THE RECORD
September 12, 2001

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

The alleged purpose of food packaging is hygiene and cleanliness to prevent the spread of disease, apart from the obvious opportunity to use bright coloured advertising on the packages. The whole thing appears to be the usual profit game, but now the question comes up: How safe is food in this packaging and is it preventing, or causing illness?

Denmark's leading business magazine, Borsens Nyhedsmagasin, has just published the results of research carried out by the independent Steins Laboratory on multi-layered plastic laminates used for packaging foods of all kinds, from chocolate to sliced meats to pasta. These thin layers of plastic are usually held together with a glue that contains aromatic amines, recognized by the World Health Organization as carcinogenic and most likely the cause of growing allergies all over the world. Some of the foods tested for this cancer causing substance by the laboratory exceeded the permissible dosages by 30 to 40 times and one kind of Italian mozzarella cheese by 100 times. Of course, these tests have been conducted on European foods, but the same packaging and substances are also used in North America.

On the genetically modified (GM) seeds and foods front the battle is warming up, with the USA and Canada using every trick and gimmick to force them on the rest of the world, while the Europeans and much of Asia are putting up increased resistance. The big argument is whether people do have the right to know what they are eating and should the foods be labeled for GM content? According to the US and Canadian governments they do not and should accept the manufacturers' words that the products they sell are perfectly safe.

The problem is that there isn't a single GM seed, or food or product on the market that had been tested for long term health and environmental effects, anywhere by anybody. This is not just a wild statement, but a well proven fact. The manufacturers of GM foods resists all efforts to have their products tested, while Phil Angell, Monsanto's Director of Corporate Communications, stated in a New York Times Sunday Magazine interview that "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring it's safety is the Food and Drug Administration's job."

At the same time independent and government scientists are prevented from receiving information about what the products contain and how they are manufactured. And when they ask questions they are threatened with lawsuits an firings, as government scientists have been here in Canada.

The US government is going even farther. The long standing international treaty against biological warfare has been recently wrecked by the USA when their representatives walked out of new talks, claiming that investigations and inspections of US biotech facilities would interfere with the patent rights of various private companies. In other words, they insist on the inspection of facilities and their right of bombing them in other countries, but prevent the same in theirs.

By the way, Dubya Bush has just announced that the USA will cancel the also long standing International Ballistic Missile Treaty whenever he feels like it. The same applies for many other treaties involving human rights, pollution, weapons sales and so on, while they call chicken feed powers, like Iraq and North Korea "rogue states."

Back on the GM front the US and satellite Canadian and British governments are on the road to force the acceptance of GM seeds and foods on the whole world through the WTO and phony free trade deals where decisions are made on the profitability and not the safety of products. As a farmer I've been reading the GM horror stories with interest for years. I don't know of a single GM food or product that may have delivered its claimed benefits.

The prairies are now full of Monsanto's Roundup resistant and herbicide proof canola, growing everywhere like weed, the pollen carried by the wind. Nobody can figure out how to kill it, except by pulling it up by the roots by hand.

One of the main clauses in the contracts for the sale of these GM seeds is that farmers no longer can save their own seeds, but must buy them from Monsanto and the rest of the GM Cosa Nostra. They took the Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeisser to court on charges that he was growing their GM canola without permit. Percy denied that he ever bought, or planted any GM Canola, or that he'd even wanted to grow any. The case went on for years, when some nutty judge decided a few months ago that even if Percy never wanted to have the crop, and even if it was the wind that blew the pollen to his fields, Monsanto still had the patent and he has to pay them something like $200,000, which would break the man. I think, there's an appeal pending right now. Let's hope the next judge will have a bit of brains.

The same is happening, with court cases all over the USA and other continents. The purpose of these GM seeds is to colonize the food supply of the Earth, where farmers could only grow bought seeds, use bought chemicals to make them work and pay through the nose to the corporations for every step they make, every breath the take and through the privatization of the water systems, every drop they irrigate with and drink. Monsanto is now into water privatization in a big way and estimate that if they have their way they'll reap $2. billion a year in profits from water alone.

Copyright (c) 2001, West's International