GM WHEAT AND CORPORATE CONTROL

The following report is most certainly an issue Queenslanders should be tackling their political ‘hopefuls’ on. As your representative “what are they going to do about it? ”

Judy Newman writes: To date, most genetic modification has occurred on crops such as corn, soy, cotton and canola. Products from these genetically modified (GM) crops have largely avoided a GM label because they either go into animal feed, which does not need to be labelled, or they enter the human food supply as highly refined products such as oils, that don't need to be labelled in many countries, including Australia.

Wheat, however, is different. Most wheat goes into the human food supply. And wheat is in a huge proportion of foods that people eat on a daily basis, including bread. Any GM wheat in those products will require a GM label in many countries, including Australia. Which means that consumers will have a choice over whether they want to buy a product with GM wheat in it or an equivalent product that is GM-free. There is overwhelming evidence that given a choice, people prefer not to eat GM foods. Consequently, wheat markets do not want to buy GM wheat.

It is therefore important that if GM wheat is grown commercially anywhere in Australia, it can
(1) be effectively segregated from non-GM wheat and
(2) markets will accept that non-GM wheat from Australia is truly non-GM and is not contaminated in any way with GM wheat.

However, it is exceptionally difficult to try to segregate GM wheat to the level expected by the marketplace. It is therefore too expensive to do and still remain competitive. In addition, the wheat industry is expecting that Australian farmers will not try to segregate GM wheat, but rather will mix it with non-GM wheat. Consequently, if GM wheat was commercialised anywhere in Australia, the perception in national and international markets is that our wheat will contain GM wheat unless we can prove, using expensive testing methods, that a particular batch is not. This means that once GM wheat is grown anywhere in Australia, we could instantly lose all of our wheat markets. This was the finding of Canadian farmers.

They asked their markets what would happen if GM wheat was grown commercially in Canada. Their markets said that they would not buy any GM wheat or any supposed non-GM wheat from Canada, they would simply not buy ANY wheat from Canada at all. Consequently, growing GM wheat commercially in Australia could sabotage our entire wheat industry.

So why then are Australian plant scientists and some of our governments pushing for GM wheat?

Plant breeders usually rely on government or Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) grants to be able to develop new crop varieties. Governments have been reducing the amount of money that goes into crop breeding organisations while GM crop companies have been increasing their share. In addition, if plant breeders do GM crop breeding, they can patent the plants produced, which gives them a cut in the profits and hence some financial security.

The Australian government supports this process, because it can not only reduce the money it spends on crop breeding, but it actually gets to make money via patents on the GM crops that are produced. It does this through the agreements and corporate alliances the public plant breeding sector has signed with GM crop companies. Farmers are required to pay levies to the GRDC on the grain that they produce. Some of this money is going into GM crop breeding. It would therefore be expected that farmers would hold some of the intellectual property (IP) over these new crops because they have paid for at least some of it. However, it is not the case. Farmers have no share in the IP on these crops and get no share in the profits. Instead, the IP is traded in deals using confidential agreements between plant breeding organisations such as the CSIRO, and GM companies such as Monsanto. These types of deals are happening throughout the plant breeding sector, including State-based plant research organisations. As part of a deal, the organisation gets to use Monsanto's patented technologies free of charge to make GM crops more cheaply.

The situation has been particularly obvious in Western Australia (WA). There, all public plant breeding institutes merged to form one corporate entity, called Intergrain. Shortly after the commercial planting of GM crops was approved by the WA Minister for Agriculture, Monsanto paid $10.5 million for a 19.5% share of Integrain and all the IP developed over decades of plant breeding in that State. Monsanto's alliance partner, Nufarm, now also has the exclusive seed selling rights for crops developed by Intergrain. Intergrain has now taken over the main building of the WA Department of Agriculture. (The Department comes under the authority of the Minister for Agriculture.) In return, Monsanto can add their GM genes into all new crop varieties developed in Western Australia. This means that Monsanto will have a patent over all new GM crops developed in the State and will get a cut in the profits made from those crops.

So, what choice does this give farmers in WA?
Will they still be able to grow non-GM crops if they want to? As GM crops make more money for patent-holders than non-GM crops, GM crops will be developed rather than non-GM crops in WA. This means that, in future, farmers will have no choice but to buy GM seeds and grow GM crops in WA because there will be no alternative seeds available to them to buy. When a farmer buys GM seeds to plant, he has to sign a contract with the patent-holder that can dictate how to grow the crop, what herbicides to use, who to deliver the crop to and who to sell it to. The farmer effectively becomes a contract farmer on his own land where the farmer takes the risks, does the work and pays the bills, while Monsanto owns the crop and controls the upstream and downstream suppliers. In effect, Monsanto controls the costs to the farmer, the price the farmer gets for the crop and therefore decides how much profit the farmer makes, if any. And the Minister got only $10.5 million in return.

Elsewhere in Australia, the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI), and the University of Adelaide (UA) joined together to become Australian Grain Technologies Pty Ltd (AGT). They consolidated more than 100 years of wheat breeding activities when they did so. A wholly owned subsidiary of Limagrain Holdings, a French company, has now purchased 25% of AGT.

Meanwhile, AWB Limited (previously known as the Australian Wheat Board) and Syngenta (a major GM crop company) have embarked on a formal joint venture. It operates as LongReach Plant Breeders, and it has stated goals of becoming Australia's premier wheat breeding and foundation seed company, and developing wheat for all States of Australia. There is also international pressure on the Australian government to accept GM crops into the food supply and to grow them in Australia, particularly from the US.
The US produces a high proportion of the world's GM crops and needs to find a market for them. Furthermore, some of the largest GM crop companies (e.g., Monsanto) are based in the US, so they employ a large number of Americans and they bring their considerable international profits back to the US. In addition, the US government itself has IP and patents on GM crop techniques. Consequently, if GM crops are adopted internationally, it provides financial and food security for the US.
The US government is therefore putting considerable pressure on Australia and other countries to provide a market for their GM crops and to grow GM crops in their own countries. Because Monsanto is by far the largest GM crop company, this promotes a close relationship between the US government and Monsanto that has resulted in senior staff from Monsanto holding senior positions in the US government. As a result, Monsanto strongly influences US government policies on crops and food.

Meanwhile in Australia, the continuing corporate consolidation of our crop seed production in a few companies, particularly Monsanto, will have a ripple-on effect through the rest of the food chain. Now, every section of the farming industry that uses the seeds, and the food industry that uses the crops produced from those seeds, will need to negotiate prices with these companies, particularly Monsanto. Monsanto not only owns 19.5% of all the plant breeding IP that comes from the largest grain producing state (WA), but it also has corporate alliances with almost all of the crop development entities in Australia.
It also controls upstream and downstream suppliers to farmers and puts farmers under restrictive GM crop contracts. The result can only be an increase in the cost of food in Australia. (emphasis added throughout …ed)

Original Source: “Network of Concerned Farmers” February 2012

IN LAW, IT’S THE DETAILS THAT COUNT

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
Doing law develops an eye for detail. One tends to notice others’ paper work mistakes. Thus I note with some amusement that the federal government forgot to arrange for the Governor-General to proclaim a start date for legislation which transferred power from the state courts for heterosexual and homosexual defacto couples’ property and maintenance disputes, to the Family Court.

This “unfortunate administration error”, as the Attorney General described it (The Australian, February 22, 2012, p.1) which is now corrected, still leaves open a challenge to any such orders made by the Family Court in such matters, between March 1, 2009 and February 11, 2012. This could be thousands of cases. It is a pity that the law industry of the federal government did not spend as much time getting such administrative matters correct as it did pursuing politically correct agendas.  

THE GREAT EDUCATION DEBATE: A FORMER TEACHER REFLECTS

by James Reed
At one time, long ago, teaching English was my passion. I put a lot of effort into it, sometimes marking essays into the wee hours. But that was long ago. Like a love affair that slowly turns sour, my passion for teaching died – withered and dried on the vine.
My new passion in life became alcohol, a dear friend that dulled the pain of what became a boring at best and warzone at worst, work day.

The social revolution of the 1960s gave us a world of decadent consumerism, godless materialism and a whole host of poisonous “isms” such as feminism. Thus, once a family could live on a family working-wage provided by dad, the bread-winner. Mum stayed home and thus there was someone there when the kids come home. Nowadays, even conservatives hammer as sexist those who like that world.

Now we have two parents working if we are lucky and a crashing net reproduction ratio: one child if the family is lucky. Mass migration is to keep the capitalists rich as people, like rats, compete for housing space. The world of the past is radically transformed into a vast supermarket and public toilet.

Schools came to be dominated by the ethical system of decadent and diseased capitalism. Old-school discipline is replaced by politically correct brainwashing by monstrous feminist teachers who make Julia Gillard look like a soccer mum. Boys implode in this toxic environment. With runaway ethno-racial diversity, teachers struggle just to keep some degree of order. Schools in Australia become basically childcare centres for techno-savages. Not all, of course. There are enough good schools, even good public schools, to supply the next generation of workers and controllers. But in many schools we find nothing more than “White board jungles” – “black boards” being seen as “racist”.

As the Asian societies are not facing this sort of psychopolitical warfare, there is no surprise in finding that the quality of their education is the highest in the world. Our new class elites want our kind to be dispossessed and then die off, as a payback for bringing civilisation to the world.  

HOW FAR SHOULD A UNIVERSITY GO TO SECURE APPROVAL AND…
MONETARY REWARDS FROM THOSE IN POWER

by James Reed
A US university once gave Frank Sinatra an honorary doctorate in engineering. Sinatra, it seems, once wanted to be an engineer. When criticised for this, one defender said that Sinatra could engineer a song!

I thought of that story when reading that Curtin University is under fire for awarding an honorary doctorate to the wife of the Malaysian Prime Minister. (“Razak’s Wife in Degree Protest”, The Australian, February 22, 2012, p.29) The decision has been condemned by many and an online social media campaign to have the university revoke the award is underway. One critic said: “The question is just how far should a university go to secure approval and monetary rewards from those in power.”

But why should one university be singled out? Either boycott them all, or live with it. Honorary doctorates have long been used as marketing tools. So why stop there? Why not just sell off degrees and save the time of students from lands afar having to study here at all? Oh, I forgot, that would halt an important part of the immigration program!  

IT’S ALL GOOD! LABOR PARTY IMPLODES, NOW HOPE FOR THE LIBERALS
AND GREENS TO ALSO SELF-DESTRUCT

by James Reed
Nowadays I have seen the power of negative thinking and its all good! Julie K. Norem has published The Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Manage Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak, (Basic Books, 2012). A certain preoccupation with the negative of how things can go wrong in our chaotic world, can actually be positive and have great survival value.

Take the Gillard v Rudd battle which was in the news cycle, but when you read this, would have passed. Which of these political backstabbers will rule the pig pen of parliament? Yesterday’s failed leader re-heated, or today’s failed leader? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the Labor Party is fatally wounded. Let us hope that the poison can flow on to the Liberals and Greens.
Remember from the negative comes the positive – it’s all good! Business leaders are worried that political chaos will damage our “lucky country” reputation.

Let’s hope that it does! The only concern of the corporates is squeezing the last few drops of profit that they can from this dying land. Bring on the chaos! Let a thousand thorn bushes bloom! It is all good, because when this old, oppressive order dies, a new order can be rebuilt and those who are now little more than meat machines will breathe the cold, sweet air again – as human beings!  

THE CRASH COURSE - THE SOCIAL ECONOMICS OF COLLAPSE

by James Reed
Uncle James’ book of the week is Chris Martenson’s The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy and Environment, (John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, 2011). Although this is an “environmentalist” book, it is not one based around climate change and computer models. Martenson, although scientifically trained, also has a financial background. Much of the book deals with the basics of exponential growth and the mechanics of credit creation by the banking sector. Martenson even quotes the US Federal Reserve, which in one document (“Putting it Simply”, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (1984)) says “when the Federal Reserve writes a cheque, it is creating money”. There you have it!

Martenson then argues that “The very mechanisms of our money system promote and even demand the exponential growth of money and debt.” (p.49) As all dollars are backed by nothing but debt, which pays interest and the debt-based money system is an exponential system, then “the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.” (p.51) Therefore the modern financial system requires perpetual expansion via continuous credit expansion as well as continuous economic growth and use of physical resources to attempt to do the impossible and pay back the money owed as debt to the financiers. The end result of all of this will be systems-collapse.

No mention of social credit or Major Douglas occurs in this book. The book has a “solutions” section but the discussion of “Economy and Money” is only two pages long. Nevertheless, Martenson accepts that alternative forms of money and credit arrangements should be put in place alongside the existing system.
This is a good start: “you cannot possibly borrow more than you can earn forever.” Let us hope that Martenson’s journey leads him down the social credit road.  

HOW CAN WE HELP PEOPLE SMUGGLERS?

by Peter West
No sooner had I written the above than did I learn that the Greens have introduced a bill to outlaw the mandatory five-year prison terms for people smugglers. (The Australian, February 7, 2012, p.4) It seems our sensitive judges are alarmed that young and poor Indonesians are getting lengthy gaol terms.
Yes these oppressed have often been “tricked to do the kingpins’ dirty work”. And here I was thinking that these guys were opportunists cashing in on the “misery” of asylum seekers! Circus Australia what can you do to top that act?  

HUMAN RIGHTS TERRORISM

by James Reed
Those of us alarmed at the prospect of a creation of a politically correct bill of rights via Constitutional change and anti-discrimination legislation should look to the goings-on in Europe. Radical Islamic cleric Abu Qatada, who had once been described as Osama Bin Laden’s right hand man in Europe, has been linked to terrorism in a number of countries. He entered Britain illegally, and was kept in gaol for 6 ½ years while legal argument took place.

Now he is free and can reside permanently in Britain! All of this is thanks to the ultra politically correct European Court of Human Rights. You see the court thought that if he was deported to Jordon to face terrorism charges the trial in Jordon would be a “flagrant denial of justice.” (The Australian, February 14, 2012, p.12).

All of this is no joke, it is the way the human rights mind operates. Human rights for the terrorist, but not for the victims of terrorism. For this reason we should not support any changes to the Constitution as anything can and will be used by the lawyer class to pursue politically correct ends. In a time of great uncertainty, the only certainty is “No! No! No!”  

BRIGHT RIGHT MINDS AND DARK LEFT ATTITUDES: WHY RIGHT-WINGERS ARE NOT DUMB

by Brian Simpson and Chris Knight
The Left have made much out of a paper published in Psychological Science (vol. 20, 2012, pp. 1 – 9) by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri, “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact.”
With an academic gobbledygook title like that it is easy to predict the results. Right wingers are dumb and liberal-left are more intelligent than conservatives. Indeed the paper claims that, based on two data sets from the UK of 15,874 people, that lower intelligence in childhood correlates with greater adult “racism”. A US data set allegedly confirmed that lower intelligence correlates with anti-homosexual prejudice.

It could well be true that individuals with lower IQ may have “greater cognitive rigidity” and “lower integrative complexity” and thus may not be seduced into accepting liberal-left dogmas, which admittedly does require some intellect to be able to understand in the first place.
But this shows nothing about the general IQ of conservatives and even racialists. Hodson and Busseri measured children’s IQ at ages 10 or 11 and then later in life between the ages of 30 and 33. However IQ is not static over the life cycle and the age gaps are too great to be able to statistically generalise.
The study is thus flawed at a fundamental level and cannot support the liberal-left conclusions which the authors draw.  

THE ACADEMIC TEN COMMANDMENTS

by James Reed
Damien Kingsbury (“Junior Academics Too Often Plagiarised”, The Australian, February 8, 2012, p.29) points out that plagiarism of junior academic research by seniors is common. It typically involves a PhD student or junior research fellow doing most of the original research for a project and the senior academic putting his/her name on the paper when published.

The practice is perhaps more common in the biomedical and scientific areas than in the Humanities and Social Sciences, where research is typically done in teams. There the senior basically supervises a number of research projects and has his/her name put on a paper with minimal work. The system runs on this and that is why millions of dollars each year are awarded from federal funding bodies for research staff. Academia is founded upon dishonesty.  

NEW WORLD ORDER DIVERSITY: WE’LL ALL BE EQUAL AT THE BOTTOM

by Peter West
An OECD report “has warned against giving parents unfettered choice of schools, recommending measures to ensure all schools enrol a diverse mix of students to guard against entrenching disadvantage in the education system.” (“Diversity at School ‘Creates Equity’”, The Australian, February 10, 2012, p.3)
Along with this, the report says that struggling students, namely those who fail, should not repeat a year. Thus they should struggle on in the next year and fail that as well. Clearly this is new world order education, where equity, that fat sacred cow, overrides common sense. 

THERE GOES SHAKESPEARE: IMMIGRATION AND THE CULTURAL WARS

by James Reed
Arizona and other southwestern US States are either majority Hispanic or soon will be. In Tucson Arizona Shakespeare’s The Tempest has been banned from school discussion because State schools offer “increasingly radicalised Mexican-American studies and the racial realist realities of The Tempest are just too much for the politically correct anti-white Establishment. (See: The Australian, January 23, 2012, p.8)

Schools have been threatened with financial penalties for failure to tow the party line on ethnic-racial studies. All the talk about freedom of speech, is just talk when the racial composition of populations change. Their fate will soon be our fate. 

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF POLITICALLY CORRECT ART

by Peter Ewer
Another day in the life of politically correct art as reported in The Australian (February 16, 2012). First we have the review of the movie Iron Sky, a satirical movie about Nazis on the moon who plan revenge. This is a “giant leap for Germans” (p.14) being able to laugh at their past. But comedies involving Nazis have been common since the 1960s. What is all the fuss about? How about a comedy about Allied War crimes – that would be a “small step for humour”.

Then we have (p.15) the review of theatre with Bad Blood Blues being featured. Pictured is a muscled black man stripping off and kissing a dyed blonde white woman. The play apparently deals with a bioethical dilemma: the woman (Clare) is in Africa conducting double-blind trials on pregnant women with AIDS. Clare is treating some people with the Big Pharma antiretrovirus drug and others with a sugar placebo.
The PC point comes because in the US a 40-year syphilis trial was conducted where blacks with syphilis were given aspirin for “bad blood” even after penicillin was prescribed for syphilis.

The syphilis experiment is “racist”, allegedly for treating people as “lab rats”. But that is just the nature of a double blind experiment. The blacks had syphilis and were not given it. They consented to the experiment, just as Clare’s women in the play did. So what is the moral problem? There is none. And if the drama is so ethically profound, why illustrate it by an interracial sex scene? Wouldn’t something featuring pregnant black women with AIDS be more relevant.  

FIRST THEY TOOK YOUR GUNS, NOW THEY WILL TAKE YOUR KNIVES…
THEN YOUR FREEDOM

by John Steele
I keep my eye on the Adelaide Advertiser because they are good for letting us know what new weapons bans the cultural – political elites having in mind. “Knives Out for Deadly Imports”, The Advertiser, February 4, 2012, p.3 is a typical shock-horror article. The concern is that “deadly imports” of knives and other weapons such as blowpipes and crossbows are approved each year, said in the article to be a “disturbing practice”. Yes, no hint of journalistic objectivity here – straight to the bottom line!

Elites are worried that weapons such as knives are used in attempted murders and murders. Yes, what else would be used: the attacker’s teeth? The thought behind this, like gun banning, is to take away the tool and the crime won’t occur. But unlike guns, knives cannot realistically be banned. Knives are easy to make (even in prison).
Banning hunting weapons will do nothing to stop such crimes. People will use kitchen knives, bits of wood, even bags full of politically correct Marxist books can be deadly!

The elites don’t want ordinary people to be able to defend themselves from the criminal elements that prey upon them. That is the real sentiment behind the cult of weapons bans.  

LETTER TO THE PRESS

To the Editor of The Australian, 9th March 2012:
James Allan is right that an Abbott government should repeal all of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act ('Hot air is best balm for ills of society', 9/3). Leaving in the Act prohibitions against words that 'humiliate' or 'intimidate' keeps available an unjustifiably subjective language that smart lawyers can manipulate on behalf of wealthy clients to curb the public expression of viewpoints unwelcome to those clients. As Ibsen showed in 'An Enemy of the People', societies stagnate and go bad without the regular infusion and refreshment of new ideas and different opinions; and entrenched anti-social persons and groups are often challenged painfully by the new.

- - Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Victoria