‘Black Friday’ For GMO in
Russia
The destructive global project known as GMO or
Genetically Manipulated Organisms is incurring major defeats. The
once-formidable muscle of Monsanto, Bayer AG, Syngenta, Dow-DuPont seems to be
suffering from a rare form of political muscular dystrophy. In Russia, despite
enormous pressure from the western GMO cartel on individual Duma members and
Russian scientists, the Duma or state Parliament on June 24, passed the third
and final reading of the bill that now bans totally all GMO crop cultivation
and GMO animals. This was the very same ‘Black Friday,’ (for the GMO lobby),
June 24, when EU member states rebelled and refused for a third time to approve
a renewal of the license of the weed-killer glyphosate that is bound up with
GMO crop cultivation. That was also the day the EU also realized that British
voters had democratically voted to exit the European Union. For the globalists
that be all in all June 24 will be remembered as their Black Friday.
On June 24 the Russian Duma
took a final vote in the third reading of a bill introduced by the government
in 2015 for a total ban on GMO crop cultivation and GMO animal breeding in the
Russian Federation. Not only that but the Duma law gives the Russian Government
authority to ban import of products containing GMOs in to Russia, if it is
revealed that a specific GMO has a negative impact on human health or the
environment. The new law also includes fines for violations. Minister of
Agriculture, Alexander Tkachev, told the press on the occasion, “The Ministry
of Agriculture is strongly against GMOs; Russian products will remain clean.”
Fake pro-GMO study
After the first draft of
the GMO ban legislation was debated and sent for possible revisions in late
2015, on January 19 this year the pro-GMO lobby made a scientifically shabby
attempt to derail the ban.
A new report claiming to be
a comprehensive review of past studies on the health and safety of GMOs was
picked up in a newswire in Russia’s TASS.ru under the headline, “Russian
scientists have refuted the findings of studies on the hazards of GMOs.” Many
other Russian papers ran the story uncritically. The article discussed what was
said to be a scientific review published in the Critical Reviews in
Biotechnology journal.
The “Russian scientists” on
closer inspection turned out to be one, Alexander Y. Panchin, of the Institute
for Information Transmission Problems (IITP) of the Russian Academy of Science.
Panchin co-authored with a US researcher, Alexander Tuzhikov, who is listed as
a Research Associate at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, University of Miami
specializing in, “Computer Science, Bioinformatics…” That would suggest he is a
computer numbers cruncher.
Their “analysis” included
only review of a mere seven published scientific articles; there was no
original actual live experiments using rats as Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini and
others had done. Many of the selected studies were influenced by Monsanto or
other GMO companies surreptitiously. In their abstract, Panchin and his US
colleague Tuzhikov wrote, “We performed a statistical re-analysis and review of
experimental data presented in some of these studies and found
that quite often in contradiction with the authors’ conclusions the data
actually provides weak evidence of harm that cannot be differentiated from chance.” Now that’s about as scientifically rigorous
as melting fudge.
The pro-GMO Academy of
Sciences IITP report was followed by a personal meeting with Russian President
Vladimir Putin from the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladimir
Fortov on January 26. Fortov told Putin of the “benefits” of GMOs. It seems the Russian President was
underwhelmed by Fortov’s arguments.
Whoever financially backed
what apparently was a well-funded attempt to kill the GMO ban in Russia must
have reckoned that Russian scientists were either primitive and ignorant,
easily influenced by bribes, or that Putin’s backing to ban GMO could be easily
overturned. They miscalculated if so. An immediate reply from a group of
Russian leading GMO research scientists, the All-National Association for
Genetic Safety (OAGB), ripped the Panchin “review” to shreds.
Debunked
The scientists of the OAGB
pointed out that the methodology employed by the two pro-GMO authors was
fatally flawed: “Statistical analysis was conducted using the Bonferroni method,
which…can show a lack of an effect which is present in reality…this method does
not allow to identify the toxic effects of the objects, but on the contrary the
method hides the toxic effects.” The OAGB scientists asked the GMO-friendly
authors to justify on what basis they picked the specific seven articles out of
dozens of articles on health effects of GMO, many alarming. Depending on your methodology one can lie in
any way with statistics. Here Panchin and friend clearly did try just that.
The Panchin-Tuzhikov five
page “review” singled out a now-famous article from 2012 by Prof. Gilles-Eric
Seralini and his group at France’s Caen University for special attack. The
Seralini group carried out the world’s first long-term two year GMO feeding
study of rats fed Monsanto GMO corn treated with Monsanto Roundup weed-killer
with glyphosate. That study revealed that the rats developed multiple cancer
tumors, many died prematurely or had organ damage. Seralini found that the most cancer
tumors appeared after the 90-day period where Monsanto studies had inexplicably
stopped.
Russia bans US GMO soy and
corn
The new law banning
cultivation of GMO in Russia follows a separate Russian ban of import of US
corn and soybeans this past February. Between 80-90% of all USA corn and
soybeans today is GMO. On February 15, Russia’s state food safety regulator,
Rosselkhoznadzor, announced a ban on all imports of US soybeans and corn
because of what it determined were “microbial and GMO contamination.” According
to the regulator, the corn imported from the US is often infected with dry rot
of maize. In addition, according to the Russian watchdog, corn can be used for
transgenic crops in Russia.
The GMO project if the
truth were to be told by Monsanto, Bayer AG, Syngenta and others, has nothing
to do with high-technology methods to increase yields to “feed the world.” It
has nothing to do with using less herbicides or other toxic chemicals. It is a
sick project of some ill minds to pollute the human gene pool with toxic waste
in hopes of ultimate population control and ultimately, population reduction.
Russia has just shown it’s possible to reject and that’s very good for Russia
and for the world. Now it’s time for Americans and others to follow suit.
F. William Engdahl is
strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics
from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and
geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
No comments:
Post a Comment