt me.

@Jaxk Cool, I was just thinking this thread was about to go all John Birch Society. I am not personally anti-GMO, either.

@glacial

I actually went to a meeting of the Birch Society when I was 18. They promised me whiskey. I don’t remember the political conversation, only the projectile vomiting. They didn’t invite me back.

Haha!

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. This is an issue I have been negligent about.

To me this should not even be about anti or pro gmo people. It shouldn’t even matter. No company should be above regulation. It is necessary. Have we not learned anything about banks to big to fail wall street and our auto companies? Are memories really that short?

That just blows my mind.

As to the flouride thing.. I recall reading articles about how Americans get too much flouride. Not enough to kill us mind you but enough to experience side effects. I also remember that countries who removed it from their water supply experienced a reduction in tooth decay and cavities that corrollated with the removal.

@Jaxk, @elbanditoroso, This is not a conspiracy theory.
It is not even a question about whether GMOs are safe or not.
It is about whether or not a company, any company, should be able to place itself above the law, write or re-write the laws to protect it from possible lawsuits or regulation.

It goes beyond the GM product bulls hit. I wrote an article quite a while ago about the liscensing and ownership of created plants and animals (biologicals like GM bacteria etc) and posed several questions. I don’t really care about GM to a large extent, but what Monsanto and their ilk do and have done is take over our food supply and other crops by owning seeds and the entire product line to grow, fertilise, weed and harvest. That cotton in your shirt you are wearing was harvested using a defolient. The cotton grown was probably designed in a lab to produce the most possible fiber and for the usable fiber to absorb as little as the defolient as possible. Both seed and defolient was probably designed by the likes of Monsanto.

Monsanto seeds can’t be reused. Every planting season, the farmers are made to buy the seed and are not allowed to collect and reuse seed from last season. Monsanto designs plants to be herbaside resistant so that the farmers and spray weed killer on the field and it just kills the broad leaf and other weeds. The whole system is screwed. The farms using those production methods produce more, lowering the price of the harvest, so that the farms using lower yeilding systems get screwed over and in the end are forced to use these ‘modern’ methods.

The weird thing is that it isn’t the actual active herbaside that is toxic, but the surfactants and additives in the Roundup-like products and seem to pose the greater danger. The use of chemicals like this, does, however, create resistant strains of plants, just like anti-biotics create resistant strains of bacteria. ‘Life finds a way’ as Ghandi said.

It is problematic and they are not listening to the research and experts and they are muddying the water with bulls hit and letting strawmen arguements make the opposition look bad.

The floride argument is for another time, I think. I support floride added to water.

@rojo

Frankly it is difficult to get to the root of this issue. There are hundreds of articles protesting this but none of them give you the wording of the provision. In fact they all say the same thing, almost identical wording. The source of the objection seems to come from the Food Democracy Organization. The actual wording is here. The provision doesn’t change any of the normal processes for authorization or deregulation. The Secretary of Agriculture still has authority to regulate under section 411(a) or 412© of the Plant Protection Act. The major stumbling block comes from the tactic of starting a law suit (environmentalists love this tactic) causing the courts to become befuddled so they issue an injunction pending further study. This provision allows continued production while this gets sorted out. In fact it sounds consistent with the Supreme Court Ruling in Monsanto Co. vs. Geertson Seed Farms.

There is nothing here that puts Monsanto above the law or is even inconsistent with the SC ruling. The noise is all about the environmental groups losing one of their main delaying tactics. Politics as usual.

Just ran into this controversy. All seems very bad so I’m intent on reading up on it, but given my way of study I would like to read the oppositions argument. A link to the opposing side might be buried in the thread above (will read through in more detail tonight), if not can anyone point to any link (without association to Monsanto) that argues that this is a good thing?

@choreplay there should be a lot of pertinent information out on the internet, all of a recent nature, because Obama just signed it into law as a rider on the Appropriations Bill to keep the gov operating. It is finally getting the attention it deserved to get before it was enacted.
But from what I just observed much of it is just the SOS repackaged by the various sites. You have to dig to get new or additional information.

Updated links regarding my article about genetic mutations and identified markers that ‘the industry’ tries to patent in order to earn money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/30gene.html?_r=0

If the man who came up with the Polio vaccine did that, our babies and children would still be dying of this disease. Please consider that when you read about these issues.

For all of you that have responded to this question, I have found a Link on the internet that gives the results of the longest running test of the GMOs. The Link is as follows

http://usahitman.com/lrgssftir/

Personally, I think that Monsanto is using all of humanity as Lab Rats.

@Linda_Owl Thanks for the followup. I have sent it on to friends on both sides of this argument.