Tuesday, March 22, 2016

THE GMO SCRAPBOOK: US SENATE REJECTS ANTI-GMO LABELLING ACT

This bit of good news was shared by Mr. W.M., and it concerns the U.S. Senate's rejection of a bill that has been dubbed the "Denying Americans the Right to Know Act," which would have created a federal law rejecting state GMO labelling law requirements:
Huge Victory: Senate Rejects the DARK Act
The bill, authored (not surprisingly) by Kansas US Senator Pat Roberts, has been rejected. But there is a cautionary tale (or perhaps, cautionary tail) here:
Another common message from many Senators was the need to continue negotiating about the contents of this bill. But more compromise will not fix the problem at the core of Sen. Roberts’ approach: Blocking state laws that require GMO labeling will strip away the ability of states to protect the public’s right to know what is in its food. Any version of this bill that would result in anything less than mandatory on-package labeling is unacceptable.
People want to know if the food they buy contains GMO ingredients. It’s time for Congress to create a mandatory on-package labeling requirement so people can decide for themselves whether they want to eat a food that has been produced using genetic engineering.
The tale is simply the presumption of federal senators, or any federal body, being able to restrict what is already happening in the marketplace, as more and more people seek out organic food suppliers and grocers, and reject the processed foods alternatives. Even the soda companies are jumping on the bandwagon, reissuing their soda products made from regular sugar, and not corn syrup. Ok, it's only marginally better, but it's a reflection of what is happening in the markets: left to their own choices, people would naturally rather eat genuine nutricious food, rather than geneitcally engineered and processed "food products" as they are euphemistically called, soaked in glyphosphate.
And it's information like this that is causing the shift(this important article shared by Mr. P.J.):
Is there a link between autism and glyphosate-formulated herbicides?
The abstract of this article should give anyone pause, especially women and even more especially, pregnant women:
Abstract
Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide on the planet, and its increasing use over time in the UnitedStates aligns well with the increasing rates of autism determined by the Centers for Disease Control. Based on the known mechanism of glyphosate toxicity, we hypothesize that a pregnant woman’s exposure at mid-pregnancy to glyphosate-formulated herbicides (GFH) may produce, in her unborn child’s brain, anatomic alterations of cortical neuron layering remarkably similar to those found in the brains of humans with autism. Glyphosate’s known ability to chelate manganese ions combined with evidence of severely depleted serum manganese in cows exposed to glyphosate makes it likely that glyphosate would induce manganese
deficiency in humans, interfering with the function of manganese-dependent enzymes. In particular, this would affect the maternal pituitary’s manganese-dependent Protein Phosphatase 1 (PP1) enzyme, resulting in a significant reduction in maternal serum levels of Thyroid-Stimulating Hormone (TSH). A study of mid-pregnancy maternal TSH serum levels in human mothers has found a statistical correlation of reduced TSH to increased risk of autism in offspring. Since insufficient thyroid stimulation by TSH or by iodine deficiency would both induce hypothyroidism, effects of iodine deficiency can be expected to emulate effects of TSH deficiency. Cortical neuron disarrangements have been produced in the brains of offspring of rat dams fed an iodine-deficient diet, and such foci of disordered cortical neurons are characteristically found in human autistic brains. While the research literature on glyphosate’s endocrine disrupting effects is limited, diverse evidence from animal studies reveals effects that suggest impaired thyroid function. If
our hypothesis can be substantiated by a focused research effort, it would provide further justification for reducing or, ideally, eliminating glyphosate-formulated herbicide exposures in pregnant women. (Emphasis added)
This cannot be good news for the agribusiness industry and companies like IG Farbensanto, but it is good news for the GMO opposition, for studies like this need to be sent to your representatives as notice that the bought-and-paid-for corporate "science" so confidently reassuring us of the safety of their products of yesteryear simply isn't holding up, and coming under increasing scrutiny.
Indeed, I think that what these types of studies really represent is what should have been done by those corporations (but wasn't, obviously), decades ago: comprehensive, intergenerational human and environment impact studies (such as Russia has indicated it will undertake with respect to this issue).
But what these studies also signify is that, for once, Congress did the right thing, but for all the wrong reasons, for as the original article avers, this is not a matter of simply working out the right wording or "compromise," It is a much deeper twofold issue: (1)  the right of people to make their own choices for their nutrition and health, and not have an irretrievably corrupt government, political process, and corporations, make it for them, and (2) the need for transparency not only in this matter, but a transparency that requires an end to mercantilist policies that priviliege corporate juridical persons over the individual persons that comprise them.
Thus, I cannot agree with the premise of the first article, that this is a "huge victory." It is a minor one. Has the bill's rejection been based on an acknolwedgement of the increasing number of studies that have pointed out the health problems of these so-called "safe products," or based upon a rejection of the implicitly mercentilist privilege upon which it was based, then I would rejoice. But that the bill's rejection really says is that it's simple (corrupt) business as usual in Washington.

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