All GMO approvals in Brazil are illegal, says whistleblowing regulator

Sunday, August 25, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: GMOs, regulators, Brazil

(NaturalNews) It may not come as much of a surprise to our regular readers, but the biotechnology industry as we currently know it is intrinsically corrupt. And a government official-turned-whistleblower from Brazil recently admitted in a government report that every single industry-prompted approval for genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in his country has taken place outside the realm of sound science and without proper legal precedent, which means all current plantings of GM crops in Brazil are illegal.

These are sweeping claims, but they are backed by a lengthy report recently published by Brazil's National Council for Food and Nutrition Security. In this report, a man by the name of Leonardo Melgarejo divulges key information about how GMOs have never lived up to the promises made about them by their creators, nor have any of the studies used to back their approval proven to be legitimate. To the contrary, most of the currently accepted safety data on GMOs is utter rubbish, he claims, because it relies on flawed methodologies and dishonest protocols.

One of the hallmarks of GMO technology has always been that GM crops will help end world hunger by increasing crop yields. During the last 20 years that GMOs have been on the scene, however, this simply has not been the case. Yields have remained the same or even decreased as a result of GMOs, while the use of dangerous and potentially deadly crop chemicals to keep weeds and pests under control has increased dramatically, a fact that is often omitted from mainstream reports about the "benefits" of GMOs.

"The argument that world hunger will be overcome by productivity gains offered by genetic engineering remains an unfulfilled promise," writes Melgarejo in an English translation of his report compiled by GMWatch.org. "In these 20 years of development of transgenics, almost all ... GMOs involve Bt and herbicide-tolerant (HT) technologies, which are not designed to achieve productivity gains."

Most NaturalNews readers are probably already aware of the "superweed" consequences of spraying mass amounts of pesticides and herbicides on GM crops, but Melgarejo also says that GM crops themselves are becoming superweeds -- that is, GM crop weeds are becoming so robust and chemical-resistant that not even the strongest chemical treatments are able to mitigate them. Superweeds, of course, have been showing up all across the U.S., and now throughout Brazil, where GMOs have also been widely adopted.

All industry-funded GMO studies are pseudoscientific garbage, suggests Melgarejo

So why, exactly, has Melgarejo gone so far as to declare GMOs in Brazil to be illegal? According to his report, all filings for GMO approvals in Brazil have thus far been in breach of established legal norms, which require strict corresponding safety studies that follow very specific scientific guidelines. Every single GMO approval, he says, has ignored these important requirements, whether by failing to use proper sample sizes or by using sample materials that were not the same as those that occur in the real world. In every case, he insists, GMOs have been illegitimately approved to serve corporate interests.

"Fundamentally, it should be said that none of the cases so far approved by CTNBio (CTNBio is the regulatory authority that governs GMO approvals in Brazil) incorporates studies required by the legal norms," adds Melgarejo. "Long-term impacts (of GMO use and consumption) are not evaluated. All tests submitted for evaluation to CTNBio examine short-term reactions. The longest is 90 days -- not allowing the identification of cumulative damage."

Besides this, industry-backed tests routinely test the effects of grains and other GM materials that do not contain pesticide and herbicide residues, despite the fact that these same materials would contain such residues in a real-world environment. Tests involving GM proteins are also flawed, in that they use proteins derived from separate bacteria rather than from the GM plants themselves, which leads to false outcomes.

You can read Melgarejo's full report, as translated into English by GMWatch.org, here:
http://gmwatch.org

Sources for this article include:

http://gmwatch.org

http://www2.planalto.gov.br

http://www.sustainablepulse.com

http://www.science.naturalnews.com