Care for prescription drugs or industrial chemicals in your corn flakes? If the USDA continues to allow biopharm food crops to be planted in open fields, this may happen.
Horizontal gene transfer has already been shown to occur in fields of genetically engineered (GE) canola resulting in the creation of “superweeds” that have become herbicide-resistant. Now the production of drugs or industrial chemicals in GE plants, called biopharming, poses new alarming concerns.
Biopharm traits can spread through pollen carried by wind or insects, spilled seed, unharvested seed sprouting the next year, and biopharm seed residues carried by farm equipment to conventional fields.
Three hundred (300) open-air field trials have already been conducted in unidentified locations across the country. While most of these substances are kept secret as confidential business information, a few known examples include a contraceptive, potent growth hormones, a blood clotter, blood thinners, industrial enzymes, and vaccines. (For more info, visitwww.ucsusa.org/pharm/pharm_open.html).
The ecological implications of hacked genetic code slipping into our food and forests and multiplying is worse than a bad computer virus.
ACTION:
Contact your Congressional representatives online at: http://www.thecampaign.org/alert-pharmcrops.htm.
Sample message:
I am writing to express my profound concern over the United States Department of Agriculture’s policy that allows food crops to be used to create genetically engineered pharmaceutical drugs and industrial chemicals.
In mid-November, it was widely reported that the biotech company ProdiGene had twice violated USDA guidelines established to prevent the contamination of the human food supply.
I urge you to call for Congressional hearings into this matter.
I also ask that an immediate moratorium be placed on the outdoor growing of all pharmaceutical drug crops that use agricultural plants to produce them.
We cannot wait for an equivalent of a “Chernobyl-type” of catastrophe to occur in the food supply.
Signed, your name and address