Seeds of Death

Claims[edit]

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.

...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...

Golden Rice also deserves a mention, as it will directly benefit people in impoverished nations.^[23]

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,^[33] 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.^[34]

Also see #2:19

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.

When the Royal Society^[40] (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".^[41]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Simply put, this is not a reputable organization. Its claims should be taken with a grain of salt at best.

Long story short, the study was badly designed and was retracted by the journal.

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^[15], 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...

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.

Additionally, many animal feeding studies have demonstrated that biotech crops are nutritionally equivalent to their conventional counterparts.

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.

Oh yeah, there's also that minor issue of their study being complete and utter bullshit...^[67][68]

Not to mention that Bt is widely used within organic farming as a pesticide.^[69] Even if Bt turned out to be harmful, Monsanto and other GMO producers wouldn't be the only people to blame.

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.

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.^[74]

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^[75], 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.

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.

Regional restrictions? Those couldn't possibly be because of politics, no? Oh.^[78]

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?^[77] No safety testing done on plants produced with the methods used to produce those!

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!^[80]

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.^[81]

Supplements? Do you mean those things that nearly killed Gary Null?^[82]

Fuck the FDA for trying to keep me healthy!

Oops, we may have forgotten to mention the warning one of Mercola's suppliers got in 2011.^[86]

Still interested? He's got a RW article, and there's a great piece on him on Respectful Insolence.^[87] There's also a good article on Quackwatch.^[88]

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.^[89]

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^[92] and the loss of milkweed is a byproduct of agriculture.

While neonics are known to be toxic to bees, there are a number of flaws with blaming neonicotinoid pesticides for CCD.^[93]

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?

Additionally, the claim that GM is riskier than other breeding methods has no evidence to support it.

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.

...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?

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,^[99] but the average yield gap is around 20% - and increasing!^[100]

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.

As for those veggies... Most of them come from patented seeds sold by giant seed companies.^[101]

• Glyphosate resistance is commonly misrepresented.^[102]
• 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.

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)

• ...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).

Also, we totally can.

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.^[103] 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.^[104]

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?

As for examples, it's always interesting to read about conventional breeding's failures, the most notorious of which is probably the lenape potato.^[106] There are numerous other examples of conventional breeding failing - here are a few more.^[107][108]

Let's do some quick fact checking on these claims... Oops!^{[109][110][111][112][113][114][115][116]}

...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"!^[15]

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.

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.

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!

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.

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".^[70]

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".^[71]

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".^[72]

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.

Bad food? Poor poor organic. So many ridiculous safety accidents.^{[140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147][148][149][150][151][152]}

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...

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,^[153] and the evidence for RR crops causing infertility is outright missing.^[154]

This kind of junk betrays the conspiratorial roots of this documentary.

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.

See #10:26

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,^[156] and claiming that it's more humane is horribly ironic.^[157]

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!