USDA goes forward with herbicide-resistant GMO seeds (China, Haiti, & other countries banned GMO corn...)

Published time: January 03, 2014 20:22
Edited time: January 05, 2014 15:59

Reuters / Dave Kaup

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Agriculture, SciTech, Science, USA

The commercial use of new herbicide-resistant, genetically modified corn and soybean seeds moved one step closer to reality on Friday when the United States Department of Agriculture announced their introduction in limited quantities.

The new seeds have been genetically engineered by Dow AgroSciences to survive the hefty application of 2,4-D, a widely used weed killer that’s commonly known as one of the ingredients in the Vietnam War-era herbicide Agent Orange.

According to a report by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, these modified seeds will be used in restricted field trials while the agency continues to evaluate the possibility that it will deregulate the product altogether, despite concerns regarding a surge in herbicide use.

Last May, government officials delayed the approval of the new crops until they had conducted new environmental impact statements (EIS). In addition to the APHIS report, a separate review is currently underway by the Environmental Protection Agency with the goal of determining the consequences of extensive 2,4-D use that’s likely to occur should the seeds come to market.

Although the EPA review should be released sometime over the next few months, it’s unclear when exactly the final rulings on the herbicide and the seeds will be made. If approved, farmers would be able to plant the new seeds while spraying fields with 2,4-D throughout the life of the crops, which in their current variation are still susceptible to the herbicide.

According to the Associated Press, scientists don’t believe 2,4-D to be responsible for health complications caused by Agent Orange, and have instead pinpointed the ingredient 2,4,5-T – banned by the EPA in 1985 – as the culprit. Previous findings by the EPA have also declared the weed killer safe to use, but other groups aren’t as confident.

As RT reported in the past, the Natural Resources Defense Council has linked 2,4-D to cases of cancer, genetic mutations and more. In addition the impact on humans, the Save Our Crops Coalition believes it will be extremely difficult to contain the application of the herbicide to a particular area.

“These herbicides have been known to drift and volatilize to cause damage to plants over ten miles away from the point of application,” the coalition claimed.

Meanwhile, there is also concern that expanding the use of 2,4-D would simply speed up the evolution of weeds resistant to the chemical. The herbicide is already the third most-used weed killer in the US, but the AHPIS deflected this argument by saying resistance could happen anyway. The agency recommended attempts to slow down the evolution of 2,4-D resistant weeds by using a combination of techniques to fight their growth and not simply relying on the herbicide.

http://rt.com/usa/usda-gmo-dow-seeds-152/

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.

In the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm.

China to US: ‘Take Your 60,000 Tons of GMO-Contaminated Corn and Shove It’

China to US: ‘Take Your 60,000 Tons of GMO-Contaminated Corn and Shove It’

Melissa Melton
Activist Post

China recently rejected 60,000 tons of corn being imported into the country from the United States when it was found to be contaminated with Syngenta’s MIR162, an insect-resistant strain of transgenic corn.

It seems MIR162 is not authorized in China, and the batch was returned according to regulations regarding genetically modified imports into the country.

This strain of Bacillus thuringiensis (or Bt) corn is only approved for food and/or feed in 11 countries throughout the world; the first country it was approved for human consumption in was the U.S., back in 2008.

So basically China — a country that had one of the worst food contamination scandals in historywhen tainted baby formula killed 6 infants and hospitalized 54,000…where one in three toysproduced is filled with toxic heavy metals like lead that can cause brain damage…a nation with appalling levels of air pollution, bad to the point that the country has officially asked its foreign embassies to stop publishing data on it because it doesn’t want the world to know just how atrocious it is…a nation where mass animal die-offs in the tens of thousands are the norm…a country where the third longest river in the world actually turned blood red likely due to toxic run off…

a country widely known for abusive working conditions in its factories and listed among the worst in the world for human trafficking/modern slavery… a country with government forced abortions daily due to a barbarous one-child policy, the kind where a mother is given an injection to kill her baby at seven months pregnant because she can’t come up with the $6,000 fine for violating said policy, who is then made to wait next to her baby’s lifeless body in her jail cell where she delivered him stillborn…China, home of the Tiananmen Square Massacre…

China has not approved this corn to be served up to its population and actually rejected and returned the entire 60,000-ton batch.

Um…yeah.

Eat up, America.

Melissa Melton is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared, and a co-creator of Truthstream Media. Wake the flock up!