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March 23, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
24:10
Jeffrey Smith GMO update January, 2012 - Monsanto, Roundup, Bayer, DuPont and more
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Welcome, everyone.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger for naturalnews.com.
Here, joined today on the front lines of the GMO campaign, the tip of the spear is a man named Jeffrey Smith.
He's with the Institute of Responsible Technology.
He's been our guest many times.
He's the author of Genetic Roulette, Seeds of Deception, many other books, websites, and activism campaigns.
He's the man who has got his finger on the pulse of the GMO activism efforts out there.
And he joins us today by Skype to give us an update for January 2012.
Jeffrey, thank you for joining us today.
It's great to have you on.
It's great to be here, Mike.
Well, give us, I don't know where you want to start, but jump right into it.
What do we need to know?
What's happening for January 2012?
Well, I want to start with news of the weird.
And that is genetically modified mosquitoes.
Now, it sounds stranger than truth, but genetically modified mosquitoes have already been released in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, and in Brazil.
And the company wants to introduce genetically modified mosquitoes in the United States in the Florida Keys.
Now, a Freedom of Information request from a European NGO, non-governmental organization, has found that the company was trying to withhold key data that could affect the future of the mosquitoes on the planet.
And here's the concept.
The genetically modified mosquitoes are engineered, they genetically engineer the male mosquitoes that do not bite.
So they say this is one reason why it won't affect humans because they don't bite.
What they do is they mate with the female mosquitoes and result in sterile offspring.
So they reduce the population of mosquitoes to fight dengue fever, which is carried by mosquitoes.
So they have big plans to introduce these mosquitoes all over the planet, and they want to introduce a diamondback moth as well.
Now, what they didn't tell us is that, in fact, there is a 3% survival rate Among the offspring, but if the mosquitoes are subjected to tetracycline, then the survival rate can go up to 15%.
Whether it's 3% without tetracycline or 15%, and tetracycline is available in nature in large quantities, We're talking about creating the offspring of genetically modified mosquitoes that can be biting humans and livestock and having completely different impacts than any mosquitoes have ever had before on Earth and possibly changing the balance of the mosquito population forever.
Now, this is a classic Pandora's box because once they introduce these mosquitoes, of course, you can't ever take them back.
There's no one due for this, right?
I wouldn't want to be hired by the company with the job of recalling them.
Now, tetracycline is a common antibiotic that's sold as a prescription drug.
You mentioned it's found in nature.
How would mosquitoes interact with tetracycline out there in the wild?
I'm not familiar with that.
Well, it can be found in sewage areas.
It's sometimes found in high concentrations of chicken and other livestock that are treated with tetracycline.
So it's out there in the environment and in food.
In fact, the study showed that when they fed mosquitoes cat food that had high levels of tetracycline in the chicken, that's where they had high survival rates.
Wow.
Now, what are the other possible side effects of these genetically modified mosquitoes than surviving and breeding and biting us?
What are we looking at, you know, a few years down the road if this goes bad?
Well, you know, the thing is, when you introduce a new genetic structure, it's really a genetic roulette.
You can end up causing all sorts of collateral damage.
And in the report, they discuss the possibility of new allergens.
So let's say you are allergic to a genetically modified mosquito, but not to regular mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes are not labeled.
You're not going to know when you're attacked by a GM mosquito, but you'll never know that it was the genetically modified mosquito that caused you to get the potentially deadly anaphylactic shock.
So you're going to be in a situation where you're going to be clueless as to why you're having an allergic reaction.
Okay, alright.
Another example of scientists just unleashing the great unknown onto us.
What else?
What else you got on your list of bizarre GMO experiments?
Years ago, Monsanto put out a release saying that they were going to triple yields by 2030 and they were going to have drought-resistant crops, etc., etc.
Well, they finally, after all this time, came up with their first drought-resistant crop, which was approved on December 21st by the USDA. However, if you read the USDA report, it doesn't work.
It's no better than the conventionally bred corn.
It only works for moderate drought conditions.
It has no lower minimum requirements for water.
And there's conventionally bred crops that outperform the GM crop in conditions of high drought.
So it's a complete failure.
But it's a public relations win because it's going to be introduced.
They're going to sell it and they're going to say, now we are protecting America's farms from drought because we have drought-resistant corn.
Well, this is what's so frustrating about corporations.
I mean, even the war on drugs is advertised as a huge success, but it's a massive failure.
Here we have these crops advertised as drought-resistant, but they're dying just as much as the other crops.
How do they get away with this?
Is the press covering their mistakes for them?
I'm afraid not.
Well, you are, which is good.
But, I mean, they said that GMOs will feed the world.
It actually works against that.
They said it would increase yield.
It actually reduces yield.
They said it would decrease the use of agricultural chemicals.
It increases agricultural chemicals.
And, in fact, it reduces biodiversity, which threatens the entire food supply at a time of global climate change.
And in fact, their Roundup Ready crops require more water, and there's a whole gamut of things that are going wrong.
But unfortunately, they've got billions of dollars to spread it around, and we've got $2.95 to work with.
So we're fighting against this juggernaut.
However, there's so much evidence now that it's a failed technology.
More and more farmers are catching on, and most importantly, consumers are catching on.
Yeah, they are.
It's huge.
Awareness has spiked in just the last few months, I've noticed.
Are you seeing that, too, when you talk to people?
Absolutely.
In fact, I noticed the big upsurge starting in the first half of 2010, then the GE salmon threat.
From the FDA came on the big scene in terms of the media.
The court cases for alfalfa and sugar beets hit.
Then the approval of alfalfa at the beginning of 2011.
And it's been absolutely nonstop in terms of increased awareness, agitation, concern, and organization against GMOs.
Okay.
All right.
Well, major efforts are underway also.
Are you going to talk about the GMO labeling campaign in California?
I'll mention that, too.
We've got a few more items that I want to cover that happened this month.
Go for it.
In Argentina, tax authorities discovered that a contractor for Monsanto down there was holding workers in slave-like conditions.
They were unable to leave their workplace, forced to work for as much as 14 hours a day detasseling corn, and forced to buy overpriced food in the company's store.
And so this was an example of how we can find how Monsanto allows its contractors to treat the people that work for it.
Well, it should be no surprise.
Look at the way they treat us as human guinea pigs.
I mean, why wouldn't they treat workers as slaves?
It's consistent.
In Europe, France is holding the line.
They're saying they're not going to plant genetically modified corn.
They said they weren't, and a European court said that their reason was not legally allowed, and they said, tough, we're not going to allow it planted anyway.
A biotech giant, BASF, that introduced a Potato for starch in Europe recently is now pulling out of Europe altogether, discontinuing the potato growing and moving its headquarters to the United States.
Also in Europe, earlier this year, there was a ruling that said that any honey that contains pollen from genetically engineered crops needs to be approved and registered and labeled.
And so it was a big setback because a lot of the honey there is in fact contaminated with genetically modified corn pollen.
Wow.
Well, yeah, that sounds like a very important victory, at least one small battle in the greater war.
That's true.
Does Monsanto and DuPont and the other companies, do they really think that they're going to get away with all this?
I mean, don't they see this tidal wave of awareness working against them?
A few years ago, an insider told me that the executives of Monsanto were getting nervous.
And that's the only recent experience I've had with direct response from what they're feeling.
But it's clear that they're being hit pretty hard from many levels.
They've had court cases where they've been shown to be lying and advertising.
The most recent one was India, where they had advertised to farmers that they would increase Their income by a certain dramatic amount.
Turns out it was completely unsupported, and an Indian government agency called them on it and said it was illegal.
The French High Court told them that it was illegal to describe Roundup as biodegradable.
A South African court caught them for false advertising.
You know, and it doesn't stop them.
I mean, they were stopped in New York for false advertising about biodegradable Roundup, and they continued to advertise the exact same claim in Europe until a court stopped them there and only fined them $23,000.
Well, we see the same thing with big pharma.
When these drug companies commit felony crimes and marketing fraud, they always end up settling with the states after a lawsuit is filed.
And in the settlement, they, quote, admit no wrongdoing, so they're never banned from doing business with government.
They continue to do business.
They just figure that lying and fraud is just a cost of doing business to cover the fines, and that's it.
They just keep doing it.
I think we're good to go.
Of ISAAA, which is the most pro-GM, ridiculously unscientific spokesbody for this industry.
They constantly put out an annual report, inflating statistics.
They've been shown constantly to have unscientific opinions.
And so this guy, who's the co-chair of the approval body in India, is actually promoting the ISAAA news releases and misinformation.
Likewise, there was another guy at the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee that actually approved a crop that he was developing and he had the patent for.
Talk about a conflict of interest.
I got total corruption.
No doubt these people are all on the take.
It's also hilarious in a pathetic kind of way that this is all being done under the name of science.
These people say, we're scientific.
It has nothing to do with science.
It has everything to do with bribery, corruption, and really what you would call corporate-funded science or distorted junk science, or how do you describe it?
Tobacco science.
Tobacco science, there you go.
Yeah, I think people get that.
I want to talk about the insecticide and herbicide impacts of GMOs, and there's three big stories around that that are brewing.
One is honeybees.
There was new evidence That a systemic seed treatment, it's a nicotine-based insecticide that you treat seeds with, and it's used a lot on corn, and it was introduced big time when GMOs were introduced.
They weren't using it very much before that, but when GMOs were introduced, for many technical reasons, they started coating these seeds with these neonicotinoid insecticides, and the GM corn was coated with five times the amount.
It turns out this neonicotinoid insecticide, or the neonics, are likely to be the primary contributor to colony collapse disorder, killing huge percentage of the bee population on Earth.
And Bear Crop Science, which made a billion dollars last year selling these neonics, their two main products, basically said, well, we know that neonicotinoids can cause B-daph and disorientation so they can't find their way back to the hive.
But there's no exposure level that would be toxic to the bees.
Well, the new study that just came out this month shows that when the seeds are planted, the dust goes into the air and carries high concentrations of these neonics into the air onto dandelions, where bees like to gather the pollen, and into the soil.
And it can go into the soil, into crops like the dandelions.
It basically gets there at levels sufficient, they believe, to kill the insects.
They also found in this study that when they found dead bee bodies, it contained the neonicotinoid insecticides in their body at sufficient deadly levels.
And they found pollen that was in the hive That had systemic levels so that that could create chronic exposure, so it's not just acute, but chronic over time, where all of the bees in there could eventually lose the ability to find their way back to the hive potential.
Well see, Jeffrey, this is where it becomes really serious.
We're talking about crimes against nature.
We're talking about crimes against humanity.
If you destroy the pollinators, You destroy the viability of human civilization.
People don't realize these honeybees pollinate about a third of every mouthful of food that you eat on the dinner plate.
Without honeybees, the food supply collapses.
We have serious problems on this planet if this is allowed to continue.
You just described there a lot of information that I hadn't heard before, the mechanism for how that actually is killing the honeybees.
That's shocking.
Earlier, there were studies that show that there were secretions of liquid in the plants that formed beads on the plant in the mornings, and then the tired bees, after fanning the hive all night, will go and get their earliest level of nutrient.
They'll go to the nearest plant and drink the nectar, and then they'll get maybe not find their way back to the hive.
But this is even more significant because they actually found bees that had died with neonicotinoid insecticides in their bodies.
The neonics also reduced the immune system defenses against a viral attack.
It's also true that a study found that when bees were gathering pollen from GM corn, from BT corn, which is designed to break open the stomach of insects and kill them, it doesn't break open the stomach of insects necessarily, the bees, but certain other types of insects.
The bees that were gathering pollen from the GM crops ended up with viral infections and the controls did not, suggesting that their immune system became compromised.
So that may explain why there's more colony collapse disorder in the U.S. than there is overseas where GMOs are planted less.
That's right.
So it could be a perfect storm.
Yeah, a perfect storm for death.
I mean, widespread death and starvation.
Isn't it just stunning that these corporate scientists are so greedy and so blinded by their own arrogance that they will literally compromise the future of life on our planet just so they can make a quarterly profit?
I mean, how sick is that?
And the lies are blatant and very often in the details.
For example, Bayer's scientist said that bees don't collect much pollen from corn, but in the study it found that up to 50% of the pollen collected by the bees were from corn when the corn had pollen.
So they're just making things up.
They just make up assumptions.
And we see this all over the place.
I have caught them, you know, 100, 200 times making up assumptions which are either blatantly false or never tested or eventually tested and found to be false.
Well, that's called science, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey, you make up whatever you want.
It gets published in a scientific journal.
All the scientists say it's true.
They just make it up.
They invent it.
I mean, how many pharmaceutical researchers have been caught just completely fabricating their results?
And some of them did it for 20 years before they finally got busted.
I mean, it's sick.
But anyway, I don't mean to interrupt you.
I can't stay silent about this.
We've got a few more minutes on this segment.
What else do you need to cover in this segment, Jeffrey?
Two more stories about herbicides.
Roundup, it turns out, is far more toxic and more pervasive and more dangerous than anyone had believed before.
There's a new organism that may be associated with the spraying of Roundup or Roundup-ready crops, and this organism was able to kill a fetus and a pregnant chicken within 24 hours.
It may be responsible for a widespread epidemic we're seeing.
In the inability of livestock to maintain their pregnancies, it's found in high concentrations of crops that have been diseased and associated with Roundup spray.
So this is one of the possible reasons why the Roundup-ready crops may be causing reproductive disorders.
Another is that Roundup chelates and binds with nutrients, making them unavailable to crops and to livestock.
So there's widespread nutritional deficiencies in U.S. livestock.
And some of those nutritional deficiencies can affect the ability to have babies or the health of those babies.
So, for example, one of the most important nutrients that's made unavailable is manganese.
And they found that 63% of the stillborn calves had deficiencies in high levels of manganese.
Also, there was a very large percentage of the stillborn, the deep birth defect calves that had Lack of manganese.
And there's basically a universal deficiency of manganese among the conventional livestock population, and that's just one of many nutrients.
So that's the second possible reason why Roundup may be causing reproductive problems.
And the third is that Roundup itself is directly toxic.
It can kill human placental cells.
It interrupts the estrogen cycle.
It can cause abnormal and decreased levels of sperm, and it can cause birth defects.
So we're having a problem right now with reproductive health in humans and animals, and Roundup is so omnipresent.
It's found in the urine of people who live in the city.
It's in a U.S. Geological Survey in the Midwest.
It was found in either up to between 60 and 100 percent of all samples collected in the air, water, and rain.
It's found in surface waters.
It was just found in a Spanish study for the first time in the groundwater there.
So it's basically omnipresent.
It's even found in the blood of North Americans, and it passes through the placenta into the blood of the fetus.
So this is another one of Monsanto's gifts to the world, like PCBs before, which is found in the blood of polar bears.
Now Roundup is everywhere, and it can be causing reproductive disasters in the populations.
Well, what's astonishing is that the people who are promoting Roundup don't know any of this information, and I'll give you a personal example of this.
You know, I'm hanging out on a ranch in Austin or near Austin.
And we had a consultant come out who was educated at Texas A&M, which is not the most organic educational institution in the country.
And he comes out and notices we have a 20-acre field that's got the wrong kind of grass in it, a non-native grass.
And we said, well, how do we convert the grass over to native grasses?
He says, oh, that's easy.
Just spray Roundup on all 20 acres.
And they say this every day to everybody all across Texas.
I mean, people are spraying chemicals and a lot of Roundup left and right like you can't believe, Jeffrey.
I know.
In fact, the incidence of Roundup is increasing so much because of the herbicide-tolerant weeds that the incidence of herbicide use in the study showed that it was up 31% in the last of the 13-year study.
31% in a single year.
But what's also happening, and this leads to the last piece from this month, Is that it's forced farmers to switch to acutely toxic chemicals like 2,4-D, which is a component of Agent Orange.
And in the making of 2,4-D, you can have dioxins, which are also linked to birth defects.
It turns out one of the ways that the industry...
Now, this is bizarre.
We started out with truth beyond fiction with the mosquitoes.
This is equally as ridiculous.
The way that Dow Chemical wants to solve the problem about herbicide-tolerant weeds that are resistant to Roundup is, and the USDA is ready to approve it, corn and soybeans that are resistant to 2,4-D. So you can spray the entire field with 2,4-D, causing an environmental and health catastrophe in order to allow Dow to sell more of its seeds and its 2,4-D chemical.
Hey, it's like being air bombed in the Vietnam War with Agent Orange, except they're going to do it right here in America in our backyard.
I mean, that's how crazy it is.
Wasn't 2-4-D? That's about 50% of Agent Orange, isn't it?
Precisely.
That's insane.
I mean, it used to be a chemical warfare ingredient.
Now it's agriculture.
This has got to stop.
And I know you're doing some great work, the most important work, Jeffrey, on the front lines to stop this.
Let me just give a message to the folks watching.
If you want to help stop this, support Jeffrey's organization, the Institute for Responsible Technology.
That's at responsibletechnology.org.
Jeffrey, is there any other website or book name you want to give out?
Well, ResponsibleTechnology.org is a way that you can sign up for our free electronic newsletter, watch free videos and audios online, catch a lot of articles.
But if you want to learn to avoid genetically modified foods, go to Non-GMOShoppingGuide.com and look at thousands of products that have been verified by the Non-GMO Project, a third-party verifier.
To back up non-GMO claims.
So if people avoid GMOs and there's enough of us, even 5% of the U.S. population, it should be sufficient to create a tipping point, as happened in Europe, so that the food companies realize that using GM ingredients is a marketing liability and will kick it out.
Absolutely.
Well said.
That is the pathway to victory.
And Jeffrey, you are an American hero for your work.
I want to thank you so much for doing what you do and for joining us here today on naturalnews.com.
Folks, thank you for watching.
Jeffrey, thanks for joining us.
Thank you, Mike.
All right, that's our interview with Jeffrey Smith.
Be sure to check other segments, other interviews with Jeffrey on tv.naturalnews.com.
Also, you can search for them on youtube.com.
We've got more coming up with Jeffrey Smith about the GMO labeling campaign effort in California.
That video will be posted separately.
Thank you for joining me today.
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