It's already too late to shut the door on GM foods

Friday, November 20, 2009 by: E. Huff, staff writer
Tags: GM foods, soy, health news

(NaturalNews) A report from the British Royal Society has been released that urges support for genetically-modified foods by the British public in order to address what it deems the world's growing demand for food. The report also reveals the disturbing reality about just how far genetically-modified (GM) foods have already penetrated the food supply in England, despite widespread public rejection of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) roughly a decade ago.

Over the years, Brits have been led to believe that their diets are GMO-free. Truth be told, nearly two-thirds of the roughly 2.6 million tons of soy that is imported into the United Kingdom each and every year is GM and most people there are entirely unaware of it.

Though used primarily for animal feed, GM soy has been making its way into the British food supply for years due to the fact that manufacturers and retailers are not properly tracking the source of their soy, allowing GM soy to make its way into the human food chain. GM soybean oil, for example, is now being heavily used by catering companies in preparing food.

GM foods found in "GMO-free" products

Further disturbing is the fact that although British products that contain GM ingredients must be labeled as such, GM ingredients are being found in all kinds of products labeled "GMO-free". Many varieties of GM soy are being found in food as well, despite the government's approval of only Monsanto's RoundUp Ready soy.

GMOs of any kind have been shown to be harmful and, whenever presented to the public as a viable alternative to the "food crisis", they are uniformly rejected. Nevertheless, many officials and regulators continue to wage support for artificial food that is verifiably dangerous to human health, claiming it is going to make its way into food anyway and that there is no way to control contamination.

The goal of the Royal Society report is to garner support for a practice that is already taking place against the will of the people, an effort that is designed to indoctrinate the public into wholehearted endorsement for GMOs in the food supply in order to solve the problems of world hunger.

Officials, representatives, and groups opposed to GMOs continue to lobby against such a hypothesis, claiming that GMOs serve no legitimate purpose in alleviating world hunger. They aim to convey the powerful truth that global hunger is actually caused by the likes of GMO companies like Monsanto who continue to gain increasing power over the world's food supply.

Data reveals that roughly 82 percent of the global seed market has intellectual property rights attached to it, meaning the seeds have been patented and are owned by one of a handful of AgroScience companies. Additionally, six companies – Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, and Dow – control about 75 percent of the global agrochemical market.

John Fagan, chief scientist of food certification company Cert-ID, believes that government hype over a perceived inability to control GM contamination is contrived. Noting his company's status as the leading certifier of non-GMO soy imported from Brazil, he emphasizes that managing ingredient supply chains is perfectly attainable. To claim otherwise, he says, is "nonsense".

Opposition against efforts to standardize GMOs continues to mount, yet many now realize that GMOs have so severely penetrated the food chain that it may be next to impossible to identify where they are hiding.

Sources for this story include

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/o...

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2...

http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?tip=0&i...