What's Behind Illinois Stealing Local Hero's Bee Hives?
by Dr. Mercola
Mercola.com
July 6, 2012

An Illinois beekeeper whose bee hives were stolen and allegedly destroyed by the Illinois Department of Agriculture has stirred up a hornet's nest with his questions on why the state did this, and most importantly, what they did with his bees.

The state claims the bees were destroyed because they were infected with a disease called foulbrood.

But when the 58-year apiary keeper had his hearing—three weeks after the removal of his bees without his knowledge—the state's "evidence" had disappeared, leaving more questions than answers about the raid on the beekeeper's hives.

Some people, including the beekeeper, Terrence Ingram, suspect the raid has more to do with Ingram's 15 years of research on Monsanto's Roundup and his documented evidence that Roundup kills bees, than it does about any concerns about his hives.

Interestingly, the state's theft targeted the queen bee and hive he'd been using to conduct the research...

Ingram believes the destruction of his bees and hives is more likely to be related to his research into the effect of Roundup on honey bees. He claims some 250 of his colonies have been killed off over the years by Monsanto's broad-spectrum herbicide, used in large quantities on both conventional- and genetically engineered crops. Ingram's research shows that Roundup can lead to what's called chilled brood, which is an entirely different scenario...

Ingram has studied the effects of Roundup on honeybees for the past 15 years, and he believes he had built up sufficient amount of data to show that the herbicide causes not just bee die-offs, but also Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—a mysterious phenomenon that has decimated an estimated one-third of all honey bees since 2006. While some bees inexplicably die, many simply vanish and never return to their hives....

Ingram is quite correct about chemical companies like Monsanto—they are seeking to take nearly full control of the food supply by controlling virtually every aspect of crop production. So he has cause to be suspicious when it comes to the question of who ordered the theft and destruction of his bees. It wouldn't be the first time the biotech giant has used questionable tactics to get rid of its adversaries. And research implicating Monsanto as the cause of CCD could definitely cause some harm to the company's bottom line.

One of the forerunning theories of colony collapse disorder (CCD) is that it's being caused by genetically engineered crops—either as a result of the crops themselves or the pesticides and herbicides applied on them, such as Roundup. Ingram's research could potentially have strengthened this theory. Monsanto's Roundup herbicide is one of the most widely used herbicides there is. As a result, Monsanto has received increasing amounts of bad publicity over their potential role in the devastating demise of bees around the globe...

But Roundup is not the only herbicide that has come under scrutiny. Newer systemic insecticides, known as neonicotinoids, two prominent examples of which include Imidacloprid and Clothianidin, are also frequently used on both conventional- and genetically engineered crops and have been implicated in CCD. In fact, bee colonies started disappearing in the U.S. shortly after the EPA allowed these new insecticides on the market. Even the EPA itself admits that "pesticide poisoning" is a likely cause of bee colony collapse as these pesticides weaken the bees' immune system...

 

 kurtster wrote: 
Here are the numbers. The drop down box shows the years.  http://www.fsis.usda.gov/fsis_recalls/Recall_Case_Archive_2007/index.asp  
 

 I think Food safety is one of the regulatory agencies Republicans keep saying they will get rid of. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-republicans-vote-to-cut-funds-to-implement-food-safety-law/2011/06/16/AGMS82XH_story.html
 Republicans don't believe in the food and safety programs, remember?  

I was going to link the contributions Monsanto gives to politicians but they have a pac, and because Monsanto is now "people" and give money secretly, who really knows... it's Orwellian.

where would we start?

 romeotuma wrote: 
Go organic...

Monsanto’s Cloned Growth Hormone rBST Still Contaminates US Milk
by Elizabeth Renter
NaturalSociety
July 2, 2012

Breast-feeding mothers are often cautioned against eating and drinking certain things; it’s because some of these things can find their way into their breast milk and then their baby. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, that some of the hormones and antibiotics given to dairy cattle would make their way into your milk carton? One hormone, recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rBST, is given to about 20% of dairy cattle in the United States, having unknown effects on individuals who consume their milk.

IS rBST safe? That depends on who you ask. Companies like Monsanto, the original producer of Posilac (an rBST) product had to reluctantly put safety warnings on the sides of their packages—admitting that it has about 20 “toxic effects” on the cows.

It’s a hormone that forces cows to produce more milk. More milk = more money, but the hormone makes the cows sick. Among other things, it causes mastitis which is an infection of the udder. This infection causes pus to be released into the milk. Yes, pus is in your milk...

 

Report: Nature May Soon Overcome Monsanto as ‘Super Rootworms’ Destroy Crops
by Anthony Gucciardi
Natural Society
June 28, 2012

What will be the end of Monsanto? Could it be lawsuits, new legislation, or perhaps even a tiny insect that is less than 0.10 mm in length. A new report reveals that rootworms may ultimately be what ends Monsanto’s crops, despite the biotech giant’s rampant success within the United States legislative system. Amazingly, western corn rootworms have virtually no problem gobbling up Monsanto’s modified maize crop, as they have developed a serious resistance to the very crops designed to kill them. So much so that these little critters are outpacing Monsanto’s top scientists.

To make matters worse for the company, the resistant rootworms are maturing earlier than expected this year. And with the enhanced growth has come enhanced birth rates, with the bug’s larvae hatching the earliest in decades. Monsanto, of course, is absolutely defenseless against the resistant rootworms which have adapted to their biopesticide known as Bt. At least 8 populations of insects have developed resistance, with 2 populations resistant to Bt sprays and at least 6 species resistant to Bt crops as a whole...

 

Monsanto Crop Bans by Courts Would Be Reversed in Bill
by Jack Kaskey
Bloomberg
June 19, 2012

The one-paragraph provision in the the 90-page bill would circumvent legal obstacles that have slowed commercialization of engineered crops, sometimes for years, benefiting Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company. Planting would be permitted until USDA completes any analysis required by a judge...

The Center for Food Safety, which has sued over USDA approvals of biotech crops, called the bill’s language a “Monsanto profit assurance provision” that interferes with judicial oversight of agency decisions and has the potential to disrupt the global grain trade.

The bill would “empower a single corporation and a few of its industry friends to move beyond the control of the U.S. courts, USDA and public review to make their own rules and profit from slippery back door politics,” Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the center, said today in a statement...

Monsanto: A Modern Day Plague
by Lisa Cerda
City Watch
June 18, 2012

 

CERDAFIED — Monsanto’s history is one steeped with controversial products, deadly consequences, massive cover ups, political slight of hand, and culminates as a modern day plague on humanity, a plague that is about to peak to biblical proportions. Created in 1901, the company started producing its first form of poison, the artificial sweetener saccharin. The rise in use of saccharin really began 70 years later. Monsanto had plenty of time for a realistic and long term study on the impact of saccharin on human health. Instead, Monsanto learned how to finagle political support and grow its empire despite the growing consensus that saccharin caused cancer.

No surprise then that the company continued on a path of controversy. Here’s a bullet point history...

 

Five million Brazilian farmers take on biotech giant Monsanto
by Subodh Varma
The Times of India
June 12, 2012

NEW DELHI: Five million Brazilian farmers have taken on US based biotech company Monsanto through a lawsuit demanding return of about 6.2 billion euros taken as royalties from them. The farmers are claiming that the powerful company has unfairly extracted these royalties from poor farmers because they were using seeds produced from crops grown from Monsanto's genetically engineered seeds, reports Merco Press.

In April this year, a judge in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, ruled in favor of the farmers and ordered Monsanto to return royalties paid since 2004 or a minimum of $2 billion. The ruling said that the business practices of seed multinational Monsanto violate the rules of the Brazilian Cultivars Act (No. 9.456/97). Monsanto has appealed against the order and a federal court ruling on the case is now expected by 2014.

About 85% of Brazil's massive soyabean crop output is produced from genetically engineered seeds. Brazil exports about $24.1 billion worth of soyabeans annually, more than a quarter of its total agri-exports...

I am now at age 63 gluten intolerant.  That is coincidental with a sharp uptick in gluten content in wheat due to Monsanto's hybridization post WWII and into the 50"s. I ate mass quantities of wheat as a kid and adult too.   More gluten = more nutrition and I believe that is what was generally thought.  The results were heralded.  It was the beginning of the Green Revolution.

I don't lay malevolence in the name of money at Monsanto's door.  It is just that, as with some other post WWII modernizations, there are late-breaking and unintended consequences to what is initially seen as a benefit.  In hindsight, or for kids now, the lesson perhaps is eat less gluten as a % of caloric intake?  This will be smth for me to delve into next week.  I'll try to find time to determine if any rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have been conducted on this issue.  Anecdotal indications are many of the "boomer" generation, as myself, are or will become gluten sensitive or intolerant altogether.

Edit: I tested negative for coeliac disorder. Coeliac is, I believe, a genetically related intolerance to gluten that commonly manifests itself in the age 20's.  It can come with a constellation of other "unpleasantries".

 romeotuma wrote: 
A damn good reason to not vote for Obama.

We are what we eat.  I made an issue of this when Taylor was appointed, but the usual deaf ears  ...  anything Obama does is ok, he means well.  Oh, and that other thing, the only reason someone would oppose Obama is because they are  r .....

And is it just me or has there been an unprecedented amount of food recalls, deaths and record levels of contamination of our domestic food supply the past three years ?  Hmmm, anyone remember the tomato thing during his first year ?  The egg thing.  Millions of tons of ground beef, that pink stuff they put in the GB.  Its been downhill ever since, IIRC.  This guy Taylor gas been doing a great job.

Busted: Biotech Leader ‘Syngenta’ Charged Over Covering Up Animal Deaths from GM Corn
by Anthony Gucciardi
Natural Society
June 16, 2012

In a riveting victory against genetically modified creations, a major biotech company known as Syngenta has been criminally charged for denying knowledge that its GM Bt corn actually kills livestock. What’s more is not only did the company deny this fact, but they did so in a civil court case that ended back in 2007. The charges were finally issued after a long legal struggle against the mega corp initiated by a German farmer named Gottfried Gloeckner whose dairy cattle died after eating the Bt toxin and coming down with a ‘mysterious’ illness.

Grown on his own farm from 1997 to 2002, the cows on the farm were all being fed exclusively on Syngenta’s Bt 176 corn by the year 2000. It was around this time that the mysterious illnesses began to emerge among the cattle population. Syngenta paid Gloeckner 40,000 euros in an effort to silence the farmer, however a civil lawsuit was brought upon the company. Amazingly, 2 cows ate genetically modified maize (now banned in Poland over serious concerns) and died. During the civil lawsuit, however, Syngenta refused to admit that its GM corn was responsible. In fact, they went as far as to claim having no knowledge whatsoever of harm...

The charges bring to light just how far large biotechnology companies will go to conceal evidence linking their genetically modified products to serious harm. Monsanto, for example, has even threatened to sue the entire state of Vermont if they attempt to label its genetically modified ingredients. Why are they so afraid of the consumer knowing what they are putting in their mouths?

 

bump: 

Next week, the USDA will decide whether to allow Monsanto and Dow to introduce one half of the chemical mixture Agent Orange into our food supply. Widescale use of Roundup has led to a new generation of resistant weeds, and the next step in the pesticide arms race is 2,4-D — a chemical linked to cancer, Parkinson's and reproductive problems. 

Farmers that sign up to use genetically-engineered 2,4-D-resistant corn will be required to spray down their fields with both 2,4-D andRoundup, double-dosing our food, our soil and our waterways with the toxins. Some experts estimate this will increase the use of 2,4-D 50-fold, even though the EPA says the chemical is already our seventh-largest source of dioxins — nasty, highly toxic chemicals that bioaccumulate as they move up the food chain and cause cancer, developmental damage, and birth defects.

We can stop this. The use of 2,4-D is banned entirely in parts of Canada and Europe, and right now the US Department of Agriculture is accepting public comments on 2,4-D to decide whether or not to approve the widespread industrial use of the toxin.

Add your name to our letter to the USDA urging them to deny approval for Dow's 2,4-D-resistant GMO corn.

This is part of a growing problem, an escalating herbicide war going on across America’s heartland. From 1996 to 2008, herbicide usage increased by 383 million pounds. Nearly half of this took place between 2007 and 2008 after the introduction of another strain of herbicide-resistant plant pushed by Dow. Like Roundup before it, 2,4-D is only a temporary solution that will require more and more tons of toxins and more and more potent chemicals leaching into our food supply.

2,4-D is nasty stuff and has been linked to a number of health problems, such as tripling the rates of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in Nebraska farmworkers exposed to it and causing reproductive problems — birth defects and high rates of miscarriage — in both mice and men exposed to it in the lab and field.

Tell the USDA - we don’t want Monsanto’s toxic pesticide.

-Kaytee, Claiborne Taren and the rest of the team

Millions Against Monsanto: The Food Fight of Our Lives
by Ronnie Cummins
AlterNet
April 11, 2012

 

"If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it." — Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto, quoted in the Kansas City Star, March 7, 1994

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job." — Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1998

For nearly two decades, Monsanto and corporate agribusiness have exercised near-dictatorial control over American agriculture, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and regulatory agencies, supermarket chains, giant food processors, and the so-called “natural” products industry.

Finally, public opinion around the biotech industry’s contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached the tipping point. We’re fighting back.

This November, in a food fight that will largely determine the future of what we eat and what we grow, Monsanto will face its greatest challenge to date: a statewide citizens’ ballot initiative that will give Californians the opportunity to vote for their right to know whether the food they buy is contaminated with GMOs.

A growing corps of food, health, and environmental activists — supported by the Millions against Monsanto and Occupy Monsanto Movements, and consumers and farmers across the nation — are boldly moving to implement mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods in California through a grassroots-powered citizens ballot initiative process that will bypass the agribusiness-dominated state legislature. If passed, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act will require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods and food ingredients, and outlaw the routine industry practice of labeling GMO-tainted foods as “natural.”...
 

 ScottN wrote: 
My general uneducated feeling is that diet changes can be self-reinforcing sometimes. I think you might have always had some level of allergy for gluten but a steady diet of it helped you maintain a tolerance for it. If you went on a diet at some point (Atkins, for example) that reduced your exposure to these foods, your level of tolerance might have dropped and now when you eat these foods, you have a reaction. When I say "you" I'm using myself as an example, because I quit milk and pasta for a while and discovered some problems reintroducing them to my diet. I'm okay with milk now but some pastas cause problems. Some don't. High-quality high-gluten pasta is fine, cheap Kraft Mac & Cheese is fine, but some house brands are not. I dunno.

I wonder if my gluten intolerance which manifest itself late in my life has anything to do with eating mass quantities as a younster of Monsanto wheat hybrids (gmo, really) developed for high gluten content?  I don't want to make them the complete bogeyman here.  Back in the 50's and 60's when I was growing up, higher gluten content (a protein, I believe) was generally considered a good thing.

My doctor told me he is seeing more of this gluten intolerance in the 60+ age range (me) lately,  than in his previous twenty years as a GP. Any relationship that someone may know about?

I am fine now on a gluten free diet.  Just have to read labels, discriminate on purchasing and pay a bit more.

 hippiechick wrote: 


Activists Call for Food Safety Czar's Ouster
by Samantha Bonar
LA Weekly
January 31, 2012

Occupy cornfields! Support is growing for a petition calling for the ouster of Michael Taylor, a senior adviser for the FDA who formerly served as vice president of Monsanto, the controversial agricultural multinational at the forefront of genetically modified foods, the Washington Post reports. President Obama took a lot of flak when he appointed Taylor to the position three years ago. As the second highest-ranking official at the FDA, Taylor is responsible for implementing the day-to-day policies that govern food safety laws in the U.S.

Tipping off the current anti-Taylor campaign is his alleged practice of going after small raw-milk producers, including the Amish, while letting large factory farms responsible for huge food-borne illness outbreaks go scot-free. As an example, activists cite the fact that Iowa agribusinessman Jack DeCoster — who was responsible for the more than 500 million salmonella-tainted eggs that were recalled in 2010 — has not been fined or arrested by the FDA, while Amish dairy farmers have been subjected to yearlong stings and hauled away in handcuffs...

Judge who Ruled against Raw Milk in Wisconsin quits to work for Monsanto law firm