This one was shared by Mr. V.T., and it’s another little indicator that GMOs, as an international and environmental issue, simply are not going to go away:

Largest international study into safety of GM food launched by Russian NGO

What’s interesting here is that this study will be conducted by what the U.K.’s The Guardian is calling an “NGO,” a “non-government organization,” you know, like the kind of non-government organizations the USA has been using in its so-called “color revolutions” to overthrow governments it doesn’t like and install ones accept to it and its corporate masters.

One should note the following paragraphs:

“According to the Nags, the experiment will try to establish whether the GM maize and its associated herbicide cause cancers, reduce fertility or cause birth defects. The scientists also want to know whether the mixture of chemicals present in Roundup (Monsanto’s tradename for its glyphosate herbicide) are more or less toxic than its active ingredient glyphosate.

“Farmers, governments, scientists and consumers around the world have been involved in an intense debate since GM foods were introduced in 1994. But while there have been many thousands of studies conducted, mostly by GM companies, which show that there is no health risk, government regulators have not required evidence of long-term safety and deep mistrust has built between different “sides”.

…

“Oxana Sinitsyna, deputy science director at the Sysin research institute of human ecology and environmental health which is part of the Russian ministry of health, one of the three scientists on the Factor GMO study’s review board, said: “The scale and format of this research project will allow us to create a really objective and comprehensive data set on the mechanics of the impacts of a GM diet on the health of living organisms over the long term.

“From a scientific point of view the ‘Factor GMO’ project is highly ambitious, which makes it very interesting, for both the public and for the scientists involved.”

Bruce Blumberg, another board member, who is a biology professor at the University of California, Irvine, said: “The cultivation of herbicide resistant crops is widespread in the US, and the use of the herbicides to which these crops are resistant has increased many-fold in the decades since they were introduced. There is a notable lack of published, peer-reviewed data on their safety, as well as data on the safety of the increased use of herbicides with which they are grown.”

The planned study will have no input from the biotech industry or the anti-GM movement, said Sharoykina.“Comprehensive scientific safety studies on GMOs and their related pesticides are long overdue. All previous studies caused controversy for various reasons: choice of animal, insufficient statistics, duration of tests, research parameters, and researchers’ connections to the anti-GMO movement or the biotech industry.

“This study is intended to remedy the situation. The project organisers have considered all of the points of disagreement and distrust surrounding this subject.” She added that Nags would not have any involvement in the scientific process.” (All emphases added)

On the surface, it appears that Russia is now moving ahead in a practical fashion to conduct precisely the types of studies that I and others who have been following the GMO story have advocated should have been done initially, but that were not, i.e., multi-generational long-term studies of GMO impact not only on animals that consume them, but on the wider environment. While this study does not indicate that the wider environment is a part of the study (e.g., the multi-generational impact of GMO planting, consumption, and herbicides on honey bee populations and bird populations, seed carrying- and so on), it is clear that the Russian study will be a much-needed study. And in the already highly-charged political atmosphere surrounding GMOs, the Russians are taking particular care to demonstrate that their study is neither pro- nor anti-, GMO. It will have to be hard and fast science.

This said, there is, I strongly suspect, an agenda here, and I also strongly suspect that this study is a bit of confirmation of a suspicion I’ve had for some time, namely, that the BRICSA nations will eventually make the GMO issue an international geopolitical issue. Already the Russia-friendly Global Research News website has run numerous articles on Russia’s attitude to GMOs (see, for example, Why Is Russia Banning GMOs While the US Keeps Approving Them? Russia sees GMOs as threat). Note the statement by President Putin cited in this article:’ Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin says, ‘Russia must protect its citizens from GMOs.‘”

I have been arguing, as noted above, that the BRICSA nations will eventually make the GMO issue a geopolitical one. But to do so, they will need something more than just the moral hypocrisy of the West with respect to its own democratic institutions and the GMO issue, a hypocrisy best in evidence with the recent goings-on in Hawaii’s county of Maui. (You’ll recall the citizens there passed a GMO ban, but were immediately faced with a papal interdict in the form of a lawsuit brought against the county by – you guessed it- the agricultural cartel of I.G. Monfarbensanto et al.) If the GMO issue is to become a geopolitical issue, then the long-term intergenerational scientific studies of species and environmental impacts will need to be done. And this study will fill at least a part of that requirement. In my opinion we are looking, in other words, at yet another indicator that the BRICSA nations intend to make GMOs a geopolitical issue.

For those with the eyes to see, the death of bees and their near absence almost everywhere in the USA – I remember as a boy they used to be busily buzzing about my mother’s flower gardens every year, and now, no matter where I go, the sight of bees is about as rare an event as the sighting of a golden eagle – is but one indicator that something is seriously wrong with I.G. Monfarbensanto’s Bought And Paid for “Science.”  And that’s the problem, for the intergenerational studies that should have been done were not, and by the time Russia concludes such a study, the damage may already have been done.

See you on the flip side…

SF Source GizaDeathStar  Dec 9 2014

(Thank, Minty)