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Biotech / Medical : Monsanto Co. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Anthony Wong who wrote (2167)	6/15/1999 12:08:00 PM
From: Dan Spillane	Respond to of 2539

Twenty years on: the GM harvest Acid Test Daily Telegraph, Monday June 14 1999 London, 2020 LORD Hague's Labour government is coming under increasing pressure from environmentalists to reverse the 20-year ban on growing genetically modified crops in Britain. The Greens argue that the non-GM foods that, by law, British supermarkets must stock are more expensive, more contaminated with pesticides and less safe. "Mandatory food segregation has been a disaster," says a spokesman for Virgin-Tesco. "Nobody's buying the British non-GM produce. We throw away tons of it every week." The country now imports approximately 95 per cent of its food from GM-growing countries. Meanwhile, the market for organic produce, once so favoured by the well off, has never recovered from the ergot-poisoning scares of the mid-2010s. In a report issued recently, Pals of the Planet argued that "organic farming cannot be called sustainable: it requires the import of nutrients, it cannot compete with GM agriculture without massive subsidies and it uses too much land, which could otherwise be left to nature. It should be banned." A small lobby, largely funded by the pesticide manufacturers, still maintains that there are unknown risks attached to GM crops. "It is far too early to tell whether genetically modified foods are safe," said a spokesman for the Toil Association. "We must not rush into this technology. Thirty years of data from trials in hundreds of countries is just not enough." Increasingly desperate, the lobby has taken to dressing up in Frankenstein masks for television cameras and predicting ecological disasters if Britain adopts GM food. However, it is now undeniable that since the introduction of genetically modified crops, the use of fertiliser and pesticides has dropped dramatically in the United States - though herbicides are still used. Indeed, pesticide use was falling in GM-farming areas as long ago as 1999. The use of oil-derived chemicals in agriculture is almost a thing of the past, with wheat able to fix its own nitrogen from the air and with most GM crops resistant to attack from fungi, slugs and insects without chemical help. Most crops are now grown with "fire-and-forget" seeds that need no treatment after sowing, which has drastically cut the energy required in their growing, as well as the product's price. So dramatic are these results that the US Environmental Protection Agency has banned the planting of non-GM crops on a large scale to protect the environment. Over-production has been addressed by farmers in the high plains who have returned more than 10 million acres to wild prairie in exchange for a 25 per cent premium paid by the big supermarkets to "Green GMO producers". BUT it is not just ecological arguments that are pressing the British government to revoke the GMO ban. The production of vaccines, plastics and cures for numerous diseases in genetically modified plants and animals was actually pioneered by Britain back in the 1990s, beginning with Dolly the sheep. But the "bio-pharming" industry had to abandon the country after the ban was enacted and has since grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, mostly in China. The price of its products would bankrupt the National Health Service, which is why the government excludes them. Last year the Chinese government successfully sued the British government at the World Court of Human Rights for denying Britons the choice of better medicines. . . I sincerely hope the future is not like this. But I am more and more convinced that the nihilism of the anti-GM lobby, its preference for vandalising crops rather than letting experiments give us answers about their safety, its indignant assertion of a monopoly on emotional blackmail and its determination to deny the British people real choice run a great risk of denying us economic, health and even ecological benefits. It is time we stopped letting lobbyists persuade our journalists to close their minds to the possibility that the future might be better with GM crops than without. It is time we stopped wallowing in imagined alarm and took a more balanced approach. dailytelegraph.co.uk

To: Anthony Wong who wrote (2167)	6/15/1999 2:30:00 PM
From: Dan Spillane	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2539

BBC/UK Headline June 15, 1999 : European warning over Coca-Cola [One starts to wonder if sabotage is behind the recent string of events in Belgium. Would activist groups in Europe do something like this? Look, now there is another mystery surfacing, targeted at (guess what) an American multi-national company. Was this an "accident" like the recent dioxin scare? Or were both of these some kind of attack by extremists?] Coca Cola products have been withdrawn from sale in Belgium Coca-Cola drinks in four European countries are now affected by the latest Belgian health scare crisis. The company has said it has identified two possible causes for the poisoning of about 100 Belgian school children. The director-general of Coca-Cola Enterprises Belgium, Philippe Lenfant, told a news conference that a bottling plant in Antwerp had used the "wrong" carbon dioxide to put the fizz in soft drinks bottles. Cans produced in France for the Belgian market, meanwhile, were contaminated with a fungicide used to treat "a small number" of transportation pallets. According to the Belgian authorities, the drinks had triggered a blood disorder that causes the destruction of red blood cells among people who had drunk Coca-Cola. The European Commission has now alerted all EU member countries to the possible threat posed by Coca-Cola drinks. The Belgian authorities have removed all beverages made by the company from the shelves. Luxembourg followed suit on Tuesday and ordered Coca-Cola products to be removed from its shelves as a precaution although there have not been any cases of poisoning in the country. France has withdrawn drinks bottled at Coca-Cola plant at Dunkirk near the Belgian border. And in the Netherlands, the Coca-Cola company itself has withdrawn all its Belgian-produced beverages that were on sale there. Risk list The BBC's Jonathan Beale: "Consumer confidence can't sink any lower" A list of suspect drinks produced by the company has now been issued to European Union countries by the commission. They include not just Coke itself, but other Coca-Cola brands like Fanta, Sprite, Nestea, Kinley tonic, Lift and juice drinks sold under the Minute Maid name as well as Bon Aqua and Aquarius lemon, orange and grapefruit. A Coca-Cola spokeswoman told Belgium radio that the cause of the problem remained a mystery. "We are searching frantically and hope to have a definitive answer in the next few days," she said. A spokesman for the European Commission said he believed the problem was mainly confined to Belgium and the company's bottling plants there, but France and the Netherlands may have received some exports. Coca Cola: A globally recognised brand As yet the cause of the poisoning is not known, and the company says tests have found nothing toxic in the drinks. But about 100 children have fallen ill with symptoms of nausea and headaches, and a number have been taken to hospital. This latest sales ban comes as Belgium is still reeling from a food scare linked to the contamination of meat and eggs by the cancer-causing chemical, dioxin. That led the government to ban sales of chicken, pork, beef, eggs and meat products. Coca-Cola has said that some bottles in Belgium had a quality defect, which could lead to symptoms such as headaches, nausea and stomach cramps. The soft-drink company sent researchers to the school at Bornem where students fell ill last week. Coca-Cola has been active in Belgium for 70 years. It has large bottling operations in Antwerp and Ghent news.bbc.co.uk