GENETIC MODIFICATION

Genetically Modified Organisms. It’s a big issue in agriculture and our food because so much corporate money has been invested in it. The science is exciting, the promised profits unimaginable, but the risks are all ours. The Green Shop is an anti-GM campaigner and has been actively so since ’96.

Do you value choice? Already, the only guaranteed way of avoiding GM is to buy Certified Organic.

How come it got so big? How did it happen so quickly? Because one firm (Monsanto) was over-reliant on one product (Roundup) for its profits and that weedkiller was about to run out of Patent – meaning it could be copied and the copies would take away sales. To keep the poison selling, Monsanto bought a soya bean (Roundup Ready) which had been genetically modified to resist such glyphosate weedkillers. Patent means Ownership. So now when farmers buy that crop they have to buy that weedkiller, too. Ka-ching!

It is ALL about money. My memory is that the GM proponents didn’t start peddling the “feed the world” line until they were forced to react to fierce criticisms of the technology, techniques and ethics. Feeding the world just wasn’t their point.

You’ll understand that other companies, not daring to be left behind, were quick to follow but you’d hardly credit just how nasty (this) industry is, in trying to force their irrelevant products down our throats. GM is a result of global corporate dominance – the new and very real political totalitarianism.

Go on-line and check out how Monsanto (and later new parent BAYER) fought against cancer claims against Roundup as just a taster of how the Corporate Model is there to help us.

Every promise about and claim for GM agriculture has, so far, proven false.

The guinea pigs in this, the biggest experiment in human history, are us, the human population. And it is an experiment. With GM, there are too many unknowns, too many possible permutations to be predicted, let alone tested. The trials are live, global and altering our entire food supply. The threat is to every single living thing (cue: thunder!)…(and: lightning!).

Yup, we believe it really is that dramatic.

Whatever the effects, good or bad, they will be irreversible: the results unknown for months, years, perhaps generations. If ever there was a need to proceed with caution, to have constant monitoring and strict controls, then this is it.

And that ain’t happening.

The Green Shop is GM free and will remain so. GM is one of the reasons that causes us to remove brands from our range. Maybe the ingredients change to include GM (big ‘names’ are good at not announcing ingredient changes of any sort) or maybe Cuddly Co got bought by Nasty Corp.

It’s up to you. Your choice will make a difference. What you buy and what you don’t buy, where you spend and where you don’t spend, these things really do matter.

Be aware. Be informed. GMWatch and Corporate Watch are great places to start – oh and, just as a general thing, read Private Eye (Fascinating rag. Published fortnightly, its content can be up to two weeks old yet still be four years ahead of ‘breaking’ news in the regular media.)

ADDITIONAL

2022. I recently saw a quite good anti-GM animated You Tube thing. It was followed by a series of supposedly neutral ‘Compare GM to…’ narrated shorts (Narrated Shorts – just right for the summer ha-ha!) which were sort of obvious in their bias while purporting to be simply looking at the evidence. Taken together, any two of these narrated shorts (that’ll be a pair, then) – and more blatantly as more vids were viewed – contradicted the pro-GM arguments in each other and contrarily showed Organic to be clearly better through the very odd choice of language/words and clear omission of evidence – along with the inevitable opinion being passed as fact (not something I would ever do. Sniff!). But at face value and if you haven’t the ability to turn the questions on their head…quite plausible stuff.

The thing that really got me was talk about diabetics having choice about the insulin they use (GM or non-GM). Medical rather than agricultural but none the less, having had a young boy with diabetes, believe me, the choice was taken away! GM or nothing. So while alternative insulins exist it’s YOU who have to know about them and YOU who have to fight your corner to get them. If you even can. Now, if they’re being economical with the truth at that level…well, trust them not!

19.10.15 GM-CREEP and ‘GOOD’ NEWS FOR VEGANS

The Green Shop has a policy of not stocking anything from a GM (Genetically Modified) source. We go further; we will not support GM in agriculture even when it’s at a distance, as examples: we delisted the Provamel/Alpro brands when we discovered that they are owned by one of the world’s top GM-promoting businesses; and we will not stock soya wax candles (it’s ALL from GM soy).

The biggest GM import into both Europe and the UK is Animal Feed and the vast bulk of that goes to the Dairy Herd. It is now all but impossible to source any non-Organic dairy product from cows not fed on GM. To stock any non-Organic dairy we investigate and we require written statements from the producer and their sources.

Did we ask for this? No. Are we being informed? No. Is it labelled? No.

Therefore, we are not restocking any of our non-Organic food lines containing dairy (milk, butter, cream, cheese, yoghurt, casein, whey, [animal] ghee, lactose, [animal] rennet – and they’re just the obvious ones – you’d be surprised!). We are losing quite a bit of product: some gluten-free, not a little Fair-Trade and one major Local casualty.

Is Organic ok? Yes. Organic standards forbid the use of any GM. However, we are keeping a wary eye on U.S. standards (overseen by the USDA) – already weak, they seem the most vulnerable to abuse and change – doomed, if TTP and TTIP go through.

There is nothing good about this. Not from our own commercial point-of-view, not from a health and safety point-of-view and certainly not from the point-of-view of ‘choice’.

Don’t get me started on food security, either!

Apart from the GM industry itself, the only beneficiaries we can think of are vegans. Because? The percentage of Green Shop stock suitable for vegans, already well over 60%, just went up, although only by default as non-Organic dairy disappears.

But is it really good news for vegans? Nope. The truth is that, GM-creep isn’t good for vegans, either. Is ‘vegan’ a GM-free guarantee? Alas, no. There are other ingredients to worry about, but vegans should be safe from GM in our shop.

[2022 update: in all likelihood GM soy, if nothing else (beware US rapeseed, too), has now eased its way directly into British human food – not just through eating dairy – and with Brexit our politicians are free to embrace GM with the same determination they used when destroying the NHS and for exactly the same reasons!]

The ONLY ways to guarantee a GM-free diet are to eat certified Organic, or grow your own – but watch out: GM seeds might already be here, they’re certainly coming and, like the food, they won’t be labelled! And remember that using Roundup or other glyphosate weed killers unavoidably supports GM agriculture.

The rest of this page is all a bit messy, left over from the old version, unedited. I might get around to it some day. So: pick’n’mix.

Of interest:

To date 19 EU countries (not the UK) have opted not to grow GM crops.

Of course this will no longer be an option if TTP and TTIP are accepted.

17.2.14 Breaking news on the Beeb: Scientists have come closer to perfecting a genetically-modified blight-resistant spud.  You should know that for over twenty years UK Organic growers have solved this particular problem by growing naturally blight-resistant potatoes from tubers originating in eastern Europe. Yet again the question arises: GM – why? If the answer isn’t for Control and Profit then bears don’t s*** in the woods. This follows January’s announcement of a tomato (another tomato…poor tomatoes) modified to carry a purple pigment. Benefit? To give us the goodness found in blueberries. Well, we could just eat blueberries but it seems that the corporations don’t (yet) own them!

– We were given a newspaper cutting from Independent from 24th or 25th January 2014 with the exciting news that crops (relatives of flax/linseed) are to be modified to give extra Omega 3 to feed to farmed fish which can’t get enough Omega 3 because they are farmed and not wild. This new ‘news’ actually dates back to at least 2009!

So what have we got? A man-made ‘solution’ creates a problem requiring another level of man-made intervention to rectify the situation…and bring who knows what problems next? Hasn’t this happened so many times before and used up so many resources? Doesn’t this strike you as insane? There’s enough Omega 3 in flax – why not just use that instead of this unnecessary interference? Why farm fish anyway? Oh yeah, I forgot…it’s to feed the world. The solution to world hunger lies in eating less meat, making such meat as we do consume Organic and allowing people to grow the crops they need, not the ones global business dictates. Seasonal, Local, Organic (NOT: seasonal, local, chemical, gm). It could be so simple, so safe and so easily done.

Every time YOU shop YOU make choices. Your choices can either help or harm.

– 21.1.14 IN THE NEWS: Antibiotic Resistance a threat to human life expectancy. Over-use and inappropriate use in medicine and agriculture (livestock being particularly cited) have helped bacteria to evolve faster than new antibiotics can be found.

No surprise and nothing new. Fleming himself predicted this!

The danger is now very, very real. One massive over-use NOT mentioned in the media is the stupid blanket addition of antibiotics to ALL early generation GM crops – and not only are these the ones in our food chain now but they’re also IMPOSSIBLE to remove. You are what you eat and the bacteria inside humans love it. Why did they do this? It was kind of a ‘marker’ thing that would show how the GM insert was doing. So not even part of the design just anther ill thought through addition with disastrous consequences.

But ‘news’? Anti-GM campaigns have highlighted this danger from the beginnings of GM in agriculture. All GM does is exacerbate the known problems of pests. How many times? Eat Organic! – Didn’t a dumb government minister recently say that the UK would be a farming “museum” if we did not embrace GM? In reality, if we had avoided GM we might well have been the place the rest of the world comes to begging for ‘clean’ seed.

– 17.1.14 EUROPE REJECTS GM MAIZE. However, your help is still needed. Follow the link: http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2014/15264-eu-parliament-rejects-authorisation-of-gm-maize-but-your-action-needed For some considerable time after this news broke there was NOTHING on BBC, SKY or other mainstream media. That tells its own quite serious story. Trust yourself not the mainstream. They have their own agenda and it isn’t yours!

– January 2014. Another Green Shop best-seller hits the dust! We’ve ditched our super selling range of scented candles. Why? Well, it seems that ALL soya wax used in the UK for making candles comes from US genetically modified soy. The industry will tell you first-off that the wax is not from GM. Persevere. They’ll then admit, if you persist, that it is from the States. Keep going and finally they’ll allow that it is in fact from GM soya but that there is “no trace of GM” in the wax. Oh well, that’s just dandy then.

A couple of points to make: 1) we know that the GM industry can be very selective both in what testing they allow and in what results they release so we’re not convinced that no GM remains in the wax but 2) and more importantly – buying soy-based candles is just giving GM soya an extra market, with nice revenues from a by-product to the main event and thus supporting the viability of a GM crop. So we’re having none of it. Soy-based candles are off our shelves.

14.9.12 Well worth watching:  http://seedsoffreedom.info/.  A 30 minute film quietly explaining the importance of global seed biodiversity and exposing some of the many failures of GM agriculture in a rant-free (clearly not one of mine, then) narrative (thanks to East Coast Organics for pointing this one out, we had missed it).

18.9.12 And there’s this 24 minute Q&A session: http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?=392D72A0CD569C34A603BB4883029B51 with Jeffrey Smith (who’s book Seeds of Deception we recommend).

15.2.13 This is fun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkionqWPc-Q An animated short. Thanks to Graham White.