Seeds of Death

Totally not a sensationalist title. Nope.

Potentially edible! Food woo

Fabulous food!

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Delectable diets!

Soy Trans fat Subway diet Carnivore diet

Bodacious bods!

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Seeds of Death is an anti-GMO propaganda film produced by Gary Null, an AIDS denialist and conspiracy theorist. Both Gary Null and Richard Polonetsky wrote and directed the film, but Gary Null is the primary writer/director. The movie was released in December 2012. In May 2013, Gary Null posted the movie on his YouTube account. As of December 2014 it has over 1.8 million views (combined view count from both copies posted by Null, up from 400,000 on copy #1 in September 2013), which seems to make it the most viewed anti-GMO propaganda film on YouTube by a large margin.

Some notable people made appearances in this film, including:

• Gary Null
• Joseph Mercola
• Mike Adams
• Percy Schmeiser

While the internet technically allows widespread access to all the information needed to refute the video, in practice, it makes so many arguments that refuting them all becomes impractical for any one person to tackle in a given span of time. But that's what this article is for.

This article is dedicated to listing and debunking the claims made, sometimes implicitly, in this movie. As the movie is approximately 80 minutes long (IMDB lists 90 minutes but the YouTube version is 79:38), this article contains a great deal of content, and may be a bit difficult to navigate through. There is a dropdown navigation bar located directly below this paragraph that can be used to skip to any particular section of the movie. Timestamps are recorded following the conclusion of the transcribed claim, so if you're watching the movie as you read this keep that in mind.

Claims Claims of the movie Analysis

00:00-09:59

0:40

Every single independent study conducted on the impact of genetically modified food shows that it damages organs, it causes infertility, it causes immune system failure, it causes holes in the GI tract, it causes multiple organ system failure,

The first and most obvious problem with this claim is that every single independent study did not show those effects. Biofortified maintains a list of many independent studies, and a few examples from this list that do not support these claims include a study on transgenic papaya, a study on RR soybeans, and a two-year study on RR soybeans. Since the producers of this video have not cited any scientific studies or even attempted to vaguely mention anything that even sounds like a study, it is difficult to address the claims directly. And since the video did not mention what type of plant these claims apply to, we will have to assume they are referring to the transgenic process as a whole, in which case the above three studies directly refute their claims.

0:50

The whole concept of genetically modified organisms is throwing a monkey wrench into the life on this planet.

One can argue that anything is "throwing a monkey wrench into the life on this planet". iPhones quite certainly aren't a natural concept, neither are roads. None of that matters though, because this is just the logical fallacy appeal to nature. Humans have been making huge changes to plants ever since agriculture started — maize being one of the drastic examples of a crop engineered solely for traits desired by humans.

1:06

Monsanto is the company that told us PCBs were safe (so we shouldn't trust them on GMOs).

The Monsanto of PCBs and the Monsanto of agriculture are two drastically different companies. There have been a lot of fuck-ups in history, that certainly was one, but this can't be considered proof that every single thing they ever produce is tainted simply because of PCBs.

1:08

They told us that Agent Orange was safe (so we shouldn't trust them on GMOs).

Monsanto was given the formula by the US government. They did not claim that it was safe, and in fact in 1952 they warned the US Government that the Agent Orange they produced was contaminated by dioxin. The government's response was to ignore this data. Furthermore Monsanto was neither the inventor nor the only manufacturer of Agent Orange — the US Army created the formula, and the other companies producing Agent Orange were Diamond Shamrock, Dow, Hercules, T-H Agricultural & Nutrition Company, Thompson Chemicals, and Uniroyal. Claiming that GMOs are unsafe because Monsanto manufactured Agent Orange is just as inane as claiming that Ziploc bags are unsafe because Dow manufactured Agent Orange, or that Krupp steel is dangerous because the company used to make tanks. There are many more examples like this of companies with dubious pasts — Volkswagen was founded by Nazis, Mitsubishi's Zero fighters were used by the Japanese military in WWII, IBM produced the tracking system that assisted the Nazis in the Holocaust, both Siemens and Kodak used Holocaust labor in production (Siemens supposedly forced prisoners to build gas chambers that were later used to kill both the prisoners and their families), Bayer manufactured Zyklon B and helped out with Josef Mengele's inhumane experiments, BMW made airplane engines for the Luftwaffe, Nintendo made playing cards and hanafuda cards for Japanese soldiers and war criminals, Nissan made engines and vehicles for the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, Mazda made rifles for the IJA, Chase bank assisted the Nazis by freezing the accounts of Jews, and last but definitely not least, Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, LBGT people, and other "undesirables" while Imperial Japan killed millions of Chinese, Koreans, Malays, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and East Indians. None of this makes the companies' products bad. This doesn't mean that all Germans and Japanese are terrible people, nor does it mean that you should avoid using Ziploc bags. It doesn't mean that your Mitsubishi, Mazda, Volkswagen, BMW, or Nissan car is going to explode. It doesn't mean that your aspirin is secretly designed to murder you. It doesn't mean that your Wii is going to force you into sex slavery under the auspices of the Empire of Japan. Yet the people who are frothing at the mouth over Monsanto being the great Satan don't seem to even acknowledge that probably everyone who had a hand in developing and selling Agent Orange is dead -- from old age, not from Agent Orange poisoning. It's not about a genuine search for the truth in context. It's all about building a laundry list of decontextualized atrocities, so they can slur anything the company produces.

1:08

They told us that DDT was safe (so we shouldn't trust them on GMOs).

Using DDT on farms was irresponsible. Using DDT to aid in malaria control efforts was not. DDT is in no way comparable to GMOs. There was little or no safety testing done on DDT, while in contrast there is an immense amount of testing done on GMOs. Once serious investigation into DDT happened, the danger was discovered, then immediately removed by banning the insecticide. As with Agent Orange, blaming solely Monsanto for this or attempting to call it equivalent isn't quite a rational comparison.

1:15

And now they're in charge of telling us if their own genetically modified foods are safe.

Using this as justification for insane claims about GMOs is ridiculous. Safety testing for these plants is extremely in-depth. Several government agencies review each new variety. Monsanto and its competitors are required to conduct any studies that these agencies demand at their own expense, then turn over the results in full so that they can be evaluated. Furthermore, even if these Monsanto-financed results were somehow faked, this completely ignores how universities, other companies, and research institutes have also been performing studies on these crops, and how their results align with industry-funded studies. This would have to be a massive cover-up involving entire fields of science! Given that oil companies have spectacularly failed to shift the consensus position in climate science (a fairly small field), suggesting that a medium-large company managed to completely corrupt a much larger field is just insane.

1:50

There has not been sufficient animal/human/environmental health testing of new transgenic fish.

It would be nice if some actual proof was cited here. Like a study — even some actual concerns beyond "I don't like how you've spent the past 22 years developing and testing these fish, therefore I demand more tests". In a way this is a form of moving the goalposts - the activists are just moving the goalposts as fast as possible so that they can keep the fish off the market. The FDA has declared that the fish pose no environmental threat and it is very likely that they will be approved for human consumption soon.

2:04

Basically they've taken agriculture and built an industrial model which doesn't fit nature.

Yet again the appeal to nature is abused! The process of plant breeding and even agriculture itself aren't "natural", so why are they singling out GM crops?

2:19

If you have an organic corn crop which sits next to an genetically engineered field, [...] your crop will be contaminated

The documentary fails to recognize that gene flow is a natural part of agriculture. No crop is ever 100% pure, which is why USDA Organic guidelines allow for a certain amount of inadvertent contamination. Likewise in the EU, contamination of up to 1% is considered acceptable. This gene flow works both ways - the conventional farmers are also having their crops contaminated with inferior organic plants, and organic farmers are also getting contaminated with the conventional farmers' plants, as well as other organic farms' plants. It's also not difficult to reduce contamination levels in the unlikely event that they are an actual problem for the farmer. Soybeans are one of the more popular transgenic crops, but their method of reproduction means that contamination is extremely low with only minor precautions. While the same is not true for all transgenic crops, proper isolation techniques can still easily result in contamination levels of under 0.5% for corn. Contamination isn't a new issue either - it's been a problem for farmers for a very long time. The only difference is that organic farmers may have to give up their premiums if they don't take extremely basic precautions against contamination that are already recommended by USDA guidelines.

2:47

The pharma industry has no interest in having you well, because they don't make any money if you're well. And the pharma industry is the biotech industry.

This is basically just the good old Big Pharma conspiracies... The proof for this particular conspiracy seems to be in the same place as for all the other ones - missing. Vaccines are manufactured by the pharma industry, come with tiny profit margins, and result in less sick people. If the pharma industry truly had no interest in having you well, then why are they selling such effective products? Maybe they're indeed focused on making money by selling effective products (which avoids the whole unpleasantness of having your product pulled from the market for deceptive advertising)? Nah, it's gotta be a conspiracy. As for the claims of the biotech industry being the pharma industry, the evidence for this is mixed. Some biotech companies have a presence in the pharma industry, some don't. But the primary company being blamed in this video is Monsanto, which is quite certainly not a pharma company. And having one company with both biotech and pharma divisions doesn't mean that there's some massive conspiracy to make people sick via their biotech division.

3:02

The use of GM in agriculture is a risk that is simply not worth taking.

This claim would sound far more convincing if they had something factual to show off instead of some lies about the scientific research and some nutty claims about pharma and biotech.

3:32

Any scientist that looks into the research or the lack of research on the safety of genetically engineered food comes to the conclusion that these foods should not be on the market and that they need another decade or two of research

Any scientists... Yes... That must be what these six hundred studies show, right? ...hmm, looks like the scientific evidence doesn't support that claim. So where are all these scientists who think that this food needs a few more decades of research? Hiding under a rock? I'm sure that they exist, but so do climate change denialists...

4:03

The FDA doesn't require a single safety study, they leave it to Monsanto.

Responsibility for the safety and testing of genetically engineered foods is split between three federal agencies: The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), AND the Department of Health and Human Services of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Biotech companies are required to provide any safety studies that the FDA demands, done at the company’s expense, and they are required to turn over the raw data to the FDA for review. The process is lengthy and complicated.

5:07

Companies only care about money, health isn't a concern.

Companies don't tend to make much money when they kill off their customers! I'm struggling to understand how this claim would ever make sense.

5:39

<Revolving door, Michael Taylor, etc>

So where is this evidence of bias? Where is the proof for this broad governmental influence? Did someone forget to present it? When Taylor was formally accused of bias by an activist, the FDA refuted the activist's claims, and even the industry critics defended Taylor. In general, Taylor's actions seem to be inconsistent with the accusations made in this movie. As for the remaining claims, if Monsanto truly ran the FDA, why would they have the FDA request expensive and time-consuming studies every time they submit a crop for approval? Why would they allow the government to ban GM crops from USDA Organic certified foods? Why would they ever let the FDA, USDA, or EPA ever delay the approval process, and why would they let it take so long? The sheer implausibility of the movie's claims is self destructive. Last but not least, experts in a particular field often work for the government - this isn't exactly unusual, most experts happen to have industry experience.

6:09

In reality the overwhelming consensus among the scientists at the FDA were not only that GMOs were different, but that they were inherently dangerous. That they might create allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems.

He seems to be representing the opinions of a few FDA scientists as the opinions of all of them, and taking a few minor concerns brought up initially and pretending that the concerns were considered valid. It's important to note that every single one of those concerns were brought up, but that they were hypothetical, and were discarded when they were deemed unrealistic.

6:24

Michael Taylor and the political appointees ignored the science, ignored the scientists, denied the existence of their concerns.

Smith hasn't presented any proof of the FDA ignoring the science. The concerns voiced seem to have been dismissed for being unrealistic. At this stage the technology was new and such concerns initially were worth evaluation, but they were (rightfully) discarded after evaluating them for realism.

6:36

Set forth a policy that allowed GMOs to be put on the market in a way that creates unprecedented risk for human beings and the environment

How the hell can you manage to turn the lengthy approval process that requires these crops to be approved by up to three federal agencies into "unprecedented risk"? Also see comments on the general Michael Taylor accusations.

7:43

The company is motivated to suppress knowledge about those negative aspects, the company is motivated to suppress government attempts to regulate [..] the company is motivated to try to infiltrate government, to lobby government...

Again, this is yet another conspiracy theory without even a shred of evidence backing it up.

8:14

They have been effective at essentially stacking the agencies in their favor to the point that it's almost physically impossible to pass any type of federal regulations or legislation because the people who make those choices are essentially owned by Monsanto, works for Monsanto, "creeps" for Monsanto

Considering the complex and lengthy approval process currently in use, it is unclear how anyone can listen to this claim without laughing at the sheer hilarity of it. If Monsanto really had so much control, why would they allow the government to cost them so much money on safety assessments and delays?

9:05

They say we don't have [the right to eat what we want], in fact we're going to force [genetically modified foods] on you

"Forcing" seems a bit dramatic. People who wish to avoid transgenic foods can quite easily obtain USDA Organic certified or Non-GMO project certified foods that do not contain these foods.

9:33

The FDA, and the USDA, who lead the charge for these new food safety bills - there's nothing in these bills to protect you, it's there to protect the genetic engineering industry, and unfortunately if we don't stop this, you won't see organic farmers

...which is exactly why the USDA Organic standards allow synthetic fertilizers and biotech crops. Oh wait, it's the other way around. This sounds like a bad case of the persecution complex. I don't understand how the organic farmers are going to become extinct - the industry is thriving thanks to their relentless PR campaigns against biotech.

9:40

Not a single human being on earth gets up and says "boy, I can't wait to go to the supermarket and buy a GMO food".

This is a blatant argument from popularity. Nobody gets up and says "boy, I can't wait to go to the supermarket and buy a food that has been mutated by sodium azide (mutation breeding)" (or fertilized by cow shit, or grown by combining plants in ways that could never happen naturally)... Why is this any different?

9:53

They haven't been able to come up with one thing in this food that actually helps the consumer.

Perhaps if there wasn't such fierce opposition to the technology they'd be interested in investing in improvements that improve the food directly. The strict regulatory process and limited consumer acceptance isn't helping either, no thanks to scare media like this movie. There are some crops in the approval pipeline that fit this criteria - Simplot’s Innate potato (nonbrowning, reduced asparagine content) and the Arctic apples (nonbrowning). Golden Rice also deserves a mention, as it will directly benefit people in impoverished nations.

10:00-19:59

10:10

85% of [GM crops] are designed so that you can soak them with weedkillers, toxic herbicides.

Glyphosate isn't exactly salad dressing, but it's not going to kill you unless you eat quite a bit of it. In fact, its lethal dose for rats is almost two times higher than that of table salt (LD50 = 5000 mg/kg). It replaced far more toxic herbicides, and is considered to be close to the ideal. The word "soak" is likewise misleading, as it implies that the alternatives would use less herbicide - which is false.

10:26

And who are the big companies that do this? [..] Monsanto, [...] DuPont, Dow Chemical, Syngenta, Bayer. What kind of companies are these? Chemical companies!

While the narrator forgot to mention BASF (and that DuPont only sells via their Pioneer subsidiary), they are correct that many companies producing transgenic crops are also chemical companies. Why you're supposed to assume that this is bad isn't clear, but it is possible they're trying to appeal to any possible chemophobia in the people watching this video. Unfortunately for those people, everything (including dihydrogen monoxide) is a chemical, so chemical phobia might be just a bit irrational.

11:07

[...] life form that is impossible to reproduce in nature because the reproductive organs don't match

Unfortunately, this isn't true. A quarter of the cow genome came from snakes, a segment of SPIN genes is present in seven different animal genomes, a trypanosome infiltrates the DNA of its hosts, a fruit fly had the entire genome of a bacterium in it, aphids stole genes from fungi, sheep's fescue borrowed a gene from swamp meadowgrass, wasps use genes stolen from ancient viruses to make biological weapons, and gonorrhea borrowed human DNA. Such cases are called horizontal gene transfer, or HGT. And of course horizontal gene transfer isn't the only option. Have you ever heard of triticale? It's an interesting grain frequently marketed as "natural" when in fact it's quite the opposite. Triticale is a hybrid of wheat and rye - something that, unlike HGT, actually wouldn't happen in nature. The first triticale hybrids were sterile, and it took breeders quite some time to figure out how to allow this plant to breed. And yet for some reason there's no massive outrage over this. And what could be more natural than spraying a plant with sodium azide in order to induce completely random mutations in the plant's genome? If you get bored of that you can always switch to the other popular option, which is putting your plants next to a gamma ray source (such as cobalt-60). Over 3200 crops have been produced via these mutagenic breeding methods, yet none of these crops have had any safety testing or environmental testing performed on them (unlike GM crops, which have to pass a battery of tests before being approved). Why exactly is GM considered unnatural when HGT is a rare but normal part of nature? And why is there no concern over crops produced by bombarding them with radiation or soaking them in toxic chemicals? Perhaps the basic issue is one of scientific literacy - which explains why the prominent anti-biotech "scientist" Gilles-Eric Séralini is attempting to dumb down high school biology classes in France.

11:18

And as a result once this form is created there's a danger - it can cross pollinate, it can contaminate traditional crops

Contamination isn't a "danger" unless you're paranoid about genetic purity (and in that case you can use a greenhouse). Also see #2:19

12:18

Percy Schmeiser was a farmer in Canada who was contaminated by Monsanto's genetically modified seed. He realized that he had been contaminated because he used some of this herbicide to kill off the weeds around the utility poles on his property and saw some of the seed did not die from the application of glyphosate and thus must be genetically modified. Well he didn't do anything to purge his property of that and the seed would require taking your crop three years out of use before you could purge them of genetically modified organisms, so he decided that he didn't want to do that, so he saved his seed for planting the following year and Monsanto said "well you now knew that you had genetically modified seed, you saved it for planting a second year, that's infringement." And they sued him for patent infringement and went all the way up to the Canadian Supreme Court, and although they found that technically he did infringe their patent, they awarded Monsanto no damages.

Percy Schmeiser didn't just kill off weeds around his utility poles, after doing that he decided to spray Roundup on two 40-foot strips of his property, right next to the road. He testified in court that "by this means he sprayed a good three acres". After doing so, he discovered that 60% of the sprayed plants were still alive, growing in clumps that were thickest near the road and thinner as one moved into the field. This is all court evidence, from the mouth of Schmeiser himself. Now this small section of the field was contaminated at 60%, but as he himself admits, the contamination decreased as he moved further into the field, so total contamination was at the absolute most 60% and most likely far lower in the harvested seed. Here's where the evidence breaks down. We know that Schmeiser harvested this field in 1997, put into a truck, tarped, and stored in a building for the winter. When planting time came, he planted this seed. The absolute highest theoretical contamination this seed could have had was 60%, yet when his fields were tested, it was discovered that hundreds of acres of his farm (1030 acres according to the court document) were contaminated at the absurdly high level of 95-98%, a level of purity that could only be obtained in this situation by spraying the fields with roundup (glyphosate). Schmeiser denied this claim in court, yet it remains the only plausible explanation for this level of purity (assuming that he didn't lie about taking the entire field's seeds to plant). Wesley Niebrugge, a farmer and employee of the Esso bulk dealership in Bruno, testified that Schmeiser's farm hand Carlyle Moritz told him that Schmeiser had sprayed his (1998) crop with roundup. There is no evidence to back up Schmeiser's claim that he did not spray roundup, and Monsanto provided evidence that Schmeiser had purchased 720 liters of roundup in 1998. Schmeiser claims that the 720 liters were used solely for burn-down and to manage ditch weeds, but was unable to present any proof that he used the herbicides he claimed to use on his crop. There is an alternate explanation for this level of purity - he could have only harvested seeds from the plants left standing in the sprayed areas in his 1997 field. However this seems less likely and Schmeiser claimed that he harvested seeds from the entire field. Since the court was never able to prove if he sprayed Roundup or isolated seeds, these angles of investigation were dropped. Some people cite this as proof that Schmeiser never isolated seeds or sprayed roundup, but the courts never found actual evidence confirming Schmeiser's claims, and the issue of how the concentration increased so drastically has never been resolved. Schmeiser still argues that he was innocent - but claims that he never wanted RR seed - so why did he save, plant, and spray seed that he knew was contaminated? Since the courts found that he was completely knowledgeable about the RR canola's presence, wanted it to dominate the field, and had the "standby" option of using roundup on his crop, Monsanto won the lawsuit.

13:23

Both in Canada and the United States, hundred of farmers have been totally bankrupted, lost their farms, lost them by Monsanto. So there's a real fear - now we call it the new fear culture amongst farmers where a corporation now, through the rights of patents on a gene have, uh, which is inserted into a seed to make it resistant to a chemical or whatever, is that they lose their rights to use their own seeds to plant. So it's total control eventually that farmers have to go back to a corporation like Monsanto each year to buy their seed because they're no longer allowed to use their own seed, so, as a victim, you basically have to pay for your lawsuit, your damages, and so on. So farmers have become victims because they have done nothing wrong, because they were contaminated by a neighbor, by whatever means, by pollen flow, by seed blowing in the wind transportation and so on. It doesn't matter how it happens - if you're contaminated, it's over, and it's over.

At this point you should have read the rebuttal to the previous claim, and so you should know that Schmeiser's claims are full of shit. First, there were a mere 145 lawsuits filed since 1997 - hardly "hundreds of farmers being totally bankrupted", especially considering how many of these cases resulted in small or no settlements (just like Schmeiser). Schmeiser claims that you cannot use your own seed if it is contaminated, and claims that Monsanto will sue for accidental contamination. This, to put it bluntly, is pure bullshit. It's such a high grade of bullshit that when the OSGATA preemptively sued Monsanto with this claim, their court case was thrown out TWICE for failing to present ANY evidence that supported their claims. What's even funnier is that Monsanto has publically promised that they do not and will not sue people accidentally contaminated by their seed (and have claimed that they will pay for cleanup costs in the event that contamination occurs).

14:00

It's quite perverse, when it's their seed that is the new intern (unclear)

Contamination to a certain extent is a normal part of farming. This guy thinks that organic farmers have the right not to be contaminated by GMOs, but what about the poor conventional farmers, whose crops are being contaminated with those inferior organic seeds? This argument applies to both sides!

17:21

<Arpad Pusztai affair>

Pusztai's study is extremely flawed. Even the best make mistakes, and in Pusztai's case, his mistakes were massive. First of all, instead of publishing the results in a scientific journal (which would require them to pass the peer review process first), Pusztai went ahead and discussed his findings on the news. His experiments weren't even completed when his interview was taped! When the Royal Society (and later Fedoroff and Brown) reviewed the study, they found a wide variety of issues. The major ones were that: There were no significant differences between the animals. Too few animals were used to allow statistical significance to be achieved. The diets were protein-deficient. Different rats were fed different diets. Some rats were fed raw potatoes, which are known to be toxic to rats, and can cause disturbances to gastrointestinal cells. In addition, Dr Pusztai's two outside collaborators at the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the University of Durham have distanced themselves from his conclusions. John Gatehouse, at Durham, is understood to be privately furious at Dr Pusztai's failure "to consider the most elementary tenet of science - that before one reaches a conclusion about cause and effect, it is necessary to demonstrate that causality exists". The claim that the UK government made two phone calls and that this is the only reason Pusztai was fired demonstrates willful ignorance of how deeply flawed this study was and how Pusztai ignored the review process in favor of discussing unpublished research that hadn't been completed and hadn't been peer-reviewed. There's a wide variety of reasons to fire him, but since the other reasons are boring, the producers of this video decided to manufacture a controversy.

18:34

Glyphosate destroys beneficial microorganisms in the soil, which normally provide nutrients to the plant, and it also promotes pathogenic organisms in the soil which then overrun the plant. So it creates weaker plants, stronger disease, and the disease does the killing.

These claims are false. There is limited evidence indicating that glyphosate could have an effect on disease susceptibility, but there's no evidence demonstrating that this actually happens with RR crops. Furthermore, the preceding claim doesn't do a good job of explaining HOW glyphosate works. Glyphosate works by inhibiting the shikimate pathway via the EPSPS enzyme. The glyphosate inhibits the enzyme, which causes the whole pathway to fail, making it impossible for the plant to produce aromatic amino acids, killing the plant. Since mammals don't depend on the shikimate pathway to get their amino acids, the herbicide does not pose a direct threat via that vector.

19:16

What do the livestock in the United States eat? They eat largely Roundup ready crops. Roundup ready soy, Roundup ready corn, cotton seed, canola mash, sugar beet pulp, and soon, alfalfa. So a huge percentage of their food intake is roundup ready crops. Roundup pulls the nutrients out of the crops and makes them unavailable, so now we have millions of livestock eating nutrient deficient food. [...] it's a perfect storm for [animal/plant/human] disease.

Don Huber's claims about nutrition/mineral uptake are of dubious quality and have been thoroughly debunked.

19:48

When 44 thousand secret FDA memos were made public from a lawsuit, about the subject of genetic engineering, the director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine made it absolutely clear that GMOs in animal feed had a unique danger. Toxins can bio-accumulate in animals and in their milk. And if there are toxins in genetically modified feed, we might have higher levels of those toxins in the meat, or in the milk, or in their products from those animals.

So a memo expressing that the CVM had concerns is considered to be hard scientific evidence? Surely Smith is joking, right? These types of letters are all over the place. Notice how Smith never really showed the entire page? There's a reason for this. If you read the actual memo, you'll notice how the wording used is extremely vague. You can catch a sense of this in the snippets Smith shows, but it's quite obvious if you read the entire paper. This particular document is from two years before the approval of the first GM crop in the US - which explains the rather speculative tone and the reason for the letter.

20:00-29:59

20:51

95% of all the genetic modifications are done in order to allow the plants to survive more chemicals being sprayed onto them, and to allow the animals to survive more drugs put into them. And of course what happens is that when their genes are changed, our genes are changed by consuming them, just as the superweeds and the superbugs are genetically altered by consuming them - the bug eats the plant, its genes change, the animal eats the plant, its genes change, we eat the animal or the plant, our genes change. Our babies genes change, and the change is permanent.

The most recent data available is from 2011, and it states that herbicide tolerant crops accounted for 59% of the planted area, stacked (usually HT+Bt) crops accounted for a further 26%, and solely insect resistant varieties occupied an additional 15%. So the 95% number is completely made up. At absolute best you could make an 85% claim, but even that's dubious because of the nature of stacked traits. As for the claims about genetics being altered by consuming the GM plants - this is completely outrageous, made more unnerving by adding in "of course", as if it's painfully obvious. If it were true, everything we eat would be altering our DNA in just the same way, because there is no difference between the transgenes from GM crops and all other genes. Do you start growing a beak after eating chicken? Do you start developing corn kernels after drinking bottles of Coca-Cola? The argument demonstrates a lack of understanding of how the evolutionary process or the digestive process works as well. There have been no records of people in history developing permanent gene changes from consuming GMOs, and considering the human population unknowingly consumes GMO crops every day, shouldn't there be at least one case of short-term gene alteration? The terms "superweed" and "superbug" are misleading (and "superbug" already means something else), but it wouldn't be constructive to get into that issue at this time. It is important to note that resistance to pesticides happens as an evolutionary tactic, not some form of gene transfer (which is technically possible but extremely rare - there are currently no documented cases of a GM crop's genes being directly responsible for resistance to anything). In general this entire claim is fearmongering at its most basic... It's a perfect example of how extreme some of these claims can get.

21:24

They do not want you to know which products you're buying in the grocery store might contain genetically engineered ingredients. They say that that label would confuse consumers. They say there's no difference between genetically modified foods and non-GMO foods. Well that's absurd. That's what the word modified means. Genetically modified - it is modified, it is different, and it is in many ways a threat to the health of the people of our nation and people around the world

Nutritional equivalence is all that matters. They're no different because functionally, you can't tell the difference. They're just as nutritious, just as safe... The only differences are a few tiny changes on the genetic level - and even those are only interesting because they have a useful function, unlike the many useless changes caused during traditional breeding.

21:35

There's been very little study on the health dangers

...other than these six hundred studies, right?

21:59

There's enough evidence of harm to cause the American Academy of Environmental Medicine to say all doctors should prescribe non-GMO diets to everyone. They say that the animal feeding studies link GMOs to reproductive problems, immune system problems, accelerated aging, organ damage, gastrointestinal distress, Dysfunctional regulation of cholesterol and insulin, to name a few.

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) is not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. QuackWatch lists it as a questionable organization, citing their promotion of the dubious concepts of clinical ecology and multiple chemical sensitivity. The AAEM opposes water fluoridation (and fluoride in general!), opposes mercury-containing vaccines, claims that WiFi is dangerous (seriously!), considers EMF/RF exposure to be a major risk, and opposes "smart meters". When Science Based Medicine took a look at them they found that the AAEM is even more quackish when you dig deeper into the organization. Simply put, this is not a reputable organization. Its claims should be taken with a grain of salt at best.

24:00

<Bovine growth hormone>

Many of those claims seem to be conspiracy theories. If misused, rBST could cause pus production, but it is not considered a normal side effect of use. There is no evidence that regulators were bribed, and the agency takeover claim is outright ridiculous. IGF is both safe, already found in milk, already found in the human body at substantial concentrations, not present in increased levels in rBGH-treated milk, and not dangerous to your health. And since rBST increases the efficiency of milk production, it is considered environmentally friendly.

24:29

In the US, there's been recent evidence that articles been published that scientists who do any research on the possible effects that show negative results of genetically engineered crops are harassed, they are denied funds, the universities that depend on industry money are pressured to not allow this/to discourage this kind of research.

This is a common claim among anti-GM activists. It usually appears every time another major study used by the anti-GM activists is discredited. To the activists, discrediting or disputing results is harassment. To the activists, being called out as a scientific fraud is harassment (Seralini even sued someone for doing this - and won). As for the university funding, Kevin Folta has a very good blog post that explains why claiming universities are being bought out is nuts.

24:38

Monsanto's own research shows that rats who were fed this Bt corn, they had signs of toxicity in the liver and kidneys.

There are some rather major issues with Seralini's reinterpretations of Monsanto's studies. Seralini published two studies, both of which were trashed by the EFSA for being great examples of poor statistical analysis (among other issues). Monsanto also published a somewhat easier to read summary of the issues with the 2009 study (and before you cry "bias", keep in mind that Seralini is funded by both the organic industry and lobby groups, and Monsanto's document contains responses from other sources).

24:53

When genetically modified soybeans were fed to rodents, they saw changes in the testicles, changing from pink to blue, changes in the sperm cells, changes the uterus and ovaries, changes in the DNA functioning of the embryo offspring

Unfortunately for Smith, this claim was debunked years ago at Academics Review.

26:13

<the claim is that Epicyte, a biopharming company, produced a gene that could sterilize humans. Monsanto and DuPont purchased them. The implication is made that the epicyte gene was commercialized by including it in GM crops>

Why isn't everyone sterile right now? And what possible reason would an agriculture company have to sterilize all of their customers? This claim is a typical depopulation conspiracy theory.

26:29

We've seen smaller babies, a death rate that's five times that compared to controls, sterile babies, even babies with hair growing in their mouth. And this has been done by government scientists as well as independent scientists who are at the top of their field.

The main claims seem to be based on Irina Ermakova's rat experiment, which has numerous issues. The hairy babies seem to be from Surov's study, which was published in an obscure Russian journal and has major statistical flaws.

28:25

<Seralini's 2012 study>

See the main article on this topic: Gilles-Eric Séralini Long story short, the study was badly designed and was retracted by the journal.

30:00-39:59

30:12

When they allow animals to graze on the cotton plants after harvest in India, for years and years there was no problem. When they introduced Bt cotton, thousands of sheep died, buffalo died, goats died. [...] These animals were successfully grazing on non-Bt cotton for years, in one case, 13 buffalo grazed on Bt cotton for a single day, and within three days they were all dead. [claims that nobody wanted to do research] this NGO did their own research [...] within a month, all six Bt sheep died and the non-Bt sheep survived. But the research was dismissed because it wasn't a government agency or a university. So we have a situation where the evidence is there, but it's not being paid attention to. Because it's being drowned out by the big bucks, and the biotech industry, with their tobacco type science, and their distortion and denial of the facts. Unfortunately, Monsanto's lobbying power, and their financial wing(?), they are able to use corrupted corporate science, something that we might call "cigarette science," to get these law - uh - products slipped into our food stream.

The claims about animals have been thoroughly discredited by Academics Review. The conspiracy claims are, as usual, not based on evidence. If anything, the anti-GMO activists are acting like the tobacco industry acted. When overwhelming scientific evidence showed that tobacco use was harmful and addictive, the tobacco industry used every trick in the book to suppress this data and to confuse people. Likewise, both the tobacco industry and the anti-GMO activists have cherry picked data, ignored vast quantities of peer-reviewed research, published an endless stream of propaganda, lied constantly about the data, and did their best to suppress any research that contradicted or refuted their narrative. In the end, biotechnology has science on its side, and the tobacco industry doesn't. Opposition to biotechnology is thus inherently anti-scientific. And while conspiracy theories about the FDA may be popular, they fall apart when you realize that a wide variety of independent and foreign studies back up the industry-funded studies. So unless you want to claim every single scientist in the world is in on the conspiracy...

30:41

The only human feeding study ever published on GMOs, showed that the gene that was inserted on the soybean transferred into the DNA of the bacteria living in our intestines, and continued to produce that protein. So if it happens to be an allergen, and you're allergic to it, you may be continuously triggered over and over again by the production of that allergen from within inside your own intestines.

This claim seems to be based off of the study "Assessing the Survival of Transgenic Plant DNA in the Human Gastrointestinal Tract", published in Nature Biotechnology. It's quite a useful study, but not for the reasons Smith seems to be using it for. He claims that the study showed gene transfer - but neglected to mention some key facts about the design of the study. Do you know what an ileostomy is? "An ileostomy is a surgical opening constructed by bringing the end or loop of small intestine (the ileum) out onto the surface of the skin." The reason you need to understand what this is is because the study Smith used was carried out in part on ileostomists. This is a very important thing to understand because the bowel system of ileostomists is not comparable to a normal human bowel system. The study found that both the non-transgenic and the transgenic DNA was detectable in the ileostomists. However, when the study was done on people with normal bowel function, they discovered that their waste was free of all genes - indicating that the large intestine destroys both transgenes and normal genes. Despite Smith's claims about the transgene growing in the intestine, the study's results indicated that while a small level of gene transfer was detected in the ileostomists, the transfer had not occurred during their experiment, and did not increase during the experiment. Furthermore the concentration of the transgene was extremely low and only contained a fragment of the EPSPS gene - the full gene was never detected. In the humans with intact digestive systems, the researchers were unable to detect any of the transgene - preexisting or not - and this did not change during the experiment. The authors additionally stated that "Our results from coculture experiments with transformed bacteria and Caco-2 cells suggest that gene transfer from GM plants to the intestinal epithelium is unlikely to occur." The authors concluded that: A small portion of the transgenes AND native genes survive the small intestine. Both the transgenes and native genes are fully degraded in the large intestine. There was some evidence of preexisting gene transfer in the ileostomists, but it represented a very small portion of the microbial population, and the complete transgene had not been transferred. It was highly unlikely for gene transfer to alter gastrointestinal function or pose a risk to human health. So in summary, there is no evidence that humans with normal digestive systems are vulnerable to gene transfer, and some evidence that suggests very low rates of partial gene transfer may occur, but only in ileostomists. As such, unless you're an ileostomist, Smith's claims do not apply to you, and even if you are an ileostomist, there is no real reason to be worried.

32:15

When we look at the quality of the nutrients in our soil, we see that that has become a victim of industrial agriculture, which destroys the microorganisms in the soil, and then puts in a few nutrients, as if that were enough to provide a healthy diet. [...] <Industrial agriculture> stripped away some of the health and nutrients that were vital to the people and to the livestock. The plants ability to absorb from the soil is restricted with GMO seeds and plants and that's why the nutritional value is going down and that has to be a very big concern and there's a very big concern that many of our foods that we eat, nutritional value contents have to be rechecked because it has changed, it alters the structure of a plant when you use, you put a GMO gene in a plant so you no longer have the same type of plant and you have changed the makeup.

See #18:34 and #19:16 for some general Huber stuff. Additionally, many animal feeding studies have demonstrated that biotech crops are nutritionally equivalent to their conventional counterparts.

32:39

Monsanto is the only company I know of that doesn't want you to know you're buying something that has their technology inside of it. Cellphones, computers, automobiles - everything else we purchase, clothing - is branded because everyone wants to know, they want consumers to know, that their product is inside whatever you're purchasing. But Monsanto wants that to be a secret.

Monsanto's products aren't even sold to consumers! No other seed company tries to brand the end product, so why should Monsanto brand it? The label "GMO" doesn't even tell you what company made the seed! And if you're looking to avoid Monsanto products, it still won't help since Monsanto controls a fairly large portion of the conventional seeds market. Contrary to popular belief, they don't solely sell biotech seeds.

33:30

If you go and purchase any of their bags of seed, and you look at the bag, there's a big huge box with a big stop sign, and when I first saw this I thought man, stop, this seed is dangerous, don't swallow it, wash your hands after you've touched it, now all those health warnings are lower down the bag in smaller font. If you look in the box where the stop sign is it actually says stop - these seeds are protected by the following patents, your use of these seeds must be in compliance with the license agreement, you may not save these seeds for replanting, bla bla bla bla bla. So they object to labeling of food that consumers buy, but they have no problem labeling their own product with all their patent numbers, so there's some things that they want the public to know, and other things that they don't.

Seed is usually not intended for human consumption. This applies to most seed, especially seed that has been treated (as many commercial mixes are). And considering how seed is frequently fumigated, warning signs seem quite justified. As for the claims about consumers - consumers aren't about to go plant their food, consumers aren't supposed to be following technology usage agreements... It makes sense to label their seeds if the farmer needs to follow guidelines when using them, but consumers don't have to follow said guidelines, so no need to label the finished product.

34:09

Traditionally, the proponents of genetic engineering have stated there's relatively no risk or simply no difference between genetically engineered plants and products and conventionally raised products. Well new studies dispute this quite widely. There was a study from last year in the journal of reproductive toxicology that showed that over 93% of genetically engineered toxins were found in the blood of pregnant women and in 80% of the fetuses. So this potent crop toxin is being transferred into the population.

The first and glaringly huge flaw in this argument is that the study by Aris and Leblanc in Reproductive Toxicology claimed to demonstrate the presence of Bt, not a danger. Oh yeah, there's also that minor issue of their study being complete and utter bullshit... Not to mention that Bt is widely used within organic farming as a pesticide. Even if Bt turned out to be harmful, Monsanto and other GMO producers wouldn't be the only people to blame.

34:18

Genetically modified soybeans has as much as 7 times the amount of a known allergen compared to non GM when the two are cooked.

There is substantial proof that GM soy is no more allergenic than non-GM soy.

34:30

With corn, there's a gene that's normally shut off in corn, but it's switched on accidentally in Monsanto's corn, and that gene produces a known allergen.

The only actual difference worth noting is one allergen, which is already a known allergen, and almost certainly resulted from factors unrelated to the genetic engineering. At absolute best the study shows that variation between corn types in terms of allergens exists, which isn't exactly groundbreaking, considering the variation of practically anything on even a plant-by-plant basis. To be concerning you would have to demonstrate that either a new allergen had been created and posed a threat, or that the variation was both consistent and produced known allergens that did not occur in any other bred of corn and posed an actual threat to humans. This was not demonstrated, and has never been demonstrated.

34:37

There's also more herbicides used on these genetically modified herbicide tolerant crops, like roundup ready soy.

Andrew Kniss, Assistant Professor, Weed Biology & Ecology at the University of Wyoming, ruthlessly tore apart Benbrook’s work over at his blog. I’ll summarize his findings here. Basically, Benbrook did not have NASS data for cotton in the years 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2011; for soybeans he had nothing past 2006; and for corn he had nothing for the years 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, or 2011. Instead of contacting private companies that track this sort of data and purchasing their data, he decided to “forecast” the data for these years. To his credit, his data for cotton appears to be fairly accurate. But for corn, Benbrook estimates that herbicide use is increasing, despite the data showing a decline. And with the soybean data, where Benbrook forecasted five years of data based on only 11 years of observed data, the trend was even further skewed. (you can view detailed graphs on Kniss's blog) But Kniss’s investigation is by no means the only one. Anastasia Bodnar criticized Benbrook's previous 2009 study (almost identical to his 2012 one) for Biofortified, and found some rather interesting things. Benbrook failed to distinguish between herbicide tolerant and insect resistant plants, lumping them together under the generalized and highly misleading label of “GE Crops”. Benbrook also used the term GE crops multiple times when he should have referred to herbicide resistant crops. Benbrook also completely ignored the relative environmental toxicity of glyphosate, which is far lower than many alternatives. Benbrook also ignored the non-biotech herbicide resistant crops, despite how they’re just as relevant to herbicide use with resistant crops. PG Economics also released a report on the study, where the study was criticized for a variety of reasons, including for overstating herbicide use by 63.4 million pounds (not exactly a small error!). Further criticisms included the failure to acknowledge environmental benefits from the herbicide resistant crops, a weak approach, and the already mentioned misleading use of NASS usage data. Last but definitely not least, claiming an increase of pounds without reporting the changing market share of herbicide resistant crops is extremely misleading.

34:43

The excessive herbicides might promote allergic type reactions.

Not only is the herbicide use claim false (see #73:09), there is no evidence to support the claim that glyphosate will cause allergic reactions.

34:52

Peer reviewed studies show that there's an association between heavy GMO consumption and serious health problems, including asthma, and food allergies.

The only actual data on this came from Smith's site, where the following claim is made: "Soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50%. Perhaps the US epidemic of food allergies and asthma is a casualty of genetic manipulation." This claim is a textbook example of confusing correlation with causation, an issue that has appeared over and over again throughout the course of this movie.

35:15

There's also a damage to the pancreas and the production of enzymes that are used for digestion in mice that are fed GM soy. If we take longer to digest proteins, then that means eating genetically modified soy might cause us to be reactive to a wide variety of foods, not just GMO food.

See #24:53

35:37

The real risks and the real concerns of these threats to the food supply are validated, and there is, the GE crops are the predominant crops, and they have contaminated the rest of the food supply. Then the genie's out of the bottle, and it's maybe physically impossible to turn the situation around.

There's nothing wrong with these crops. Every claim brought up so far in this video has been refuted. They're safe, but some people just won't accept that. People frequently claim that the "genie" can't be put back into the "bottle" - tell that to StarLink corn, which was recalled successfully. Furthermore, the genie argument applies to all crops - including organic ones, which aren't necessarily safe (and don't even have safety testing performed on them).

35:52

There has been no long term research on the concept and consequences of what this genetic modification does not just to us but to the environment.

...there has also been no long term research on cell phones, rutabaga, or kitchen sponges after they've gone through the microwave. Because of the null hypothesis, this isn't proof of anything, especially due to the sheer amount of research conducted on GM crops. The whole definition of the term "long term" is also a bit slippery, since nobody ever tries to define it and any studies contradicting their claims get ignored. But since Seralini's 2012 study is frequently cited as a "long term" study, we'll assume any other study of around that duration should be considered long term, in which case a certain literature review of long term and multigenerational studies might be considered a little inconvienent to these claims...

36:17

Right now from all the research that's showing up that says this has a very negative and profound effect on destroying the environment in which we live. So therefore I find it senseless that the government would support and condone genetically modified foods without even having the basic research to understand the liabilities involved in these monster organisms, and putting them into our world.

This particular claim is basically pure fearmongering. Hundreds of studies have been conducted on GM crops. Multiple government agencies review every new GM crop, but their research is rejected by the activists because they don't like it. The fact that GM crops are the only type of crop with safety testing is also conveniently ignored - who cares about potatoes that make you sick? Well-tested crops with no demonstrated ill effects are far more important!

36:33

The commence agency in Europe and in countries in South America and in Asia is much more sophisticated in terms of its understanding of science and the importance of independent peer-reviewed science that isn't contaminated or corrupted by corporate influence.

Yep, that explains why the EFSA ruthlessly debunks every scrap of bullshit that comes their way, and has stated numerous times that GM foods are safe. Regional restrictions? Those couldn't possibly be because of politics, no? Oh.

36:58

Here in the United States, the birthplace, the bedrock of the free market system and democracy, we are having our rights corrupted by corporate influence, the major impact that Monsanto has is their ability to get their products approved with minimal scientific oversight and minimal review of these products for human health testing is really an abomination.

...haven't we already been over then whole Monsanto/approval process and how it makes no sense for a Monsanto-controlled government to make applying such a painful process? As for the usual appeal for human testing, it ignores how human testing of food is useless from a logistical as well as ethical standpoint, as well as how no other type of food has ANY testing performed on it. Remember those poison potatoes? No safety testing done on plants produced with the methods used to produce those!

37:05

The entire scientific foundation underneath genetically modified organisms is false.

Funny. Dr Lipton's Ph.D. is in biology. Possibly, he thinks that biology is false? How about gene transfer, also false? The absurdity of these claims is just ridiculous. At any rate, Lipton seems to think that genes and DNA can be manipulated by a person's belief, and works for a college of chiropractor practices... He's not exactly in a good position to be making claims as absurd as this one.

38:17

Organisms are not genetically determined. When we understand that we recognize that the only way to create crops that will humanity is to understand nature herself, and learn to live in harmony with it, and this is a completely different approach than humans have had for the last couple hundred years, where we always thought "oh human's job was to control and dominate nature". In that process, we are now leading the world into the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet. Five times in the history of this planet life essentially got wiped out and started all over again. The five previous mass extinctions were attributed to things like comets or asteroids hitting the earth and destroying the environment. We are now, deep into the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet. We are loosing species of organisms faster than even in the previous five mass extinctions. But the source of the problem is much closer to home than a comet or an asteroid. Science has recognized that it's human behavior, that is undermining the web of life. Rather than trying to control nature our mission is actually how to live in harmony with nature.

Hmm, what happened in the last couple hundred years... Science perhaps? Where crazy superstitious beliefs were discarded? The entire claim is nothing more than a massive appeal to nature, but hey, if it's natural, it must be good... Ironically, biotech represents an amazing way to fix a large part of humanity's issues with food, but this idiot would rather have you eat your environmentally unfriendly "organic" food so that you can feel good while remaining ignorant and contributing even more to the planet's issues.

39:10

The FDA, which treats the American people as slaves, knows that if people knew the truth, about how healing their foods can be, and how dangerous the processed foods really are with all their chemical contaminants and their genetic modification - if people knew the truth, they would demand food freedom. They would demand access to healing herbal therapies and healing dietary supplements. They would demand that the FDA back down from it's intimidation campaigns that have been leveled against producers of dietary supplements and herbal remedies and raw dairy products and so on. The people would demand that if they knew, and that is why they are kept ignorant. Under this campaign of disinformation currently being waged by the FDA.

Good old boy Mike is looking for a way to avoid having to put that pesky FDA label on his "miracle cancer cure"... What tactics are he using today? First up, the FDA is apparently a slavemaster. It is unclear how a consumer product safety administrative body can enslave the public, but what do we know compared to our lord and savior Mike the Scam Ranger? I must plead ignorance on healing foods. Thankfully, it looks like Mike is selling some healing sprouts for just $79 per 4LB tub! What a bargain! They even come with free Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli bacteria! I'm a bit baffled at the next claim. My chicken-shaped cluster of chemicals is already made of chemicals. How are we going to contaminate my chemicals with more chemicals? Should we quit sprinkling the chemical NaCl on my chemicals? Raw dairy? That, like sprouts, often does not end well. Supplements? Do you mean those things that nearly killed Gary Null? Fuck the FDA for trying to keep me healthy!

40:00-49:59

40:12

I've been vigorous in my opposition of these strategies that these large corporations use to use their influence for their benefit. And as a result of that my positionings I am criticized by their own local networks - the skeptic networks and so on. And also their ability because they are so politically connected to use the federal regulatory agencies to come after me personally to file claims against and statements against my company and also to criticize me such that it can be viewed in most of the traditional media to skew the information the truth of what we're saying. They twist the tables so that it looks like we're the bad guys when actually nothing could be further from the truth - we're just seeking to help people understand what the true reality is and give them the tools to make that distinction and give them the right to know.

Ah... Mercola... A website filled with quackery, a huge web store selling various scams, and three formal warnings from the FDA. What an impressive resume! Oops, we may have forgotten to mention the warning one of Mercola's suppliers got in 2011. Still interested? He's got a RW article, and there's a great piece on him on Respectful Insolence. There's also a good article on Quackwatch. Mercola promotes literally every health-related conspiracy and quackery on his site. There truly is no limit to the bullshit Mercola is willing to post, which includes claiming that cancer is a fungus.

40:49

In the early 2000s Monsanto and the biotech industry vilified a scientist for his linking of Bt corn to a decrease in Monarch populations. Two years ago another research paper came out confirming that yes, Monsanto's Bt corn and their Bt cotton products were actually reducing the habitat of Monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies are the canary in the coal mine on the prairies and in the midwest of the major impacts, the negative environmental impacts that these products are having.

The early 2000s paper claimed that Bt pollen was killing Monarchs. It was bullshit. The 2010 paper had an entirely different theory. It proposed that the decline of milkweed (due to the use of effective herbicides such as glyphosate) was affecting butterfly populations. However, the science is flimsy and the loss of milkweed is a byproduct of agriculture.

42:10

The large scale cultivation of GMO crops can harm biodiversity in a number of different ways. One is that in the case where the crop is engineered to be tolerant to a herbicide, such as roundup, or glyphosate, then the application of high doses of these weed killers destroys upon which other organisms normally would be consuming. So the insect population is reduced, and then there isn't the insect population upon which the birds are also consuming, so there could be a knock-on effect on the biodiversity within the fields where herbicide tolerant crops are being grown. And indeed, large scale field trials sponsored by the UK government several years ago now did indeed find that in fields were growing herbicide tolerant sugar beets and canola, that the biodiversity in this field was markedly reduced.

So.. He's arguing against using any herbicide for any reason? Why? And by this logic every thing humans make is unnatural because it destroys things that other organisms depend on. Cars, planes, the internet, shopping malls... The fatal flaw is that the field of crops is not natural in the first place... Any insects living off of it are living off of plants that were never "naturally" there in the first place.

42:52

There is a lot of information now on bee colony collapse and it's now linked to certain of the chemicals that are sold by certain of the major companies, so there's a lot of concern and now about the bees dying and now we'll loose a major insect that pollinates our plants and so that also has become a big concern. But it's all related and all goes back to the massive increase of new types of more powerful chemicals, more toxic chemicals, then we ever ever had before, and that's why we have many of our beneficial insects are being killed by these new types of chemicals.

This has absolutely nothing to do with GM crops. While neonics are known to be toxic to bees, there are a number of flaws with blaming neonicotinoid pesticides for CCD.

43:26

GM carries novel health and environmental risks, which we are now beginning to measure in terms of environmental impact and also outcomes. In feeding trials - controlled feeding trials - the animals - then I feel that the use of GM in agriculture is a risk that is simply not worth taking. GM doesn't address root causes of problems in agriculture. At best it is a symptomatic coverup.

Again, there's the usual lack of evidence, brushing aside the contradictory evidence, etc...

43:34

No genetically modified crop can grow unless it's attached to some type of pesticide

Well that's a blatant lie. Herbicide resistant plants don't need herbicides to grow, and most other types of GM crop currently being researched or developed have nothing to do with pesticides (although many of them have/can decrease the amount of pesticides used on certain crops.) For instance, although not without controversy, there are GM-modified golden rice supplying vitamin A to address vitamin A deficiency in China.

43:55

Those pesticides, more and more, are in these plants, they may have killed the weeds, they may have killed the insects, but the product is still on the plants, and if it's washed off, then it's in the water, it gets into the lakes, it gets into the oceans, everywhere.

So what? Glyphosate has a low toxicity and doesn't survive well in the environment. It, like most other pesticides, gets gradually broken down over time. The pesticides used by organic farms are also dispersed into the environment - but for some reason nobody's worrying about them. Why? They're usually more toxic than glyphosate and used in greater quantities. And for the insecticides, doesn't this mean that the Seeds of Death producers support Bt crops, due to the vast reductions in pesticide use associated with the use of Bt crops?

43:57

And it's toxic, it causes cancer

Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.

44:00

also it causes endocrine disruption

Glyphosate does not negatively affect the endocrine system.

44:21

They don't even want to label that this is genetically modified [...] of course they don't want to label it, because people won't want it

Perhaps, perhaps not. But it's quite clear that after the decades of misinformation spewed from the mouths of activists, the term "GMO" has become poisoned by misinformation and lies. So it makes quite a bit of sense for food companies to oppose the label. If Monsanto was demanding for all manure-fertilized organic food to be labeled with "Grown with shit", would these GMO labeling supporters support that label too? Because it's not much different.

44:48

We have thousands of different varieties of any different food crop you can mention. And by simply dipping in to this already existing reservoir, or varieties of crops, resurrecting old crop varieties which have been displaced, could readily meet our food need without having to resort to the risky procedures associated with GM.

Most retired crop breeds are retired for a reason. Hybridization and other conventional breeding techniques have benefited greatly by breeding traits, but you cannot benefit the same by using the old traits; you have to breed new ones to meet modern yield demands. Over the past century, yields have skyrocketed. The methods supported by this documentary's producers would reverse this trend. Additionally, the claim that GM is riskier than other breeding methods has no evidence to support it.

45:14

and they're going to have to come back to you every year to get them [herbicide]

Roundup isn't even patented! It's been off patent for over a decade! Monsanto's technology usage agreement also explicitly specifies that generic herbicides can be used, so it's not as if they're forcing farmers to buy their brand of glyphosate.

45:30

Once you start applying herbicides on this scale your farmland is so devastated that to convert to organic for example is economically difficult

True, but not because your farmland is "devastated" - it's because USDA organic guidelines would require leaving that land fallow or devoid of synthetic herbicides (among other things) for seven years. If organic farming was truly such a great way to farm, farmers should have no problems growing with organic methods and selling at conventional prices for seven years.

45:35

The most comprehensive analysis of GMOs shows that they actually reduce yield.

Like many other claims in this documentary, this is a lie. The issue of yield is absurdly complicated, but the general issue is that current biotech traits are intended to improve overall yield instead of intrinsic yield. The GM activists test crops by growing conventional and GM crops side-by-side in an artificial environment, devoid of pests and weeds. This provides a fairly accurate picture of the crop's intrinsic yield, but gives no indication of the crop's overall yield in real world conditions. By misrepresenting these completely artificial results as real-world results, activists can pretend that GM crops have no better yields than conventional ones. But if you plant those crops outside under the pressure of insects or weeds, the advantages of GM crops become obvious. This is the scenario that the activists have intentionally ignored, since it completely breaks their artificial comparisons of yields. So, in essence, this claim hinges on pretending that artificial results from plants not under any form of weed or pest pressure are evidence that real-world yields are no better, when in fact the real-world yields show that GM crops come out ahead.

45:40

Sustainable technologies can increase yield by an average of 79%

Then why aren't we using them? Perhaps it's because every one of these "miracle cures" for yields has involved extremely labor intensive farming that's impractical on any reasonable scale. Or maybe it's because many of these "solutions" just plain don't work in the real world.

45:59

What Bt corn does, and Bt soy does, and what roundup ready does, is it decreases labor. It's labor saving. As if we need less farmers in this country. And we have a limited planet. So more people farming is the key to higher yields, not chemicals.

Labor intensive is good? Let's burn all of the computers! More people using typewriters will result in better content. Or something. Innovation is bad, right guys? ...I mean seriously. You can't take these claims seriously. You just can't. It's insane! Reducing labor inputs and increasing yields is good! More farmers producing less food? How is that good for anyone? How about fewer farmers producing more and cheaper food, allowing more people to spend their time in other professions?

46:02

GMOs are stealing the money away from these more appropriate technologies

Cars are stealing the money away from horses! Wait, wtf!?!

46:21

We have more food per person than any time in human history. We have enough food growing to feed 11.3 billion people. What we don't have is the ability for people to access that food. And so it's not a silver bullet of increased yield that the biotech industry tries to sell us.

We have more food because of the green revolution and biotechnology, but distribution is the problem. Despite what certain activists seem to believe, instant zero-energy transport hasn't been invented yet, and complicated world politics make it impossible to distribute food to everyone on earth that needs it. Biotechnology can help solve world hunger by allowing countries to improve yields locally instead of having to rely on imported grain (or none at all). More food is the solution, especially more localized food production. Increased yields are one of the many ways biotechnology can help - insect resistance, fungus resistance, biofortification, improved foods, regionally tailored crops, and many other things are possible with biotech. Golden Rice is one of the best examples of how biotechnology holds the potential to fix large-scale issues in impoverished countries.

46:33

The IAASTD report proved that organic and sustainable agriculture had the same and higher yields than conventional chemical intensive genetically engineered crops.

The IAASTD report is a ridiculously flawed piece of unscientific propaganda that downplayed biotechnology, despite how the evidence contradicted virtually every claim made in the report. Several authors dropped out before the report was completed, leaving a small group of writers with little experience of biotech, and at least one of the writers has a history of producing anti-biotech propaganda. The report contained very little scientific information, and had basically become a soapbox for the organic industry's supporters. It was a complete failure, and has been criticized by numerous credible sources, including a Nature article. When you take a look at the scientific literature, the depth of the IAASTD report's lies becomes very obvious. Organic yields are up to 34% lower, but the average yield gap is around 20% - and increasing!

46:45

These herbicides are actually having a major impact in killing the beneficial soil microorganisms in the soil, which actually not only add to the yield gains, but also the nutritional value of these plants.

See #18:34 and #19:16.

47:38

Cotton production has increased in this country because of acreage, not because of Bt technology. Rice and beet increased in India because of irrigation acreage. Land and water account for it, not the seed and the chemicals. In fact, the seed and chemicals have created a scarcity. First, the new seeds had to be grown as [???] so you have less food. Today, we're importing pulses from Canada, from the United States, very vital to a vegetarian diet. We're not growing pulses because of our monocultures have no place for pulces. Pulces give you free protein. Pulces give you free nitrogen fixate. All of that was wiped out. All seeds, farm trees, agroforestry. The water use of this so-called revolution was ten times more compared to equivalent farming systems.

In general, the claims about water use seem to ignore how the Green Revolution increased yields - of course the water use is going to increase when you drastically increase the production of biomass. Oddly, Shiva claims that yields increase from increased irrigation, then that yields stayed the same during the Green Revolution, where irrigation increased yet again. Shiva, however, is a Green Revolution denialist, which explains why she is misrepresenting the effects of the Green Revolution on yields and water use. She has no interest in the evidence, and pushes myths about farmer suicides, terminator seeds, the green revolution, biotech crops, Bt crops, and numerous other subjects.

48:25

One huge problem with the GMOs is that they have completely blown out conventional breeding in our land grant colleges. In this country we only have 10% of the vegetable seeds that were available to our forebears a hundred years ago. Our seedstock is going down the toilet and we can't even use our land grant colleges to breed in a standard way because there's no money for it and that is a huge huge huge threat to the future of agriculture, to loose the skill of breeding standard, which is in fact what all that food you see on the - on your grocery shelves, all those vegetables came from thousands of years of farmers sharing their seeds.

Horse, meet car. Car, meet horse. Prepare for the mass protests against horse breeding going down the toilet. Guess what guys! Old technology is retired! And since breeding is still extremely heavily used both outside of and inside biotech, it's not as if it's going away... As for those veggies... Most of them come from patented seeds sold by giant seed companies.

48:50

As a result of the loss of beneficial soil microorganisms not only have the yields gone down but there's been a dramatic increase in the rise of crop diseases, which are impacting corn and soybeans in the US. We're sacrificing our soil just because it's an easier way to farm. And trying to convince ourselves that it's more economical but it's not.

See #18:34 and #19:16.

49:33

I've seen neighbors who've been doing this stuff for a lot of years and they can't get rid of these weeds now, these weeds are getting resistant to the glyphosate herbicide so farmers are upping rates, then all of a sudden it's not doing it anymore so you have to switch herbicides, so now the soil is just more and more full of poison, so there's going to be more sickness in that field, it's going to be more susceptible to diseases, insects, it won't make it through drought periods as long. The same crops side by side right across from each other, the natural plants are going to mate more over time. And you have a soil that you can continue to poison, nature's going to win!

Each point is addressed by the below bullet points. Glyphosate resistance is commonly misrepresented. Stacked herbicide resistances will virtually eliminate resistance. For soil damage/disease, see #18:34 and #19:16. Side-by-side? Let's take a look! A side-by-side comparison of Bt cotton and conventional cotton after pests attacked.

49:42

In 2006 Cornell University released a study on soil degradation that stated by the year 2050 that 30% of the land that's already cultivated will be unfarmable.

The study in question has the following on page 19... Estimates are that agricultural land degradation alone can be expected to depress world food production approximately 30% during the next 25-year period (Buringh, 1989) or 50-year period (Kendall and Pimentel, 1994). These forecasts emphasize the need to implement known soil conservation techniques. These techniques include the use of biomass mulches, crop rotations, no-till, ridge-till, added grass strips, shel- terbelts, contour row-crop planting, and various combinations of these. Basically all of these techniques require keeping the land protected from wind and rainfall energy by using some form of vegetative cover on the land (Troeh et al., 1991; Pimentel, 1993; Pimentel et al., 1995). Guess what herbicide resistant crops promote? Yes, that's right! (it's important to note that not all herbicide resistant crops are transgenic, and that not all transgenic crops are herbicide resistant, but nevertheless herbicide resistance remains one of the more popular uses for transgenics)

50:00-59:59

50:39

Now the thing about Roundup, or glyphosate, is that it stays in the soil for months or years, and it continues to cause the reduction of available nutrients and the promotion of these diseases. And so, people like Doctor Huber, Dr. Don Huber from Purdue University, have identified more than forty plant diseases that are on the rise in the US, because of the overuse of Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides. Now it pulls these nutrients out of the food supply for months or years. According to Reuters in 2007 there was about a hundred and eighty million pounds of glyphosate herbicide used in the United States. Now that's one of many many years. Hundreds of millions of pounds. Which means hundreds of millions of pounds of nutrients have been tied up and taken out of the food supply.

Time for more bullet points! ...yet again, Huber needs another link. For soil damage/disease, see #18:34 and #19:16. The details don't matter, but genetically modified crops are not the only thing that uses glyphosate, and glyphosate is sold to consumers too. Glyphosate does not 'pull nutrients out of the food supply'. This claim is completely absurd. The notion that there is a limited amount of nutrients in the environment is entirely false. The production of synthetic fertilizers, such as ammonium nitrate, literally creates new nutrients out of thin air (and hydrogen derived from natural gas).

50:53

When we have a company like Monsanto, that says "I don't care what nature says - I'll create the crops that I want", and we look at what happens, we see another step, another process in our own demise.

Yet another appeal to nature? This claim also ignores how gene transfer isn't exactly unnatural - but that's a subject that will be covered in depth in a different response.

51:05

This is a very powerful enemy, a classic David vs Goliath, a challenge. And the only way we can ever approach, the only possibility of ever winning this thing is if we work together as a community.

...see #70:52.

51:20

The whole concept of genetically modified organisms is throwing a monkey wrench in the life on this planet. And until we change that, we are headed downhill, at a rapid rate of speed, towards our own extinction.

Repeating claims is getting boring... See #0:50

51:59

Nature, god, or another supernatural being (if you like), does not permit [transgenics]. You cannot take the gene of a bacteria and put it into a pig, or people, or anything like that, or vice versa.

See #11:07. Also, we totally can.

53:39

There's a genetically modified salmon that was created by Canadian researchers, that was tested up in Canada. They put these frankenfish into tanks, and they fed them sufficient food and there was no problem. When they reduced the amount of food, the frankenfish freaked. They started killing and eating their neighbors. So what happens if the FDA approves these frankenfish, and let's say they escape into the ocean. I don't know what's worse - the extinction of natural salmon, or the roaming of these frankenfish going around and killing and attacking other species, and changing the whole ecosystem balance. They both have a mating advantage because they're larger, but they a survival disadvantage, and it's that combination that should a male transgenic fish escape into the wild, cause the rapid collapse and extinction of both transgenic and wild fish. In as little as 50 generations.

The first claim was actually completely original! This, unfortunately, is usually a bad sign. There does not seem to be any evidence supporting Smith's claim. AquaBounty, the company behind this "frankenfish," said: Specifically addressing your inquiry, our salmon are no more "aggressive" than conventional salmon when it comes to foraging for food. Any fish which is starved for nutrients, including our salmon and including wild salmon, will exhibit "aggressive feeding behavior". In that respect our salmon is no different than conventional wild salmon. What Smith is attempting to do is to misrepresent a factual characteristic of our salmon, which is that in a food-deficient environment, our salmon will tend to ignore predators in its search for food, which is one of the reasons why our salmon is at a competitive disadvantage if it were to be present in the wild (which in itself is highly unlikely). Since Smith doesn't seem to have even a shred of evidence backing up his claims, it is reasonable to take AquaBounty's response at face value. The other claims are no better. Escaping salmon would be quite the feat, given how they'll be grown in inland tanks. And even if they did somehow manage to escape into the wild, they're all sterile females, so it's a bit pointless. The claim that they are "larger" is likewise false - they grow faster, but end up no larger than normal salmon, so any advantage is temporary at best. In response to the claim of rapid collapse AquaBounty sent me this (response in italics below): They are referring to the mythical Trojan Gene Theory, and the founder and creator of the TGT (Professor Muir) has publicly stated that the TGT would not apply to our salmon (precisely for the aforementioned reason that our salmon, if it were to escape into the wild, would have reduced survival and reproductive fitness), and yet dishonest activists will frequently attempt to invoke the TGT. And yes - Muir did indeed state that his work is being misrepresented and that the Trojan Gene Theory does not apply to AquaBounty's salmon.

53:57

Scientists take genes from one species, and force it into the DNA of other species. Now the process itself creates massive collateral damage in the plant or animal. But they don't test for those changes and the side effects before they introduce, say, the crop into our food supply.

This is blatantly false. The general claim is also false due to safety studies, which would catch any unintended changes. And even then...mutation breeding, hybrids, cross species breeding, etc is all far more random... Where's the oversight and safety testing on those methods of breeding? Why is the far more precise method tested the most?

56:06

When the GM gene is introduced into the plant, the genetic engineer has no control over where the GM gene integrates or splices into the DNA of a plant. And the effect of this is that the GM transformation process, as a whole, actually is very disruptive on the DNA structure and function of the organism. And as a result, very unpredictable and potentially hazardous outcomes. Because if you disturb the balance of gene function - remember, the gene function is controlling the function and the biochemistry of the organism - if you disrupt the balance of gene function, you disrupt the biochemistry, and if you disrupt the biochemistry, you run the risks of creating novel toxins, novel allergies. As well as a disturbance to nutritional value. These types of outcomes resulting from the disruptive effect of the GM transformation process, have been observed, are observable, and they're genuine.

The claims about genes are mostly false, and gloss over how breeding in general works. Mutation breeding is far more unpredictable and potentially hazardous. Biotech plants don't contain novel toxins or allergens, nor do they have a changed nutritional value. As for examples, it's always interesting to read about conventional breeding's failures, the most notorious of which is probably the lenape potato. There are numerous other examples of conventional breeding failing - here are a few more.

57:47

When we eat food - when micro RNA from the food is picked up by the digestive system and not broken down, the micro RNA is taken into our own body intact, and now what they found is that the micro RNA from food ends up in our own cells like in our liver and other cells in our body. And these micro RNA still have the same function. They change our genetics and they change our readout of our genome. And the significance is profound. It says that when you eat genetically modified foods, we are eating a new class of micro RNAs that have never really been in the world before. And yet, these micro RNAs are picked up by our biology, and they adjust our own genetics. So in the sense the old story "we are what we eat" actually now has a biochemical foundation. And now all of a sudden it says that if that's true, then why would you risk your life eating a genetically modified food containing micro RNAs that can totally distort our own biology and cause great problems in our lives.

And now all of a sudden it says that if that's true, then why would you risk your life EATING CHICKEN? WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU COULD TURN INTO! A CHICKEN-GMO-HUMAN HYBRID? ALL THAT DANGEROUS MICRO RNA IN CHICKEN WILL MAKE YOU GROW FEATHERS AND WINGS AND A GIZZARD! Let's do some quick fact checking on these claims... Oops!

59:05

[...] the bacteria in our gut that are required for our survival - we need these bacteria - the bacteria also pick up the genetic engineered genes. And we modify the gut bacteria. Why is that relevant - well we need the gut bacteria for survival, but the gut bacteria change our genetics, information from the bacteria is picked up by the digestive cells, and adjusts the digestive system cells to be compatible with the bacteria and with the gut. There is a dialog and a communication. If you alter the genetics of the gut bacteria, by definition, you completely alter the development and genetics of our own cells.

Already addressed in #30:41.

59:55

Way back in the 70s they developed this grand vision of being able to splice in high yield and drought resistant and pest resistance and they dreamt of patenting those genes and having proprietary ownership of these genes and during the 80s, that indeed came about from a number of court decisions they believe they could make billions of dollars from these proprietary gene transfers and to make food do certain things, to make crops do certain things. When the evidence came out that there were fundamental flaws in the genetics they just did not want to know - didn't want to do the research into these issues of food safety, and they went ahead with their development yet they weren't doing the basic research.

Seralini? Not on my fucking article! Get out! ...do we even need to cite the ridiculous amount of "basic research" conducted by these companies? I'd say that six hundred studies is quite definitely enough "basic research"!

60:00-69:59

60:15

You see GMOs are the product of an infant science. And now we are feeding that product to the entire population. And it's known to create unpredicted side effects. And no one is testing to see if the rise in all these diseases since GMOs were introduced in the mid 90s is caused or promoted by these GMOs.

Diseases? Rise? GMOs? Looks like somebody flunked statistics. Perhaps cell phones are the reason. In case the point didn't make it across yet, correlation does not imply causation. There's also no biologically plausible reason for transgenic food to cause diseases, nor does the evidence support this claim.

60:50

If Monsanto's patent on a gene - if that gene gets into any, and I'll use the term, higher life forms, so what does that mean? Birds, bees, animals, and the question I have to ask - what about human life? If they - if Monsanto's patented gene gets into you, gets into me, does that say they own me, they own you? These are all questions that they - that the courts and the governments will have to address. How far does the patents on genes - on life - go?

I'm not going to write an actual response to this because it's completely insane.

60:03

There have been over 140 lawsuits filed by Monsanto against farmers, including against those farmers who wanted nothing to do with Monsanto's genetically modified seed.

...140, over a period of what, 10 years? Is 140 farmers out of Monsanto's 275,000 or so customers getting sued each year really such a vast amount? None of those farmers "wanted nothing to do with Monsanto's genetically modified seed" - something the OSGATA unwittingly proved in court recently. See #13:23.

61:53

When you ask Monsanto whether genetically modified seed is natural they have two answers. Yes and no. And it depends on which side of Washington DC you're talking to. If they're at the FDA, or the USDA, they say that genetically modified seed is absolutely no different than natural food, doesn't need to be tested, doesn't need to be labeled, the public doesn't need to know if their food has been genetically modified because it's no different. Then when they're on the other side of Washington DC at the patent office, the patent office is saying "well you don't deserve a patent because your seed is no different from natural food" they say "oh no it's not, it's completely different, we've invented something brand-new, it's radically different and it's so inventive we deserve not just one patent, we deserve an entire portfolio of dozens and dozens of patents.

This video fails to make the distinction between equivalence on a safety/nutritional standpoint and equivalence on a functional or genetic level. You can take two breeds of grapefruit and put them side-by-side, then claim that they're the same from a safety/nutritional standpoint, but you can turn around and patent them because they're different on a functional or genetic level, and this is exactly what plant growers have been doing for a very, very long time. Let's say you invented a brand new corn. It's purple. You want to patent it. Your corn is no different from other types of corn on a nutritional level. But it's a completely different color, and on those grounds, if you can prove that you're the first guy to create this corn, you can patent it.

62:10

The United States is the only country in the world and still is that allowed genetically modified organisms or any organisms to be patented. Up until then, living organisms, all their products, could not be patented.

There are a very wide variety of EU patents granted to Monsanto for things ranging from specific transgenic crops to Cry proteins. In the US, certain plants could be patented since 1930. Transgenic plants (as well as some other plants) couldn't be patented until 1970. So patenting living organisms came before patenting transgenic organisms.

63:25

In the European Union where labeling is required, there is almost no genetically engineered food on store shelves and restaurants, there's almost none of it planted.

The EU situation is quite amusing and only shows that the organic farmers are pushing for labeling because it'll bolster their sales. Their laws are written by politicians who have turned a deaf ear to science in favor of trade protectionism.

63:31

Today more than fifty countries around the world allow labeling of genetically engineered food

The US allows labeling, the USDA organic program is even a federally funded voluntary labeling standard. It is unclear what point Smith is trying to make.

63:46

<list of countries that enforce labeling is shown>

Clearly this means that homosexuality is a terrible sin, since there's 76 countries with anti-gay laws. Or perhaps the number of idiots doing something doesn't matter, since that's a fallacy called argumentum ad populum, more commonly referred to as the "appeal to the masses". Science isn't a popularity contest!

64:01

The FDA has received over a million comments from citizens demanding labeling of GMOs. Ninety percent of Americans agree. So why no labeling? I'll give you one reason - the influence and the corruption of the political process by Monsanto.

This is an exceedingly poor justification for mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. Furthermore, it is already possible for consumers to obtain non-genetically-engineered foods. Any product with the USDA Organic label cannot contain genetically engineered food, and the independent Non GMO Project certifies products as GM-free. Thus not only does the consumer already have an easy way of accessing foods that meet any possible personal preference, the existing process is completely voluntary and has resulted in a wide variety of products being sold that meet these requirements. Labeling the products that do not comply makes little sense, and making that labeling mandatory has no reasonable justification. The FDA has taken a science-based stance on the matter. Claiming that there's some grand conspiracy makes little sense. Monsanto is not the only biotech company out there, and as evidenced by Prop37 lobbying, both the pro and anti labeling sides are backed by large companies with deep pockets. Even then, there is no actual proof that Monsanto "corrupted" the process, especially when there's quite a bit of justification for NOT labeling.

64:36

If you have a organic corn crop that sits next to a genetically engineered corn field, and it happens to tassel at the same time and it happens to be downwind, you're going to get your crop contaminated. In fact even the seed stocks are becoming contaminated. I should have the right to be a conventional farmer, you should have the right to be an organic farmer, but if you have GMO farmers you no longer can have an organic farmer, you can no longer be a conventional farmer, you'll become a GMO farmer whether you like it or not.

See #2:19

64:50

An expert on air pollution calculated how far corn pollen can travel in 24 hours which is the maximum time it can remain viable to cross pollinate. It could travel under certain weather conditions, over 500 miles.

"Certain" weather conditions aren't "normal" weather conditions. Corn pollen is only viable for two hours under normal field conditions, and averages to 1% contamination with relatively small buffer zones. A study done on corn with market traits demonstrated that a buffer of only 150 feet was far enough for contamination to stay around 0.75% on a whole-field basis.

65:56

We have increasing numbers of retarded and autistic and genetically damaged people among us. We have increasing numbers of lethal allergies, potentially lethal allergies, that coincide with the introduction of genetically modified food. We have increasing amounts of autoimmune problems, we have increasing amounts of pretty much everything. The pharmaceutical industry has no interest in having you well because they don't make any money if you're well. And the pharmaceutical industry IS the biotech industry, and it is the agrochemical industry

Correlation does not imply causation! A good example of how correlation does not equal causation ...and of course if you refuse to believe that correlation does not imply causation, then make sure to blame organic food alongside those GMOs. Cell phone adoption probably correlates pretty well too. I must admit, the term "genetically damaged" is a new one. It's also not relevant. As for the allergies, that's been rehashed to death. A study in the Journal of Experimental Botany investigated genetically modified soybeans and food allergies. It found that "Current GM crops, including soybean, have not been shown to add any additional allergenic risk beyond the intrinsic risks already present”, and additionally recognized that “Biotechnology can be used to characterize and eliminate allergens naturally present in crops". A 2005 study on the allergenicity of transgenic maize and soya found that "None of the individuals undergoing tests reacted differentially to the transgenic and nontransgenic samples under study. None of the volunteers tested presented detectable IgE antibodies against pure transgenic proteins". Another 2007 study on the allergenicity of transgenic soybeans compared to non-transgenic soybeans found that "Soybean endogenous allergen expression does not seem to be altered after genetic modification". Allergies: Now 100% more lethal! (seriously the level of hyperbole here is ridiculous) I don't know what it is, it sounds scary, let's throw it in the list! "Pretty much everything" my ass. Attention ladies and gentlemen, it's time for another appeal to big pharma! Appealing to big chemical actually makes a tiny amount of sense (not in a good way), but appealing to big pharma makes far less (when did Monsanto start selling aspirin)? There has not been much criticism of BASF or Bayer so far, it's been mostly about Monsanto, but now they're blaming things on the pharma industry?

66:02

Thousands of doctors are now prescribing non-GMO diets to every patient.

That's lovely to know, but it doesn't prove anything other than that "thousands" of doctors are gullible. Quite a few doctors urged their patients to avoid immunizations after Wakefield's "study" became popular, and we all know how that ended up.

66:22

In fact the American Academy of Environmental Medicine urges all doctors to do so. They evaluated the animal feeding studies and said that there is a causal relationship between GM feed and disorders, and they urged the government to put a moratorium in place on GMOs, and of course they're for labeling.

See #21:59

66:37

My(?) God we are one of the sickest of the major countries in the world, and we're also becoming the dumbest of the major countries in the world, and the significance about that is what a coincidence, this is the motivation of our government, and this is exactly where we are.

Ironically, this video is a shining example of the decline of intelligence in America. Idiots spouting their brain-dead views to an audience of other idiots. This is exactly why many people have dedicated time towards advancing science in America, instead of intentionally confusing the public with propaganda and junk science like this video attempts to do.

67:05

A country like the United States has 20% of its GDP spent on healthcare costs on trying to cure chronic disease. We're giving vaccines in(?) children, we're giving all these other drugs, bad food, bad pesticides, hormones, everything getting into the system. In animals and people. This is going to drive countries bankrupt.

Other drugs? Like Gary Null's brush with death, thanks to the supplements he sells? Bad food? Poor poor organic. So many ridiculous safety accidents. Bad pesticides? Then why do these guys support organic farming, with its ineffective and often highly toxic pesticides? Wait a second, did he just say vaccines? Oh dear. You would think that by this point in history, people are done with vaccine denialism...

67:22

We're talking about people whose lives are either terminated through preventable diseases which were not prevented, through the toxification of their bodies, by toxic food.

As previously demonstrated, these claims are not only false, but also insane.

68:08

Total population of the world is about seven billion now. The same thing by 2050 the population will grow to approximately 9 billion. And these companies and the governments all over the world are saying that the amount of food in the world will have to be increased to twice the amount. The biotech industry is promising to feed the world with crops that'll have higher yields, even though it's not the amount of food right now that's the critical issue. It's access to the food, and access to the food is largely an economic issue. There's no shortage of food. This is purely due to corruption. Because corrupt people, people who [???] power won't let poor people have their share.

This ignores how how more food is always a good thing, as it drives prices down. Local production is also a very important topic - there's no point to having to ship food all around the world when biotech means that it's easy to grow it locally. Local surpluses can also help small countries become self-sufficient instead of having to import all their food, and can generate local revenue streams. 100% efficiency is also impossible to obtain - no matter how efficient the food system is, there will always be a certain amount of wastage. It's unavoidable. Better distribution can help but ultimately biotech will play a major role in fixing issues, especially in developing nations.

68:28

Since GMOs were introduced there has been a dramatic increase in infertility in the United States. But there's significant evidence both in laboratory animal feeding studies as well as livestock experience to point a finger at roundup ready crops as a potential cause.

The main thing to take away from this is that correlation does not equal causation. A good example of how correlation does not equal causation As for the laboratory studies, there do not seem to be any supporting his claims... And of course he doesn't cite anything. Even more annoyingly, he doesn't explicitly specify if the infertility is caused by RR crops or by glyphosate. However, Glyphosate's safety seems fairly well established, and the evidence for RR crops causing infertility is outright missing.

68:51

The newest information that I just published a week ago showed that these toxins in the food have actually been associated with an increase in [???] obesity [???] this is found in salmon and rats, and there are other suggestions that they produce long term imbalances in fertility rates, in hormonal levels, and immune function. And in the ability to digest foods.

It is difficult to refute research that doesn't exist...

69:33

The agricultural and chemical companies don't want to label GMOs. What these corporations say is that labeling GMOs will increase our food bills. What I say is that they're so concerned about our bills, then they need to focus on a bigger price tag, and that's our healthcare costs, and we're not just talking about the costs of medications here. How about the cost of missed work, and lost productivity. When parents have to rush their child to the emergency room, or to a doctor's office. And for the children, how about the missed school, and summer camp? We're talking about an emotional and societal cost, played out, over and over again, hundreds of thousands and millions of times over.

So basically, these people took the previous claim (GMO causes "Pretty much everything"), and decided that it's true. Once again there's an absence of evidence here, but this particular activist seems to believe that without GMOs, society would be a utopia, free of disease... perhaps she's forgetting all those pesky medical issues that have been around for far more than two decades. These people literally believe that minor genetic modifications to a plant cause every single illness on the face of the earth.

69:45

These companies, that are promising us to have abundant food and bring prosperity are lying, and the governments are with them.

Yet again, another conspiracy theory... The evidence, as always, is missing.

70:21

I think if you really want to know the true story about what corporations are doing to/in our society, the various harms and dangers that they present, you can't rely on mainstream media. You have to go deeper and you have to go further. That's going to be a very important piece in us moving forward, the fact that we do have the/those sources of investigation that are not beholden to corporate, corporate media, and that we do have a mechanism in the internet for disseminating them broadly.

So basically, these people want you to believe that their media is so much better than "mainstream" media. Let's face it: A lot of media sucks. But this isn't a good reason to choose even shittier media, aka "alternate" media. Media with a history of unquestionably accepting even the shadiest studies, then reprinting them for the ad views... Media with a history of just plain making shit up when they can't find something in their favor... It's also worth pointing out that the organic industry funds many of these so-called "independent" sources that churn out propaganda - like Jeffrey Smith, who makes quite a few appearances in this video.

70:00-79:59

70:52

We have this sort of common enemy that has allowed the profession - the healthcare professionals, and the journalists, and the variety of individuals and media sources so wouldn't think would be lying, and typically many of us have disagreements on certain issues but we're all working together to realize that this is a very powerful enemy, a classic David vs Goliath challenge, and there's the only way we have any approach, any possibility of ever winning this thing is if we work together as a cohesive group.

Why is this suddenly about David and Goliath? Why is science vilified so much? Why is David a PR campaign and Goliath a pile of scientific studies? This kind of junk betrays the conspiratorial roots of this documentary.

71:21

So what you see is Monsanto genetically contaminating crops, monopolizing seed and destroying biodiversity, turning farmers into serfs through this indebtedness, corrupting government, undermining law and [the] regulatory process, and worst of all polluting scientific knowledge. Polluting genetically, polluting politically, [...] and they're even stealing our minds.

Most of these points were already addressed, and the unaddressed ones are just crazy conspiracy theories (Stealing our minds? Turning farmers into serfs? What the fuck?).

71:47

Through the food we eat, through the television and programming and the news media [that] we see, that information alone constitutes what you might call the [???] information. That negative information about the world is causing us to become sick. The food we eat exacerbates that same problem. We are living in a situation where we must take back our own power.

Again, this film overuses the crazy conspiracy theories. If negative information makes people sick, then does that mean this documentary is a serial killer?

72:11

They can surround the Congress, they can surround the Congressional offices back in their district, they can surround the Monsantos and the city groups and that's what they've gotta realize, that's the first stage. Because people showing up and massing together with agendas and with good artwork and signs and music scares the hell out of these politicians and their corporate masters.

It's a pity that so many misinformed people are being duped by the activists who created Seeds of Death. It's doubtful protests scare the hell out of anyone though, as long as they're peaceful... Occupy Wall Street was a prime example of this - a fairly peaceful protest that accomplished very little.

72:35

Americans have a right to know if their food is genetically engineered. It's time for labeling, it's time for people to know how their food is being produced.

Nope! See #44:21.

72:53

It is completely pro-capitalist to have things labeled. That's how you know what you're getting. And the consumer over and over and over again says "they want to know". They want to know, they want the choice. Producers are freaked out because the choice is not going to be for them.

Since when was this about capitalism? What does capitalism have to do with this anyways? And besides, mandatory, government-enforced labels are the exact opposite of "pro-capitalist". Capitalism is about market freedom, not market restriction, and especially not about idiotic restrictions. Nobody gives a shit about if you want to know. Yet for some reason the GMO activists believe that their precious "Contains GMOs" label deserves laws making it mandatory, while a just as useless "Mexican-picked" label to appease people concerned about migrant labour apparently doesn't. But hey, it's pretty ironic, him mentioning choice... USDA Organic and Non-GMO project labels are the very definition of choice. Voluntary, market-produced choice. Those options are practically the golden examples of the market meeting a need, and yet this guy believes that mandatory labeling is pro-capitalism. It is very obvious that all the rhetoric about "choice" coming from anti-GMO activists is utterly dishonest. They actually want to remove choice by forcing GM food out of the market with lies, propaganda and pseudoscience. They want mandatory labels only because they would make their efforts more effective.

73:09

By stopping, by eradicating GMOs you'll also then stop less chemical use.

For once he's accurate, unintentionally so, but still accurate... Yes, you'll stop the reduction of insecticide and herbicide use seen with GM crops by eradicating them. Unintentional accuracy is always the best kind of accuracy!

73:41

Grow heirloom foods without any chemicals

THE CHEMICALS! OH MY GOD THE FOODS ARE MADE OF CHEMICALS! THE WATER TOO! See #10:26

74:02

It's very important to be an organic farmer for the future of our children and for the future of our grandchildren and even ourselves and the food that we eat.

Perhaps he is planning on having starving children inherit an ecologically devastated planet with no remaining rainforests? (They would have been cut down long ago for cropland if we went 100% organic.)

76:25

For ten thousand years humans grew crops without chemicals. It's time that we get mandatory labeling, it's time we cut down the biotech bullies to size, and then now, let's have that discussion again about chemical agriculture versus organic or traditional agriculture. The overwhelming majority of the public wants us to produce food and to raise animals in the natural healthy humane way, in a way that doesn't destroy the environment, public health, and the climate. And we're going to get to that point but it's going to require as I often put it "the food fight of our lives".

For X thousand years humans did Y without Z. You can use computers, cell phones, the internet, chemotherapy, hybrid crops, whatever the hell you want as an example. It's just not a valid argument. It is just a poor attempt to appeal to ancient wisdom. Innovations are by definition new. The appeal to nature just seals the deal. Organic is nowhere near more healthy, and claiming that it's more humane is horribly ironic. Oddly enough, only one industry is trying to destroy the other industry here. The biotech industry thrives off of seed sales. Mounting massive PR campaigns against its competition won't do much. The biotech industry doesn't even sell directly to consumers. But the organic industry thrives off of frightened consumers, which is why the organic industry funds people like Jeffrey Smith, whose job is literally to scare the public. The organic industry makes its money off of consumers, not farmers. So who should we call the bully? It would appear that the organic industry is doing a pretty damn good job of bullying the biotech industry. Fearmongering, lies, PR campaigns, misinformation... They've got it all!

78:38

<Mike Adams rapping> Mike Adams rapping about GMOs for NaturalNews/Seeds of Death. Mike Adams rapping about GMOs for NaturalNews/Seeds of Death.

Mike Adams is apparently an amateur rapper! Who would have known! It is still unclear who's supposed to be convinced by the king of pseudoscience rapping about GMOs, but it's amusing to watch!

See also

• NaturalNews, Mike Adams' personal cesspit of New Age nonsense

External links

• Seeds of Death - Full Movie - the movie itself on YouTube