By Rady Ananda

Current speculation that falling US birth rates are connected to genetically modified foods is debunked by a historical review of US birth rates. We cannot tie GM foods to falling US birth rates, yet anyway, since a look at the rate over the past 100 years shows much sharper drops than the one seen since 1996 when GM foods were deployed.

Spermicidal corn has been developed, as William Engdahl points out, and likely deployed somewhere (he suggests in Latin America or other "Third World countries"). If deployed in the US, its effects cannot be teased out from other environmental and cultural factors that contribute to a nation's birth rate, given lack of GM food labels and subsequent safety testing.

Read more »

Sheila Samples

"Monsanto, which gave us the deadly Agent Orange
and the toxic weed killer Roundup, is not alone in its
quest to manipulate, or to control the world's order."

I have learned over the past decade if I want to know what's really going on in the United States, I have to cruise through the foreign media to see what's creating a furor or causing a stink. So, while searching for the status of Spain's on-again, off-again criminal proceedings against six Bush Administration war criminals, this headline in Der Spiegel caught my eye -- "Frankenfood Ban is Neither Populism nor Panic-Mongering."

A closer look at the article revealed it wasn't a Norm Coleman ploy to get folks in Minnesota to quit eating burgers and fries, nor a menu for the genetically obscene monster in Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein," but an announcement by Germany's Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner that Germany is banning the cultivation of MON 810, a genetically modified (GM) corn produced by US biotech giant Monsanto.

The GM Monster

It appears that MON 810 is also believed to be the "Frankenstein" of GM crops by at least five other European countries -- France, Austria, Hungary, Greece and Luxembourg -- all of whom have banned its use. MON 810 was approved by the European Union in 1998, and was the only GM crop approved for cultivation in Germany. Aigner said she had legitimate reasons to believe that the genetically modified Monsanto seed "presents a danger to the environment." The plant produces a toxin that not only destroys the larvae of the corn borer moth, but other, beneficial, insects as well.

Read more »