Wednesday, December 30, 2009

From the Intertubz

Hi all, I hope you are having a good winter. Here's some fun reading to stimulate the mind during the "off season".

"For the first time in the world, we've proven that GMO are neither sufficiently healthy nor proper to be commercialized. [...] Each time, for all three GMOs, the kidneys and liver, which are the main organs that react to a chemical food poisoning, had problems," indicated Gilles-Eric Séralini, an expert member of the Commission for Biotechnology Reevaluation, created by the EU in 2008.



In 2006 a paper by Catherine Badgley found that, while yields from organic systems in temperate regions were typically 9% less than in non-organic systems, in. tropical regions, organic agriculture can increase yields by over 50%, with the possibility of more than doubling the production of some types of food. A report in 2006, by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), based on 114 studies in Africa, found that organic agriculture could increase yields by up to 116% – more than double.


With the purchase of Seminis in 1995, Monsanto is now estimated to control between 85-90% of the U.S. nursery market (this includes pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers). By buying up the competition and lobbying the government to make saving seeds illegal, Monsanto has slowly been taking over all of the seeds.

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