When will it be ALL GONE?

[radioranger]

I dont blame Monsanto for the worlds poor farmers, anytime you have tenant farmers you've got trouble it seems to me, theirs is a tough road , and of course they want big families to help them , no schools etc etc, if you want the real picture it's just the same old human struggles , we are lucky , factories and big productive farms feed 99 % of us pretty well, too well if you go to the malls and look around , why do you think crossovers got popular, to fit big people !! on a ecomodder note, grille block added good 1.5 mpg on the Ranger and warmer underhood temps have engine purring great.

[suspectnumber961]

You are mostly just being simple-minded and are not seeing the bigger picture. Research does not happen in a vacuum...it is influenced by $ and prejudices.

You need to be asking this: WHY isn't independent longer-term research being REQUIRED and funded before GMOs.... for instance...are unleashed on the world??

As far as Indian farmers...there is a woman in India that would have the hard info...she speaks perfect English....do the deep research.

The articles I post and link to are supposed to be a START...not the final analysis.

You do a good bit of damage with your simple denial of overall realities...my advice...DON'T FEED THE DUMMIES. Unless you are secretly working for Monsanto...et. al....then of course...it is AOK in a capitalistic system where the corps run the show.

Originally Posted by niky

The morality or lack of morality of certain corporations does not reflect as to whether something they do is bad or not. The only thing that determines whether something is bad or not is the fact that it is bad... or not.

Again, I am perfectly willing to accept that Monsato is a vile, profiteering, dangerous agricultural monopolist that promotes bad practices and maybe sells dangerous products. And that excessive fertilizer and pesticide use is bad for the environment.

But I need to see the evidence backed by hard facts rather than pandering rhetoric. And many of the links posted don't show a positive correlation that would stand up to close scrutiny. Not the Indian farmer suicides, not the lab rats, not the Parkinsons links. (So, are we going by case studies with single patients, now? The same kind that proved, once and for all, that cellphones cause brain cancer?)

Sure, Monsato, evil. Yeah. Industrialist out to take advantage of poor farmers. But saying that Monsato is the only reason Indian farmers are suffering is grossly oversimplifying the problems of third world farming.

[suspectnumber961]

Limits to Growth Author Dennis Meadows Says that Crisis Is Approaching - SPIEGEL ONLINE


SPIEGEL ONLINE: Professor Meadows, 40 years ago you published "The Limits to Growth" together with your wife and colleagues, a book that made you the intellectual father of the environmental movement. The core message of the book remains valid today: Humanity is ruthlessly exploiting global resources and is on the way to destroying itself. Do you believe that the ultimate collapse of our economic system can still be avoided?

Meadows: The problem that faces our societies is that we have developed industries and policies that were appropriate at a certain moment, but now start to reduce human welfare, like for example the oil and car industry. Their political and financial power is so great and they can prevent change. It is my expectation that they will succeed. This means that we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Several central forecasts you made in the book have come true, the exponential growth of the world's population, for example, and widespread environmental destruction. Your prediction regarding economic growth, namely that it would ultimately cease and the global economy would collapse, has not yet come to pass.

Meadows: The fact that the collapse hasn't occurred so far doesn't mean it won't take place in the future. There is no doubt that the world is changing, and we will have to go along with it. There are two ways to do that: One is, you see the necessity of change ahead of time and you make the change, and the second is that you don't and are finally forced to do it anyway.

Let's say that you're driving a car inside a factory building. There are two ways to stop: Either you put on the brakes or you keep going and hit the wall. But stop you will, because the building is finite. And the same holds true for Earth's resources.

[suspectnumber961]

Cornstalks Everywhere But Nothing Else, Not Even A Bee : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR



The answer amazed me. He found almost nothing. "I listened and heard nothing, no bird, no click of insect."

There were no bees. The air, the ground, seemed vacant. He found one ant "so small you couldn't pin it to a specimen board." A little later, crawling to a different row, he found one mushroom, "the size of an apple seed." (A relative of the one pictured below.) Then, later, a cobweb spider eating a crane fly (only one). A single red mite "the size of a dust mote hurrying across the barren earth," some grasshoppers, and that's it. Though he crawled and crawled, he found nothing else.

"It felt like another planet entirely," he said, a world denuded.

[niky]

Originally Posted by suspectnumber961

You are mostly just being simple-minded and are not seeing the bigger picture. Research does not happen in a vacuum...it is influenced by $ and prejudices.

So a study on rats, GMOs and cancer risk undertaken by a known anti-GMO activist and homeopathic pharma shill who just happened to release his new book on GMOs at the same time did not have any ulterior motive attached to it, either, I suppose.

Originally Posted by suspectnumber961

You need to be asking this: WHY isn't independent longer-term research being REQUIRED and funded before GMOs.... for instance...are unleashed on the world??

Tell me. Why do we assess cancer risks in humans in multi-year or decade-long studies instead of lifetime studies? When you do research over "long-term", "long-term" being defined as the expected lifespan of the research animal, the signal-to-noise ratio goes down. A lot.

Originally Posted by suspectnumber961

As far as Indian farmers...there is a woman in India that would have the hard info...she speaks perfect English....do the deep research.

Why don't you? I live in a third-world country, attend various seminars on the plight of poor farmers and new approaches in agriculture and how to help them. I'm quite aware of the problems facing third-world farming in the absence of GMOs. And those problems don't go away WITH GMOs.

Originally Posted by suspectnumber961

The articles I post and link to are supposed to be a START...not the final analysis.

So... what's wrong with analyzing, then?

Originally Posted by suspectnumber961

You do a good bit of damage with your simple denial of overall realities...my advice...DON'T FEED THE DUMMIES. Unless you are secretly working for Monsanto...et. al....then of course...it is AOK in a capitalistic system where the corps run the show.

Oh, dear me. I hope Monsato didn't forget my check in the mail. And my seed packets. Not a single GMO within thousands of miles of me. And I live in a town that used to be farmland as far as the eye can see. We've got to rectify that, soon.

I suppose I'm not a very good denier when I say:

Originally Posted by niky

Again, I am perfectly willing to accept that Monsato is a vile, profiteering, dangerous agricultural monopolist that promotes bad practices and maybe sells dangerous products. And that excessive fertilizer and pesticide use is bad for the environment.

Originally Posted by niky

As for crop patenting... cross-pollination makes such lawsuits problematic... and frivolous. You'd have to prove (as the corporation) that there is a systematic attempt to steal your property. Suing farmers for having fields with scattered samples of your seeds IS one of the unethical things Monsato et al are doing.

Please overlook those statements when writing my check, please.

-

On a completely different tack. That last link was thought-provoking. Looks like a good book.

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by suspectnumber961

As far as Indian farmers...there is a woman in India that would have the hard info...she speaks perfect English....do the deep research.

Her name is Vandana Shiva, and she is not only an expert organic farmer, but she has a PhD in quantum mechanics. She is one of many experts in Dirt! The Movie:

Watch Dirt! The Movie online | Free | Hulu

Dirt is alive, and we are the same basic minerals as dirt - and chemical fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides kill the life in the dirt that we all depend on for our very lives.

[suspectnumber961]

U.S. Intelligence Agencies See a Different World in 2030 - Bloomberg


New technologies, dwindling resources and explosive population growth in the next 18 years will alter the global balance of power and trigger radical economic and political changes at a speed unprecedented in modern history, says a new report by the U.S. intelligence community.

The 140-page report released today by the National Intelligence Council lays out dangers and opportunities for nations, economies, investors, political systems and leaders due to four “megatrends” that government intelligence analysts say are transforming the world.

Those major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states*, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts.

...

While technological advances, migrations, wars and other factors drove change in earlier periods, what sets the next quarter century apart is the way seven “tectonic shifts” are combining to drive change at an accelerating rate, said NIC Counselor Mathew Burrows, the report’s principle author. Those factors are: the growth of the middle class, wider access to new technologies, shifting economic power, aging populations, urbanization, growing demand for food and water, and U.S. energy independence

...

Population Growth

The key question, the report says, is whether divergent growth rates and increased volatility “will result in a global economic breakdown or whether the development of multiple growth centers will lead to resiliency.”

A world population that’s projected to rise to 8.3 billion from 7.1 billion today by 2030 will add to the strains, the report says. More people will join the middle class, especially in the developing world, and even conservative estimates forecast the global middle class doubling to more than 2 billion in 18 years.

The education sector will both drive and benefit from this growth in the middle class, the report projects, and economic success will be closely tied to educational levels. In the Middle East and North Africa, average levels of schooling are expected to rise from 7.1 years to 8.7 years. Education for women -- a driver of both economic growth and social health and welfare -- will rise from 5 years to 7 years in the region, according to the report.
Cities Grow

Much of this growing middle class will flock to cities, increasing the world’s urban population from roughly 50 percent of the world’s total to nearly 60 percent by 2030. Rising incomes will fuel their appetite for food -- especially protein from meat and fish -- water and energy, which will be in shorter supply, the report says, in part because climate change and water shortages will alter patterns of arable land and greater demand for energy could curb the amount of fuel available to make fertilizers and other products.

Demand for food will rise 35 percent by 2030 as global gains in agricultural productivity decline, the report says. Worldwide water requirements will reach 6,900 billion cubic meters in 2030, 40 percent more than current sustainable water supplies, making water a likely cause of regional conflicts, particularly in South Asia and the Middle East, the report says.

Climate Change

Climate change will complicate resource management, particularly in Asia, where monsoons are crucial to the growing season and decreased rainfall could disrupt the region’s ability to feed its growing population.

Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns are happening faster than expected, Burrows said. When his researchers updated their section on climate change, the new figures showed the rate of change was even greater than it was 18 months before, when they started the project.

New communications technologies and expanding educational opportunities, meanwhile, will empower the growing middle classes to make greater demands on their governments for services, a scenario that’s already part of the Arab Spring movements in countries such as Egypt.

“You have a huge problem on the resource side,” Burrows said. “How do you manage all this prosperity that is putting a lot of strain on the resources?”

...

* except in the US...a leader in surveillance and repressive tactics?

[suspectnumber961]

The covert war to discredit Seralini's study

There's a simple way to definitively discredit Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini's controversial study that apears to show the potentially harmful effects of GMOs: pressurise the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) that published it to "retract" the study from its list of publications.

This is what many experts are fighting to achieve in what appears to be an orchestrated attack. It's a veritable public relations war with no holds barred.

The journal has received many letters from critics. It has published around twenty, and a response to the critics by the Séralini team is also available online.

Legitimate scientific debate, you might say. But behind the cohort of academic titles that are listed is a hidden "biotech sphere" which brings together biotechnology researchers, regulatory policy experts and representatives of industry.

These biotechnology proponents denounce the "bad science" ("junk science") of the "militant researchers", who are routinely described as "activists linked to the environmental movement" and as "motivated by personal interests."

...


The litany of conflicts of interest and pro-biotech positions of the fifty or so public critics of Seralini's study could continue for pages. We meet representatives of Indian organisations that promote the trade in biotechnology, others who want to end world hunger with a ration of GMOs, or pro-GMO communications specialists (David Tribe), and other lobbyists working between São Paulo, Washington and Brussels, the golden triangle of GMOs...

A closed world, dressed in the garb of science; the well-oiled marketing strategy of a GM seed industry that reaped 13 billion dollars in 2011 – all this stands to be disrupted by Seralini's study. It remains to be seen whether the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology can resist the weight of the lobby that is determined to bury Seralini's study.

[niky]

And then you have Seralini, whose work is sponsored by a company that sells "antidotes" for Glycophosate toxicity?

-

Interesting Bloomberg report. Mostly accurate, though it's impossible to say how large the middle class can grow during a recession. Especially as economic growth in China is levelling off.

Don't think the middle class can dictate to government in the US? Ask Mitt Romney how his cabal of upper-class and industrialist supporters won him the election. Or not.

[suspectnumber961]

....

I'd guess that there ARE supplements that might mediate or offset the effects of glycophosphate.

....

But what the middle-class got is Busch Lite....or maybe Busch Heavy? They may have appeared to have won something...but I'd really doubt it.

Originally Posted by niky

And then you have Seralini, whose work is sponsored by a company that sells "antidotes" for Glycophosate toxicity?

-

Interesting Bloomberg report. Mostly accurate, though it's impossible to say how large the middle class can grow during a recession. Especially as economic growth in China is levelling off.

Don't think the middle class can dictate to government in the US? Ask Mitt Romney how his cabal of upper-class and industrialist supporters won him the election. Or not.