bad, bad news on modified food

http://perdurabo10.tripod.com/id451.html


Uh Oh; The Bugs Are Eating Those "Pest Killing" Crops

Two research teams in England and Venezuela have discovered something alarming about the new genetically modified crops filled with insecticide. The insects not only eat them, they seem to thrive on them.

Scientists at Imperial College in London and the Universidad Simon Rodrigues in Caracas found that the insects that the chemical additive was supposed to kill were not only feeding on the poison, but the stuff seems to help them thrive.

That the biotech companies added genes from a naturally occurring poison, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is widely used as a pesticide by organic farmers, means that the mutation by insects to survive the poison is a potential threat to the organic farming industry.

-snip-

But there is more bad news about those modified crops. Lots of it.

-snip- (this snip lists 8 bad things)

The report concludes: "sufficient evidence has emerged to raise serious safety concerns, that if ignored could result in irreversible damage to health and the environment."
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the food barons will see that this is ignored in our media.

this topic is just as important as global warming which is the most important issue we have.

you gotta eat.

This website is rubbish.

For The Voice of Lucifer Radio
http://voiceoflucifer.net

Now that's something you don't see every day.

Oh and look...


Well, that's nice. I think I'll go to that site for all my science information now. :sarcasm:

nt

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Universidad+Simon+Rodrigues+in+Caracas+found+that+the+insects+&btnG=Search

Among the websites quoting the original article are:
agnews.org,
organicconsumers.org,
detroitgardencenter.org,
many more...

Who does it serve to attempt to trash articles like this?

Wat

It isn't like anybody didn't see this coming. After all, it was predicted at the onset of GM crop use that such modified crops would produce both insects and weeds that would live, thrive and survive in spite of the modifications made.

But GM crops aren't really designed to prevent pests and weeds or to increase yields, despite what they claim. No, GM crops are essentially designed to allow agra businesses to have monolithic control over what is planted. They are doing this through patent law, of all things, and when one of their crops cross pollinates with a non-GM crop, that farmer's crop is destroyed, all the interests of protecting the patent.

The goal is to do this so much that the only plants out there will be GM crops, and rather than the farmers' tried and true method of saving the seed, they will instead be forced to buy new seed every year.

In addition, this is slowly but surely going to force the organic farmers out of business. Despite using organic farming methods, the crops will be contaminated by GM crops, and thus will become instantly unsellable for the organic farmer.

And sadly, you're correct, the MSM won't be reporting at all on this, and the US will merrily continue on its way, eating food that is less and less nutritious for you, and is instead more and more poisoned.

nt

... faster than IDIOTS who try to justify this kind of biological engineering. We are messing with the very fabric of life here, and the people who are doing it haven't the SLIGHTEST IDEA where this will all lead. They are playing around with stuff they understand at the 1% level.

I've been incensed about this shit since they first concieved it. First of all, on the macro scale, I think it is stupid and idiotic, they simply don't know all the ramifications of what they're doing, and sadly, they don't care. This is simply another disastorous product of short term, bottom line thinking that all too many corporations and politician are guilty of.

It also pisses me off personally because it effects me personally. I'm an organic farmer, growing heirloom, organic fruits. I'm lucky in that they haven't started bioengineering fruit trees and bushes to any extent close to what they're doing with traditional row crops, but I can see it coming down the line. And when they do it is going to mean a lot of extra work for me, pollinating by hand, and even with all that work I still might be screwed by some little stray pollen. And if the giant fruit corporations follow the same path as their row crop brethern, in they will come, cutting down my trees, all for the sin of picking up a bit of pollen from their GM tree. Years and years of work will go down the drain, along with all the personal and monetary investment that I've put in.

But there is increasing resistance to GM crops, and I hope that it becomes so intense that it will keep GM out of the fruit business, and push it back out of the row crop sector too. Then all we'd have to deal with is the super pests, both plant and animal, that evolved due to GM shit.

If you want to help, it is as simple as buying food from your local farmers' market. I attended the National Small Farm Conference last fall, and GM foods was getting huge buzz, and we are organizing. So buy from your local farmer, and he will take some of that money and use it to help do away with GM crops.

GO AFTERN THE AGRIBUSINESSES WHO ARE ABUSING THE TECHNOLOGY, NOT THE TECHNOLOGY ITSELF!!!

So I guess me, my fellow biotech majors, and all biotech scientists are idiots according to you? Typical ludditie BS.

...if your career plans are to splice a BT gene into corn, yes you are not only an idiot, you'd be a fucking idiot.

I don't recall saying anything about biotechnology in general, just the misquided, dangerous and probably ultimately disastrous applications of the sort being done by Monsanto et al.

diverse strains of crops. Some bugs will like some strains, others will like others, but none will like all and all strains will have some degree of protection against most.

The great potato famine in Ireland occurred because there were only (IIRC) 2 different strains of potato grown in the entire country, which by that time had turned to near exclusive growing of potatoes - the traditional rye and barley was not being grown except as sustenance crops, and they were not really large enough to sustain.

GM monoculture invites similar disasters.

claim in the link. The first is enough.

The two research teams actually were one: Ali H. Sayyed, Hugo Cerda and Denis J. Wright. Cerda was at Imperial College when the research was done, with the other two co-authors of the study.

Some previous work showed that under the right circumstances, Bt resistance is possible. But as of a year ago, it was only reported in the lab, and those reports were fairly old. The resistance could come by the means typically expected; or strains of insects naturally partially resistant could be mixed together and forced to breed in confined circumstances, without a gene pool of non-resistant strains to dilute the resistance trait; this mimics in the greenhouse what might possibly happen in nature, but isn't likely.

The crux of their research seems to be:
"The evolution of resistance to transgenic insecticidal crops involves the interaction of many genetic and biological factors (Tabashnik 1994), including fitness costs. Here we look at two possible fitness costs, the larval development time and fresh pupal weight, of a highly Cry1Ac-resistant re-selected sub-population of P. xylostella SERD4, an unselected (UNSEL) sub-population of SERD4 and a susceptible ROTH population of this species. All populations were reared in the presence or absence of Bt toxin Cry1Ac. The aim was to conduct a preliminary experiment to test the idea that such a toxin could have nutritionally favourable effects on insects that, because of their resistance, could consume large amounts of Cry protein with impunity."

On edit, added: Cry1Ac is the toxin in Bt. SERD4 is the specific strain of Plutella xylostella (L.), the 'diamond back moth' or 'cabbage moth'. Widespread in Europe and N. America.

In prior research, they summarize, resistance led to possible ancillary changes in the insects, with subvarieties being selected for resistance, and altering the overall group properties--perhaps a different color, different size, developmental delays. But mostly they're quibbling with the idea that resistance always entails fitness costs, as found in other studies of Bt resistant insects, some of it their own research. The bugs were previously found to be resistant, but less fit in other ways. (Implication: The presence of Bt crops is what confers survival, management of the resistant strain of insect is simple, simply rotate the Bt crops with non-Bt crops.)

In this research, which started out with resistant insects, they followed up on previous work showing such effects, but looked at a different species. In this species, the larvae were larger; they found they couldn't be certain why this was the case. It might be that the resistant variety was simply larger (but this seems highly unlikely); it's much more likely the resistant moth uses the protein as food. Which makes sense: if it's not toxic to the moth, it's just an otherwise nearly irrelevant protein. (Implication: rotating Bt crops will do nothing to knock down the Bt-resistant strain of this particular pest, if it becomes established in a field.)

"The present results and previous work on re-selected SERD4 populations (Sayyed & Wright 2001) suggest that resistant larvae may be using Cry1Ac as a supplementary food protein, and that this may account for the observed faster development rate of Bt resistant insects in the presence of the Bt toxin. This could either be a pleiotropic effect linked to Bt resistance or, more simply, because of resistant insects exploiting their ability to survive high doses of the toxin. In both cases, the insects are able to digest and utilize the Cry protein. Plant insect nutrition is the result of a complex balance between beneficial and toxic components in the plant. The presence of Cry1Ac toxin could have modified the nutritional balance in the plants for resistant larvae."

Your link seems to imply that the bugs are found in the field, and weren't hand selected; that probably many different species do thrive on Bt crops, instead of the one specific strain of moth looked at; and that this research was performed twice, instead of once. This leads the reader to a wrong conclusion as to what's happening in the field; presumably the author read the original study, and either intended the wrong conclusion to be reached, or simply didn't understand what s/he read in this article.