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Today in AgBioView - Money and Blood! (22/3/2005)

1.Apel's 'Money and Blood'
2.The Scotsman's idea of 'SCIENCE'
3.Today in AgBioView - Money and Blood!
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1.Apel's 'Money and Blood'

First of all an apology to subscribers and even an apology of sorts to New Scientist. Why? Well, that will become clearer in a minute but first a little detour via yesterday’s AgBioView bulletin. On the day of the UK's final farmscale trial results with headlines breaking like 'Transgenic crops take another knock' (Nature), 'GM Crops Harm Wildlife' (Press Association), AgBioView was silent on the day's big story, preferring to run the headline 'Andrew Apel is back!'

Who Apel? He's the editor of the biotech industry newsletter, 'AgBiotech Reporter'. He was also at one time a regular attack dog on C S Prakash's email list, using, for example, the Sept 11 attacks to put forward the view that scientific critics of GM like Dr Mae-Wan Ho and Dr Vandana Shiva had 'blood on their hands' as a result of the terrorist attacks.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=12

On another memorable occasion Apel commented on police behaviour at the WTO meeting in Genoa, during which Berlusconi's police made a notorious night-time raid on the HQ of the Genoa Social Forum and the Independent Media Centre. The police suffered no injuries in the raid but over 61 of the occupants, many of whom were in their sleeping bags, were injured. But Apel told agBioView's subscribers, 'From everything I have seen, the police in Genoa never did anything other than defend themselves.. Police are dangerous people, that is why they are hired for the job they have. Only a fool goes against them, and in Genoa many fools have received their due.' More than a dozen of the 93 people arrested in the night-time raid were carried out on stretchers. Film footage showed walls awash with blood. 35 of the injured required hospital treatment with several requiring surgery. One of those whose arm was broken in the raid was a reporter.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,526484,00.html

Apel was also at the forefront of attempts by GM lobbyists to use the resistance of countries in southern Africa to accepting GM-contaminated food aid, as a way of attacking biotech industry critics. While even ardent pro-GMers like Prof Derek Burke have admitted the right of developing countries to determine their own biosafety policies on such issues and the need for their choices to be respected, Apel called on the U.S. to bomb Zambia with GM grain if it had the audacity to continue to reject it. On a discussion list Apel wrote of the crisis, 'I can almost picture the darkies laying down their lives for the vacuous ideals... their death throes, how picturesque, among the baobab trees and the lions!'
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=12

In Apel's latest offering, 'Money and blood' - the second item below - Apel talks about the 'infamous Oxfam' and the 'execrable Zambian Jesuits' who pretend, he says, to be the voice of the poor. Apel goes on, 'The Council On Racial Equality (CORE) has repeatedly pointed out the depravity of so casually counting the poor in developing countries as acceptable losses in the activist war against progress.' Actually it's not the 'Council On Racial Equality' but the 'Congress of Racial Equality', but what do such niceties matter - one set of 'darkies' is presumably as good as another when one's engaging in blackwashing and tokenism.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4987

According to Apel, activists opposing GM crops enjoy 'plush lifestyles' courtesy apparently of payments from 'Europe' and 'Britain'. Apel also seems to say the British government fixed the UK public debate on GM and the reporting of the farmscale trials in order to block GMOs. Clearly, Prime Minister Blair and his Science Minister Lord Sainsbury are playing a much deeper game than any of us ever realised. As Apel says, 'Such a vast chess game...'

The springboard for this drivel, topping a listserv that according to Prakash reaches literally thousands of scientists, journalists and bureaucrats, is, believe it or not, the New Scientist piece 'On the Uptake of Healthier GM Foods'. These healthier GM foods, says Apel, could become a success in Europe dealing 'a blow to credibility that activists can ill afford'.

Which brings us back to the apology. In a recent bulletin we asked, 'Is Monsanto's pulling a GM confidence trick with its supposedly healthier low linolenic acid soya beans? It certainly looks like it!' We went on to comment on two excerpts from the current edition of New Scientist which state that 'the first GM products claiming to have direct benefits for consumers have arrived'. We pointed out that this was misleading as the healthier trait in the plants had been created by non-GM means and Monsanto had deliberately turned it into a GM crop.

This is indeed the case. Monsanto has merely added a GM trait - Roundup Ready resistance - that has absolutely nothing to do with consumer benefits. But what we didn't say, because we weren't aware of it from the online versions of the articles available to non-subscribers, was that further on in the New Scientist pieces, it is made clear that non-GM breeding gave rise to the plant's supposedly healthier property. This we discovered when we got hold of the print edition of the magazine and got down to paragraph 6 of 'Will low-fat foods sway biotech sceptics?'

The content of para 6, of course hardly explains - indeed, it totally undermines - the industry hype that precedes it - 'Monsanto... says Vistive soya is leading a second generation of GM crops that benefit consumers not farmers,' etc. Monsanto could, after all, breed GM herbicide resistance into any food crop or herb that naturally had supposed health benefits and then say they were part of the new wave of healthy GM foods!

And it is not only people who fail to get as far as para 6 who are being misled. Both Apel's article and the Scotsman piece below make reference to 'healthier' plants courtesy of GM without any para 6 style clarification. Doubtless many more such pieces will follow even if AgBioView put Apel back on his chain.

Finally, we repeat our previous point aboutt Iowa State University conventionally breeding an even lower linolenic acid variety that would be better than the Monsanto one and which hasn't had any GM traits added to it
http://www.notrans.iastate.edu/
http://www.zfsinc.com/refining.asp

As it is better than the Monsanto product, it would be interesting to know what has happened to it and whether it is going to be made available (given that Monsanto like-minded corporations now own so many seed companies).
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2.SCIENCE
The Scotsman, 19 May 2005
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=296272005

GENETICALLY modified crops that have targeted benefits for consumers are to go on sale. The controversy in Europe over the first generation of these misnamed "Frankenstein" foods is likely to mean they will not be welcome. In the United States, however, they will sell well. Among the crops produced by Monsanto is a Vistive range of soybeans, which the company says will make processed foods healthier as oil from the beans doesn't turn into trans-fatty acids.
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3.Today in AgBioView on March 21, 2005 (http://www.agbioworld.org):

Money and Blood
- Andrew Apel, AgBioView, March 21, 2005 ([email protected])

From time to time, the news in one single edition of AgBioView happens to juxtapose nearly all the major current issues surrounding agricultural biotechnology in a way that brings them sharply into focus. That is the case with the March 19, 2005 edition.

In "On the Uptake of Healthier GM Foods" from New Scientist, we are tol

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