There is apparently a motion, or a resolution, to be placed on the table for voting by the Green Party members next week. The motion is about changing the party’s policy in GMO. So far it had been against adoption of GM technology with its patented seeds, monoculture and pesticide dependent model in Canadian agriculture. But now, they are contemplating a reversal of policy and support of GM Crop and pesticides for Canadians.
This is considered so outrageous a development by many sustainable living and ecologically conscious people, and by a vast majority of the population that do not like GMO and pesticide, that it shocked the traditional Green supporters.
So, following the original wording of the proposed motion, I wrote the leader of the Green Party, Ms Elizabeth May, the following letter. The original wording of the motion is taken from their site and copied below my letter.
From: Tony Mitra
Subject: Inviting you to take part in the nationwide testing of Glyphosate poisoning
Date: June 26, 2014 at 9:57:58 PM PDT
To: Elizabeth May
WHEREAS the Government of Canada has never conducted nor ordered any independent study on long term effects of Genetically Engineered crop and its associated pesticides on the environment, on Canada’s biological diversity and on people;
WHEREAS the Government of Canada has never even set up or encouraged any lab in the country to test for presence of Glyphosate (the main poison in Monsanto’s RoundUp week killer) in human body fluids or human food;
WHEREAS the Government of Canada only accepts toxicological study of industrial toxins from the promoters of the product, which is a case of conflict of interest;
WHEREAS the Government of Canada fires Health Canada scientists should they find bio-engineered products of foreign corporations to be lacking in sufficient evidence of being safe;
WHEREAS Health Canada and Environment Canada keeps mentioning working with EPA of the US to assess safety of agricultural products such as RoundUp ready crop and their associated pesticides, where EPA itself does not engage in independent study of safety and bases its approval on reports submitted by the product maker;
WHEREAS there is clear evidence of a revolving door policy between the industry and the Government in both USA and Canada, allowing unprecedented level of control and interference by a handful of corporations in driving national agriculture, forestry, environment and trade policies;
WHEREAS retired scientists from EPA have blown the whittle on how corrupt EPA is, ref “Poison Spring” by Dr. EG Vallianatos;
WHEREAS Canada signed the Cartagena protocol but never ratified it, and did not put in place international standards in preservation of our biological diversity from unintended harm from introduction of living modified organisms, while over 160 other countries did;
WHEREAS calling genetically engineered agricultural products, with associated pesticide driven model to be “green” and associated with the Green Party is considered by the people to be a joke and a betrayal;
WHEREAS there are enough evidence from independent scientists, such as Seralini, Goulson, Pusztai and many others, that GM corn and RoundUp can be very harmful for mammals, in studies conducted in Europe, and if Canada finds those studies to be doubtful, prudence and precautionary principle would demand that Canada conducts its own “independent” study on it instead of listening to the promoter of the product, and yet Canada did not conduct any truly independent safety study on GM products and pesticides;
WHEREAS it is an open secret that education is no more public funded and science is now shackled to funding from Industry, which does not like its product to be found wanting, as a result of which science is losing its objectivity and neutrality and has become biased, vindictive to differing views, and pugnacious and feared;
WHEREAS the Government of Canada ignores all the independent safety warnings, such as extremely uncanny and strong correlation between usage of Glyphosate and rise of all kinds of chronic disease and their pathway links – through papers of Nancy Swanson, Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff;
WHEREAS overwhelming majority of the people in Canada as well as in USA do not like pesticides and GMO and will avoid it if labelled and reasonable alternatives are available:
WHEREAS promotion of this unproven and potentially dangerous GM agriculture model is likely to push Canada into a future where all the food Canadians eat will be owned by a foreign corporation and small organic farmers have to go extinct or convert to grow only GMO, and where they have no more any right to save their own seeds;
WHEREAS this model of corporate control may be dangerous for Canada’s food security and very foundation of her political and economic independence;
WHEREAS supporting GM technology flies in the face of the very concept of being “Green”;
WHEREAS a growing number of Canadians stopped believing the Government on GMO and pesticides and are engaged in direct self driven and funded initiative to conduct a nationwide test of Glyphosate in people, their environment and food;
WHEREAS our counterparts in the US are also engaged in a coast to coast testing of Glyphosate of their body fluids and food;
THEREFORE, we request, that you too join this grassroots movement, paying for your own urine sample for measuring Glyphosate content if any, costing around $32 only for batch processing in a lab in the US, and also paying for another homeless or low income person that does not have the luxury of eating carefully selected organic food, and cannot afford even $32, to get his/her urine tested. Please write email to glyphosate.testing@gmail.com to join and partake in the test and encourage your other party members to do the same. Also, while you and your party is always begging the people for donations, here is a counter suggestion of donating back some of that public fund towards a crowd sourcing scheme to allow homeless and poor people to pay for their own Glyphosate test at : https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nationwide-glyphosate-testing.
Thanking you
Tony Mitra
(Address and tel #)
And now, the original wording of the motion the full text here :
This policy motion will force a rewrite of G06-p14, G06‐p34, G06‐p53, 1998 Environment, 1996 and 1998 Agriculture policies, which declare support for a complete ban on the Canadian use of genetic engineering in agriculture and pesticides, and oppose experimentation and research by Agriculture Canada.
WHEREAS national science academies of the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, China, India, Brazil, and Mexico, Third World Academy, World Health Organization, International Council for Science, European Academies Science Advisory Council, Health Canada, U.S. National Research Council, American Medical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society of Toxicology, Washington State Academy of Sciences, American Society for Cell Biology, American Society of Plant Biologists, Scientific American magazine, Science magazine, European Commission’s review of 130 studies across 25 years from 500 independent research groups, an Italian review of 1783 studies, and 600 peer-reviewed papers have concluded that genetically engineered foods are safely regulated;
WHEREAS bioengineered organisms from anthocyanin-rich purple tomatoes to vitamin A-rich golden rice have no universal biochemical traits distinct from products developed through thousands of years of traditional breeding;
WHEREAS peer-reviewed literature over a 20-year timeframe found bioengineered Bt contributing to biodiversity through decreased insecticide usage in northern China (Nature, 2012), with similar findings from a Landes Bioscience review of 155 papers (Carpenter, 2011), and a Nature Biotechnology review of 49 peer-reviewed journals surveying farmers of 12 countries, finding the greatest bioengineering benefits for developing world farmers (Carpenter, 2010);
WHEREAS dissenting papers identifying health harms in animals have methodological errors such as missing hypotheses, testing of specific products like NK603 instead of the engineering process, or retraction like with the Food and Chemical Toxicology journal to the 2012 Seralini study;
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Green Party of Canada will support Health Canada’s existing regulatory regime for genetically engineered foods and will permit bioengineering experimentation by Agriculture Canada.