Japan’s largest corn processor have started buying PMB corn for human consumption, although Japan have permitted PMBs for animal feed.

63,000 tons of PMB corn arrived in Seoul, South Korea on Thursday last week and officials said that they couldn’t get hold of enough non-PMB corn because the European’s are sweeping the small supply that exists off the market.

The trouble with getting hold of non-PMB crops has hurt inside Europe too, a corner stone factory that processed food oils in my hometown in Norway shut down in 2005, and EU official’s thinks that the rice in food prices might sway the European political opposition against PMBs, we can only hope and see…

Although some of our current ailments are based on ill conceived ethanol mandates, subsidies that skew the food markets, and increased consumption in India and China, a recent op ed in the Telegraph joins a more and more unified Brittish demand for adopting PMB’s. The op ed also points the finger in the direction of OPEC, and the hypocrisy of leaders like Hugo Chavez. Chavez is supposedly a champion of the poor, but the high oil prices caused by the cartel’s price fixing are part of the problem with the rise in the cost of food.

Parts of the Arab world are harvesting the riches from the price fixing, it is important to remember that not all countries in the Arab world have oil. The region is balancing on a precarious edge between civil unrest and political chaos by choosing either of the options available to alleviate the situation.

Zimbabwe is again looking at starvation, not only due to the food prices, but also due to new bouts of drought. Last time they faced this situation, about 6 years ago, the government in Zimbabwe refused to accept aid shipments of maize because the grains came from PMB’s. This is the same corn that Americans eat every day. Luckily the starving population would not stand for this decision, spurred on by jet-setting environmental activists from Europe and USA. They raided the food containers, so the grain eventually got the people it was intended for, but what will the misguided leaders in Zimbabwe do this time around?

On the good news side, Ethopia opened up its first commodity exchange last week, which will lower the transaction cost for several major commodities in the country. Hopefully that will help Ethiopian farmers and consumers with lower cost for important foodstuffs.

Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

The main structure of the story is straight out of a report by the Center for Food Safety, called Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers. Center for Food Safety is a high profile anti-biotechnology lobby with strong ties to Union of Concerned Scientists. Center for Food Safety’s Executive Director, Andrew Kimbrell is an understudy of known anti-technologist Jeremy Rifkin, although Rifkin has no problems with plants bred with molecular plant breeding (PMB’s) which the anti-biotechnology lobby calls genetically modified organisms.

The report is a long list of supposed mistreatment of farmers at the hand of Monsanto, while the company is trying to protect and enforce it’s patent rights and license agreements.

The most famous case, which the Vanity Fair reporter did omit, is the Percy Schmeiser case from Canada. Scheiser had brown-bagged Monsanto Canola and was found guilty of this all the way through the Canadian Supreme Court. The anti-biotechnology lobby and Schmeiser himself is still claiming this was pollen flow, and that Monsanto was infringing on his heirloom seed by “polluting” those seeds via pollen flow. The Canadian court documents is unequivocal in their decision that this is not the case. Vanity Fair would not even have had a shred of credibility left, if they had used this case. Instead they picked a case that never went to court, so they could report on the bully tactics, rather than facts that was verified by a court.

The next part of the story is about Monsanto’s company history. This is taken directly out of the movie “The World According to Monsanto” which is a French crockumentary. The crockumentary gives a particular version of the well-known history of the chemical company Monsanto. The version is one that emphasizes malevolence and conspiracy. Against this backdrop the director asks the viewer if they think Monsanto has good intentions with their PMB’s.

The movie gets a ton of facts wrong, including such a basic fact as how Monsanto introduced the Roundup Ready trait into the soybeans. The movie claims the company used a gene gun, while they in fact have been using Agrobacterium for all the non-grass crops.

The last part of the story is about growth hormone for cattle. Diary farmers have been using growth hormone on their cattle since the 1940’s to increase the milk yield from their cattle. The hormones had to be harvested from the pituitary glands of cattle. Only in 1994 did scientists figure out how to get bacteria to produce the same hormone, and Monsanto markets this hormone under the brand name Posilac.

Certain diaries started labeling their milk as not containing growth hormones, which is factually wrong. All milk, regardless of hormone application will contain growth hormone. FDA said this was misleading marketing. The next attempt was to label the milk as produced without growth hormones, however since it is impossible to find a difference between milk from cattle that received growth hormones and milk from cattle that did not, the claim cannot be verified.

Vanity Fair argues that Monsanto is the ones that are pushing the label battle, while it is in fact food snobs that are insisting that this is important consumer information. I still claim that the label organic is all that is required, but most of the food producers in this battle are not willing to pay for organic milk. The food snobs started the label wars, to label Monsanto as the aggressor for defending their product, the integrity of consumer information, and sound science is misrepresentation.

From the beginning some consumers have consistently been hesitant to drink milk from cows treated with artificial hormones. This is one reason Monsanto has waged so many battles with dairies and regulators over the wording of labels on milk cartons. It has sued at least two dairies and one co-op over labeling.

We do in fact know that the milk labeled as produced without growth hormone never captured more than 1.5 percent of the diary market in the food conscious Northeast. But you will not find this information in the playbooks of the Center for Food Safety, which would require the poor reporter to actually do reporting…

Also, the part that the story leaves out on growth hormones and labeling is the fact that anti biotechnology lobby groups are leveraging lawsuits in most of the states across the country. This is driven by lobby groups, not by Monsanto. Monsanto is again in the position of defending itself, they are not the aggressor as Vanity Fair paints them.

For safe measure, Vanity Fair included one source in the whole story that was supposed to represent the other side. This one source was a call to Monsanto who declined to comment on the story about the country storeowner, which says Monsanto threatened him over illegally using the seed. There are plenty of sources out there who would be willing to discredit most all of the stories in Vanity Fair, but again the reporter could not bothered.

The final graph is just a plain out groin kick of Steven Milloy, who supposedly is behind a website that are presenting the other half of the labeling debate. There are some issues where Steven and I do not see eye to eye, mainly the stem cell debate. However, when it comes to all these issues about consumer safety and biotechnology, Steven has his facts straight, and the misleading information comes from the same sources that Vanity fair relied on so heavily in this story.

International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics are starting up is starting up research facility that will enable smaller firms to outsource field trials. It is a novel approach to business incubating, and it will be interesting to see the results of this project. It might be a smart business model that we can apply to speed up the second green revolution.

The research information is submitted to the government under the premise of confidentiality. The government has access to the information so it can review the safety and efficacy of new products, but it has made a promise to keep the information confidential for a time period.

The sunshine laws was never meant to give competitors access to proprietary business research, it was meant to give insight into the day to day workings of politicians and bureaucrats. Using it to break down corporate trust in the regulatory system will stymie innovation, which will cost all of us in the end.

While French farmers are trying to get access to biotechnology seed, Austrian activists are trying to pressure the U.S. government to back off penalty tariffs U.S. is considering. The U.S. is considering imposing penalty tariffs because the members of the EU still is not complying with the WTO ruling that stated the import ban on GMO’s is a trade barrier without valid scientific and public health concerns.

It is a fundamental fact that we cannot keep any seed supply free of seeds from other plants, whether they belong to the same species or not. Thus there is a widespread acceptance of a 1-2 percent level of other types of seeds, whether these might be from weed plants, other types of the same plants, or in this case, plants that have not been bred with molecular plant breeding methods.

It still baffles me that there is such a resistance against these plants, but if these guys and their customers are willing to pay for the cost of keeping a grain supply outside of the regular grain supply chain, I don’t mind. Their problem is that they are fighting the tide of history, and the non-molecular plant breeding supply is growing smaller with each growing season. This means the prices are going up.

This story from Carey Gilliam at Reuters in Kansas City is one of those one-side sourced stories and I have several questions to her two “shocking” facts:

“There were 39 cases of crop contamination in 23 countries in 2007, and more than 200 in 57 countries over the last 10 years, according to biotech critic Greenpeace International.”

OK, so Carey is hedging by labeling her information as one sided, but what constitutes crop contamination for Greenpeace has been known to be a mixed bag. A farmer that was convicted for brown bagging licensed seed is still hailed by Greenpeace and their peers for being a victim of big evil corporations.

I am not sure what contamination is in this case, is it a level of commingling of seeds above the industry standard of 1-2 percent? Is it pollination of a couple of flowers on a plant in a crop by a plant that has been bred with molecular plant breeding? It could be other things as well, so I wonder what it is.

The organic farmer that claims to test every load of grains he buys also puzzles me. This seems to be an excessive cost, especially when he is hedging by also putting warning labels on his products. I only know of two methods of testing the seed, and please correcting me if I am wrong here, but one is to use tissue culture after sterilizing the grain, germinating them, and then pouring the herbicide used as the marker for the novel gene over the germinated seed.

If parts of the seed survive and start propagating new shots, you have a plant bred with molecular plant breeding. This seems straight forward, but it takes time, money, and a lot of care. This farmer also faces the problem of testing for the different herbicides used as markers, which counts somewhere between two and four for corn currently on the market. I don’t see a cattle farmer doing this for every load of grain he buys for his cows.

A cow will eat 7 lbs of corn for every 1 lbs of weight it puts on, and they do gain several hundred pounds during the fattening up stage of their lives where they are forced to sustain themselves on corn anyways.

The other way I can see him doing it is extracting the DNA from the corn and sequencing it to look for the particular gene that was inserted. This takes a lot of expensive equipment and time, and again, I don’t see a cattle farmer taking time for this. But I might be wrong, and there might be some quick shot test on the market that I don’t know about. It is worth investigating, and I will do so in the next months while I work on the book. I promise to report the results here.