MONSANTO must go!!!

First, please check out this page - HEYOKA Magazine.

Next...take about two hours sometime, and WATCH THIS FILM.

The World According to MONSANTO


If you are as disgusted with GM foods as I am, please contact your congresspersons and tell them that you want these "foods" LABELED.

If the companies balk at labeling them, they're not welcome in our stores.

Please follow this link and read the comments.

Also...read this - please join the fight and end GM foods BEFORE THEY END US.

Here's some more - this is serious.

Science 26 November 1999:
Vol. 286. no. 5445, p. 1663
DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5445.1663

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News Focus
FOOD FIGHT:
Monarch Press Release Raises Eyebrows
Dan Ferber*

ROSEMONT, ILLINOIS--The 1-day conference, held here on 2 November, was not yet over, and researchers were still heatedly debating whether corn that had been genetically modified to make Bt, a protein toxic to insects, harms monarch butterflies. Yet a headline that day in the hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, seemed to give the meeting's conclusion: "Monarch Butterfly So Far Not Imperiled." Similar stories appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. How could the newspapers have known the upshot of the conference before the researchers themselves did?

In fact, they didn't. The stories illustrate how eager interest groups are to spin even preliminary and debated results in the continuing war of words over the risks and benefits of genetically modified (GM) crops.

The conference, which was sponsored by an industry group called the Agricultural Biotechnology Stewardship Working Group (ABSWG) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), was the outgrowth of research reported last May showing that monarchs fed Bt pollen in the lab often died. In the wake of the uproar the report caused, the ABSWG and the USDA funded new studies to see whether the butterflies are at risk in the field. The conference brought the researchers together so they could present their early results (see main text).

But the day before the conference began, the ABSWG had held a conference call between reporters and a small group of researchers whose results mostly seemed to show that the butterfly was safe. The ABSWG also issued a press release on the morning of the conference--before most of the researchers had presented their results--stating that the conference would "dispel doubts raised last spring about the safety of the monarch population."

The ABSWG's actions did not sit well with many meeting participants, including some whose results supported the industry claims. The press release "took me totally by surprise. I thought it was premature," says one such researcher, entomologist Galen Dively of the University of Maryland, College Park. And insect ecologist Orley Taylor of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, director of the conservation group Monarch Watch, describes what the ABSWG did as a "manipulation." Taylor, who remains to be convinced that Bt pollen is safe for monarchs, adds, "This steals the possibility of having a fair and deliberate discussion ... by dictating what the interpretation of the meeting should be before it was held."

ABSWG spokesperson Val Giddings responds: "I think that's nonsense. ... This was about as open and untrammeled a meeting as you could have hoped for." Entomologist Richard Hellmich of Iowa State University in Ames agrees: "The intention of the meeting was to talk about science, and that really didn't disrupt the discussion."

Giddings also defends the accuracy of the press release, saying that the majority of the researchers concluded that the potential harm to the monarch was minimal. "It was virtually, although not completely, a consensus view," Giddings says. But at the close of the conference, most researchers said more work was needed to show the true effect of Bt corn on the butterfly. "It was inappropriate to conclude there's no impact on the monarch butterfly," Taylor says. "That was not a fair conclusion of any of the commentary we heard."